San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2013

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) celebrates its 18th edition this year with a line-up more international in scope than ever before. Ten of its 14 feature films originate from outside Hollywood, with movies postmarked Russia, Japan, Sweden, Germany, France, Denmark, Bali and the UK. The festival, which is the largest and most prestigious silent fest outside of Pordenone, Italy opens this Thursday with Louise Brooks' last great film (Prix de Beauté) and closes on Sunday with Harold Lloyd's iconic Safety Last! In between there'll be such amazements as a tribute to animator Winsor McCay, a 150-minute reconstruction of G.W. Pabst's Garbo-starring The Joyless Street, a two-strip Technicolor Goona-goona epic from Gloria Swanson's ex-husband (Legong: Dance of the Virgins) and a long-thought extinct 1925 drama set at our own San Francisco Chronicle (The Last Edition). Other marquee-worthy names include stars Douglas Fairbanks, Marion Davies and Charley Chase, as well as directors Yasujiro Ozu, King Vidor, Allan Dwan, Victor Sjöström, Jacques Feyder and the ubiquitous Keaton and Chaplin, who are represented with a pair of shorts. As always, each presentation will be accomapanied by live music.

Here's a closer program-by-program peek at what SFSFF has in store this weekend at the glorious Castro Theare.


Thursday, July 18 

7:00 PM Prix de Beauté (1930, France, dir. Augusto Genina, digital)

Proving that San Francisco can't get enough Louise Brooks, this year's festival opens with what is considered the iconic actress' last important film. She stars here as a conflicted, Parisian typist whose jealous husband can't handle the attention she receives after winning a Miss Europe beauty pageant. It was shot after the release of Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl and was the only film she'd make in France. Released in both silent and (entirely dubbed) sound versions, the fest screens the silent version recently restored by the Cineteca di Bologna, accompanied by pianist Stephen Horne. Knowing I couldn't attend opening night this year, I checked out the chatty, cacophonous sound version available on YouTube. What stood out was Brooks' soulfully luminous performance in a decidedly non-vampy role (but still decked out in Jean Patou couture), a fascinating gaze at Parisian street life of 1929 and a suspenseful, shocking proto-Noir final act. At the SFSFF's Opening Night Party at McRoskey Mattress Company, costumed revelers can compete in the festival's first-ever Mr. and Ms. Silent Film beauty pageant.



Friday, July 19

11:00 AM Amazing Tales from the Archives

Each year this free-admission SFSFF presentation takes an insider's look at the current state of silent film restoration. First up, Céline Ruivo, Director of Film Collections at the Cinémathèque Française will speak on that organization's restoration of films from the Paris Exposition of 1900. Then preservationist and SFSFF board president Rob Byrne will elaborate on the collaborative effort between SFSFF and the Cinémathèque in restoring director Alla Dwan's once-lost The Half Breed from 1916, starring Douglas Fairbanks (screening Saturday at noon).


2:00 PM The First Born (1928, UK, dir. Miles Mander, 35mm)

This melodrama reps the directorial debut of actor-writer-playwright-novelist Miles Mander and is based on his novel and play – with screenwriting assistance from Alma Reville, aka the future Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock. It stars Madeleine Carroll, an actress best known as the first of Hitch's icy blonde heroines (The 39 Steps), who would also enjoy a brief but lucrative Hollywood career (The Prisoner of Zenda). (One source I stumbled upon claims she was the world's highest paid actress in 1938). The First Born's plot revolves around a barren society matron who adopts her unmarried manicurist's newborn while her philandering husband (Mander) is off on an African adventure. Upon his return she claims the child is theirs, which of course leads to nothing good for all concerned. This film is known for its naturalistic acting and surprise ending, which I've spoiled for myself by reading the film's plot synopsis on Wikipedia. Stephen Horne accompanies this recently restored print from the BFI National Archive.


4:30 PM Tokyo Chorus (1931, Japan, dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 35mm)

Released one year before Ozu's I Was Born, But… (SFSFF 2011), this bittersweet portrait of the Great Depression in Japan centers on a how a family copes when its insurance salesman father is fired for protesting the dismissal of an older employee. The family's young daughter is played by Hideko Takamine, later known for her acclaimed work for Mikio Naruse. Accompanying the film – and making his SFSFF debut – is composer-conductor-keyboardist Günter Buchwald.


7:00 PM The Patsy (1928, USA, dir. King Vidor, 35mm)

Marion Davies starred in three silent comedies directed by King Vidor. Unlike paramour-svengali William Randolph Hearst, he saw her as a comedic rather than dramatic actress – having witnessed her wild antics at many a Hollywood party. Davies is often credited with inventing the "screwball" style of comedic acting, and here she portrays the put-upon daughter of a social-climbing family who's in love with her younger sister's beau. The Patsy represented a comeback for Grande Dowager-Battleaxe Marie Dressler, who plays Davies' contentious mother. (Hollywood legend has it that a suicidal Dressler was eating her Last Supper at a restaurant, when director Allan Dwan, acting on behalf of Vidor, offered her this role). This is the festival's only revival for 2013, having screened previously in 2008. Clark Wilson accompanied on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer that evening and I remember it being riotously funny. There can be no doubt that the fabulous Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will do The Patsy justice as well.


9:30 PM The Golden Clown (1926, Denmark, dir. A.W. Sandberg, 35mm)

A.W. Sandberg directed 42 films between 1914 and 1937, and this melodrama remakes his own 1917 picture of the same title, albeit with a much larger production budget. It was the biggest commercial success of the 1920's for Nordisk Studio, which is still operational and now considered the oldest continually operating film studio in the world. The Golden Clown stars Gösta Ekman – last seen in the title role of Faust at the 2013 SFSFF Winter Event – as a rural circus clown who loses the love of his life after becoming the toast of Paris. Ekman was already a cocaine addict when shooting this film, and he would die from the drug in 1938. Sweden's Matti Bye Ensemble will accompany this restoration from the Danish Film Institute.



