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Film Features

To be Dee

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To be Dee

cheryl@sfbg.com

TRASH Scrolling through Steven Spielberg’s filmography and trying to pick which of his blockbusters should be dubbed “most beloved” is no small task, but even diehard Indiana Jones fans and Velociraptor devotees have to give it up for 1982’s E.T. The Extraterrestrial. In honor of its 30th anniversary, the family classic gets a sparkling Blu-ray upgrade, plus bells and whistles (some extras are recycled from earlier DVD releases, and there’s no commentary, but the behind-the-scenes footage unearthed for “The E.T. Journals” is pretty nifty).

Dee Wallace, best-known for playing the matriarch of E.T.’s earth family — though she’s also a cult fave for her roles in horror flicks like 1981’s The Howling and 1986’s Critters — phoned for a quick chat on the eve of E.T.‘s Oct. 9 Blu-ray release.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Re-watching the movie, I was struck by how much of the film is really about a family in crisis.

Dee Wallace For me, the main theme of the film was the friendship between E.T. and Elliott, and that friendship was heightened because of the crisis of the family. Elliott really needed a friend. He needed somebody’s attention. [My character,] Mary, couldn’t give it to him — she was too busy making a living for everybody and raising three kids, you know? I think the family dynamic certainly catapults the film into people’s hearts, because they understand what it means to need somebody.

SFBG The family interactions seem very natural, and the extras on the Blu-ray go into how the kids were allowed to ad-lib some of their lines. What was that like for you?

DW I always looked at it as just being another one of the kids. I love to work that way, where I never know what’s going to happen. Steven would throw people lines and then he’d tell us, ‘Say this line but don’t tell them you’re gonna say it.’ We all were allowed to improv and bring our own ideas in, and then he would add things in to throw us all off. I love that because it keeps you in the moment all the time.

SFBG In telling the story from the kids’ point of view, Spielberg didn’t shoot any of the adult characters’ faces until well into the film’s third act — except yours. Did you have a sense of that at the time?

DW Oh yes. He explained to me that was his plan and that’s why I was cast, because he felt that my energy had a childlike quality to it. Which is true, even today! I’m still pretty childlike.

SFBG You’re also known for appearing in quite a few classic horror films. (I’m a big fan of 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes!) What drew you to those roles and how is acting in a horror film different than acting in a film like E.T.?

DW I don’t think it’s different — I just think you get to act more! [Laughs.] I think you get to use a wider range of emotions, a lot of times, in a horror film. Although in E.T., Mary was very emotional: she was angry, she was worried, she was joyful. I got to create a really beautiful emotional arc in E.T., and that’s what I look for.

SFBG You’ve appeared in some Rob Zombie movies, including his upcoming Lords of Salem, which features several horror vets in the cast.

DW Yes, Rob uses a lot of iconic horror actors in all of his stuff. I adore Rob. I love working with him. I think he’s brilliant. And he reminds me a lot of Steven: very in the moment, very loose, a real visionary, and open to people’s input and creativity.

Chronic youth

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Chronic youth

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM It can’t be a coincidence that within a week, a pair of films have been released about 35-year-olds who contemplate hooking up with 19-year-olds. That 16-year age gap — with an immature or other otherwise emotionally stunted thirtysomething on one end, and a precocious millennial on the other — is narrow enough to be plausible, but just wide enough to be awkward.

Now in theaters, Hello I Must Be Going traces the existential flailings of Amy (Melanie Lynskey), so discombobulated post-divorce that she moves back home and takes up with Jeremy (Christopher Abbott), the son of one of her father’s potential clients. Despite their chic Connecticut lifestyle, Mom (Blythe Danner) and Dad (John Rubinstein) have been hit by the recession; Amy’s self-pitying second adolescence only makes the household tension worse. Meanwhile, her hot, clandestine fling with Jeremy, an uninhibited actor, is tested less by their age difference than by his connection to the lucrative account that Amy’s father is desperately trying to land. Of course, there is a cringe-worthy scene where Amy crashes a party, looking for Jeremy, and the bleary-eyed youth who answers the door announces “Someone’s mom is here!”

This week’s Liberal Arts reverses the genders of the controversial couple, with Jesse (How I Met Your Mother‘s Josh Radnor, who also wrote and directed) falling for Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a student at the leafy Ohio university he graduated from years before (never named, but filmed at Kenyon College, Radnor’s own alma matter). The two meet when Jesse, now a jaded Brooklynite, visits to celebrate the retirement of Professor Hoberg (Richard Jenkins); unlike Hello‘s Amy and Jeremy, who waste no time knocking boots, the question of whether to consummate the relationship becomes a major plot point.

Liberal Arts is at its best when delineating a specific type of collegiate experience — as safe, privileged bubble where, as Jesse explains, you can announce “I’m a poet!” without anyone punching you in the face. It can also be an oppressive space, as illustrated by a cranky prof who feels trapped by academia (a razor-sharp Lucinda Janney), and a morose classmate of Zibby’s who identifies a little too closely with David Foster Wallace.

And it’s stuff like the Wallace references (again, never named — just identified via heavily dropped hints, for all the cool viewers to catch) that’re ultimately Liberal Arts‘ undoing. Radnor explores some interesting themes, but the film is full of indie-comedy tropes — the friendly stoner (Zac Efron) who randomly appears to dispense life lessons; an anti-Twilight rant that’s a bit too pleased with itself; the unusually attractive character who appears in the first act and is obviously destined for inclusion in the inevitable happy ending.

By contrast, “airless” and “predictable” are not words anyone would use to describe the life of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, colorfully recounted in Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, a doc directed by her granddaughter-in-law, Lisa Immordino Vreeland. The family connection meant seemingly unlimited access to material featuring the unconventionally glamorous (and highly quotable) Vreeland herself, plus the striking images that remain from her work at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Narrated” from interview transcripts by an actor approximating the late Vreeland’s husky, posh tones, the film allows for some criticism (her employees often trembled at the sight of her; her sons felt neglected; her grasp of historical accuracy while working at the museum was sometimes lacking) among the praise, which is lavish and delivered by A-listers like Anjelica Huston, who remembers “She had a taste for the extraordinary and the extreme,” and Manolo Blahnik, who squeals, “She had the vision!”

Glamour also factors into Peter Ford: A Little Prince, a 40-minute documentary directed by Alexander Roman, who’ll attend both Sun/30 screenings with film subject Peter Ford. “My whole life has been defined by being Glenn Ford’s son,” the sixtysomething Peter says. (For all the Jeremys and Zibbys out there, Glenn Ford was a Hollywood superstar in the 1950s.) Home movies and snapshots depicting a blissful domestic life contrast with Peter’s rambling interview, which spans the length of the film and reveals that all those happy scenes were staged for publicity purposes. Less a bio of Glenn, Peter, or Peter’s mother, dancer Eleanor Powell, A Little Prince is more a peek into the psyche of someone who’s spent his life in the shadow of a legend. “Being a movie star’s child is the hardest job in the world,” Peter says — hyperbole clearly wrought from a lifelong identity crisis.

And it wouldn’t be a week in San Francisco without a film festival (or two: check out Nicole Gluckstern’s take on the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival elsewhere in this issue). The folks at SF IndieFest — who already program their flagship fest, plus DocFest and genre showcase Another Hole in the Head — add another to the rolls with the Northern California Action/Sports Film Festival.

Aimed at athletes rather than typical film-fest types (evidence: movies screen at Sports Basement locations, where you can gear up for your next adventure on the way out the door), this three-day event contains the expected array of skiing, skateboarding, and surfing flicks — check out Manufacturing Stoke, which takes a look at how the surf industry has been transformed by a recent trend toward using environmentally-friendly materials to build boards — but also films focusing on more specialized pursuits like bouldering and slacklining.

Fans of Into Thin Air won’t want to miss 40 Days at Base Camp. The base camp in question is the bustling, ever-shifting village — filled with an international population of guides, climbers both soulful and breezy, Sherpas, volunteer medics, and assorted support staff — perched beneath Mount Everest. As personal triumphs mingle with day-to-day activities (and grimmer tasks, like clearing away long-dead bodies that have worked their way up through the ice), one observer accurately dubs the scene “a fascinating microcosm.” *

Liberal Arts and Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel open Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

Peter Ford: A Little Prince screens Sun/30, 11am and 3pm, at Delancey Street, 600 Embarcadero, SF. For tickets ($8) and more information, visit www.alittleprince.net.

