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Film Features

SFIFF: Apolitical animal

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SFIFF Do we have Francisco Vargas’s The Violin (2005) to blame for the omission of Lake Tahoe — the follow-up to Fernando Eimbcke and screenwriting partner Paula Markovitch’s imperfect and wonderful 2004 debut Duck Season — from this year’s selection of Mexican films at the San Francisco International Film Festival? Did the success of Vargas’s film, which won the New Directors Prize at last year’s fest, give the selection committee too much confidence in the rookies?

There are three Mexican films this year, all first features. Though one manages to be an infield home run, the overall representation of the country is underwhelming and, we hope, less than representative.

Let’s begin with Rodrigo Plá’s La Zona (2007), an alleged thriller that seeks to eviscerate Mexico’s cloistered middle class.

It does not. Nestled within the dirty vibrancy of Mexico City is "La Zona," a gated community of those same ornate houses with the Mediterranean-tile roofs that blight the American suburbs (I lived in one during high school). When a fallen billboard becomes a stairway over the wall, a violent scuffle with intruders puts the community’s zoning charter in peril. For the residents of the enclave, the possibility of losing their ability to live separately just won’t do. The movie’s message — that a tier of Mexican society is sacrificing its soul to divorce itself from its economically ravaged country — may as well have been plastered across that catalytic billboard.

La Zona is the type of idea Eimbcke and Markovitch might have considered and rejected in high school. The Nintendo light guns in Duck Season do a helluva better job evoking the spiritual violence that is so painfully literal in La Zona. It’s strange to me that Eimbcke and Markovitch haven’t made a bigger splash in the United States. Lord knows the majority of people inclined toward reading subtitles don’t like to work too hard, but the American influence on these filmmakers’ first film (it got a lot of Stranger Than Paradise comparisons) is apparent. It’s a wonder they aren’t already riding the same train, albeit in coach, as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuarón. They’re minimalists, but the likeable kind.

But enough pining. Back to the reality.

One wants to muster the energy to hope that Alex Rivera’s sci-fi antiglobalization flick Sleep Dealer, which wasn’t available for screening, takes La Zona‘s same drive to filter Mexican political concerns through pop conventions and produces something substantial. The centerpiece concept — site-specific American labor outsourced to Mexico with the help of drones — is certainly intriguing. But judging from the easy political humor of Rivera’s short films (the proxy farm worker idea was already played for laughs in his 1998 short Why Cybraceros?), we should brace for another dour lecture hastily fitted with genre tropes and called subversive.

But even if Sleep Dealer turns out to be a powerhouse, its NAFTA-Tron 3000 robots have to be awfully cool to contend with the quiet power of Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán’s Cochochi. The film, about two preteen brothers from the Raramuri tribe in northwest Mexico, is slightly shy of the visual achievement of The Violin‘s textured grayscale, but it’s also more sincere and less showy in its social awareness. The two boys (real-life brothers Antonio Lerma Batista and Evaristo Lerma Batista), while delivering medicine to family in a neighboring village, promptly lose the horse they "borrowed" from their grandfather. Then they lose one another. Like a bifurcated Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Cochochi is a pleasantly disorienting trek through unfamiliar territory, trailing overburdened children who register their mounting worries with the stony expressiveness kids are brilliant at.

It’s an unassuming naturalist document that, for all its hushed grace, crackles with anxiety and proudly maintains a layer of abrasiveness. In this respect, it reminds me of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ gorgeous nutso-realist films, minus the impish provocation. Like Reygadas, Cárdenas and Guzmán use local, untrained actors to languorously stilted effect. The filmmakers relied heavily on the brothers for the film’s story and dialogue, which is spoken in the Tarahumaran dialect of Raramuri.

Cochochi is no thriller and there aren’t any robots, but it is the rightful destination of your dollar. Besides, if the current Under the Same Moon is any indication of distribution trends, there’ll be plenty of opportunity for self-flagellation later.

COCHOCHI May 1, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 6:30 p.m., PFA

SLEEP DEALER Mon/28, 9 p.m., PFA; May 4, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

LA ZONA May 3, 9:30 p.m., Clay; May 5, 2 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Color her deadly

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It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains at least one, and arguably two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Critic’s choice

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SFIFF J. Hoberman — trenchant weekly critic, book author, programmer, teacher — is celebrating his 30th year at the Village Voice, an unheard-of stretch for a film writer. (Pauline Kael’s famous tenure at the New Yorker lasted 23 years.) Freshly garlanded with a three-week program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and an Anthology Film Archive screening of his early forays in experimental filmmaking, Hoberman continues his prize tour with this year’s Mel Novikoff Award.

The recent programs at BAM and Anthology highlight attributes that made Hoberman an essential buttress against the sycophantic rivalries flowing from Kael’s 1960s showdowns with Andrew Sarris. Over the phone from his New York office, Hoberman told me about his early days at the Voice: "I created a beat of things the other critics weren’t particularly interested in, and that took in a lot of stuff. Originally they had brought me on to write about avant-garde and experimental film, but pretty soon I was writing about documentary, animation, revival series, foreign films that weren’t from France … all kinds of things."

Hoberman’s BAM program was accordingly unwieldy, covering Andrei Rublev (1969) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Ernie Gehr and Martin Scorsese. Cinephilia Hoberman-style seems to be everywhere at once, encompassing Looney Tunes, No Wave New York, Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Yiddish cinema. It’s eclecticism with a program, matched by a willingness to chase the rabbit down its hole — but never at the expense of analytical rigor.

Although Hoberman is a professed admirer of the puzzling jazz in Manny Farber’s criticism, his prose is solidly explicatory and instructive. He knows how to open a discussion: "In its tireless attempts to mean everything to everyone and empirical willingness to try anything once, the American culture industry intermittently generates its own precursors, parallels, and analogues to local or European avant-gardism." He’s an apt profiler: "Pain and Fear — and the convulsive desire for public recognition — are Scorsese’s meat." And he’s not afraid to take a stand, as with a recent rave for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007): "From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run."

He’s also an accomplished facilitator of Jean-Luc Godard’s idea that the history of cinema is synchronous with the history of the 20th century. We can count on Hoberman to connect Terror’s Advocate (2007) with La Chinoise (1967), to draw a line from a prescient film like A Face in the Crowd (1957) to Watergate and Nashville (1975). When his interests come together — as with an appreciation of Southland Tales‘ (2007) avant-gardism, midnight movie appeal, and socio-political currency — sparks still fly. Talking about an upcoming "prequel" he’s penning to his 2005 decoupage of ’60s cinema, The Dream Life (New Press), Hoberman muses, "I think that now, or at least since [Ronald] Reagan, it’s sort of customary to see movies as political scenarios." To the extent that this is true, Hoberman is due significant credit — his meditations on that movie-land president, for one, are as adroit as that of any policy wonk.

Historical markers notwithstanding, Hoberman’s film selection for his special night is likely the most unabashedly sensuous movie not starring Asia Argento to play this year’s festival. Spanish director José Luis Guerín described In the City of Sylvia (2007) as a "simple" film at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, and it certainly does offer a distilled vision of cinematic paradise: gazing and grazing faces, old Strasbourg, and a slow stitch of sound and image.

Our inlet to Sylvia is a whiskered young man, haunting the city at a dreamy remove. He sits in an outdoor café with his notebook, sketching the faces of radiant women while Guerín orchestrates fractal cutting, multilevel staging of faces, and intricately gradated sound design into a sun-dappled symphony. After changing seats, the dreamer recognizes a woman sitting behind a pane of glass. She leaves and he follows, locked in an ambiguous reverie inscribed with resonant detail and sweet ambiguity.

Sylvia fulfills the cinephile’s dream of disembodiment. "It’s a narrative that comes organically from the fact of making the movie rather than dramatizing a story situation," Hoberman opines. "There’s a real love of cinema, the process of it." Each of the film’s handful of extended passages is distinct in its precise design, but this blissful lucidity Hoberman describes is Sylvia‘s central melody and romance.

Late in Guerín’s film, after a yearning bar scene set to Blondie’s "Heart of Glass," the young man sits at a tram stop, considering the waiting women and rushing window reflections for some clue as to his own loss. In a virtuosic eliding glimpse of a passing bus, Guerín dissolves the sounds and images of shots already superimposed by the panes of glass. A quick succession of several more multi-tiered, unexpectedly conversant portraits of women ("Elles," the dreamer notes in his book) finally lands on a mesmerizing rear-angle of a woman’s hair blowing wildly in the wind. The young man can’t put pencil to paper. He’s as enamored as we are with this siren song from what the director calls "the continent of cinema," a place J. Hoberman knows all too well.

AN EVENING WITH J. HOBERMAN (includes screening of In the City of Sylvia), Sun/27, 6 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA Tues/29, 4 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 9 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: On tour

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SFIFF His last letter read, "Forget me" and "I’m never coming back." But instead of crying, waiting, hoping he’ll return, or pleading, "Please, Mr. Postman, look and see, if there’s a letter, a letter for me," she decides she will follow him, wherever he may go, because maybe, just maybe, one fine day, they’ll meet once more, and he’ll want the love he threw away before.