Saturday, July 20

10:00 AM Winsor McCay: His Life and Art

Generally acknowledged as the first master of both the comic strip and animated cartoon, Winsor McCay created ten films between 1911 and 1921, four of which will be screened at this presentation (Little Nemo, 1913, How a Mosquito Operates, 1912, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914, and The Sinking of the Lusitania, 1918). John Canemaker, author of the definitive 1987 book on McCay, will present the films along with images from his book. McCay's longest running comic strip was "Dream of a Rarebit Fiend," which was adapted into a 1906 film by Edwin S. Porter and was screened at the festival in 2011. Stephen Horne will be on hand to accompany. If ten o'clock on a Saturday morning is too early for you to be inside a movie theater, all four films in this presentation are available to watch on Winsor McCay's voluminous Wikipedia page.



12:00 PM The Half-Breed (1916, USA, dir. Alan Dwan, 35mm)

The past two years have seen a bounty of Douglas Fairbanks films at SFSFF (Mr. Fix-It, The Mark of Zorro, The Thief of Bagdad). For 2013's fest they've reached back to 1916, a year when the actor shot 11 movies. In this outing Fairbanks plays a half-Native American societal outcast who lives in a hollowed-out redwood tree and ultimately finds acceptance from a medicine show dancing girl. Shot in Northern California near Boulder Creek (Santa Cruz County), the film has a number of interesting names attached to it. Victor Fleming was the cinematographer and Anita Loos wrote the screenplay (adapting Bret Harte's short story "In the Carquinez Woods"). There's a scene in which a nearly-nude Fairbanks bathes in a river, which was reputedly put in the film by director Dwan only because Fairbank's then-wife, a cotton industrialist's daughter named Ann Beth Sully, hated the idea of her husband playing a "dirty, unwashed" half-breed. Thank you, Ms. Sully! As mentioned previously, The Half-Breed is a co-restoration between SFSFF and the Cinémathèque Française, the details of which will be discussed at this year's Amazing Tales from the Archives presentation. Günter Buchwald will accompany on the Castro's (reportedly ailing) Mighty Wurlitzer, the only time the instrument will be used at this year's festival.


2:15 PM Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935, Bali, dir. Henri de la Falaise, 35mm)

"Nudity Without Crudity" is how the adverts read when this Balinese docu-drama-cum-ethnographic travelogue opened in NYC in 1935. Tickets reportedly cost $5.00 or $84.20 adjusted for inflation. Financed by the director's wife, actress Constance Bennett (Henri de la Falaise was also the former Mr. Gloria Swanson), Legong applied Western plot contrivances to tell its tale of a Balinese dancer who pines for a musician, but he's got eyes for her sister. Butchered by censors for bare breasts and cock-fighting, the film played American grindhouses for decades under various lurid titles. Today it's recognized as an significant document of Bali's traditional dances, funeral rites and marketplace scenes of 80 years ago. It's also one of the very last silent films produced in Hollywood and a near-final example of the two-strip Technicolor process. Although Legong is making its SFSFF debut, the film was exhibited at the Castro for an entire weekend in the spring of 1999, accompanied by the Club Foot Orchestra and Gamelan Sekar Jaya. Those same musicians will be performing again at this year's SFSFF screening.


4:00 PM Gribiche (1926, France, dir. Jacques Feyder, 35mm)

In addition to being a classic French sauce, Gribiche is the title of this silent from the director of 1935's Carnival in Flanders, a classic I recently saw for the first time and wholeheartedly adored. Shot both in the studio and authentic Paris locations, the film tells the story of a poor boy who gets adopted by a rich American woman, but soon becomes bored and rebellious. Gribiche was made by the notable Films Albatros, a studio founded by Russian émigrés in France that produced important works by Marcel L'Herbier (L'Argent, SFSFF Winter Event 2011) and René Clair. Acclaimed art director Lazare Meerson created an entire 17th century Flemish village for Carnival in Flanders and his art deco sets for Gribiche are said to be no less spectacular. We'll be seeing a new restoration by the Cinémathèque Française, who will also receive this year's SFSFF Award at the screening. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra accompanies.


6:30 PM The House On Trubnaya Square (1928, USSR, dir. Boris Barnet, 35mm)

In this Russian comedy of manners from the director of The Girl with the Hat Box (SFSFF 2006), a young peasant woman and her duck travel to Moscow searching an uncle and a new life. What she finds is romance and political consciousness after securing a servant's job with a barber and his bossy, lay-about wife who live in a crowded tenement. The film is said to use charm and cinematic invention to poke fun at bourgeois urban Soviet society, housing shortages and labor unions. Stephen Horne provides the accompaniment.


8:30 PM The Joyless Street (1925, Germany, dir. G.W. Pabst, 35mm)

SFSFF's 2013 Centerpiece Film was the third directorial effort of G.W. Pabst, who would go on to make such important films as Pandora's Box with Louise Brooks and The 3 Penny Opera. Set in post-WWI Vienna during a time of extreme economic duress and wealth disparity, the film stars Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo as two women in dire straits, one of whom will turn to prostitution for survival. This was 19-year-old Garbo's second major role and her own personal favorite. She would depart for Hollywood later in the year. The Joyless Street, exhibited in the U.S. as The Street of Sorrow, served as a bridge between German Expressionism and a "new realism" style of European filmmaking. It is known to most film buffs via a butchered 61-minute version. The festival will be show a reconstruction by Stefan Drössler that runs nearly 2 1/2 times that length, with accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble.