Northern California Action/Sports Film Festival runs Fri/28-Sun/30 with films screening simultaneously at Sports Basement locations in SF, Walnut Creek, and Sunnyvale, and Mission Cliffs, 2295 Harrison, SF. For tickets ($5; festival pass, $25) and schedule, visit www.sfindie.com.

Goodbye to romance

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Goodbye to romance

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM A movie called Bachelorette is inevitably going to be accused of riding Bridesmaids‘ coattails, even if — as it happens — Bachelorette‘s source-material play was written years before the 2011 comedy hit theaters.

A coincidence, to say the least, but also a hat tip to the zeitgeist. Bachelorette‘s title evokes not just Bridesmaids, but also TV’s wretchedly addicting The Bachelorette — as well as the wedding-industrial complex, which remains at frenzied heights, recession be damned (I blame Pinterest).

Bachelorette playwright turned scriptwriter-director Leslye Headland may also count herself among the current crop of female writers and directors who are bringing incisive, women-centric entertainment to pop culture’s forefront: Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumolo (Oscar nominees for penning Bridesmaids), Tina Fey, Diablo Cody, and Lena Dunham among them. The latter three’s Mean Girls (2004), Young Adult (2011), and HBO show Girls, respectively, share themes with Bachelorette, an imperfect film that nonetheless does a good job portraying women who are repulsive in realistic ways.

Imagine Young Adult‘s Mavis broken into three parts, stripped of her complexities but with her bad habits intact; you’d more or less have Regan (Kirsten Dunst), Gena (Lizzy Caplan), and Katie (Isla Fisher). A decade ago, they were the popular “B-Faces” at their high school and haven’t matured much since. Competitive Regan is a Type A blonde; Gena’s the queen of one-night stands; and Katie’s a self-destructive party girl. All of them are pushing 30, and though Regan’s the most functional among them, she’s the hardest-hit when she learns that Becky (Bridesmaids‘ Rebel Wilson), always treated as a second-tier B-Face by virtue of being plus-sized, is engaged. “I was supposed to be first,” Regan wails via three-way cell call to Gena and Katie, who’re sympathetic to this sense of entitlement.

The wedding is a fancy New York City affair, so the B-Faces reunite for what they think will be a bachelorette party for the ages. Most of the film takes place during that single night, a madcap, coke-fueled, mean-spirited spiral into chaos that puts Becky’s wedding dress in peril and sees Gena sparring with the high-school boyfriend (Adam Scott) she’s never forgiven or forgotten, Katie OD’ing, and Regan locking horns with the irritatingly hot best man, who also happens to be a complete douchebag (James Marsden). Nothing that transpires is as funny as the high points of The Hangover (2009), though Bachelorette is unafraid to match that film’s raunch factor.

That’s not to say the film lacks any laughs. The scenarios they get themselves into may be exaggerated, but the women themselves often feel unusually true to life. Headland’s dialogue sounds like real people talking (overlapping, snarking), and the script is loaded with 1990s pop-culture references, which makes sense, since the characters are nostalgic for their teenage glory days. Bachelorette also delves into thornier issues — eating disorders, unplanned pregnancies, drug abuse, raging jealousy — that groups of close female friends often grapple with.

However, it’s a problem for the audience when nearly every character is utterly unlikable. Headland’s play was written as part of a series on the deadly sins (Bachelorette was for “gluttony” — obviously reflected in Becky’s weight, but also Katie’s pill-gobbling, Gena’s sluttiness, etc.), and it’s one thing to see a satirical comedy play out onstage. The actors are there in front of your eyes: intermittently hateful, but living, breathing, and palpably human. Blown up to movie size, there’s nothing to temper the toxicity of the characters; even on the small screen, where Bachelorette proved to be a popular On Demand pick prior to its theatrical release, their awfulness can be agonizing.

Back to inevitable comparison point Bridesmaids: sure, Wiig’s hapless maid of honor was prone to cringe-inducing episodes (dear god, the airplane scene), but Bridesmaids took the time to explore the reasons behind her outrageous behavior. Her character was shaped by, not completely defined by, her failings, and through all her fuckups she remained sympathetic. Her sweet conclusion was cheesy, but she’d earned it.

Bachelorette‘s leading ladies are amusingly vile in the moment, but the movie’s so pleased with itself for being “edgy” that its own last-act attempt at sentiment rings jarringly false. Young Adult didn’t need a happy ending, and neither does Bachelorette, a film that would’ve been better served by sticking with its rallying cry: “Fuck everyone!” 

 

BACHELORETTE opens Fri/7 in San Francisco.

Mid-century modern

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Mid-century modern

arts@sfbg.com

FILM After World War II, the hitherto miniscule U.S. market for foreign language films slowly opened up, partly due to G.I.s returning home curious about the countries they’d been stationed in. But mostly it was because bold new voices in European cinema were delivering a new realism that could be sold (even when cut by censors) as more “shocking,” “frank,” and “shameless” than anything Hollywood would hazard for years yet.

While Sweden, France, and other nations would soon catch up, the first to make a significant impact was Italy, whose artists chronicled the ruination it had to recover from after Axis defeat. Italian Neorealism, as the movement came to be called, looked like nothing else before it; even rare social-issue documentaries had been heavily doctored and sanitized by comparison. Reacting against the increasingly incongruous glamour of studio films made as war and Mussolini’s government wreaked havoc, the neorealists (largely film critics turned makers, as with the French New Wave a decade later) eschewed soundstages and trained actors for the real world. Lines between fiction and nonfiction were willfully blurred.

Leading neorealist films (which fast influenced American film noir and other genres) made a splash. That happened thanks to (or in spite of) misleading adverts for movies that were far from sexy: 1945’s Rome, Open City (resistance fighters caught, tortured, and killed by Gestapo), 1946’s Shoeshine (poor kids scapegoated by corrupt cops, thrown in prison), 1948’s The Bicycle Thief (desperate father and son lose the vehicle that provides their threadbare subsistence), 1952’s Umberto D. (old pensioner gets sick, evicted, suicidal). All these were directed by Roberto Rossellini or Vittorio De Sica, the first star neorealists.

By 1953 Italian cinema was moving on. It had begun to export bombshells (Silvana Mangano from 1949’s Bitter Rice, then Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida); soon would come the sword and sandal epics and international co-productions that would make Rome a crazy hive of commercial filmmaking. Neorealism was on its way out, but as a brand it still had familiarity and a certain market appeal. Ergo a “second generation” of directors were introduced via Love in the City (1953), a recently restored six-part omnibus feature opening for a week at the San Francisco Film Society Cinema (side note: SFFS’s residency at Japantown’s New People ends August 31; the organization plans to shift its fall programming to various local venues).

It isn’t a great film so much as a great curio, and a crystal ball forecasting where the local industry would be head for the next 20 years or more. Little of that was immediately apparent, but just months later Federico Fellini (the sole director here who’d already made several well-received features) would cause a sensation with La Strada (1954). The others, including Michelangelo Antonioni, would eventually follow with breakthroughs of their own. The two surviving today are still active — in fact Francesco Maselli and Carlo Lizzani just contributed to a new omnibus feature last year.

Introduced as “a journal created out of film rather than pen and ink” — love being the topic of its first (and last) “issue” — Love in the City announces its “Raw! Revealing! Shocking!” intentions with Lizzani’s psuedodocumentary opening “article,” a series of interviews with alleged prostitutes. The next similarly surveys women driven to attempted suicide. While the style is as yet unidentifiable, the subject of profound, despairing alienation amid the crowd could hardly be more apt for young Antonioni.

Things lighten up considerably with a delightful set piece of amorous shenanigans in a divey dancehall, demonstrating the wry observation that would make Dino Risi one of Italian cinema’s greatest comedy directors. Fellini’s equally bemused vignette finds a young reporter investigating a matchmaking agency for a humorous story sobered by the plight of the poor, earnest would-be bride he meets.

These breezy episodes are followed by the most devastating. Maselli’s Story of Caterina, co-written by De Sica’s scenarist Cesare Zavattini, follows its plain, forlorn heroine (Caterina Rigoglioso) from bad to worse — impregnated and abandoned, she can neither return to the Sicilian family that’s disowned her or work legally in Rome to support her toddler son. The extremes to which she’s driven are bleakest tragedy.

