By Lynn Rapoport
Mabel (Gena Rowlands, in an Oscar-winning Oscar-nominated performance) has a rare calm moment in A Woman Under the Influence.
The first weekend of the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival produced a cheerful, if windblown, bottleneck along Post between Fillmore and Webster. The one outside the Castro on Sunday night had a slightly more shell-shocked emotional tenor. The crowd seemed in good enough spirits (though this reviewer admits to getting a bit misty-eyed) while giving Gena Rowlands a standing ovation when the 78-year-old actor came onstage before John Cassavetes’s A Woman under the Influence (1974). But the film’s two and a half hours of abrasive familial dysfunction and poorly attended-to mental illness are rough going, and no one could be blamed for wandering home in a torn-up, overwrought fugue. (Think happy thoughts: like the 2008 restoration of the film by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, underwritten by Gucci.)
Less emotionally brutalizing was Friday evening’s screening of Art & Copy (screening again Tues/28, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki), where doc maker Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch, Surfwise) expressed satisfaction at finally getting a film into SFIFF and noted that this one was centered on “the idea that if you hate advertising, make better advertising.”
Radio, radio: a scene from Art & Copy.
DVRs, defaced billboards, and legislation to calm the traffic of branding on virtually every visible surface of public space also spring to mind. However, these and other options are left unexplored in favor of a brief history of the revolution that occurred in advertising midcentury; commentary by some of the rebel forces and their descendants, including locals Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein (Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners); entertaining behind-the-scenes tales of famous ad campaigns (Got Milk?, I Want My MTV); and stats sprinkled throughout on advertising’s cultural presence, nationally and globally.
Self-comparisons to cave painters and a sequence near the close that feels like an advertisement for advertising (emotionally evocative images of children’s faces upturned in wonder to the sky: check) are somewhat uncomfortable to witness. But Pray has gathered together some of the industry’s brighter, more engaging lights, and his subjects discuss their vocation intelligently, thoughtfully, wittily, and often thoroughly earnestly. It would have been interesting to hear, amid the earnestness, and the exalted talk of advertising that rises to the level of art, some philosophizing on where all this branding and selling gets us, in an age when it’s hard to deny that breakneck consumption is having a somewhat deleterious effect on the planet. Or to learn from these creatives whether there were any ad campaigns they wouldn’t touch, such as one centered on nuclear energy, or the reelection of George W. Bush. After all, many of the interviewees come across as shaggy ex-hippies and liberals. (Last fall, trade paper the Denver Egotist referred to “the entire creative world uniting against John McCain in support of Barack Obama” in a piece on Goodby, Silverstein-made anti-McCain spots that the agency cofounders reportedly underwrote personally.) Still, the film is successful in humanizing and developing a richer picture of a vilified profession. And what it reveals about the visions of its subjects (one compares a good brand to someone you’d like to have over for dinner; another asserts that “great advertising makes food taste better”; another that “you can manufacture any feeling that you want to manufacture”) makes it worth watching, even if you make a habit of fast-forwarding past the ads.