Sunday, July 21

10:00 AM Kings of (Silent) Comedy (Digital)

If you've never seen charismatic French preservationist Serge Bromberg in action, you owe it to yourself to catch this program of four silent comedy shorts he's chosen for digital preservation. The titles include a Felix the Cat cartoon (Felix Goes West, 1924, dir. Otto Messmer), Charles Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917) and Buster Keaton's The Love Nest (1923). The one I'm most excited about, however, is Hal Roach Studio's Mighty Like a Moose (1926), directed by Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, Going My Way) and starring Charley Chase, a silent comedian I know only by name and reputation. The film was selected for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 2007, and it details the shenanigans which ensue when an equally homely husband and wife decide to have plastic surgery on the same day. Günter Buchwald will accompany the merriment. It's worth mentioning here that children under 10 are admitted free to all SFSFF screenings!


1:00 PM The Outlaw and His Wife (1918, Sweden, dir. Victor Sjöström, 35mm)

Filmmaker and actor Victor Sjöström directed over 40 films in Sweden before emigrating to Hollywood in 1924, adapting the name Victor Seastrom. While SFSFF has shown several of his American films over the years (He Who Gets Slapped, The Scarlett Letter, The Wind), I believe this is the first time they're screening one of his Swedish silents. (According to the festival archive, even his 1921 silent classic The Phantom Carriage has been M.I.A.). In this 1918 film based on a real 18th century Icelandic outlaw, an escaped convict (played by the director) takes up with a wealthy widow and the two escape to a life in the wilderness. Appropriately, musical accompaniment will be provided by Sweden's Matti Bye Ensemble.


3:30 PM The Last Edition (1925, USA, dir. Emory Johnson, 35mm)

Actor and San Francisco native Emory Johnson appeared in over 70 films before turning his hand to directing in 1922. He would make 13 features, most of them stories about blue collar professions adapted from stories written by his mother, Emilie Johnson. In The Last Edition, veteran actor Ralph Lewis (Birth of a Nation, Intolerance) plays a pressman for the San Francisco Chronicle who has a son that works for the D.A.'s office. When a gang of bootleggers frame the son on trumped-up bribery charges, the father literally tries to stop the presses, resulting in the printing plant blowing up. The film was shot in and around the Chronicle Building(s) – both the old one on Market Street and then brand new one at 5th and Mission – and the film's nifty website contains a Chronicle front-page article about the film's preview for newspapermen at the St. Francis Theatre on Market Street. Until two years ago the film was considered lost, then SFSFF's Rob Byrne discovered that the EYE Film Institute Netherlands possessed an original nitrate print. This screening will be the world premiere of the restoration. Stephen Horne accompanies.


6:00 PM The Weavers (1927, Germany, dir. Friedrich Zelnik, digital)

This Soviet-influenced historical drama centers on a 1844 uprising of Silesian cotton weavers, who were concerned about the impact of steam-powered looms upon their livelihood (the event took place roughly 30 years after the Luddite revolt in Britain). The film stars Paul Wegener (best known for his silent film Golem portrayals) as the heartless mill owner and the inter-title art by renowned caricaturist/Dadaist George Grosz is said to be one of its many highlights. Günter Buchwald will accompany. As an added attraction at this screening, Ken Winokur of the Alloy Orchestra and Beth Custer of the Club Foot Orchestra will accompany a two-minute trailer for Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year, which was recently discovered in the Ukraine.

 
8:30 PM Safety Last! (1923, USA, dir. Sam Taylor, Fred Newmeyer, digital)

Is there a more iconic image from the silent film era than Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock face high above a busy city street? Hard to believe it's taken SFSFF 18 years to get around to showing it, but I for one am thrilled to finally be seeing this classic in its entirety. Lloyd, of course, was the "third genius" of silent film comedy, though at the time his films were more commercially successful than either Chaplin's or Keaton's. Safety Last! was his final film with Hal Roach Productions before striking out on his own. Lloyd stars here as an ambitious small town boy who departs for the Big City, leaving his girlfriend (played by the actor's wife Mildred Davis) behind. He secures a lowly sales clerk job and through a combination of circumstances finds himself ascending a 12-storey department store façade with a new peril – pigeons, a mad dog, a mouse running up his pant leg – awaiting him at each floor. The film joined the National Film Registry in 1994 and while most film scholars don't consider it his best – that honor seems to go to either The Freshman or The Kid Brother – it is certainly his best known and most beloved. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will accompany this Closing Night presentation.

Cross-published on The Evening Class.

Frameline37 2013

The world's oldest LGBT film festival celebrates its 37th anniversary this year, as Frameline's 2013 edition rolls out in San Francisco and Berkeley from June 20 to 30. Globally, the fest remains the largest event of its kind, with this year's record-setting 800 submissions being whittled down to a mere 82 features and 155 shorts representing 30 countries. At the festival press conference it was noted that 2013's line-up is top-heavy with romances and comedies, something not necessarily reflected in the seven narrative and four documentary features I previewed.