Even the most frivolous of these segments capture the realities of urban poverty with unblinking authenticity. As if acknowledging that so much realism might be bad for the digestion, Love in the City ends on its silliest (and sole upwardly mobile) note. Future Mafioso (1962) director Alberto Lattuada’s The Italians Turn Their Heads finds all Roman mankind neck craning to leer at a procession of pretty women in tight modern fashions, each granted their own distinct lounge-music theme by composer Mario Nascimbene — thus silencing the chorus of wolf-whistles that would have been their real-life soundtrack.

LOVE IN THE CITY

Aug. 17-23, 2, 4:15, 6:30, and 8:45pm (no 6:30pm show Mon/20), $10-$11

SF Film Society Cinema

1746 Post, SF

www.sffs.org

 

The comeback king

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The comeback king

arts@sfbg.com

FILM As told in Searching for Sugar Man, the tale of the lost, and increasingly found, artist known as Rodriguez seems to have it all: the mystery and drama of myth, beginning with the singer-songwriter’s stunning 1970 debut, Cold Fact, a neglected folk rock-psychedelic masterwork. (The record never sold in the states, but somehow became a beloved, canonical LP in the closed Petri dish of repression and imminent revolution of South Africa.) The story goes on to parse the cold, hard facts of vanished hopes and unpaid royalties, all too familiar in pop tragedies.

Yet loping into the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in a black suit and teal troubadour’s shirt, guitar slung around his shoulder, the long-haired man in sunglasses known as Sixto Rodriguez by friends and family in his native Detroit seems far from bitter, decades after his hard-to-classify music failed to make an impact on charts then dominated by BJ Thomas and Simon and Garfunkel.

“People who make me mad don’t inspire me — it’s issues. Hate is too strong a passion to waste on someone you don’t like, if you know what I mean,” he mutters, half easygoing ramble and half shy-guy mumble. In the decades since Cold Fact, Rodriguez has channeled the streetwise poetry of his lyrics into a politically active life, attending demonstrations and running for Detroit city council and even mayor at one point, though he’s never won an office.

“Social issues are more interesting to me. I’m about peace and prosperity and the pursuit of happiness — and how about justice?”

His is a curious, complicated conversational mixture of hipster-philosopher whimsy, stream-of-consciousness bohemian spiel, and numbers as hard as cash. The latter inspires the 70-year-old to start to breaking down his appeal in terms of seats sold (5,000 here; 10,000 there), celebrities in the audience (Alec Baldwin was at one recent show), and the money to be had in licensing (the Rolling Stones can charge $100,000 for a song!) — as if he needs to justify his presence with raw data.

Nonetheless, it’s an understandable response. Searching for Sugar Man lays out the ballad of Rodriguez as a rock’n’roll detective story, with two South African music lovers in hot pursuit of the elusive musician — long-rumored to have died onstage by either self-immolation or gunshot, and whose music spoke to a generation of white activists struggling to overturn apartheid.

Opening with the soulful strains of Rodriguez’s unforgettable “Sugar Man” and images of a sunlit drive along the South African coast, the film makes its way to the snowy urban wasteland of the Motor City. Filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul orients himself around the efforts of Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, who wrote the South African CD liner notes for Rodriguez’s second full-length, Coming From Reality (both of Rodriguez’s Sussex albums have since been reissued by Light in the Attic, which is releasing the doc’s soundtrack with Sony Legacy), and music journalist Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, who wrote the story of the search that eventually led Rodriguez’s eldest daughter, Eva, to make contact with Segerman and ultimately Rodriguez’s wildly disconnected fans.

Swedish documentarian Bendjelloul first got wind of Rodriguez’s tale in 2006, from Segerman. “I saw this was an amazing story, but after I heard the album, I thought, what amazing music — it needs an amazing director,” says the filmmaker, sitting across a conference table from Rodriguez. “I didn’t think it would be me. I was nervous that I would screw it up.”

His devotion to the project — which led him to quit his job, pour his savings into the movie, draw his own animation sequences, and resort to filming Super-8-like footage on his iPhone — took him on his own four-year journey.

Rodriguez came to the project in 2008, memorably materializing out of the shadows in Searching for Sugar Man in the window of the house he’s lived in for the last 40 years (and purchased for $100, he swears). He made a living doing demo on construction projects. “I’m from a working class background and that’s what I do,” the musician declares proudly. “I always like to say, ‘Never throw away your work clothes!’ I think it’s good for people to stay active: you can kick a lot more ass if you stay physically fit.”

Of his story’s fairy-tale trajectory, Rodriguez says, “I didn’t believe I was anything in South Africa. In this music business, everybody’s the greatest and latest. Everyone’s a sweetheart. But underneath that, there’s a lot of realism in music. People aren’t as successful as they appear to be. They talk about the wonderful Motown thing, but if you list all the tragedies they had, it wouldn’t be such a pretty picture.”

Still, even one as familiar with the cold facts as Rodriguez can’t deny the power of a great song — and one that he wrote. “This current issue of Esquire magazine has a song of the month: it’s ‘I Wonder,’ a 20-year-old song. The longevity of music amazes me,” he offers laconically, the barest hint of pleasure creeping into his voice. “It can last.” *

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN opens Fri/3 in San Francisco.

RODRIGUEZ

Sept. 29, 9pm, $20

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

www.bimbos.com

Love to Lovecraft

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Love to Lovecraft

TRASH The movies had barely begun when adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories began appearing onscreen. However, that author’s closest inheritor, H.P. Lovecraft, sparked no interest from the medium until a good quarter century after he died in 1937 at age 46, a death as premature following a life by all accounts as miserable as his predecessor’s. Were his macabre tales too lowbrow (having been published in pulp-fiction magazines like Weird Tales) or just too grisly for film treatment until literary respectability and audience tolerance for graphic horror caught up with them?

That initial neglect has been more than made up for, especially in very recent years: according to one source there have been over 70 Lovecraft derived features and shorts since 2000 alone. Most of these have been very free with their source material; many are pretty bad in the usual way of cheap horror knockoffs. But Lovecraft’s bizarre ideas survive updating fairly well (if not his racism, which the movies seldom touch), and there have been interesting spins like the gay-angled Cthulhu (2007), U.S. indie Pickman’s Muse (2010), Alien (1979) writer Dan O’Bannon’s Shatterbrain (1992), multinational omnibus Necronomicon: Book of the Dead (1993), or John Carpenter’s relatively big-budget In the Mouth of Madness (1994).

The Roxie hosts a Lovecraft double bill Thu/2, offering up two of what are considered the all-time best adaptations to date. Points for extra faithfulness go to the filmmakers of The Whisperer in Darkness, which plays first (and also screens Fri/3 at the Rafael Film Center). But then you might expect special attention to fidelity from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which produced it last year. You might not expect that attention to extend as far as not only keeping the original short story’s 1930 origin as its setting, but making the film in the style of a black and white early “talkie.” (The Society’s prior film venture, the sub-feature-length The Call of Cthulhu, was based on a tale written in 1926 — so that 2005 enterprise, which plays alongside Whisperer Fri/3 in Marin, is a silent film.)

Tangentially related to the Cthulhu mythology that defined the author’s last decade of activity, Whisperer in Darkness articulates his favored theme: that mankind and its emphasis on scientific logic are pitifully ill-equipped to fathom the otherworldly forces truly shape our hapless destiny. Professional skeptic and professor of folklore Albert Wilmarth is drawn by a late colleague’s strange notes and a farmer’s desperate letters to rural Vermont, where locals believe “monsters” have been abducting their kin since settler days. Many a strange thing occurs before Wilmarth realizes the truth about a “strange colony” in the nearby hills and the alarming cult-like control it exerts over human followers.

Blackly humorous, slow-moving in the cinematic style of another era (things don’t really pick up until after an hour has passed), detailed in its aping of “Golden Age” Hollywood tropes, Whisperer is pulp sci-fi horror of an amusingly camp stripe. Despite content a tad grislier than any 1930s film would have allowed, it’s not far from the thrilling serials that entertained kids at matinees back then.