What follows is the sublime La France (2007), a holy union of war movie and love story, consecrated in the same chapel of pop that houses tearful penitent Brian Wilson, radiant nun Anna Karina, and verse-scribbling choir boy Jacques Brel — and stage-set with the mist-swathed romanticism of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

After our heroine and "Dear Jeanne" letter recipient Camille (Sylvie Testud) dons the boyish garb of a wartime Viola to unearth news of her soldier husband, she stumbles on a mysterious military troop slumbering uneasily in the woods. Camille wants to eat like them, march like them, and become one of them, with the sacrificial passion of a lover desperate to wear the garments and walk in the footsteps of her pined-for mate. But in the fall of 1917, all is not-so-quiet far from the Western front as director Serge Bozon’s band of brothers — many played by the actor-auteur’s fellow French film critics — pick up impromptu instruments fashioned from canteens and pots to play the sweetest yet strikingly barbed lovelorn tunes. What better way to meet doom while their country takes some of the heaviest casualties of World War I? What better way to mend a broken heart?

La France is "a war movie but almost in the absence of war and a love movie almost in the absence of love," as Bozon explains via e-mail while attending a Buenos Aires film festival. It turns gracefully on "a quest — just like the war, because we are never in the battlefields. So the war is more a horizon — something outside, always close but almost never reached.

"The unifying impulse is this magnetization, by definition from outside," he continues. "I think here the master of magnetization is Jacques Tourneur, the Henry James of cinema: how to drive la mise en scène by the absence of something at the (double) center of the story."

Balancing the visually sumptuous La France (lensed by the director’s sister Céline) on what he describes as the edge and arrogance of English pop-sike and the narcotic etherealness of California sunshine pop, Bozon has made one of the most unique films in the festival. No joke. He sports only two shortish works — the 84-minute L’Amitie (1998) and the 59-minute Mods (2002) — beneath the belt of his modish slacks: La France is his first feature. It’s also inadvertently launched something of a burgeoning DJ career for the music-obsessed director, who promises to draw from his healthy garage rock and Northern soul singles collection for at least one dance-party during the fest.

SFBG Why did you title the film La France? Does the soldiers’ plight say something about your country in general?

SERGE BOZON To put it in the words of Michel Delahaye, one of my favorite film critics from the ’60s (in Cahiers du Cinéma) who wrote a paper about La France, I’ve tried to tell the story of those men who "got lost in the shadow of victory."

I wanted to deal with desertion, not to tell the story of the deserters who were caught by the French army, not to tell the story of the deserters who managed to reach their goal, but to tell the story of the deserters "in between," because they are the only ones who have left no trace (no trace in France, because they managed to escape France, and no trace in any other country, because they never attained their destination). So it’s like a secret story that only fiction can tell. To sum up, this crucial part of French history can only exist through fiction. That’s why I chose the title.

Just listen to "Going All the Way" by the Squires or "On Tour" by the Chancellors (two garage diamonds found by the mighty Tim Warren of Crypt Records), and you’ll understand the relation of this title to the music. "On Tour" is a song, as you can guess, about the life of a group on tour (the girls, the cities, the trains, boats and planes). But like all the real garage bands, the Chancellors never played even once outside their own city (Potsdam, actually). Now think about the "tour" of my soldiers. You begin by expecting some light pop, but in the end it’s only frustration and anger.

SFBG What do war movies mean to you?

SB It is the only classic American genre that is still alive in France, where a lot of war movies are made each year. The menace of war is unceasing — or even eternal. To be more precise, my movie is more a movie about the menace of war than about the war itself, so I could have done it in a present-day setting. But what I wanted, from a historical point of view, is to deal with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917. I filmed only the menace, and this menace is in our present and desertion is, still, in our present history — "needles and pins," to quote the Ramones covering the Searchers.

SFBG Which war movies have intrigued you or inspired La France specifically?

SB The American and Russian war movies of the ’40s and ’50s. And I must press this point: the movies of [Samuel] Fuller, [John] Ford, [Raoul] Walsh, Tourneur, [Howard] Hawks are not more important for me than the sublime Russian war movies — for example [Ivan] Pyryev’s Tales of the Siberian Land (1947), [Leonid] Lukov’s Two Soldiers (1943), [Yuli] Raizman’s Mashenka (1942), [Alexander] Macheret’s Soldiers of the Swamp (1939).

In all of these movies, contrary to Walsh, Fuller, and company, you have songs in crucial moments and the moods do not have to be hard-boiled all the time. There is a lot of childish tenderness and emotive exuberance among the soldiers, because the relation of men to virility is more naive. You also have beautiful female characters. Mashenka, for example, is a war movie about a woman. You also have a non-American, rural way of filming the landscapes with a romantic touch (in the musical sense, like Berlioz).

For example, A Good Lad from 1943 by Boris Barnet is — in one hour! — a musical with opera singing during the war scenes, a comedy, a love story, and a war movie, and everything is perfectly balanced and free. By the way, Barnet is the best Russian film director ever, far away from the auto-proclaimed Russian geniuses like [Sergei] Eisenstein, [Andrei] Tarkovsky, and [Alexander] Sokurov, whose movies all suffer from a severe grandiloquence and solemnity disease.

In these different aspects, those Russian movies are more like the early ’30s American movies, when the exuberance of the filmmakers was not restricted by the Hays Code, the strict separation of genres, all those narrative and ethical codes. Just think of a typical ’30s masterpiece like Sailor’s Luck (1933) by Walsh. My movie, with some exceptions, is much more Russian than American.

SFBG What do you want those who see La France to come away with?

SB Ninety-six tears.

LA FRANCE May 2, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 6, 6:45 p.m., Clay


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Ashes to ashes

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SFIFF One of the greatest pleasures of the 50th SF International Film Festival was Forever, Heddy Honigmann’s 2006 study of the living among the dead at Paris’ Père-Lachese cemetery. Between footage of the sun-dappled necropolis in all its hushed, springtime glory, Honigmann (who received last year’s Persistence of Vision award) profiles several regular visitors, who in the course of discussing an attachment to a particular resident — whether that dweller be Frédéric Chopin or a deceased husband — reveal a great deal about how we commune with memory in our daily lives.

Echoes of Honigmann’s film can be heard on the breezes that float and whip through John Gianvito’s lean and hypnotic Profit motive and the whispering wind (Gianvito’s use of lowercase is intentional). In focusing on a very different kind of memorial landscape, Gianvito uses Howard Zinn’s oft-revised 1980 radical assessment of American history, A People’s History of the United States, as a roadmap. He’s constructed an hour-long pilgrimage to the graves, minor monuments, and commemorative plaques erected to honor America’s freethinkers and radicals.

Static shot after static shot shows names etched in stone, carved on wood, or stamped on metal: Red Jacket, Sacagawea, Thomas Paine, Mary Dyer, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Daniel Shays, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer (whose eloquent protest, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired," is now her epitaph), Malcolm X, Dorothy Day, and César Chávez, to name just a dozen. America is a nation of defectors, suffragettes, abolitionists, Wobblies, anarchists, union members, community organizers, and conscientious objectors. We see commemorations of the labor movement’s bloody struggles: the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Mass., the Homestead Strike near Pittsburgh, and the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Occasionally we see signs that others have visited these sites: small tokens of solidarity left on graves, graffiti, piled pebbles. But many of the markers exhibit the creep of age and neglect.

Eschewing narration or interviews, Profit motive is near-silent, save for the ambient sounds of each site: chirping birds, the lazy buzz of insects, the occasional whiz of traffic, and most prominent, the whistling wind — though a whisper is only one part of its range. As Honigmann does in Forever, Gianvito periodically turns his camera away from the ground to watch the dance of sighing boughs or rustling plains. These almost animistic sequences remind us that the landscape has borne witness to the people who shaped it long before our time, underscoring the transience of human life and, by extension, political struggle.

The film’s jarring final minutes, however, break its meditative silence in a move that aims to establish affinities between the left’s scattered history and current protest movements. Gianvito’s dedication to Zinn seems to get the better of him, and the closing montage of contemporary protests juxtaposed against McDonald’s and Wal-Mart signs comes off as crudely didactic. The answer — or, at the very least, some incendiary spark out of the past — it seems, was blowing in the wind after all.

If Gianvito’s film is part eulogy and part rallying cry for America’s radical left, then Hartmut Bitomsky’s more conventionally structured documentary Dust (Straub) is a vanitas for late capitalism. Just as Gianvito marshals a certain poetic charge from his footage of rustling branches and swaying grass, Bitomsky’s cold yet compelling study also mines the many-faceted existential resonance of the particulate terrain it surveys.

Bitomsky’s gravelly-voiced narrator is fond of repeating a Raymond Queneau quote: "Dust always leaves a trace, no matter what; then, a trace of the trace. There’s always a trace you’ll never get." Indeed, dust is as ubiquitous as it is unremarkable. It is both the byproduct of human industry and what accretes once our industriousness has stopped. It is a bugaboo for museum preservationists, vacuum cleaner engineers, and clean room custodians. It is the cosmic prima materia from which the universe was born and to which we will all return long after the worms have had their fill. And as we are reminded in the documentary’s opening frames, dust is the very substance of film itself. What we watch are the shadows of dust, shot through with light.

From an industrial paints manufacturer, to a frighteningly OCD housewife, to a sweetly loopy artist who creates sculptural dust taxonomies, to military scientists testing for radioactive fallout from ballistics currently being used in Iraq, Bitomksy lets his unnamed subjects speak with little interruption on their Sisyphean efforts to analyze, sift through, and eradicate dust. At times, the extended and often extremely technical explanations of particle acceleration and filtration assembly can be tryingly dry. But the straightforward and de-personalized presentation of information is fitting with the film’s po-faced tone.