For queers of a certain age and temperament, the highlight of Frameline37 has got to be I Am Divine, the long-awaited documentary about the "cinematic terrorist" alter ego of one Harris Glenn Milstead from Baltimore. I fess up to being a rabid Divine fan. I know the films by heart and saw him act in the stage play "The Neon Woman." I also own a stack of Divine vinyl and watched him perform those same songs live at The Stone nightclub on Broadway not long before his death in 1988. I even read the book written by his mother. So when Kickstarter came calling, I couldn't refuse. I'm very pleased with the fruit of my (admittedly meager) investment, which shouldn't be a surprise given the participation of director Jeffrey Schwartz, a master at this kind of bio-doc (Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story and last year's Frameline opening-nighter, Vito). I Am Divine is lovingly assembled and succeeds whether you’re a newbie or diehard devotee, with ultra rare photos, archival clips and interviews with co-stars Tab Hunter, Ricki Lake and every still-breathing Dreamlander. Personal assistants, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, mother Frances, Joshua Grannell aka Peaches Christ and of course, the ubiquitous-for-a-good-reason Mr. John Waters, all chime in as well. The festival's "hold-review" policy for this film prevents me from saying much more, but be advised that I Am Divine screens one-time only, at the Castro Theatre on Sunday, June 23. Tickets are still available.


It's only a short hop from Divine to Disco, the latter being the subject of Jamie Kastner's Canadian documentary, The Secret Disco Revolution. As an early and enthusiastic adherent in that revolution, I can vouch that the film gets it right – especially how the music began as joyful, 4/4 beat, Philly-based soul (The O-Jays, First Choice) being played in gay and black urban clubs in the early 1970's. Crucial early tracks like Barry White's "Love's Theme" and Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa" get spotlighted, along with dance crazes like the Hustle and the Bump. I lost interest in the scene well before the release of "Saturday Night Fever" and Kastner's film recounts that period as well. As it spread to the straight, white mainstream, the music devolved into a thumping, narcissistic parody of itself, which lead to the racist/homophobic backlash of Disco Demolition Night. The Secret Disco Revolution pinpoints disco's death date as August 25, 1979, the day The Knack's "My Sharona" knocked Chic's "Good Times" off Billboard's Hot 100 top spot. Our guides through this slice of a music history are a rather silly Mod-Squad-ish trio of disco revolutionary "masterminds" and several "experts" whose pronouncements on the music's socio-politico import can be pretty eye-rolling ("We can see beneath Disco's carefully vapid veneer to its true aim – the mass liberation of gays, blacks and women from the clutches of a conservative, rock-dominated world.") Still, this doc does its job with lots of fun archival clips and interviews with the likes of Evelyn "Champagne" King, Vicki Sue Robinson, Thelma Houston and Harry Wayne "KC" Casey. Oddly enough, the film opens at Landmark's Opera Plaza Cinema on June 28, the day before its lone Frameline screening.

Each year Frameline has documentaries which remind us how dire life is for LGBT folk in many parts of the world. And it's getting worse. Just witness recent events in Russia, Nigeria and Georgia – films about which we'll no doubt see at Frameline38. I became aware of Jamaica's rampant homophobia back in 2009, when U.S. concerts by musician Buju Banton, including one in San Francisco, were cancelled due to pressure from LGBT activists. Micah Fink's tremendously affecting The Abominable Crime – the title derives from the island's colonial anti-gay law labeling homosexuality as "the abominable crime of buggery" – takes a personal look at the situation there via its two main subjects. Maurice Tomlinson is a gay Jamaican LGBT activist who is married to a Canadian minister, and Simone Edwards is a single mother who was shot several times and left for dead, just for being a lesbian. Following continued threats on her life and the denial of a U.S. visa, Edwards boarded a plane for Turkey (for which Jamaicans don't need visas) and sought asylum during a stopover in Amsterdam. The film keeps returning to film Edwards as she adapts to her new country and awaits reunification with the young daughter she left behind. Meanwhile, a persistently fearless Tomlinson, much to the consternation of his husband, continues the fight to repeal the island's anti-buggery law with the assistance of the British Lord who helped overturn anti-gay laws in Northern Ireland. The end credits reveal that anti-LGBT attacks in Jamaica have risen 400 percent since 2009. Another related doc worth checking out is Chris Belloni's I Am Gay and Muslim, in which a half dozen gay Moroccan men open up about living clandestine sexual lives and how they reconcile that sexuality with their religion. Director Belloni asks provocative, but respectful questions and receives some surprising answers from his uniformly educated, English-speaking subjects.

 
Moving on to Frameline37's narrative features, my favorite of those previewed would be Yen Tan's Pit Stop, a low-key yet emotionally complex drama about two gay men approaching middle age. Gabe (Bill Heck) is a building contractor who is still actively involved in the lives of his young daughter and ex-wife. Latino warehouseman Ernie (Marcus DeAnda) has just sent

his younger live-in boyfriend packing. These two wounded, and not to mention, ruggedly attractive men, move through life coping as best they can, and it's lovely when the film allows their paths to ultimately cross. Director Tan makes good on the promise exhibited in his second feature Ciao (Frameline32), with perfectly paced scenes, thoughtful camera placement and realistic dialogue (he co-wrote the screenplay). An added bonus is the refreshing blue collar Texas milieu in which the film takes place. The only other U.S. narrative I previewed was C.O.G., which represents the first time writer David Sedaris has permitted a film adaptation of his work. Glee's Jonathan Groff stars as the Sedaris stand-in, a priggish Yale grad who comes to rural Oregon seeking life experience and then tumbles into a series of gnarly misadventures. Despite assured direction from Kyle Patrick Alvarez and several engaging supporting performances, the film comes off curiously flat, suggesting that perhaps Sedaris' brand of humor works best on the written page.