Striking a very different tone is Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond (1986), the second Roxie feature. The sleeper success of Gordon’s feature debut Re-Animator the prior year had occasioned this second loose Lovecraft adaptation, which would be far from his last — there would follow Castle Freak (1995), Dagon (2001) and a 2005 Masters of Horror episode. All are good, but Beyond is especially, deliciously berserk.

At the outset research assistant Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) has finally, semi-accidentally made Dr. Pretorius’ “Resonator” machine work — but its stimulation of the pineal gland opens a portal between this world and the next that is addicting and dangerous, with results that see the doc dead and Tillinghast committed to a prison psych ward. The latter is sprung, however, by Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), who returns him to the scene of the crime (accompanied by Ken Foree’s cynical cop) to find out what really happened. Unfortunately, the Resonator soon appears able to turn itself on, literally and figuratively — experiencing one endless “orgasm of the mind,” pervy Pretorius re-materializes again in grotesque form, as eager to mingle pleasure and pain with his unwilling visitors as Hellraiser‘s (1987) considerably less horn dogging Pinhead.

Luridly lit in shades of hot pink and turquoise, From Beyond doubtless would have shocked Lovecraft himself (who was from all evidence vehemently disinterested in sexual matters) with its MPAA-challenging mix of icky lasciviousness and ickier mutational gore. It’s one of those rare films that starts out near climax and just keeps building toward ever greater plateaus of tasteless glee. *

“WEIRD CINEMA: AN H.P. LOVECRAFT DOUBLE FEATURE”

From Beyond, Thu/2, 7pm; The Whisperer in Darkness, Thu/2, 9:15pm, $6.50-$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.roxie.com

“AN EVENING WITH H.P. LOVECRAFT”

The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness

Fri/3, 7pm, $6.75-$10.25

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St, San Rafael

www.cafilm.org

Personal detectives

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Personal detectives

cheryl@sfbg.com

SFJFF This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival includes a trio of documentaries inspired by ephemera: hand-scrawled memoirs and journals, decades-old letters, fading photographs, and yellowing newspapers, long-forgotten and crumpled into attics and storage closets.

Dust be damned, for all three filmmakers — Arnon Goldfinger (The Flat), David Fisher (Six Million and One), and Daniel Edelstyn (How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire) — become obsessed with these scraps from the past, and with piecing together their family histories, all of which were studded with tragedy and rarely discussed with younger generations. The task requires the kind of determination that can only be mined from a deeply personal place — and it results in some deeply personal films.

The docs are similar, especially when viewed in the short span of a festival, but Goldfinger’s The Flat is the standout. It begins as the filmmaker’s family descends upon the Tel Aviv apartment of his recently-deceased grandmother, “a bit of a hoarder” who lived to 95 and seemingly never got rid of anything. This includes, as Goldfinger discovers, copies of the Joseph Goebbels-founded newspaper Der Angriff, containing articles about “the Nazi who visited Palestine.” The Nazi was Leopold von Mildenstein, an SS officer with an interest in Zionism. Turns out he made the journey in 1933 with his wife and a Jewish couple named Kurt and Gerda Tuchler — Goldfinger’s grandparents.

Understandably intrigued and more than a little baffled, Goldfinger investigates, finding letters and diary entries that reveal the unlikely traveling companions were close friends, even after World War II. His mother, the Tuchler’s daughter, prefers to “keep the past out,” but curiosity (and the pursuit of a good documentary) presses Goldfinger forward; he visits von Mildenstein’s elderly daughter in Germany, digs through German archives, and unearths even more surprises about his family tree. Broader themes about guilt and denial emerge — post-traumatic coping mechanisms that echo through generations.

Family is a favorite subject for fellow Israeli David Fisher (2000’s Love Inventory). For Six Million and One, he rounds up his brothers and sister for a visit to the Austrian concentration camp where their late father was held as a teen. The elder Fisher recorded his thoughts in a memoir that only David can bear to read. As the siblings engage in the odd pursuit of being tourists in a place of brutality — the film illustrates the town’s changing landscape through eerie, before-and-after photos — their playful arguments escalate into legit psychodrama as the camera rolls and four raw nerves react to their intense emotions.

Interspersed with this journey is David Fisher’s visit with some American veterans who saw unimaginable horrors when they arrived to liberate the camps. It becomes clear that post-traumatic stress doesn’t just affect Jewish families grappling with the after effects of the Holocaust. When Fisher wistfully remarks that his father never spoke about his experiences, an elderly solder tells him, “Maybe you’re better off not having heard the stories.”

Lighter in tone, but with an equally serious back story, is Daniel Edelstyn’s How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, which follows the British filmmaker’s quest to import the vodka made at the Ukrainian factory once owned by his great-grandfather. The disheveled Edelstyn, who admits he has no business experience, pinballs between charming and exasperating as he fumbles through meetings with distributors and dodges hostile locals in his grandmother’s hometown. Despite the film’s title, Edelstyn’s adventures in booze are less compelling than the tale of that grandmother, whose remarkable life is re-enacted with sepia-toned silent film-style clips (starring Edelstyn’s wife, Hilary Powell, who’s also the film’s cinematographer), and miniature animations.

 

THE MORE YOU KNOW

There’s more for fans of non-narrative cinema, as SFJFF unspools several biopics that also delve into troubled pasts — with significant triumphs along the way. No one embodies this more than Roman Polanski, subject of Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, directed by Laurent Bouzereau and structured as a sit-down conversation with longtime Polanski pal and producer Andrew Braunsberg. If you’re hoping for hardball questions or new information on Polanski’s colorful life, prepare for disappointment; the familiar pillars of the Polanski legend (traumatic childhood growing up as a Polish Jew during World War II; filmmaking success with films like 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1974’s Chinatown; wife Sharon Tate’s gruesome death at the hands of Charles Manson’s followers; and that oh-so-inconvenient sexual assault charge, which came back to haunt him 30 years after the fact) are all covered.

If you’ve read Roman By Polanski, the director’s autobiography, or seen the 2008 doc about his struggle with scandal, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, this is familiar turf. But to hear the celebrated director share his memories in his own voice, encouraged by an interviewer he trusts, is a unique experience.

You won’t hear the spoken voice of passionate, patriotic Yoni Netanyahu, the Israeli commando who died leading the 1976 hostage-rescue mission at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, in Ari Daniel Pinchot and Jonathan Gruber’s Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story. But Netanyahu — adored older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current Prime Minister — was prolific letter-writer, and his words (read by actor Marton Csokas) are an invaluable component of this affectionate portrait. But it’s not all heroic platitudes: Netanyahu, who also fought in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, put the military above everything else, including his marriage.

“I don’t ever remember walking as a young person,” jokes sportscasting great Marty Glickman at the start of James Freedman’s upbeat Glickman. “I always ran. It was just my nature to run.” Though he’s referring to his extraordinary sprinting ability, which got him all the way to the 1936 Olympics (where he was denied the chance for certain glory for Hitler-related reasons), it’s also kind of how he lived his life, attacking bigotry and adversity with sunny side-up resilience. Glickman died in 2001, but his life was well-documented — when he wasn’t making sports history, he was doing the play-by-play for it. As an influential broadcaster (basketball fans: he was the first one to say “Swish!”), there’s no shortage of famous fans willing to weigh in: Bob Costas, Bill Bradley, Jerry Stiller, Jim Brown, and Larry King, who has supremely high praise for Glickman’s skills: “It was like his voice was attached to the ball.”

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 19-August 6, most shows $12

Various Bay Area venues

www.sfjff.org

 

The man who made 500 movies

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The man who made 500 movies

arts@sfbg.com

FILM In 1969, a lot of silent films unloaded on the Library of Congress by Paramount Pictures was found to include The Canadian, a little-remembered 1926 drama that proved a major rediscovery when shown to new audiences under the American Film Institute’s banner. Its director, William Beaudine, had never seen it — hustling between assignments at different studios, he’d had no time — and would die at age 78 in March of 1970. But the prior month he managed (just out of the hospital, in a wheelchair) to catch a revival screening. Surprised by both the film and his standing ovation afterward, he admitted “Maybe I wasn’t such a bad director after all.”