Bitomsky’s deadpan facade is tied on extra-tight. But faint traces of a smirk can be made out whenever he pauses on a particularly cruel irony (for instance, when he quotes military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz over photos of American and Iraqi babies deformed by in utero exposure to depleted uranium dust) or takes note of a pathetic one (a hulking, former GDR housing block imploded to make way for a shopping mall). As entropic as it is constant, dust is indifferent to human life or regime change.

Gianvito’s film clearly seeks to offer a momentary defense against our country’s tendency toward historical amnesia, though it also suggests that history may be one more notch on finitude’s marble bedpost. For Bitomsky, on the other hand, history is a dustbin.

DUST May 3, 1 p.m., PFA; May 5, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Blood ties

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

You can keep those classy, highbrow Coppolas. I’ll play the low card with the Argentos any day. This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival is a feast for fans of the father-daughter team: Dario directs Asia in Mother of Tears, his long-awaited final entry in the cultishly beloved "Three Mothers" series, which includes 1977’s Suspiria and 1980’s Inferno. Asia also stars in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, as well as the fest’s opening-night film, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress.

I first encountered the duo under the least relaxing of circumstances at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Press interviews for Mother of Tears were held in a hectically crowded hotel restaurant. Waiting for my turn, I watched as team Argento chowed down a quick lunch, chattering together in Italian about who knows what (witches, ancient artifacts, the weather?). I clutched my tape recorder, feeling possibly the same mixture of fear, awe, and excitement that filled Suspiria’s Suzy Bannion when she arrived at a certain cursed ballet school.

Fortunately, my chat with the pair was devoid of ceiling maggots, underwater zombies, or — as featured in Mother of Tears — demonic monkeys. Probably the most frequent question Dario Argento has had to answer is the most obvious: why did he decide to finish the trilogy now, nearly three decades post- Inferno? "We have a time for everything," he told me, because of course that’s exactly what I asked him first off. "You wait until the idea comes."

There’s no doubt Mother of Tears sprang from Argento’s brain; his signature occult themes, glorious violence, and attention to style (instead of, say, plot) are all accounted for. He cowrote the film’s script with a pair of Americans he met while working on Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch (Simona Simonetti and Mother of Tears editor Walter Fasano are also cocredited). The film, which opens theatrically in San Francisco in June, received mixed reviews on the festival circuit. Variety critic Dennis Harvey, who also writes for the Guardian, called it a "hectic pileup of supernatural nonsense." True enough, but I would argue that while Mother of Tears is flawed, it’s enjoyably flawed.

The story revolves around a museum worker named Sarah (Asia Argento) who must summon previously dormant spiritual powers (inherited from her late mother, played by Asia’s real-life mother and Dario’s former partner, Inferno star Daria Nicolodi) to defeat an evil witch’s plot to take over Rome and eventually the world. Eyes are gouged out. Cleavers make short work of necks. Underground pools of muck must be navigated. Udo Kier, playing an exorcist, very nearly reprises his Suspiria role as Exposition Guy. Characters, including witches, take the time to use public transportation. Silly? Yeah, a bit.

Waiting to make Mother of Tears enabled Argento to take advantage of CG, one of his favorite cinematic inventions. His 1996 film The Stendhal Syndrome (which also starred Asia) was reportedly the first Italian release that used CG. In Toronto, Argento told me the film has more than 180 visual effects — including a church on fire — which were created in conjunction with Lee Wilson, another Masters of Horror veteran.

The freedom Argento has enjoyed with CG (now, he says, "it’s possible to fly high!") is matched by another door that has opened since the releases of Suspiria and Inferno: the censorship that plagued his early career is less of an issue in these accustomed-to-gore times.

"I hate censors," Argento assured me in our second interview, conducted over the phone in late March. "For Mother of Tears, I talked to the producer, the distributor, the financier [and told them], ‘I want to be free. I want to show my natural reality after so many years.’ And I did that."

In Rome prepping for his next film, simply titled Giallo (sorry, fellow horror nerds, I couldn’t get him to spill any dirty details), Argento reflected on working with his daughter. Stateside, Asia Argento is known chiefly as an actor (she tangled with Vin Diesel in 2002’s XXX and pissed off corpses in 2005’s Land of the Dead). But she’s also directed a handful of films, including 2000’s Scarlet Diva (which Dario co-produced) and the 2004 J.T. LeRoy adaptation, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things.

"She understands what it means to be in the project — not just thinking about her character, but the other parts of the film," Argento said. "Since she was a child, she’d follow me on the shooting of many of my films. She grew up on the sets of my films. She’s very comfortable in this world, this show business."

In Toronto, Asia Argento stepped in as translator for both my questions and her father’s answers. She said that when she heard about the Mother of Tears script, she asked to be a part of the film. As in previous Argento-Argento collaborations like The Stendhal Syndrome, the part called for some grueling physical scenes. Still, the pair seem to have an easy rapport, laughing over the aforementioned underground pool of muck ("That was really gross to do," Asia remembered. "He prepared that for three days, this horrible soup. I would watch him prepare that soup, but I wouldn’t say anything!") Later, over the phone, Dario described he and his daughter as "big friends."

Onscreen, Asia Argento has a certain magnetism that few other performers can claim. In Go Go Tales, she appears in only a few scenes, playing a surly dancer who drags her giant Rottweiler with her everywhere, including into her stripper dance routine. Abel Ferrara, who also directed her in 1998’s New Rose Hotel (she directed him in the 1998 short doc Abel/Asia), calls her a "very, very special actress."

"She’s courageous, she gets out there, and she’s not afraid to take chances with the character or with herself," he said, calling from New York, where he’s working on a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel. "When you write a script like [Go Go Tales] obviously you’re looking for the women to bring it to life. We knew we needed people who could really bring something to the table. She’s got that something — it’s indescribable."

Mother of Tears offers Argento a juicier part as a woman who may or may not be totally crazy. But it’s her role as the titular character in The Last Mistress that ranks among her best work to date. It’s a dramatic, passionate period film about an upper-class man’s insurmountable attraction to his moody, impulsive woman on the side (guess who?). Her character pinballs from ecstatic howls to anguished wails, glamorous salon-lolling to beachside pipe-smoking, and dinner table stare-downs to horseback smackdowns. Indeed, it’s a bit over the top, but she pulls it off. As a pair of striking careers can attest, it’s an ability that’s surely imprinted on the Argento genes.

GO GO TALES Sat/26, 11:45 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/28, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki

THE LAST MISTRESS Thurs/24, 7 p.m., Castro

MOTHER OF TEARS Fri/25, 10:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Explosive stuff!

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SFIFF The pop detritus of today is the archaeological evidence of tomorrow, to be pieced together by future generations — should there be any — who will no doubt want to know what the hell we were thinking. Their conclusions may be bizarre. But will their conjecture be any stranger than our present-tense realities?

Inventing tomorrow’s conspiracy theories today is Mock Up on Mu, the latest pseudodocumentary, sci-fi historical dig, Situationist prank, and thinly veiled fight-the-power rant by San Francisco’s collage king, Craig Baldwin. In the mode of his prior cult faves Tribulation 99 (1992), O No Coronado! (1992) and Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) — albeit with a higher percentage of new staged sequences mixed into the ingeniously assembled archival errata — it again grinds fact and fiction into a tasty genre-defying pulp. For many, Mu‘s world premiere is the most eagerly awaited event in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival’s goody-laden schedule.

It’s 2019 AD on the Empire of Mu — the Moon — where L. Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard) is building theme parks, selling crater-naming rights, and beaming corporate logos back to "that prison planet called Earth." Having been banished from our planet, he must dispatch "Agent C," a.k.a. Marjorie Cameron (Michelle Silva), back to the blue ball to engage in some espionage involving the seductions of both Ra-worshiping rocket scientist Jack Parsons (Kal Spelletich) and sleazy defense contractor Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke). Realizing "Commodore" Hubbard’s purposes may be more nefarious than professed, she finds the truth is out there … way out there. It’s naked and shameless, in fact. Those hippies were right: free love will save us all.

As ever, there is a certain investigative method behind the Oakland-born Baldwin’s jigsaw madness. The real Parsons was the founder of the pre-NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an avid occultist. He started a private boat dealership with none other than Hubbard, before Hubbard absconded with some money and Parsons’ girlfriend (whom he married). Soon thereafter, Hubbard wrote the original Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, which in turn led to that gift to mankind we call Scientology. As for Parsons, he went on to marry painter, author, and psychic Cameron, who, like him (as well as Hubbard) was an early American devotee of Aleister Crowley and a participant in sex magick rituals.

Thus you don’t need six degrees, let alone Kevin Bacon, to connect Wernher von Braun, Kenneth Anger, and Tom Cruise. History is fun! As is Mu, with its antic use of everything from old propagandistic footage to clips spanning eras of cinematic sci-fi: Georges Melies’ 1902 Trip to the Moon, the original Flash Gordon serial and 1936’s H.G. Wells–based Things to Come, drive-in trash (it’s always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), and Star Trek. The resulting fair-use frolic nonetheless reveals a serious side or three while exploring the dense and slightly demented history of military and aerospace business in sunny California.

Baldwin recently took a break from his numerous other roles — programmer at Other Cinema; teacher at SF Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and Artists Television Access — to sound off on Mu.

SFBG I hate to ask such a blunt question, but what is this movie about?