Each year it's interesting to look through Frameline's World Cinema section and see where the majority of new LGBT films are coming from. Last year's edition featured an extraordinary number of works from the Muslim world and its diaspora, and two years before that we experienced a large presence from Latin America. After several years of underrepresentation, it appears that Asia is back in the game and colleague Tony An has done an excellent job of profiling Frameline37's Queer Asian Cinema selections. The only one I've personally seen is Jun Robles Lana's Bwakaw, a somewhat broad but nonetheless endearing film which was last year's foreign language Oscar® submission from the Philippines. Veteran superstar Eddie Garcia, who has a whopping 556 acting credits in his imdb profile, gives a memorable performance as a terminally cranky, gay retiree who softens when his pet dog Bwakaw develops a terminal illness.

 
French language films are normally a significant part of Frameline's line-up, but not this year. I can only guess at why French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan's (I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats) acclaimed transsexual epic Laurence Anyways failed to make the cut, as well as Les Invisibles, the Cesar-winning documentary on French LGBT senior citizens from Sébastien Lifshitz (Come Undone, Going South, Frameline34). What we're left with is Belgian entry Beyond the Walls, a reasonably fun and sexy intergenerational/cross-cultural romance which becomes histrionic and ludicrous once the older partner goes to prison for drug smuggling. Moments of misconceived clunkiness also weigh down two otherwise fine European entries – Free Fall, a taut, well-acted drama about a pair of mutually attracted German police cadets, one of whom is married with a baby on the way, and In the Name Of, Frameline37's Centerpiece Film about a conflicted Polish priest who runs a facility for at-risk youth, which won the prestigious Teddy Award at this year's Berlin Film Festival. And finally there's It's All So Quiet, an enigmatic, but lumbering Dutch film about a joyless, middle-aged farmer which boasts a riveting performance from stage actor Jeroen Willems, who died shortly after filming and to whom the movie is dedicated.

 
Elsewhere in the Frameline37 line-up are films I'm hoping to catch during the festival proper. I'm a sucker for biographical documentaries and don't want to miss profiles of writers Gore Vidal (Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia) and Paul Bowles (Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open), as well as Bay Area poet/filmmaker James Broughton (Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton). Other docs high on my list are Continental, about the NYC

bathhouse that launched Bette Midler's career; The New Black, which examines shifting attitudes of African Americans toward LGBT rights, and Born This Way, a look at the fight for LGBT acceptance in Cameroon, which will hopefully be as good as last year's audience award-winning, Uganda-focused Call Me Kuchu. Brazilian director Bruno Barreto (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Four Days in September) appears on the Frameline37 roster with Reaching for the Moon, dramatizing the 1950's romance between American poet Elizabeth Bishop and eminent Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares. If I can summon sufficient stamina, I'd also love to experience Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass presentation of Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, said to be the gayest of the Nightmare flicks, with a Peaches pre-show, costume contest and personal appearance by the film's star, self-professed male Scream Queen Mark Patton. Last but not least, I won't be missing Interior. Leather Bar, experimental filmmaker Travis Mathews and actor James Franco's meta-polemic re-imagining of the "missing" sex scenes from William Friedkin's 1980 film Cruising.

Cross-published on The Evening Class.

SF DocFest 2013

For its 12th edition, the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival aka SF DocFest has chosen to withdraw from the Bay Area's cramped autumn festival calendar and relocate to a spacious sweet spot in between the SF International Film Fest and Frameline. With a line-up of 40 features and three programs of shorts, this year's event remains anchored at the Roxie Theatre, while adding three-day mini-fests at S.F.'s Balboa Theatre, Oakland's New Parkway, Landmark's Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto and the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz.

DocFest 2013 kicks off on Thursday, June 6 with Spark: A Burning Man Story and concludes two weeks later with Cullen Hoback's Terms and Conditions May Apply, one of two internet-related docs I previewed on DVD screener. This unnerving exposé on internet privacy and personal data abuse begins with a look at those interminable "Terms of Service" agreements we all click to "agree" without reading. In a cogent and entertaining fashion, Hoback's film shows how those clicks, combined with a lobbyist-influenced Congress and de-anonymization have dragged us into the chilling era we're stuck in today. Facebook is now the C.I.A.'s biggest information source and the film's inarguable conclusion is that any notion of online or telecommunications privacy is officially d-e-a-d. I also took a look at TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard, Simon Klose's scrappy look at the unsavory Swedes behind the world's largest peer-to-peer file-sharing website, and the $13 million copyright infringement lawsuit brought against them by Hollywood's film studios. No matter which side of the piracy vs. copyright divide you fall, there's plenty to chew on here.

The internet also plays a tangential role in Fuck for Forest, which DocFest is billing as its most controversial entry. The film's title comes from an "erotic, non-profit ecological organization," whose members create self-produced porn for a paid-subscription website. The profits are earmarked to protect rainforests. The tiresome first half of Michal Marczak's film is spent introducing FFF's core members, a very sincere but completely self-absorbed band of Berlin-based, dumpster-diving neo-hippie libertines. Things perk up in the film's second half, when after amassing a war chest of €420,000 the group jets off to the Amazon to play Santa Claus. Some hilarious culture-clashing ensues, along with surprising revelations about the actual desires of the indigenous people they've come to help.

As someone who rides the subway four times on an average workday, I zeroed right in on Trains for Thoughts when selecting the handful of docs to review for this piece. While director Timo Novoltny's mix of handsomely photographed images, upfront electronic score and spoken passenger reflections never quite achieves the poetry it strives for, the ride is worth buying a ticket for. Trains for Thoughts begins with New York City's 24-hour subway system and then heads West, with stops in L.A. (where the stations look like movie sets), Tokyo (sexual harassment, suicides and "pushy" uniformed platform attendants) and then Hong Kong. The latter is the only system which actually makes money, largely from the housing developments and shopping malls that spring up around stations. The best is saved for last, as we vicariously experience Moscow's palatial subway stations as part of an Italian tour group.