That wasn’t just false modesty speaking — over the course of six decades in the business, Beaudine no doubt had been called a bottom-rung director, or worse. This wasn’t due so much to the actual quality of his movies (had anyone bothered to evaluate them as a whole) as the assumption that no one so ludicrously, indiscriminately prolific could possibly be good. Upon retiring a couple years earlier, he’d completed some 500 theatrical films (including shorts) and approximately 350 TV programs. No one even knows the precise numbers, as he occasionally worked under pseudonyms. What could you say about a man credited with such titles as Blonde Dynamite (1950), Tuna Clipper (1949), Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), Voodoo Man (1944), Trick Golf (1934), The Girl from Woolworth’s (1929), and Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla (1952)? How could a one-man factory be expected to be an artist, too?

The truth was that Beaudine seldom got the chance to be one, and by being so pliant and efficient at directing low-end commercial product he probably helped ensure those chances would be rare. Still relatively unknown, The Canadian was certainly one such exception. It plays Saturday afternoon as part of the 17th San Francisco Silent Film Festival, on a program that will also see an honorary award go to Telluride Film Festival directors Tom Luddy, Gary Meyer, and Julie Huntsinger for their event’s long-standing efforts at preserving and exhibiting silent cinema.

A working-class Manhattan native infatuated with the movies from childhood — Beaudine and his brother actually acted in a 1900 short for Thomas Edison’s company — he began working in the then-NYC-centered early industry while still a teen, performing nearly every job behind (and a few before) the camera. He apprenticed under pioneers D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, graduating to the director’s seat shortly after a second, permanent move to Los Angeles in 1914.

Beaudine quickly acquired a reputation for being fast and funny — comedy was considered his forte, alongside working with child actors. It was the latter talent that won the attention of “America’s Sweetheart,” film industry tycoon Mary Pickford. Grudgingly accepting that the public still only wanted to see her in juvenile roles despite the fact that she was pushing 40, she chose him to direct two “comeback” vehicles after a year’s hiatus. Sentimental 1925 entry Little Annie Rooney was a great hit; the next year’s more Gothic Sparrows is still considered by some her best vehicle.

These prestige assignments and several other box-office successes should have lifted Beaudine to the top tier of Hollywood directors — he was already paid accordingly — yet curiously his self-effacing flexibility and ability to deliver the goods under-budget seemed to work against his acquiring the kind of artistic cred that might have let him choose his projects, or be assigned bigger, A-level ones. Frequently loaned out by whatever studio he was currently contracted to, he invariably did a sound job, even if the material was sub-par.

The Canadian itself was an example of his ability to roll with the punches. Sent east by Paramount to make a football picture, he arrived in New York only to find he was now directing a rural drama instead. Improbably based on a W. Somerset Maugham play, it starred Thomas Meighan as an Alberta farmer who marries his neighbor’s sister — a sort of grudge match, as she (Mona Palma) is a European society snob just recently forced here by dwindling family fortunes, and who proposes marriage herself largely to spite the brother and sister-in-law she’s managed to offend.

Sometimes compared today to Victor Sjöström’s 1928 The Wind with Lillian Gish, The Canadian is much less extreme in its style, melodrama, and emotions. (Its heroine doesn’t nearly go mad, for one thing.) The taming-of the-snoot gist is routine, but played out with charming naturalism and restraint. A somewhat difficult, weather-challenged location shoot near Calgary paid off in admiring reviews and good business, although by then Beaudine was already well into other projects, the most immediate being SF-set Frisco Sally Levy (1927).

Beaudine nimbly transitioned into “talkies,” freelancing rather than tying himself down. Yet perversely his adaptability, and knack for getting the most out of a budget, got him typed as a B-pic director rather than promoted to the front ranks. Wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash, he accepted what turned out to be a very successful stint abroad directing some of the top English comedians (notably Will Hays in 1936’s deliciously titled Windbag the Sailor). But those films weren’t seen in the U.S. When he returned home, Beaudine was — for reasons still murky — shut out at every Hollywood major, despite a long track record and being widely liked by coworkers.

His remaining three decades were a testimony to dogged workaholicism, versatility, and solid craftsmanship under sometimes trying circumstances. He worked for all the low-budget “Poverty Row” studios, as well as companies targeting “Negro-only” cinemas, and Protestant church circuits. He chalked up umpteen bottom-half-of-the-bill features in popular series, including dozens starring those aging adolescent cutups the Bowery Boys. He also directed infamous “sex hygiene” film Mom and Dad (1945), which for years played grindhouses and tent shows while fending off as many legal challenges as Deep Throat (1972) years later. Moving into television, he cranked out episodes of everything from The Mickey Mouse Club and Lassie to The Green Hornet — becoming surely the sole person ever to direct both Mary Pickford and Bruce Lee.

This year’s Silent Film Fest contains many more treasures, from two with the “It Girl” Clara Bow (1926’s Mantrap, 1927’s Wings) to films by Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, and Buster Keaton; from China, Russia, and Sweden; and with irrepressible cartoon id Felix the Cat. If you loved The Artist, check out The Mark of Zorro (1920) — its leaping, grinning star Douglas Fairbanks was the unmistakable model for Jean Dujardin’s Oscar-winning turn. *

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Thu/12-Sun/15, free-$42

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.silentfilm.org

Out for more

Andrew Lam
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Out for more

arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE It was Blue (1993) and Swoon (1992) and Frisk (1995), or My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Hours and Times (1991). Paris Is Burning (1990). The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995).

It probably depended a little on who you were and what you’d seen lately that made you feel grateful to be coinciding with this point on the timeline of queer cinema. For me, it was Lilies (1996) and Go Fish (1997), and All Over Me (1997) and Beautiful Thing (1996), and every other gay teen romance, and any totally f***ed up thing Gregg Araki chose to put onscreen (including 1995’s Doom Generation, billed as “a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki,” which made straight look like a fairly provisional state of being). It was kind of like irony or porn — I couldn’t exactly define it, but I was pretty sure I knew it when I saw it while bingeing, mid–gay adolescence, on whatever the 1990s had to offer in the way of LGBT experience on film. “It” being this thing called New Queer Cinema, a term that film critic and scholar (and past Guardian contributor) B. Ruby Rich had coined in a 1992 essay in the British film journal Sight & Sound.

Rich, these days teaching in UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media Department, offered up the idea of New Queer Cinema as a way to frame a ragged-edged genre that she saw emerging. Populating it were films that told unfamiliar, upsetting, outrageous, and sometimes deeply lyrical stories of queer experience, forcing a more complicated picture onto the screen. As many of them gained a cultural foothold (seldom reaching deep into the mainstream, but drawing respectable numbers of art-house-goers), they made a space around themselves for more such films to follow their unsettling examples.

Over the next decade and beyond, the genre, and the larger, disparate queer culture, welcomed a world of untold stories; films like My Own Private Idaho and later Velvet Goldmine (1998) and Boys Don’t Cry (1999) entered the popular culture by way of some combination of star and story power; and one morning we woke up to the sight of significant swaths of the country heading to the multiplex to watch a swoony, gloomy tale of two cowboys in love.

Now, somehow, Brokeback Mountain (2005) is starting to seem like a long time ago, and you could say that New Queer Cinema has both evolved and devolved, a fact reflected in the rom-com-packed LGBT section of your friendly neighborhood video store as well as in each passing year’s Frameline festival catalog. This year, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival offers the opportunity to compare and contrast, casting its eyes back on the genre 20 years after Rich pronounced its existence and sketched its parameters.

In addition to presenting Rich with its annual Frameline Award, the fest has programmed a retrospective of four films that offer a sense of New Queer Cinema’s expansive scope and permeable borders: Alex Sichel’s dark-and-light, riot grrrl music–infused All Over Me (costarring a baby-faced Leisha Hailey from The L Word); Ana Kokkinos’s Head On (1998), about a reckless but closeted young man living in a tight-knit Greek Australian community; Gregg Araki’s violent, trashily romantic, HIV-inflected road movie The Living End (1992); and Cheryl Dunye’s experimental mix of documentary and dyke drama The Watermelon Woman (1996). (In 2012’s Mommy Is Coming, also screening, Dunye adds to the mix Berlin sex clubs, explicit taxicab-backseat role play, and a parent-child dynamic likely to leave you flinching in horror.)