CRAIG BALDWIN My "Mu-vie" is about how utopian visions of technology and space exploration became compromised by the military in the late 20th century. And [about] how the lives of [technological and space travel] pioneers afford a rich trace of California regional history after World War II: the complex crossing of alternative tech research, personal belief systems, lifestyles, artistic practices, newly organized and newly imported religions, and spiritual institutions. Plus that era brought an explosion of the formerly marginalized sci-fi genre, of which Mu is of course the very latest iteration!

Mu is also about the cult of film, especially experimental film. I’m trying to work though a new model of historiography or storytelling that I am calling collage-narrative. It’s a humble stab at opening up a new space in film practice that is not only of interest to historians but also to aesthetes. And, my dear, I don’t have to tell you that these groups are certainly not mutually exclusive!

SFBG Your father worked for a rocket manufacturer. Has that made you more interested in Cold War and military-industrial complex themes?

CB Yes, my dad worked for Aerojet. He was born the same year as Parsons! And I was born the year Parsons died. I am his reincarnation. But the point is something like 30 percent of Californians were involved in the aerospace biz at its height.

SFBG How much real Scientology material is in Mu?

CB [The film] remains at the level of Swiftian allegory or satire, spinning off of their Genesis story and [acting as] a meta-gloss on Hubbard’s own autobiography.

SFBG I wish Unarius had become the growth religious cult of our time. They’ve certainly made better movies. But regarding yours, the real life connections between Parsons, Hubbard, Crowley, "Mother of the New Age movement" Cameron, occultism, and scientific and military work are stranger than fiction.

CB Everyone has been very influenced by the New Age, uh, belief systems. But more than anything, I identify with postwar bohemians, beats, and hippies. Those days when rocket scientists and sci-fi pulpmeisters and occult conjurers and proto-Wicca ritual carnal orgiastic pagans intermingled may be long gone — though Kenneth Anger is still around.

SFBG Mu uses a lot of excerpts from mainstream and low budget entertainment. But where does the less familiar material — educational, promotional, and so forth — come from? You must spend infinite hours looking for the perfect clip.

CB It comes from my usual source: My basement archive of 2,500 industrial films. I do spend time in there, but could hardly claim to find the perfect clip. Au contraire. I call it "availabilism" — making what I do have work for me, through editing and audio techniques, overwriting it all into an associational stew hopefully akin to the half-memory, half-fantasy, sublinguistic colloid of thought itself.

SFBG What reaction does your work get from students? They presumably grok the pop culture stuff, but do they get the political undercurrents?

CB People can be responsive to the pop-cult clips, or the regional history, or the antiwar sentiments. But methinks [Mock Up on Mu] will be a touchstone for legions of occult or subcult partisans ravenous for these almost mythic tales of the roots of alternative religions.

SFBG Sir, your Thetan level must be off the charts.

MOCK UP ON MU Mon/28, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 8:55 p.m., Pacific Film Archive


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

Sibling rivalry

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REVIEW This week most San Francisco cineastes will be focused on the International Film Festival — but please don’t let this Italian import, one of the best in years, leave town before you catch it. Cowritten (with director Daniele Luchetti) by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli of the fantastic Best of Youth (2003), the film shares that four-hour epic’s ability to pare decades of roiling postwar Italian political history into an absorbing personal drama. Accio (Elio Germano) is the youngest child, perpetually at odds with everyone in his poor family. He is a natural contrarian and zealot — first as a divinity student too self-righteously pious even for the priests to bear, then as an avid member of the Fascist Party. (His hometown is the small central Italian city Latina, a one-time party stronghold founded during the Mussolini era that previously had been an undrained swamp.) Those proclivities, not exactly fashionable in the story’s 1960s and ’70s setting, particularly exasperate Accio’s brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio, one of those Italian men who are so good-looking they almost constitute a traffic hazard), a charismatic born leader who becomes increasingly involved in the Communist Party and underground radical actions. Still, blood is thicker than water — and by the end we realize this famiglia‘s constant yelling and slapping are as much forms of affection as anything else. And the siblings do have something else in common, namely a jones for Manrico’s upper-class girlfriend Francesca (Diane Fleri). My Brother has been compared to Italian leftist classics like Marco Bellochio’s Fist in His Pocket (1965) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964), no doubt largely because its manically malcontent protagonist — an indelible performance by Germano — and almost too-hyperactive imagery echo their restless intellectual agitprop. Fortunately, this is too warmly human a drama to share those films’ Godardian paternity.

MY BROTHER IS AN ONLY CHILD opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

Wong takes wrong turn

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Whether his focus is on a gangster who falls for his cousin (As Tears Go By, 1989), or a lovesick cop getting over a breakup (Chungking Express, 1994), or two men who move to Argentina seeking a fresh start (Happy Together, 1997), the world of Wong Kar Wai is always populated by heartbroken people whose unresolved emotions render them romantically challenged. The fluid cinematography, evocative music, and sublime use of slow-motion that accompanies these tales of unrequited love make Wong’s attractive cosmos all the more moving and melancholy.

Although My Blueberry Nights, the director’s first US production, has all of the above ingredients, it isn’t what one expects from Wong. Unnecessary explanatory voice-over and Hallmark-card dialogue destroys the subtlety that permeates most of his films.

During a recent phone interview, Wong attributed this lack of subtlety to the "straightforward" way he believes Americans express their feelings. But I suggest a lot of it has to do with Norah Jones being the film’s star. Although the director admitted the singer was the reason he made the film in the first place, her performance isn’t nearly as nuanced as that of Maggie Cheung’s in In the Mood for Love (2000). An equally plausible explanation might be that well-known mystery novelist Lawrence Block was Wong’s unlikely script collaborator.

Anyone familiar with Wong’s films will be disappointed by the cheery conclusion of My Blueberry Nights. But according to the filmmaker, what we witness is not actually a happy ending. Instead, we’re given what he calls "the happy beginning of another story," one whose ending is as open as it is inevitable.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Opens Fri/18 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.blueberrynightsmovie.com“>www.blueberrynightsmovie.com”>www.sfbg.com

www.blueberrynightsmovie.com

Offbeat direction

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When successful actors turn to directing, you can often gauge how long they’ve been immersed in fiction by the degrees of condescension and cliché in their movies. Ethan Hawke is an unfortunate recent example. I’d say John Cassavetes is the classic one … but then people would hunt me down and kill me.

Of course, some actors can think outside themselves behind the camera: George Clooney, Sarah Polley, and Ben Affleck (who knew?) provide recent testimony. Even Mel Gibson might qualify. Though his films reveal a sadomasochistic freak flagelutf8g himself and us for God, they still express something beyond the cumulative wisdom acquired from drama school scene study and that aerial view of society one gets from the top of the entertainment industry heap.

Tom McCarthy isn’t as famous an actor, despite working steadily (on Boston Public, The Wire, and several Clooney movies) for a decade. This low profile may be an asset: while his 2003 writing-directorial debut, The Station Agent, sounded too precious, it turned out to be wonderful. McCarthy’s directorial follow-up, The Visitor, isn’t as successful. Still, it’s an unforced, gracefully crafted, emotionally rewarding (to a point) miniature that suggests he has a reliable second career option.

Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is an Ivy League economics professor who is as dour as a spreadsheet. He fires his fifth piano teacher in a row (stage great Marian Seldes) because he’s frustrated about poor progress at his chosen hobby. He’s a bone-dry lecturer whose office hours are coldly unwelcoming and lives in a Connecticut house too big for anyone with such a shrunken soul. His department forces him to deliver a paper at a New York University–sponsored conference, and thus he reenters, for the first time in years, his large Manhattan apartment.

Walter is surprised to discover Senegalese émigré Zinab (Danai Gurira) in his bathtub; her screams nearly bring Walter a beat-down from Syrian boyfriend Tarek (Haaz Sleiman). Once it’s sorted out that a scam artist has rented Walter’s prime piece of real estate to the couple in his absence, they set off, though they have no immediate berth.

Rousing from emotional slumber, Walter eventually invites the couple to stay. Then he starts to enjoy their company, or at least that of Tarek, a percussionist with an ingratiating personality who starts teaching him how to drum — a better musical option for Walter than the piano, even if he is the stiffest white guy attempting funkiness this side of Jad Fair. Tarek invites the stuffy 60-something to his jazz club gigs and introduces him to Fela Kuti CDs. It’s all good — until the NYPD profiles Tarek one night and he’s thrown into a windowless, characterless, Queens correctional facility, with deportation imminent.

The Visitor is beautifully acted and admirably sculpted. But in the last laps, McCarthy has Walter deliver a big speech to low-level governmental authorities, complete with an ironic fade-out on Old Glory and gives Walter a too-convenient, thwarted romantic interest.

It all leads to a routine, uplifting ending that would play better if Jenkins (of Six Feet Under and myriad supporting roles) had developed some drumming chops. This movie is a respectable follow-up to The Station Agent. But its suit-finds-groove response to globalization and deportation ultimately feels like a formula McCarthy should have already seen beyond.

THE VISITOR

Opens Fri/18 in San Francisco

See Movie Clock at sfbg.com

www.thevisitorfilm.com

Twin Olsen meltdown

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If you see one 11-minute video this year, make it Michael Robinson’s magnificent, hilarious, and terrifying Light Is Waiting (2007). The primordial, extreme slo-mo soundtrack is like a glitch mix from beyond the grave by DJ Screw. Robinson’s seizure-inducing blasts of stroboscopic light rival those of the Austrian film experimentalist Peter Tscherkassky.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Olsen twins.

Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, that formerly pint-size pair of formerly perfectly interchangeable human products, are part of Light Is Waiting. Robinson uses episodes of Full House as source material. His video’s first big punch line arrives after a two-minute unfiltered blast of the sitcom replete with laugh track, bad fashions, and Candace Cameron’s feathered hairdo. Robinson’s deployment of this clip is akin to a magician juggling TVs. He then mines the show’s trip-to-Hawaii episode — a colonialist trope that dates back past The Brady Bunch to another Robinson, last-name Crusoe (and that fires up a torch that’s been passed forward into the Survivor era) — in a manner so kaleidoscopic it’s hallucinatory. A three-eyed John Stamos’ version of "Rock-a-Hula Baby" turns into a Godzilla dirge, as his white-pantsed rump does the bump with itself. One Olsen twin becomes one two-headed Olsen twin, then turns into two Olsen twins forced to smooch each other.

Light Is Waiting exorcises American pop cultural demons via video the way Kenneth Anger did with film in 1964’s Scorpio Rising. Rife with floral symbolism, Robinson’s older studious excavations of the ideologies lurking beneath scenic landscapes don’t have the same impact. He had a semi-breakthrough with 2006’s And We All Shine On, where a karaoke instrumental of "Nothing Compares 2 U" — yet more floral imagery, this time evoked via unsung lyrics — magnifies the loneliness of video game vistas. The sardonic creep factor is akin to that of Bobby Abate’s One Mile Per Min (2002), and it makes me wonder what a recent Robinson video I haven’t seen, 2007’s Victory over the Sun, does to Axl Rose.

SHINE ON: FILMS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON

April 27, 7:30 p.m., $6–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

Seniors behaving badly

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REVIEW From the onset, it seems as though a documentary about a choir of seniors behaving badly would be a comical one-trick pony. But because of the involvement of a very savvy choral director and the endlessly unpredictable antics of high-spirited octogenarians, Young@Heart is a sweet, wonderful, harrowing laugh riot from start to finish. Seriously, I didn’t laugh this hard at Superbad. Director Stephen Walker also narrates; he’s a British expat whose dry delivery is well timed and well chosen. The singers are instantly lovable, and they do nothing but outfox their physical maladies — they’ve earned their age and let nothing restrain their appetites for living. The inevitable tragedies that befall a few subjects make for painful plot twists, though certain changes of context make this a unique meditation on age; the videos tapped by Walker to illustrate the unconventional songs this choir sings are clever cues. "I Wanna Be Sedated," anthem of disaffection and recreational drug use, is set in a convalescent home. Meanwhile, other more melancholic meditations (like the choir’s version of Talking Heads’ "On the Road to Nowhere" — placed in the doc just after the passing of a central member) seem pointed at the possible conclusion that the subjects of Young@Heart grasp their existential crises, and simply choose not to be bothered.

YOUNG@HEART opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

Bigger than life

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How would you define an improbable Tilt-A-Whirl Technicolor or Vistavision or Cinemascope view of American virtue and vice? Jean-Luc Godard’s term for it was Tashlinesque. Watching the feverish films in the Pacific Film Archive’s short Frank Tashlin retrospective, we see an artist pushing the outermost limits of cinematic realism, gorging 1950s America on its desire for bigger, better, and faster.

The Tashlinesque land of excess encompasses Jayne Mansfield’s breasts, Kool Aid-red convertibles, and bubblegum teenagers. If there is a milk bottle in a Tashlin film, it will cream when a pin-up walks by. Ten-gallon hats spontaneously ejaculate oil. "The room temperature is changing, if you catch my cruder meaning," Mansfield coos in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and we do, over and over again. Tashlin’s America is a nation of alcoholics and dupes, softheaded nincompoops and sexpot cynics. France had Jacques Tati, and we had — and have — Tashlin.

Just as it did with other stateside pulp visionaries, it took the French to recognize Tashlin’s genius. "There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust [1956] and It Happened One Night [1934]… but a difference of kind," Godard wrote in a 1957 assessment for Cahiers du Cinéma. There’s a touch of cruelty (and a trace of the director’s cartoon roots) in Tashlin’s preference for physically excessive actors like Mansfield and Jerry Lewis, though the way he uses these figures to channel the distorting nature of American gluttony and naïveté is brutally effective.

It’s not just the bodies that are inflated. The frame itself seems to be stretched over the course of these films, with camera angles and props used to accentuate the horizontality of the widescreen image. Just as Preston Sturges outdid his era of talky screwballs with dialogue-mad farces, Tashlin amplified ’50s Hollywood’s taste for grandiosity and crudeness to a pointedly unmanageable extreme. His self-aware movies give a sharp sense of the studio system in its death throes.

As satire, Tashlin’s send-ups of ad men and agents are as prescient as they are unsparing. A typical Tashlin alarm is sounded when Dean Martin’s character in Artists & Models (1955) announces at the outset that he moved to New York to make money in order to study art. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Tony Randall’s title character turns on the television to hear what the starlet Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) is saying to reporters on his front lawn — an apt commentary on the way technologies abstract reality and invade our privacy. The spin cycles continue to gain speed: the ’90s were an especially prime slice of the Tashlinesque, what with a booming economy, celebrity sex tapes, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Cinematically speaking, Richard Kelly just tried his hand at Tashlinesque with Southland Tales (2006), though I can’t help thinking the originator would have done better with the musical numbers.

Tashlin’s burlesque is dexterous, but it doesn’t hatch from any stable logic. Television is clearly the enemy, but the movies aren’t much better. With every bathing beauty and each overripe burst of Technicolor, the director indulges and implicates our most blithering desires. (One feels like a child reaching out for a lollipop while watching Tashlin’s films: when Godard famously quipped that there was no blood in his own 1965 Pierrot le fou but only red, he might have been quoting his American forebear.) If the plots nominally resolve themselves, the tone and visual style remain pitched between splendor and disgust.

"By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically," Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker. It was Tashlin who taught us to see this way. If there were any justice to art history, he would be in the pantheon of Pop Art, not just for his content, but also for his bold use of color and scale. But he of all people would have known that artistic success is on the same shaky ground as achievement in politics, entertainment, and business — same as it ever was.

FRANK TASHLIN: AMERICAN NONSENSE

Fri/11 through April 18

PFA Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

“No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema”

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PREVIEW In 1960s Japan, Nikkatsu meant a new kind of action. Promotional materials for the studio even spelled "action" in katakana, the syllabary used for borrowed foreign words. Indeed, the studio’s super-stylized films — only a smattering of which are showcased in this all too brief series presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Outcast Cinema — reflected many of the postwar period’s cultural sea changes. Played by an exclusive line of marquee names including boyish rake Watari Tetsuya and the chipmunk-countenanced Joe Shishido, Nikkatsu’s lone wolves and hit men hang out at rock and jazz clubs, drive hotwired foreign cars, get in brawls with white devil sailors, and possess the kind of smoldering cool that Elmore Leonard thinks he copyrighted. Similarly, directors such as Toshio Masuda, Takashi Nomura, and the better-known Suzuki Seijun developed a kinetic visual style that cribbed from Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and Frank Tashlin in equal measure (Suzuki’s extreme stylistic bravura eventually got him canned). It’s the first two directors who merit closer looks. Nomura’s awesomely titled A Colt Is My Passport (1967) stars Shishido as a sniper on the lam, and its finale — both desolate and explosive — tops any spaghetti western’s final showdown. Shishido makes another appearance in Masuda’s The Velvet Hustler (1967), this time sporting a creepy Chaplin-stache. His quarry is Goro (Tetsuya), a Tokyo hit man and all around playboy who is forced to lay low in the international port city of Kobe after a botched job and becomes the city’s slacker underworld kingpin. But even a poor little rich girl (the perfectly coy Ruriko Asaoka) from the capital can’t hold Goro’s fickle attentions for long. In Nikkatsu action, it’s a man’s world. Dames come and go, but these boys only have eyes (and silent tears) for their fallen brothers in crime.

"NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960S NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA" Thurs/10–Sun/13, $6–$8. See Rep Clock for schedule. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

SFIFF: Color her deadly

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It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains not one, but two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

The joy of cowboys

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"The western has not so much died as fragmented," declared New York Times critic A.O. Scott in a think piece last year about Hollywood’s latest incarnations of the genre. Citing Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and more recent, far-flung revisions such as Wisit Sasanatieng’s 2000 Tears of the Black Tiger, Scott argued that the western is a mutable export because the myth of the Old West existed even before the advent of cinema. Myths build on their grandeur and solidify their status with each new telling and embellishment, whether those revisions take the form of broadsides spreading the dastardly deeds of Billy the Kid or cinematic Cold War–era allegories staged by John Ford under a baking Arizona sun.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s film series "Non-Western Westerns" has traced the global fragmentation of the western myth from more familiar locales such as Utah (as represented by the Italian Alps in Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 film The Great Silence) and the Mexican desert (Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo), to unexpected stopovers in Bollywood (1975’s Sholay) and Hong Kong (Johnnie To’s 2006 Exiled). But the most curious, if not the most joyful, destination in the series’ itinerary has to be the land once known as Czechoslovakia, the home of Oldrich Lipsky’s rangy 1964 horse opera Lemonade Joe.