A special highlight of DocFest 2013 is a retrospective of pioneering queer experimental/non-fiction filmmaker Tom Joslin, who's most vividly remembered as one-half of the A.I.D.S.-stricken couple seen in 1993's Silver Lake Life: The View from Here. That unforgettable Sundance Jury Prize-winning doc, which Joslin co-directed, will screen at the fest along with 1977's Blackstar: Autobiography of a Close Friend. In this earlier autobiographical work, Joslin employs home movies, family interviews, vintage cartoons and inter-titles to create a portrait of growing up "different" in post-WWII New England. Following a mid-film title/credits sequence – 25 years before Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours, mind you – Blackstar shifts focus to Joslin's homosexuality, his family's reaction to it and his lovingly contentious relationship with life partner Mark Massi. In an extended sequence that closes the film, the couple lies naked in bed covered with film stock, struggling to find a non-sexual way to express their intimacy on camera. Their solution, which I won't spoil except to say it involves Laura Nyro and Labelle's cover of "I Met Him On a Sunday," is perhaps the loveliest movie moment I've experienced this year. The third work in DocFest's Joslin retrospective is the posthumously assembled Architecture of Mountains, described as a "film on the nature of dreams and dreaming."

The above-mentioned titles represent only the tip of the DocFest 2013 iceberg, so be sure to check out the entire line-up. Out of the three dozen remaining titles, I'm most looking forward to Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, which is also set to open HBO's Docs Summer Series 2013 on June 10. Other docs I'm intrigued by include the portrait of a legendary American fetish pin-up model (Bettie Page Reveals All), a look at Americans who have their dead pets taxidermied (Furever) and a saga of mass murder atop K2 (The Summit).

SFIFF56 2013 Wrap-Up Week Two

A most memorable 56th San Francisco International Film Festival ended last week after having presented 158 films from 51 countries spread out over 15 days and 263 screenings – 144 of them sell outs. Here are some thoughts on what I saw the second week of the festival, in the order I saw them. (Week one can be found here).


Everyday Objects
In Nicolas Wackerbarth's prickly and detached second feature, a German woman arrives at a French Mediterranean resort to meet up with her lover. She soon learns he had to leave town unexpectedly, forcing her to share a roof with his petulant children while waiting. She puts up with the town's hostile dogs and condescending shopkeepers as well. I was fully engaged in this wry vision of alienation until it felt like the director was artificially stacking the deck against his protagonist. I completely lost interest somewhere around the pube-trimming scene. The film's blah ending seemed to scream, "so what, who cares?"


La Sirga
This was one of two Latin American films I saw with a strong female character in an aquatic locale, in this case a mountain lake high in the Colombian Andes. In William Vega's austere and transfixing debut film, a young woman flees from a village massacre to her uncle's ramshackle homestead, a lakefront guesthouse being fixed up for tourists who are unlikely to come given the region's political instability. Vega inserts sexual tension and the possibility of romance into his vision, along with ethnographic details such as talk of mountain elves, a drunken jam session and scorpion-marinated water which the uncle rubs on his body at bedtime. What I'll probably remember most about La Sirga, however, is its infuriatingly vague ending in which an important character appears to have been killed, but without a clue as to why or by whom.


Youth
I had fairly low expectations for this semi-autobiographical film about a girl's transformation during the fatal illness of her famous film director father. But first-time director Justine Malle, daughter of Louis, has produced a memorably bittersweet film that could promise great things ahead. Esther Garrel, daughter of director Philippe and sibling of actor Louis (with whom she shares hangdog eyes and prominent nose), is almost too good as the self-absorbed and overly sensitive college-age teen navigating her way into adulthood.


Computer Chess
Despite walking into this movie totally unnerved – the screening next door was the controversial late-term abortion doc After Tiller and every ticketholder has to pass through airport-like security – I still managed to sleep through much of this new film from mumblecore progenitor Andrew Bujalski. Was it the film's grainy B&W, low-fi look, achieved from a 60's era Portapak videocam, or perhaps the deadpan humor that fell flat as often as not? Should I want to give Computer Chess another chance, and another chance I think it deserves, I can revisit this 1980-set comedy about nerds attending a computer chess convention when Landmark Theatres opens the film locally on July 26.

Inequality for All
SFIFF56's Centerpiece Film was this cogent documentary about our nation's widening economic disparity. The film "stars" and is narrated by charismatic ex-U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, whose UC Berkeley lectures, accompanied by some of the most inventive and effective graphics I've ever seen in a documentary, are used as a framing device. Both Reich and director Josh Kornbluth were on hand for a Q&A. I enjoyed Kornbluth's response to a question about the film not showing "both sides" of the issue. He replied that sometimes – as with science vs. creationism – facts are facts and there isn't a second side worthy of discussion.


Mai Morire
Enrique Rivero's second feature was one of my top films of the festival and the second Latin American film to feature a strong female protagonist in an aquatic setting, this time the canals of Mexico City's suburb of Xochimilco. Stunning widescreen visuals, ethereal landscapes, disturbing dream sequences, gentle humor, ethnographic details and leisurely pacing are all employed to tell this story of an independent woman who returns home to care for her dying 99-year-old grandmother.


No More Road Trips?
Film archivist Rick Prelinger presented a work-in-progress screening of his newest creation, an assemblage of home movies taken of Americans on the open road. The titular question mark derives from Prelinger's supposition that the high cost of gas has put an end to the notion of cross-country road travel. While the film contained much that was memorable – Yellowstone bears, a retracing of JFK's Dallas assassination route, atomic clouds back-dropping a 1958 drive through Las Vegas – there was overall too much generic road footage and not enough moments of human interest. This film was screened silently, but audience members were encouraged to provide a "soundtrack." The result was a lot of onomatopoeia and people indentifying makes of cars.


Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The occasion for screening this 1978 sci-fi classic was the festival's handing of 2013's Founder's Directing Award to Bay Area filmmaker Philip Kaufman. Following a clips real, the director was interviewed by film writer Annette Insdorf (author of a 2012 Contemporary Film Directors edition on Kaufman), who claimed him as her favorite American director because of his non-auteurist approach to movie-making ("He's more interested in telling a good story"). This was my first time seeing a Castro Theatre on-stage interview projected on the big screen and it was a little disconcerting. I admire Kaufman well enough, but I was really there for a Body Snatchers nostalgia trip. The film was shot in San Francisco just two years after I'd moved here and it was a thrill to catch things like Woolworths on the corner of Powell and Market. I hadn't seen the film since its initial release and forgot how incredibly suspenseful it is. I only regret that the fest was unable to rustle up a 35mm print and resorted to a less than optimal Blu-ray projection. Finally, to my great astonishment, I watched as a Castro staff member scolded a director with a film in this year's festival – he was sitting across the aisle from me – for recording Invasion of the Body Snatchers with his cell phone camera. I kid you not.


The Search for Emak Bakia
This was at great year for documentaries at SFIFF and Oskar Alegria's whimsical, free-form search for the reason artist Man Ray named his 1926 experimental film Emak Bakia, was a favorite. A Basque phrase meaning "leave me alone," Emak Bakia goes down some delightfully screwy paths before arriving at the truth – it was the name of a Biarritz seaside mansion where Ray stayed during filming. That discovery, however, only leads down more byways – one of which involves an old Romanian princess – before reaching the end of this poetic and endlessly fascinating work of non-fiction filmmaking.


Crystal Fairy
My 2013 SFIFF ended on a high note with this screamingly funny and ultimately touching new work from favorite Latin American filmmaker, Sebastián Silva (The Maid, Old Cats). Michael Cera, of all people, stars as an obnoxious American putz who drags three hapless Chilean brothers (played by the director's own siblings) plus an intense American neo-hippie named Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman), on a quest for a hallucinatory cactus plant in the desert region of Northern Chile. Both Silva and Cera were onstage for a rollicking Q&A afterwards, in which it was revealed that: the film is an "85 percent true story" based on Silva's experiences with an actual San Francisco woman named Crystal Fairy, it was conceived in one week of pre-production and shot in 12 days, and yes, they did all ingest the psychedelic cactus pureé we see being cooked in the movie. Best of all, it was announced that Silva will be returning to San Francisco in December for an Artist in Residency program with the SF Film Society.




In addition to the 24 programs I saw during SFIFF56, I squeezed in another three films via DVD screener. Dan Krauss' tragic The Kill Team, tells the story of young military whistleblower Adam Winfield, whose failure to immediately report "scenarios" in which American soldiers got away with killing innocent Afghans, resulted in three years of prison and a bad conduct discharge. The film won the festival's Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Feature Documentary. Next, after hearing many terrific reports about Kenji Uchida's Key of Life, I felt compelled to check it out. This meticulously constructed social comedy about a suicidal slacker and Yakuza hitman who inadvertently switch lives is indeed a near-flawless work, although I might argue with the festival's categorization of it as a "screwball comedy." Finally, in Present Tense, Belmin Söylemez' deadly dull drama about living life in state of abeyance, a young Turkish woman works as a café fortune teller while futilely planning a move to the U.S. It's the kind of film that makes me wish the festival didn't devote an entire third of its line-up each year to the works of novice directors. But what the hell do I know? Present Tense ended up winning SFIFF56's New Directors Prize and the $15,000 cash prize that goes with it.

SFIFF56 2013 Wrap-Up Week One

 
A most memorable 56th San Francisco International Film Festival ended last week after having presented 158 films from 51 countries spread out over 15 days and 263 screenings – 144 of them sell outs. Here are some thoughts on what I saw the first week of the festival, in the order I saw them. (Week two can be found here).


The Artist and the Model
The first regular screening of SFIFF56 was a preview of what would bedevil the festival throughout its first weekend – movies not screening properly because the coded "key" used to "unlock" DCP files for a specific time and theater refused to cooperate, especially when it came to the display of subtitles. Fortunately, my French and Spanish comprehension were adequate enough to enjoy Fernando Trueba's B&W tale of an aging artist (Jean Rochefort) and his young model, which is set against a political backdrop of Nazis and Spanish partisans. Claudia Cardinale plays the artist's wife and original muse, never looking more radiant than she does now at 78. It was also fun to see Spanish character actress Chus Lampreave (the old lady in Almodóvar's movies with the thick glasses) as the meddlesome maid.


Leviathan
In this radically experimental, narration-less documentary from Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, the viewer spends one trippy, churning night aboard a North Atlantic fishing trawler. The visuals are grainy and candy-colored, and the hand-held camera work so disorienting there are times you can only guess at what you might be watching. Leviathan inspired more audience walkouts than any other film I saw at the festival. I would be alternately bored and then blasted awake by images of starfish showers, hovering birds illuminated against a black night sky and live skates being hacked in two by machete-wielding boatsmen. Visceral, fantastic, unforgettable.


State of Cinema Address
Steven Soderbergh's delivery of the 10th annual State of Cinema Address was the first SFIFF56 program to sell out. I arrived early and grabbed a front row seat in front of the podium, where I sat captivated for the next 40-minutes. Despite Executive Director Ted Hope's advisory that the address not be recorded, a sound file was leaked to Indiewire, thereby prompting the SF Film Society to post a video of the entire speech originally meant for archival purposes only.