Elsewhere in the fest, French writer-director Virginie Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie has a mosh pit soundtrack and follows, clumsily, Araki’s frenetic and unrestrained example. Béatrice Dalle (1986’s Betty Blue) and Emmanuelle Béart (2002’s 8 Women) play former teenage punk rock sweethearts who met in a mental institution and reunite after a long estrangement to reenact the past and rip open old wounds. A high point, though not for their relationship, occurs when Dalle’s slightly unhinged character tells a woman at a highbrow cocktail party, populated by Paris’s public-intellectual set, that her dress is sectarian, before physically assaulting another guest. Cloying and soap operatic, offering the gauzy fantasy fulfillment of a Harlequin Romance, Nicole Conn’s A Perfect Ending nevertheless earns points for its premise of an uptight housewife who employs the services of a call girl — and for casting Morgan Fairchild as a madam who uses her Barbie collection as a staffing organizational tool.

Other queer stories are more successfully delineated. Aurora Guerrero’s coming-of-age tale Mosquita y Mari, which screened at the SF International Film Fest in April, soulfully and subtly captures the ambiguous friendship that develops between two Latina high schoolers struggling with unspoken feelings as well as pressures both familial and financial. In Joshua Sanchez’s Four, adapted from a play by Christopher Shinn, Fourth of July fireworks and a mood of lonely isolation serve as a backdrop to four disparate individuals’ uncomfortable attempts to find physical and emotional connection. Stephen Cone’s The Wise Kids is set in and around a Southern Baptist church in Charleston, South Carolina, and tracks a trio of teenagers as they sort out the facts of their religious and sexual identities.

There’s a startlingly small quantity of queer baby-making going on in this year’s fest compared with recent years, and the family proposed in writer-director Jonathan Lisecki’s romantic comedy Gayby (as well as Ash Christian’s Petunia) is not necessarily nuclear or easy to encapsulate in kindergarten on “Let’s draw our family tree!” day, marrying the concept of queer family to the Heather-has-two-mommies narrative. The film’s gay-boy Matt and straight-girl BFF Jenn decide that it’s time to settle down and start a family together, but reject the idea of turkey basting or consulting a fertility specialist in favor of comically awkward, highly unerotic, goal-oriented sexual intercourse.

Come to think of it, their method could resonate with the procreation-only, can’t-wait-to-be-raptured crowd, who might be less enthusiastic when the pair switch to good old-fashioned DIY insemination and Matt’s friend Nelson (a scene-stealing Lisecki) brings over a container of holy cat cremains to sanctify the proceedings. Either way, with queer spawning sometimes serving as the rope in a tug-of-war argument about heteronormativity, queer identity, transgression, and basic rights, an unruly rom-com about queer family planning is a fitting entry in a genre and a festival that have both grown into panoramic representations of the queer world.

FRAMELINE36

June 14-24, most shows $9-$11

Various venues

www.frameline.org

You @ the festival

Andrew Lam
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You @ the festival

cheryl@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE What happens when a human being becomes a meme? This is the question at the heart of Me @ The Zoo, about YouTube celebrity Chris Crocker — destined to be forever known for his sobbing rant imploring the universe to “Leave Britney alone!”

What could have been a one-joke documentary is, to filmmakers Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch’s credit, a layered look at insta-fame in the internet age, the perils of cultivating an oversized persona (particularly while living in a small, closed-minded town), and the hard lesson that life in the spotlight also equals life under a microscope.

Far from being reducible to a single screen grab, Chris Crocker is a deeply complicated person. As the film begins, he knows exactly who he would like to be — her name rhymes with “Britney Spears” — but is a little less certain about who he actually is. Growing up in Bristol, Tenn. (“A good place to live,” an oft-filmed town sign reassures us), Crocker was bullied for being gay; in high school, home-schooling became necessary. With few friends and little supervision (his troubled mother is a peripheral presence; he lives with his grandparents — the parents of his completely absent father), the bright, charismatic, attention-starved teen turned to the burgeoning world of internet video.

Despite homophobic haters all too happy to shower him with ugly, threatening comments, he became a MySpace sensation with his manic, lip-glossed, gender-bending videos. He cultivated a bratty catch phrase: “Bitch, please!” When YouTube appeared in 2005 (the doc’s title comes from the site’s very first upload), Crocker was one of its early addicts, and his fame grew along with his subscriber count. He danced, he provoked his tough-as-nails grandma, he modeled wigs, and he vlogged, often with exaggerated emotion. When his idol took a dive into paparazzi-documented insanity in 2007 (Feb.: head shave; Sept.: disastrous “comeback” performance on MTV), of course he made a video about it. He could not have known that the clip, which currently has over 43 million views, would go viral, and that suddenly everybody would know about Chris Crocker.

Yay! It’s what he wanted! But was it? “I love acting like I don’t want it,” he gleefully announces, faux-shunning photographers trailing behind him on a visit to Los Angeles. But the Crocker zeitgeist ends nearly as soon as it starts. His reality show (to be called Chris Crocker: Behind the Curtains) fails to find a network, and he soon becomes yesterday’s novelty-news hook. Back in Tennessee, he’s surprisingly sanguine about his short-shrift stab at stardom and eventual slide into notoriety: “I’m one of the first people who’s famous for not being famous,” he says. And later: “I can’t stop being myself.”

As the kids say, haters gonna hate. But when being yourself brings you such joy, who cares? Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe’s effervescent Ballroom Rules follows a team of Australian same-sex ballroom dancers as they train for the Gay Games. The action revolves around Melbourne’s only LGBT-centric ballroom studio, Dance Cats, and its crew of dedicated learners. Comparisons to 1992’s Strictly Ballroom (frustrating practice sessions; copious sequins; stuffy jerks who oversee the mainstream ballroom scene) can be made, except same-sex dancers must be what the movie calls “ambi-dance-trous” — able to switch leader-follower roles mid-routine. That the Dance Cats crew is such a warm, often hilarious group who’ve overcome much (homophobia is the least of it) to get where they are makes Ballroom Rules that much more inspiring.

Also inspiring: the Lance Bass-produced Mississippi: I Am, Harriet Hirshorn and Katherine Linton’s short doc about what it’s like to be a gay teen in the deep South. Hint: it sucks year-round, but prom season is especially dicey. Julie Wyman’s STRONG!, about Olympic weightlifter Cheryl Haworth, follows the 290-pound athlete as she hefts mind-blowing amounts in the gym and speaks honestly about her issues with confidence and body image. Haworth is a delight (her nickname is “Fun”), and while STRONG!‘s more serious themes are important, the off-the-cuff scenes with its subject (her car, a hilariously retro 1979 Lincoln Continental, is dubbed “Mary Todd”) are just as memorable.

Two more docs worth mentioning, about a pair of men whose fascinating lives are ideally suited for cinematic exploration: the PBS-ish Revealing Mr. Maugham, about hugely successful playwright and author W. Somerset Maugham, whose works are still being made into films today; and Times of Harvey Milk-ish Vito, about groundbreaking activist and Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo — a spot-on opening-night choice for Frameline. 

www.frameline.org

Womb raiders

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Womb raiders

TRASH A primary figure in Philippine folklore dating back centuries, the aswang is a monster that has taken many forms — shape shifting being one constant. But arguably the most prevalent, at least in pop culture today, is that of a vampiric “witch” who uses the guise of a seemingly harmless old woman to ingratiate herself wherever there are pregnant women or young families, with the goal of eventually making a snack of the newborn or not-quite-yet-born. They manage the latter selection by using an extremely long proboscis to suck the … oh, you don’t want to know. (Although surely that image will someday be used by the ever-more-hysterical anti-abortion forces.)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ “New Filipino Cinema” series (see Film story) features a mockumentary about Lilia Cuntapay, a senior actor whose modicum of local fame has come from playing variations on these mythical creatures, notably in the never-ending Shake, Rattle & Roll horror movie franchise. But for all the aswang’s ongoing ubiquity in the Philippines — a popular costumed Aswang Festival was held for several years in provincial Capiz until the Catholic Church got it shut down as “devil worship” — it’s rarely surfaced in entertainment abroad. Of course other cultures have their own traditional ghouls to play with. But it’s hard to deny that the baby lifeforce-sucking hag is a concept rather low on international-export value

One major exception is among the great underappreciated U.S. indie horrors of the last 20 years: 1994’s Aswang, shot on 16mm in and around Milwaukee for a reported grand total of $70,000, was the first feature for young Midwesterners Wrye Martin and Barry Poltermann. Their screenplay, devised from a story idea by Philippines-raised friend Frank Anderson, was the heartwarming tale of a lass in conventional “trouble” who finds a savior who’ll do what’s best for both her and her unwanted baby. Or so she thinks.