Lemonade Joe is a sweet and goofy musical parody of the type of westerns Hollywood specialized in before Sam Peckinpah sauntered into town. Though made the same year as Leone’s breakthrough, A Fistful of Dollars, Lipsky’s movie is its diametric opposite. The good guy’s whites remain stainless; the bad guys are mustachioed; and the Trigger Whiskey saloon is likelier to erupt into musical numbers or slapstick fisticuffs than gunfire. The plot follows song-prone sharpshooter Lemonade Joe (played by the suitably dashing operetta stag Karel Fiala) as he weans the rowdy menfolk of Stetson City off of their beloved firewater and over to his miracle tonic, Kolaloka lemonade, all the while competing for the hand of temperate ingenue Winifred Goodman against archnemesis and Trigger Whiskey owner Doug Badman.

Lemonade Joe‘s hand-tinted look is clearly at odds with its soundtrack. But Lipsky’s last concern is fidelity, let alone realism. Indeed, the plot is periodically nudged along by touches that are as evocative of Bugs Bunny cartoons as they are of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). Smoke rings spell out messages, dotted lines plot the course of bullets, men fall like dominos after a single punch, and an unforgettable wide screen close-up travels deep into Joe’s yodeling throat.

As singularly silly as Lemonade Joe may be, its eccentricity is a reflection of the western genre’s established popularity in Eastern and Central Europe. Writer Jirí Brdecka based his screenplay on the Lemonade Joe stories he penned for magazines in the ’40s. Around the same time, Karl May’s novels set in the American West were immensely popular in Czechoslovakia. During the Cold War, Eastern Bloc countries produced and consumed westerns that functioned as ideological critiques of America, yet trafficked in the trappings of that most stalwart of American icons: the cowboy.

Then again, wherever it is set, the western has always been about the encroachment of capitalism and civilization onto untamed, lawless wilderness. Many of the genre’s narratives are driven by an unspoken nostalgia for a savage paradise lost. In Lemonade Joe, this takeover is staged in economic terms. Joe’s father turns out to be the president of the company whose product he constantly shills, and whose fiercest competition is the whiskey market. In true entrepreneurial fashion, Joe and his newly-won Winifred hope to ride off into the sunset to sell their new product, Whiskeykola, bringing together alcoholics and teetotalers under brand unity.

Lipsky’s imagery and Brdecka’s screenplay may be slyly critical, but they’re far from a critique of American imperialism. If anything, their movie’s outlandishness might be seen as a rebuff to the then–Soviet Union’s aesthetic mandate for socialist realism. Lemonade Joe is an East Side love letter to a now-vanished chivalric myth of the West, one that Hollywood was discarding in favor of moodier and bloodier fare, and one to which it is impossible to return — except, perhaps, in the movies.

NON-WESTERN WESTERNS: LEMONADE JOE

Sat/5, 3 p.m., $5

SFMOMA, Phyllis Wattis Theater

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Tom’s jones

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Last year, after he was "fired" by Paramount for becoming the new Wacko Jacko, Tom Cruise bought United Artists. As the company prepares to Cruise into an uncertain future, the Castro Theatre is presenting a retrospective of its oft-glorious middle period. It kicks off with some Woody Allen (1977’s inevitable Annie Hall and 1975’s rare Love and Death). The lineup includes once-celebrated films (1955’s Marty, 1971’s The Hospital); classics that gained that stature after their initial release (1955’s Kiss Me Deadly and Night of the Hunter); and newly-struck 35mm prints. The 35 mm batch includes 1961’s West Side Story, whose hothouse palette makes it one of the greatest-ever testaments to old-school Technicolor.

Plus, Tom Cruise will personally introduce every screening and shake each patron’s hand as they leave. OK, we made that part up. But you never know.

UNITED ARTISTS 90TH ANNIVERSARY FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/3 through May 4; $7–$9.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Positive space

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In 2003, filmmaker and CalArts professor Thom Andersen completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, an ambitious and inventive undertaking that combines clips from a library’s worth of different movies set in Los Angeles into a long, discursive, highly opinionated film. Divided into three parts, this treatise presents an intriguing account of the numerous ways Los Angeles has been cinematically conceived, represented, and perceived. Through the cameras of thousands of filmmakers, Hollywood’s neighbor has been viewed either in accordance with or (more often) at odds with its particular geography and range of architectural styles.

The German artist-filmmaker Heinz Emigholz is attempting a similar spatial exploration — one that started long before Andersen’s, in 1993, and one that continues today. The five films in the Pacific Film Archive’s Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography are part of a larger "Photography and Beyond" project Emigholz has been working on for the last 24 years. This handful of works captures constructions by important but somewhat neglected architects of the 20th century. One aim of Emigholz’s endeavor is to provide an alternative kind of biography: a biography in which knowledge about the architect is derived directly from his or her creations.

All five of the cinematic explorations of space in "Architecture as Autobiography" are presented starkly, so that, as Emigholz explained to Siegfried Zelinski in an interview, "The eye reverts back to what it always was: an extension and interface to the brain, and one that needs no codes. It thinks and feels at the same time."

In Emigholz’s movies, there is no voice-over narration to share background facts about architects, their aesthetics, and the reasons for their historical importance. Instead, intertitles on the screen inform the viewer about the names of the buildings, their locations, when they were built, and when they were photographed. This information is juxtaposed with long, medium, and close static shots of the buildings, accompanied by sound from the locations.

Described this plainly, Emigholz’s films might sound boring. But watching them proves to be a surprising and fascinating experience. In Sullivan’s Banks (1993-2000), the long succession of shots depicting banks that the American architect Louis H. Sullivan was commissioned to build from 1906 to 1920 slowly allows us, the viewers, to make certain connections. Through observing Sullivan’s banks in their surroundings (from various exterior angles) and in the context of their use, we come to understand his intention of harmoniously uniting function and form. Upon entering one of Sullivan’s imposing, cathedral-like buildings, you feel like you’re in a serious institution — one where your finances are absolutely secure.

Similarly, in Maillart’s Bridges (2001), the quiet repetition of photographs featuring bridges designed and built between 1910 and 1935 by the Swiss civil engineer Robert Maillart points to his obsessive experimentation with arches. In looking at Maillart’s curved constructions, one can’t help but marvel at their flowing shapes and forms, and also at the discrete ways in which they mingle with their natural environs.

This concern is even more evident in Goff in the Desert (2002-2003), where the filmmaker unobtrusively records — repeatedly — buildings that American architect Bruce Goff created from the 1920s through the 1970s. Goff’s attempts at simuutf8g the environments around his buildings yield imaginative constructions. Multilevel room divisions and novel uses of circle formations are two characteristics of his unique approach to spatial perception.

The residences in Schindler’s Houses (2007) — including one owned and occupied by none other than Los Angeles Plays Itself filmmaker Thom Andersen — are less preoccupied with fitting within a broader physical environment and more concerned with the harmony of their interiors. In the process of observing the ornament-free constructions that the Austrian American architect Rudolph Schindler built in Los Angeles from 1921 to 1952, Emigholz reveals the architect’s insistence on creating spacious, breezy, and minimal interiors for outwardly bulky houses.

The relative freedom Emigholz allows the viewer in terms of contemplation is one major reason among many that give his unusual films intrigue. Emigholz’s filmmaking technique moves several steps beyond — or in a different direction from — Los Angeles Plays Itself‘s concerns regarding spatial conception, representation, and perception. It does so while remaining true to one filmmaker’s particular perspective of how we experience and understand space.

"I believe that everyone perceives space differently, and that art and structure arise out of the perception of these nuances," Emigholz has said. In his films, this idea takes a number of different forms. Through his own understanding of space, Emigholz interacts with and presents other people’s conceptions and perceptions of it. In the process, he also creates his own artful cinematic structures — films that stimulate our understanding of space while in a sense simultaneously creating and navigating a visual maze. Mind boggling, isn’t it?

HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: ARCHITECTURE AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Through April 17

$5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Desperately seeking cinema

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Jennifer Reeves’s movies are personal wishing wells, each a repository of dreams and worries. As we see ourselves reflected in the water’s surface after tossing in a coin, so too is Reeves’s presence apparent in the handmade, fussed-over quality of her moving pictures. I use that broad designation pointedly, as her films are as varied in material and form as they are prosaic in mood and temperament. Over 15 years of independent filmmaking, the New York–based artist has created hand-painted films in the style of her mentor Stan Brakhage, freewheeling shorts, fiction fantasias, 16mm double-projections, feature narratives, and experiments in high definition. San Francisco Cinematheque hosts the formally restless filmmaker for a three-program tour.

Reeves’s early shorts channel riot-grrrl spark with scratched-up film stock. Elations in Negative (1990) is a good sample of the celluloid-mad sexual politics of these 16mm beaters, though Taste It Nine Times (1992), with its vivid pickle-biting innuendos, will be missed from the Cinematheque run. In painted films like The Girl’s Nervy (1995) and Fear of Blushing (2001), Reeves’s appropriation of Brakhage’s technique conveys playful femininity in color, pattern, and music.

Though Reeves toyed with narrative early on, most notably in 1996’s psychodrama Chronic, 2004’s The Time We Killed represented a kind of breakthrough. An unhurried 94 minutes passes through the dark mirror of an agoraphobic poet keeping to her New York apartment during the buildup to the Iraq War. "Terrorism brought me out of the house, but the war on terror drove me back in," Robyn (Lisa Jarnot) says in her peripatetic voice-over, adding later, "I’m afraid of catching the amnesia of the American people." Reeves’s magnetically immersive filmmaking is such that the political situation neatly folds into an extended experiment in subjectivity — besides being an unstinting portrait of madness (it’s everywhere in this film: in a record’s spin and neighbors’ voices echoing through the walls, in dogs’ faces, bathwater, and masturbation), The Time We Killed also serves as an understated chronicle of the collateral psychic and moral damage of our country’s manufactured warmongering.