The Pirogue
For some years now, SFIFF has come up short when it comes to programming sub-Saharan African stories that are directed by the region's own filmmakers. I therefore jumped at the chance to catch Senegalese director Moussa Torré's harrowing saga of 30 disparate West Africans journeying to Spain in a wooden boat. The film was effective and engaging, if occasionally stilted, with a storm-at-sea sequence every bit as intense and terrifying as something Hollywood could produce.


Something in the Air
Acclaimed French director Olivier Assayas and I are one year apart in age, which could explain why I was so affected by this wistful, semi-autobiographical look back at radicalized European youth of the early 70's. This may have been my most "perfect" film of the festival and I'll likely see it again when it opens at Landmark's Opera Plaza Cinemas this Friday. Extra points are given for including Captain Beefheart and The Incredible String Band on the soundtrack.


The Act of Killing
Along with Leviathan, this was one of two SFIFF56 entries that appeared on my 20-film wish list for this year's festival. In Joshua Oppenheimer's unclassifiable documentary, Indonesian paramilitary death squad leaders who were responsible for the slaughter of over a million so-called "communists" in the mid-60's, eagerly and shamelessly re-enact their crimes in the style of Hollywood genres, including, of all things, a musical. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. You won't want to miss this when it opens at a local Landmark Theatre on August 9.


Downpour
Despite my initial enthusiasm for seeing this 1971 Iranian social comedy recently restored by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation, lack of sleep plus a warm theater plus a rambling storyline all conspired to ensure that I "watched" a good third of this movie with my eyes closed. Because I had to rush off to my next film, I missed the Q&A with director Bahram Beyzaie, but was later told he gave elusive and unforthcoming answers to the audience's questions.


Twenty Feet from Stardom
It came as little surprise when Morgan Neville's rousing and inspirational look at the world of background singers won the festival's Audience Award for Best Documentary. I admired the artful flourishes which elevated the film above your standard, talking-heads-and-archival-footage doc. One highlight is singer Merry Clayton and Mick Jagger recalling the fateful night in 1969 when a fur coat and hair curler-clad Clayton was tossed into a taxi at 4 a.m. and sent to record her legendary vocals on the Stones' track, "Gimme Shelter." Speaking of Clayton, I regrettably missed the screening two days earlier, when she and Tata Vega performed a live mini-concert in the Kabuki Cinema's House One. I did, however, track her down earlier in the evening and she autographed my vinyl copy of her 1971 self-titled solo LP. Festival memories are made of this.


Museum Hours
SFIFF56 Persistence of Vision Award winner Jeb Cohen's Museum Hours was my favorite of all of the films I previewed prior to the festival (my review is here). I attended this awards program to learn about rest of his oeuvre, as well as revisit this marvelous film on a big screen with an audience. The 45-minute interview between the equally soft-spoken Cohen and Pacific Film Archive programmer Steve Seid revealed a career spent making films that don't require "taking meetings," meaning that alas, very few are readily available to watch, even on-line. Favorite quote of the evening: "Film festivals? We would be in seriously deep shit without them."


Populaire
This zingy French bonbon with the self-fulfilling title would go on to win SFIFF56's Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. While I found it wholly enjoyable, I disagree with critics who consider it the Second Coming of Tashlin. Set in the 1950's world of secretarial speed-typing competitions, Populaire's costume design and art direction are upfront and flawless, as is Déborah François' performance as the wannabe secretary from the sticks. Romain Duris, however, is weirdly priggish and unlikable for a period rom-com leading man. First time director Régis Roinsard was on hand for a Q&A, in which he revealed that François did indeed learn to type that fast for her role – no stunt doubles here. Populaire opens at a local Landmark Theatre on September 13, and it will be interesting to see if distributor The Weinstein Company excises a fairly racy sex scene from what is otherwise G-rated fare.


Nights with Theodore
My encounters with eventual festival award winners continued with Sébastien Betbeder's 67-minute made-for-French-TV movie, which took the SFIFF56 FIPRESCI prize. Both wondrous and charming, it combines a fictional narrative about a young couple spending clandestine nights in Paris' Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, along with documentary footage about the park's history and reputation for having mystical powers. Unfortunately, some heavy-handed owl symbolism early on is actuated in the film's clunky final act. Pio Marmaï (Living on Love Alone, SFIFF54) again proves himself one of Europe's most watchable young actors.


Night Across the Street
I sheepishly confess to the personal shortcoming of never having grooved with the complex, playful and enigmatic works of Chilean-born auteur Raúl Ruiz, including his 2010 magnum opus Mysteries of Lisbon. I also failed to embrace this, his final completed film.


Stories We Tell
The reviews for Canadian actress-turned-director Sarah Polley's first foray into documentary filmmaking were so ecstatic, I doubted her film could live up to the hype. It's a pleasure to report that this heartbreaking and humorous inquiry into family secrets and the unreliability of memory, specifically Polley's vivacious mother Diane and the mystery of parentage she left behind, is everything it's been cracked up to be. My only regret is that I missed the SFIFF56 screening at which Polley was present. The film opens at Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema on May 17.


Penance
I knew going into Kiyoshi Kurosawa's five-episode, five-hour TV mini-series that I only had time to see half of it, figuring I could catch the rest on DVD screener if I got sufficiently hooked. That didn't happen. But there was a sequence in episode two where a young female teacher uses her kendo skills to subjugate a knife-wielding maniac around a swimming pool of terrified children that was perhaps the most thrillingly directed scene of any film I saw in the festival.