Knocked up by an irresponsible mullet-head boyfriend, barely-legal Katrina (Tina Ona Paukstelis) refuses to abort, instead agreeing to an unusual advertised offer: she will carry the child to term, posing as the bride of Peter Null (James Spader-ish Norman Moses). The last male heir to an aristocratic émigré Filipino clan, he claims he and his actual wife cannot conceive, and must resort to this ruse to inherit the family fortune. In an uncomfortable meeting presided over by a hilariously bored lawyer (John Garekis), the parties meet and sign the necessary contractual documents.

Seven months later, now ready-to-pop Katrina and her “husband” reunite, driving from the city to Chez Null, a rambling, isolated rural property with an aura of going-to-seed grandeur. She’s introduced to regal matriarch Olive (Flora Coker), given a creepy once-over by Tagalog-only-speaking housekeeper Cupid (Mildred Nierras), and pointedly told not to visit a small adjacent house where Peter’s sister Claire (Jamie Jacobs Anderson) is, ahem, not well. An uninvited, unwelcome guest of sorts also shows up, one Dr. Roger Harper (Josh Kishline). He says he’s just renting a vacation cottage nearby, but seems to be poking an investigative nose into some Null family mischief that is most definitely not for public consumption.

It does, however, involve consumption — as Katrina finds out after being put to bed heavily drunk on Cupid’s homemade special cider. Waking groggily, she senses a disturbance under the covers. To her considerable distress, it turns out she’s getting an intrusive visit from what one crew member later called a “50-foot tongue with a mind of its own.” Thus begins, just half an hour into the film’s 82 minutes, a nonstop escalation of grotesquely funny, tasteless mortal crises that rank ought to rank Aswang up there with The Evil Dead (1981) and Re-Animator (1985) for freaky, semi-camp gore-horror ingenuity.

Ought to, but Aswang sort of fell through the cracks, despite gaining some attention (not all favorable) as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s first-ever midnight sidebar. Theatrical release never came to pass; the U.S. video distributor released it cut, redubbed The Unearthing, and dumped into low-end retail outlets. Fame and fortune did not ensue for the filmmakers, who’ve separately stayed active in various capacities — editing, producing, even directing a documentary record of Charles Nelson Reilly’s one-man stage show — but never again created anything remotely like their crazily intense debut

The Mondo Macabro DVD release, out a few years now, has helped Aswang gain a small cult following, as well as regain its original title. Among factoids revealed in the extras are that most cast members were drafted from longtime Milwaukee avant-garde company Theatre X, though male lead Moses was, incongruously, a regional stage musical star. (Despite his memorably unhinged performance here, he seems to have never made another film.)

The making-of documentary is amusingly contentious, with some participants still discomfited by the paces they were put through, others retroactively doubting the directors’ competence, scruples, or whether they even shot particular scenes. They may still not quite know what they got themselves into, but hopefully time will prove it was something perversely great. Aswang does aswangs proud.

Pinoy rising

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Pinoy rising

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Cinema has had a long and colorful history in the Philippines, with a first “golden age” of home-grown product in the 1950s, a turn toward exportable exploitation films in the ’60s, notable new-wave directors (like Lino Brocka) emerging in the ’70s, and so forth — sustaining one of the world’s most prolific film industries despite difficulties political and otherwise. At the turn of the millennium those wheels were wobbling and slowing, however, hard-hit by a combination of too many low-grade formula films, shrinking audiences, and stiffer competition from slick imported entertainments. The commercial sector stumbled on, but as a shadow of its robust former self.

But there’s something percolating beyond hard consonants on the archipelago these days, signs of a new DIY vigor coming from independent sectors juiced by the inexpensive accessibility of digital technology, undaunted (at least so far) by problems of exhibition and income-generating at home. It’s a sprawling, unpredictable, work-in-progress scene that some figure could well become the next “it” spot for cineaste types seeking one of those spontaneous combustions of fresh talent that arise occasionally where you least expect it — like Romania, to name one recent example.

One person who definitely thinks that’s the case is Joel Shepard, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ longtime Film/Video Curator. He’s traveled to the Philippines several times in recent years (once serving on the jury at CineManila), and has previously programmed a few prime examples of the country’s edgy new voices — particularly Brilliante Mendoza, whose notorious 2009 police-corruption grunge horror Kinatay (a.k.a. Butchered) was one of the most hotly divisive Cannes jury-prize winners in recent history. Now YBCA is presenting “New Filipino Cinema,” Shepard’s first “big fat snapshot” — hopefully to be continued on an annual basis — of a wildly diverse current filmic landscape, assembled in collaboration with Manila critic Philbert Ortiz Dy.

Shepard’s program notes call the Philippines “an extremely fascinating country…but the more I learned about the place and its people, the less I felt like I actually understood anything. The truth felt more and more slippery.” One might get a similar sensation watching the films in this expansive (nearly 30 titles, shorts included) sampler, in that they’re all over the map stylistically and thematically — from lyrical to gritty, satirical to anarchistic — suggesting no single defining “movement” or aesthetic to New Filipino Cinema.

Nor should they, since these movies reflect very different cultures, politics, and issues in regions hitherto underrepresented onscreen. After all, Manila isn’t the only place you can get your hands on a digital camera; and Tagalog is primary language for just one-third of all Filipinos.

The series opener has significant local ties: Loy Arcenas is a lauded stage set designer who’s worked frequently with our own American Conservatory Theater. Unavailable for preview, in description his feature directorial debut Niño (2011) sounds redolent of Luchino Visconti and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (as well as, perhaps, 1975’s Grey Gardens) as it depicts a once grand family of Spanish émigrés living in decrepit splendor, diminished over generations by political inconvenience and a proud, fatal inability to adapt.

Their aristocratic pretensions are a far cry from the rowdier real life captured or depicted in other YBCA selections. A bizarre footnote to the United States’ complicated, incriminating relationship with the Philippines is documented in Monster Jiminez’s Kano: An American and His Harem (2010). Its subject is a Yankee Vietnam vet whose military pension allowed him to construct a sort of one-man imperialist paradise centered around his penis. Whether he was a gracious benefactor, a bullying rapist, or both is a puzzle only clouded further by contradictory input from former/current wives and mistresses (even while he’s in prison), stateside relatives who recall a childhood ideal to shape a sociopath, and the authorities who’ve lately kept him in prison.

War is ongoing, marriage an impractical hope in Arnel M. Mardoquio’s impressive Crossfire (2011), whose young lovers in southern region Mindanao must dodge government-vs.-rebel-vs.-bandit guns as well as a rural poverty sufficient to make our heroine vulnerable to being offered as a lender-debt payoff. Their plight is starkly contrasted with the spectacular scenery of countryside few tourists will ever hazard.

Its atmospheric opposite is Lawrence Fajardo’s Amok (2011), whose thousand threads of seemingly free-floating narrative depict life dedicatedly melting down all race, age, class, and economic divisions during a heat wave passage through one of Manila’s busiest intersections. What birth and development keeps apart gets nail-gunned together, however, once this string of naturalistic vignettes hits a plot device that delivers deus ex machina to all with no melodramatic restraint. Fate also lays heavy hand on the junior protagonists of Mes de Guzman’s At the Corner of Heaven and Earth (2011), a crude but honest neo-realist drama about four orphaned and runaway boys trying to eke out a marginal existence in Nueva Vizcaya.

Should this all sound pretty grim, be informed there’s lots of levity — albeit much of it gallows-humored — on the YBCA slate. Jade Castro’s exuberantly silly Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings (2011) finds the funny in homophobia as its crass young hero (a farcically deft Mart Escudero) is “cursed” by an angry queen he’d insulted to become gay himself; meanwhile somebody goes around their regional burg assassinating cross-dressers via ray-gun. Plus: zombies, and the proverbial kitchen sink. Also on the frivolous side is Antoinette Jadaone’s mockumentary Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (2011), in which the titular veteran screen thespian struggles for recognition after decades playing bit parts and occasional showier ones, notably as witchy folkloric “aswang” attempting to suck the lifeblood from newborn babes. (See aswang-related coverage in this week’s Trash column, too.)