The Time We Killed is heavier than Reeves’s other work, though it’s not without humor; she finds the ridiculous, unwieldy side of depression in Robyn’s litany of death fantasies and a painfully misguided interaction with a curious neighbor. Robyn’s locked in, but Reeves is formally unfettered, mixing conventional 16mm footage with lyrical, associative streams of inner life shot in high-contrast black-and-white. The filmmaker raids her home-movie archive for the film, in addition to using her own apartment and acting as Jarnot’s body double during the extended shooting. This air of transference makes The Time We Killed weirdly transparent, so we feel as intimately connected to Reeves’s isolated work in the editing room as we do to Robyn’s experience in the apartment.

Since The Time We Killed, Reeves has returned to more typically experimental filmmaking. Her 2006–07 Light Work variations strike an ideal balance of abstract and representational visions, in the process cataloging the changing textures of cinema. In the affecting He Walked Away (2007), Reeves dissects, refracts, and abstracts footage from her older movies to create a tri-tipped memorial piece in which the intrinsically elegiac nature of cinema is connected to the dissolution of film technology, which is then tied to the disappearing loves and friendships that shadow personal lives.

As with Guy Maddin — another filmmaker who favors overheated evocations — one has the sense that Reeves could make a hundred interesting movies from the same scraps of footage. "I want to counter the turncoats who say film’s dead," Reeves announces on her excellent new blog. "Try telling a painter that she can only use digital paint on a Mac for the rest of her life. She’d be pissed." But if she were Jennifer Reeves, she certainly wouldn’t slow down.

IMMERSIVE CINEMA: JENNIFER REEVES

Artists’ Television Access, Sat/15, 8:30 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sun/16, 7:30 p.m.;
Tues/18, 7:30 p.m.; $6–$8

See Rep Clock for venue information

Beautiful losers

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Great movies stay with you in the oddest ways. In the days after I first saw Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, I was preternaturally attuned to the sound of skateboards dragging the street outside my bedroom window—the slow tug of concrete, the bumping waves of wheels. This ambient strain surrounds Paranoid Park‘s cherubic point of focus: Alex (Gabe Nevins), a sleepy-eyed skater waiting out his parents’ divorce in a Portland, Ore., suburb. He occupies most of the film’s exquisitely composed frames, though he’s more a figure etched in light than a proper protagonist.

Figure-eight narrations and slow-moving Steadicam tracks have underpinned Van Sant’s last couple of films (2003’s Elephant, 2005’s Last Days), though they’re more artfully embedded in Paranoid Park‘s fragrant sprawl, not least because of the visual equivalencies provided by the film’s skateboarding footage. Blake Nelson’s airless young-adult novel presents Alex’s story as an extended confessional letter. Van Sant dissembles chronology and inflects the narration with associative freedom.

Most immediately, Van Sant folds Nelson’s plot to delay the central trauma, which first enters our vision peripherally through a detective’s investigation and a local news report. With that said, narrowing the effect of this organizing principle is a little like trying to get a fix on Phil Spector’s reverb or Gerhard Richter’s gray — Van Sant’s placid puzzling is a textural aesthetic before it’s a device. Where Nelson’s moral tale is a streamlined account, Van Sant’s adaptation aims for something more transparent and sublime. His Alex is at once layered and laid bare.

This channeling begins with a slow-creeping tracking shot as Alex is interviewed by a detective. What begins as a conversation eventually lands as a full-frame portrait of the adolescent, the detective’s words ("What’s your parental situation?") left hanging in the air, irrelevant. As Nevins garbles his lines, the boundary between the nonprofessional actor and his character becomes palpably blurred. Does Van Sant’s MySpace casting call automatically qualify as tawdriness? Not when Paranoid Park maintains its enigmatic distance. Indeed, Van Sant renders the film’s MacBook surfaces — the subdued luminescence, boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and soundtrack shuffle from Elliot Smith to the Juliet of the Spirits score all evoke a MacBook — as something unique and refined.

Like so many high school boys, Alex is essentially passive (see the film’s hilarious sex scene, with talky girlfriend Jennifer’s blond wisps dissolving Alex’s face like something from Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon). Van Sant captures this state via formal permeability, rigorously designing Paranoid Park‘s memory machine as a head trip. Strips of slow motion, a narrow-depth-of-field, ping-ponging sound, a mumbled voice-over — all these elements serve to cover the largely amateur cast but also to project Alex’s environmental interiority. This tendency reaches a swollen apex during a posttraumatic shower. The camera again draws in, and Christopher Doyle’s typically luscious lensing isolates every droplet; the lighting darkens, and the blistering sheets of water-noise are overlaid with thick forest sounds as Alex drops his head, revealing the bathroom wallpaper’s bird motif.

There’s no buried logic to Paranoid Park, and even though it’s shaped as much like a jigsaw as Donnie Darko (2001) and Rian Johnson’s underappreciated Brick (2005), it doesn’t invite solutions. Whether or not Alex’s withholding aura is read as a symbolic closeting, Van Sant’s direction is some kind of sorcery, especially in those B-roll streams of easy riders through which the film’s story expands to encompass all breathless teenage riots. Paranoid Park ends with these images after cutting from Alex asleep in biology class, dreaming of flying. He never touches the ground, always hovering between idyll and responsibility, the dream and his place in it. (Max Goldberg)

PARANOID PARK

Opens March 21 at Bay Area theaters
www.myspace.com/gusvansant

Diamonds are harder than gym bodies

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Black Lizard made me gay. Or, at the very least, Kenji Fukasaku’s 1968 jewel-toned mod noir opened my quasicloseted 16-year-old eyes to a certain queer aesthetic — one which foregrounds its own artifice by using Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome as wallpaper; one which dresses deviance in a gown with a 25-foot-long feathered train; and one which knows that the flipside of fabulousness is utter ridiculousness. It certainly wasn’t something I was seeing in the twink-filled issues of XY foisted upon me by my Pride ring–wearing, secret community college beau, but something closer to what I later found in John Waters’s films with Divine, James Bidgood’s diaphanous beefcake photography, and Ronald Firbank’s deeply purple prose.

However, unlike the above artists, Fukasaku was heterosexual, and Black Lizard represents an anomaly within a career that included much macho studio boilerplate. Even at his finest, Fukasaku had a flair for rough stuff: he directed some of the best yakuza films ever made (Battles Without Honor and Humanity [1973–74]) and ended his career with 2000’s controversial adolescent bloodbath and political fable Battle Royale. Yet, as with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s practically flaming 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, there was just the right combination of elements (and most importantly, the right combination of peacocks involved) to make Black Lizard one of queer cinema’s unsung gems. Which is precisely why freelance curator T. Crandall chose the film to kick off his rep series, "The Revival House: Classic Queer Cinema," at Artists’ Television Access.

As clichéd as such a phrase may be, Black Lizard is awash in precious stones and glittering surfaces — but none shine with as much brilliance as the transvestite Akihiro Miwa (credited as Maruyama), who plays the titular jewel connoisseur and criminal mastermind that kidnaps specimens of human beauty to freeze them in eternal tableaux vivant on her island lair. The film is completely Akihiro’s: her entrances stop time, her song is a siren call which causes men to become her slaves, her lavish outfits become more so with each new scene. "The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event," quipped Roland Barthes (referring to Audrey, not Kate). Miwa’s face, whose mouth morphs rubber band–like from a sour moue into the devouring O of a deep cackle unleashed, is a gloss on Barthesian idealness.

Prior to Fukasaku’s film, Miwa had appeared in the same role in Yukio Mishima’s long-running stage adaptation of pre-World War II mystery and suspense novelist Edogawa Rampo’s 1934 short story "Black Lizard." Rampo’s tale was one of many starring his Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant detective Gogoro Akechi, who in Mishima and Fukaaku’s retelling falls heart-first into a dangerous pas de deux with his androgynous quarry. Miwa was a successful nightclub entertainer active in avant-garde theater (and she still is: last year, she starred in a Tokyo production of Jean Genet’s The Eagle Has Two Heads) when she met Mishima — our second of the aforementioned peacocks — who was haunting Tokyo gay bars to "research" his 1953 novel Forbidden Colors.

It’s not hard to see why Rampo’s story of a moribund ice queen obsessed with changeless beauty appealed to Mishima. By 1968, Mishima was that queen, fully immersed in his own homoerotic brand of aestheticized Emperor worship, which would reach its grisly apogee in his ritual suicide four years later. Prior to Black Lizard, his muscular body had already been given the coffee table book treatment in Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses (Aperture, 1971), where Hosoe Eiko’s photographs present the author posed as a martyred St. Sebastian or as a snowbound samurai. Appropriately, he makes his cameo in Fukasaku’s film as one of Black Lizard’s frozen exemplars of aesthetic perfection— a brawny sailor, no less.

In the end, though, diamonds are harder than gym-wrought muscle, and it was Miwa’s flash, not Mishima’s flesh, that held my attention — at least consciously — upon my first adolescent exposure to Black Lizard. Many viewings later, Mishima seems pathetically unaware of the self-parody he’s partaking in. But Miwa’s exquisite luminescence remains untarnished.

THE REVIVAL HOUSE: BLACK LIZARD

March 19, 8 p.m.; $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.myspace.com/therevivalhouse

There won’t be blood

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Michael Haneke would likely be offended if you said you enjoyed his movies — though no doubt he would enjoy hearing you were offended by them. The chill surface neutrality of a Haneke feature such as Caché (2005) is designed to intrigue and then frustrate — by depriving extreme situations of their usual sensationalism and neat narrative resolution so that we end up implicated by our own thwarted expectations. Even as a scold, Haneke is too disciplined to let us join him on his soapbox. The whole point lies in being discomfited.

The "normal" boy who kills a girl in Benny’s Video (1992); the bourgeoisie unraveling due to exposure of their own race and class prejudices in Code: Unknown (2000) and Caché; and an entire society reverting to primitive behaviors after unspecified catastrophe in Time of the Wolf (2003) are all so disturbing because they’re so banal. Even when portrayed by movie stars, these figures are willfully ordinary, observed at length performing dull tasks or making poor decisions for petty reasons. The one time he approached a conventional melodramatic arc and larger-than-life protagonist (if an antiheroine) was in the Elfride Jelinek adaptation of The Piano Teacher (2001) where Isabelle Huppert’s character embodies the masochistic role usually played by his viewers themselves.

None of these films are exactly date movies, but they still orbit an audience’s comfort zone more closely than Haneke’s most notorious film, the original 1997 Funny Games. Now, Haneke has made the seemingly perverse choice of creating a shot-for-shot remake as his first English-language feature. Actually, it’s a decision as coolly logical as any he’s made, since he has said more than once that the original is more a comment on US society and media than their Austrian equivalents.

Beyond its sheer unpleasantness, both language and subtitling prevented the original from reaching his target audience. Still, it’s unlikely people will be turning out en masse for Funny Games U.S., as the movie is being called everywhere but here. Those who do take the plunge are likely going to hate, hate, HATE it — which will be one way of gauging that Haneke’s subversion of standard genre rules is working as planned.

We meet the Farber family via eye-of-God aerial shots following their car to the exquisitely leafy countryside where their expansive lakeside summer home resides. With little Georgie (Devon Gearhart) in the backseat, Ann (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) play guess-the-classical-composer. It’s too perfect and we know it, because Haneke incongruously interrupts their banter with a jarring blast of cacophonous death metal (actually a John Zorn piece) — the only music heard in the film that’s not ostensibly played from CD by an onscreen character. Horror, it suggests, might just be a dial flip away from intruding on this cozy trio.

Stopping short of their own electronic gate, the Farbers greet strangely uncommunicative neighbors standing on their lawn with two unknown men. Later, while father and son prep the sailboat, Ann gets a visit from Paul (Michael Pitt), who says he’s staying with the aforementioned neighbors and has been sent to borrow some eggs. Apologizing profusely, he nonetheless quickly manages to turn her hospitality into sputtering rage. Meanwhile, the dog disappears. Soon Paul is joined by Peter (Brady Corbet), his doppelgänger in tennis whites and floppy bangs. They look like consummate squeaky-clean preppies — or Hitler Youth. They have a not-long-hidden agenda. Things degenerate very quickly.

For all their sadism, Peter and Paul aren’t so much conventional villains as they are abstracts — tools to indict the viewer for participating in these games, or expecting anything like the usual fictive payoffs. The casting of the instantly recognizable Watts and Roth distracts at first, but Haneke’s approach (which employs agonizingly long takes, including one extreme instance that approaches 10 minutes in duration) and the actors’ grueling expressions of physical and emotional distress hit the right note of violated ordinariness.

It’s worth noting that perhaps Haneke’s most ingenious (and frequently overlooked) gambit is that there is almost no onscreen violence. As much as Funny Games feels like particularly merciless, graphic torture porn, the actual moments of assault are almost always cut away from or just out of frame. The one exception turns out to be Haneke’s single cruelest joke — and naturally, it’s on you. Without coming right out and saying it, Funny Games is now very much an answer to Hollywood norms and a larger cultural denial: here, violence is all suffering and no spectacle. *

FUNNY GAMES

Opens Fri/14 at Bay Area theaters

wip.warnerbros.com/funnygames

The young untold

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To say that Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers might sound like a provocation. But I have said it and will repeat it: Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, and there’s nothing willfully perverse in my statement. What follows are initial notes toward understanding why Costa matters. Final judgment is left up to the audience — to whom this director yields so much — and should only follow from seeing his films. Watching Costa’s work gives me the chills; it’s a most mysterious, unusual, and unclassifiable oeuvre, one littered with ghosts of the past and the present.

From the first frame of each Costa film, it’s apparent we’re in the company of that rare filmmaker who simply cares about people: about who his subjects are, about what they’re feeling and thinking, and just as crucially, what his viewers are thinking about them. Each work is riddled with enticing close-ups, and Costa’s pictorial attention (coming out of a sensibility equally at home with European fine art as, say, the dust bowl photography of Walker Evans) is a constant wonder. The subjects are for the most part the downtrodden inhabitants of a Lisbon, Portugal, slum called Fontaínhas, people literally overlooked by dominant cultures. He’s not trying to rub their misery in his viewers’ faces — calling him a "Straubian neorealist," to quote J. Hoberman, is misleading; if anything, his films, with their rejection of rational structures, are more neosurrealist. Rather, the progression in Costa’s cinema has been to give voice to his subjects and to treat them as worthy of existing as fictional characters (Bones, 1997); then, to delve further into their world, their personalities, and their ways of living (In Vanda’s Room, 2000); and most recently, with great success, to combine the two approaches (Colossal Youth, 2006).

Costa finds richness in small variations, and his evolution has led to a narrowing of both subject matter and spatial exploration. Costa has retreated from the wide-open, Monument Valley–esque volcanic surface of Cape Verde to interiors; the benefit of seeing 1994’s Down to Earth is in realizing how Costa’s characters must now feel, cramped in their disheveled surroundings. Combined with his movement toward a long-take style, this signals a shift from a cinema of space to a cinema of time. A parallel trend is an attempt to redefine beauty in cinematic terms — from the exquisite monochrome 35mm of The Blood (1989) to the grubby, purposeful digital video of In Vanda’s Room — and its staggeringly unique use (aided by Costa’s remarkable compositional eye) in Colossal Youth. Likewise, few contemporary filmmakers are as concerned with the juxtaposition of image and soundtrack, and each of Costa’s films reveals new ways of seeing and hearing: in Colossal Youth, the sound is a better narrative guide than the visuals — making long takes a necessity.

Yet the more these movies seem to be within one’s grasp, the more they slip away from comprehension. Costa seems to be saying the same thing about life today: he portrays the outside world as a labyrinth and the domestic arena as a much-needed shelter. He’s surely something of a Brechtian modernist (with Jean-Luc Godard as perhaps an even greater influence than Jean-Marie Straub), yet it’s tempting to assign the modifier post in order to understand Costa’s work. His persistent interrogation of the ways in which people live is certainly post–Yasujiro Ozu. And as Jeff Wall has noted, Costa can also be considered post-Bressonian in that he improves on what some find problematic about the master’s later works — namely, Robert Bresson’s tendency to turn his models into intense abstractions. Costa corrects this by allowing disorder, the uncleanliness of the real world. (Bones is that rare transitional film able to stand on its own as a masterpiece, though at the same time, it doesn’t go far enough — as Vanda and Colossal Youth show). The category that Costa might most willingly fit is that of a postpunk director; that the English moniker Colossal Youth — distinct from the film’s Portuguese title Juventude em marcha, literally "Youth on the March" — is also the only album from the stripped-down Welsh band Young Marble Giants (Rough Trade, 1980) is a surrealist coincidence.

Costa’s films are complex objects in which the present and the past intermingle, both literally (in the posthuman Portuguese slums where Costa’s last three features unfold) and within the history of film. The lipstick traces of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur, and many other auteurs reappear in Costa’s films. Just as Down to Earth takes off from I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Bones remakes The Searchers (1956). (It might be perverse to say Colossal Youth is Rio Lobo [1970] to Vanda‘s Rio Bravo [1959], but … there, I just said it.) Les inrockuptibles‘s Serge Kaganski has said that Fontaínhas’s poor are like Indians in classical westerns, and that seems about right. In the same way that he recognizes Bresson’s genius, Costa nods to Hollywood even as he tries, in his unorthodox mode of production — he’s created a studio system in which the crew is minimal, and in the case of Colossal Youth, technical support is provided by the actors off camera — to rip it up and start again.

One final, crucial note: As Costa describes, the themes in the films are highly personal. A search for family and for home threads through them, articuutf8g desire for a community that merges the personal and the political (his community is about as far from the European Commission as one can get). And in his subjects, he’s found that missing family, which is but one of many reasons why Colossal Youth is so touching. He’s also developed an alternative, collaborative model of filmmaking that is radical yet replicable, and one that will generate disciples — provided a director is willing to devote the time needed to nurture similar relationships with actors. Even if Costa "only" continues to make films about downtrodden Portuguese — exploring what one festival guide has called a "desperate utopian dream of a human existence" — it’s a new form of cinema that will continue to reverberate, echo, and grow richer with each variation. The avenues of inquiry are innumerable. After all, John Ford only made westerns.

STILL LIVES: THE FILMS OF PEDRO COSTA

Through April 12

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

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