Yet those are but moderately playful New Filipino Cinema exercises compared to the determined off-map outrages practiced by Mondomanila (2011). This gonzo eruption of spermazoidal huzzah! by multimedia Manila punk underground mover Khavn de la Cruz seeks to leave no societal cavity unexplored, or unoffended. Opening with an infamous quote from Brokedown Palace (1999) star Claire Danes, who characterized Manila as a “ghastly and weird city … [with] no sewage system,” it delivers both fuck-you and fuck-me to that judgment via 75 minutes of mad under caste collage. There isn’t much plot. But there’s variably judged arson, pedophilia, yo-yo trick demonstrations, poultry abuse, upscale mall shopping, voyeuristic pornographia, Tagalog rap, rooftop drum soloing, and limbless-little-person salesmanship of duck eggs.

Further complicating your comprehension of a very complex scene, the YBCA series encompasses avant-garde shorts by veteran John Torres and newer experimentalists. There’s also a free afternoon Indie-Pino Music Fest Sat/9, and on June 17 there’s a postscript: Lav Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, the six-hour latest epic in a career whose patience-testing wide open cinematic spaces make Béla Tarr look like Michael Bay. 

“NEW FILIPINO CINEMA”

June 7-17, $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

Rites of passage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Rites of passage

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It’s commonly said of Nathaniel Dorsky’s films that they are beautiful beyond words. Which is true as far as it goes, but then the same could be said of many poems and they are words. What’s clear is that Dorsky is absorbed with a classical fulfillment of form, and as such his films do better with poetics than interpretation (he has himself supplied a fine entry point with his slim volume Devotional Cinema). Poetics in this context means respecting the mystery and proceeding gingerly with gesture, metaphor, and detail. No one ever says of a Dorsky film, “I liked it the more I thought about it.” Conversely, watching a second or third time one marvels to find the beauty springing to life with the same force, subtler and lovelier now for this trick of renewal. No one ever says of a sunset, “I’ve seen this one before.”

A three-part retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive beginning June 10 retraces the last decade of Dorsky’s work. The Return (2011) and August and After (2012) receive local premieres this weekend, accompanied by the delicate Pastourelle (2010). June 17 brings his “Quartet,” to my mind a signal achievement of the young century. The series concludes June 24 with three earlier films confirming Dorsky’s mastery of an open (sometimes called polyvalent) form of montage: Song and Solitude (2006), Threnody (2004), and The Visitation (2002). How fitting that these films should be spaced out over consecutive days of rest! They will be shown on 16mm because that is what they are (last I checked the museums still show the Old Masters in paint).

It’s our good fortune to share a city with Dorsky: opportunities to see the films with him as a guide come a little more frequently, and the phenomena that supply his visual repertoire are that much more familiar. Here are the blossoms, the Chinatown lanterns, the drifting Muni trains, the ocean skies, and the seasons as we only dare to see them in deepest reverie.

Dorsky began making movies under the influence of people like Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos, filmmakers who strove for an intrinsic cinematic language (while the auteurists chiseled out an essential cinema, they sought cinema’s essence). After relocating to San Francisco in 1971, he reemerged with Hours for Jerome (1980-1982), a dense exercise in spiritual autobiography culled from pastoral years in New Jersey. The films began arriving with greater regularity after Triste (1998) and continue apace even after the desertion of his beloved Kodachrome.

The silence of Dorsky’s films is lush, providing intoxicating accompaniment to the slowed projection of 18 frames per second which dips the photographic action just out of the flow of representation. The crescendos that surge past the finish of his films invariably leave me surprised that I haven’t been listening to music, as the black of the theater seems clarified in the same way silence is after an expressive composition. Pushing the analogy further, the relationship between movement and stillness in his films is akin to that of sound and rest in music, the two leaved together as intonation. We really need a new word to describe the juddering movement of branches and buds that punctuate Dorsky’s films. “Quiver” is close, but it doesn’t capture the spring in the frame, like dancers on a stage.

A couple of months ago, Dorsky showed something called Kodachrome Dailies from the Time of Song and Solitude (Reel 1) at Lincoln Center: Song and Solitude-era footage in the chronological order in which it was shot. The material had a completely distinct character viewed this way. Dorsky talked of it as a journal. The loose form made it easier to relate to his eye being grasped by something in the world, and yet one missed the justice of the cuts.

If pressed for a defining quality of these films, I would say rightness —each shot developing to its fullness, tuned to what comes before and after. The fact that this formal refinement is itself the focus of the films creates a suspension of time which, after all, is a basic condition of paradise. Certainly the films are colored by experience, as August and After for instance is clearly marked by grief, yet this is never what they are “about.” Trust is placed in the self-expression of the film stock — its luster and dusk.

Dorsky’s films will reintroduce you to what branches make of the sky and how the grass gladdens when the sun reappears from its shade. I think this is what people are talking about when they say the films remind them of childhood. “A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full/hands;/How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any/more than he./I guess it must the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful/green stuff woven.” We could choose many lines of verse to say the same, but Whitman’s will do. There is something mystical in Dorsky’s slightly ajar illuminations of worldly objects and features. And yet so too is there something altogether sensible and almost courtly in their formal arrangements. The shots of dogs make us chuckle because we’re in a position to recognize our own recognition, all too human.

On first viewing The Return struck me as a deeply melancholy work, its darkly reflecting surfaces and doublings bearing the impression of lost sleep. August and After, on the other hand, is more immediate in its effect and a superior example of how Dorsky’s style can serve distinct emotional structures (threnody here). Tender impressions taken near the end of George Kuchar’s life, the filmmaker surrounded by family and friends, are framed in the light of long afternoons. Everything that follows is touched by these pictures of intimacy: two workers sliding down a skyscraper, a distant glass door sweeping a ray of light across a café, agitated steps into bramble. A rhythmic montage focuses on packages and fruits carried down the street, the actual things transfigured into pure color. When the film’s ship finally sails, it does so with such grace as to say love without saying.

“AFTERIMAGE: THREE NIGHTS WITH NATHANIEL DORSKY”

June 10, 17, and 24, 7:30pm, $5.50-$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Light meter

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Light meter

art@sfbg.com

FILM San Francisco Cinematheque artistic director Steve Polta balances familiar names with lesser known for the third annual “Crossroads” festival at the Victoria Theater, though Ken Jacobs’ Occupy-strength Seeking the Monkey King (2011) promises to unseat the image of a mellowing old master.

The festival’s only solo program, besides a tribute to Canyon Cinema co-founder Chick Strand (her 1979 film Soft Fiction is rarely screened and highly recommended), belongs to Laida Lertxundi. A former CalArts student with a sure handle on 16mm as a philosophical instrument, Lertxundi was recently featured in the Whitney Biennial. Where Strand made some of her most beautiful work far from Southern California, Bilbao-born Lertxundi brings an outsider’s eye and sharply turned cadence to the shifting landscape of Los Angeles: one has the sense of desert reclaiming city watching her short films.

A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) opens on the curled lip of James Carr’s soul number “Love Attack” and a cragged landscape view. The long take floods with softening light, but then a terrifically decisive cut deposits us in the flat light of an apartment. The sudden switch bears the imprint of both insight and displacement. Leafy potted plants reach for the natural light framed in a window, and Carr’s wail gives way to Robert Wyatt’s impressionism: a different emotional architecture entirely. The camera turns slow pirouettes through the apartment, passing over an amplifier (always this confusion about the relationship between sight and sound), a woman kneeling to play a keyboard, some records, and then catching up with her again sprawled in bed.

As is often the case in Lertxundi’s films, the composition does not settle on the human form in the usual way. The residue of the apartment, oddly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), develops until a few shots later we end with a bleeding red dusk spreading across Los Angeles — an image pitched on the edge of surrender.

My Tears are Dry (2009) is even more minimalist in its riddling structure. Lertxundi cuts between an image of a woman’s torso on a bed, playing and rewinding the same snip of Hoagy Lands’ title ballad, and another woman sitting on a couch strumming a dissonant chord. Out of this frustrated syntax comes blessed continuity. The song breaks through and sets in motion a weightless daydream borrowed from Bruce Baillie’s 1966 single-shot film, All My Life (included on the same program along with other antecedents by Hollis Frampton and Morgan Fisher): in place of his horizontal pan across flowers, Lertxundi tilts her camera up past palms towards the same pale blue sky. Poignant without object, the film delivers a gentle spiritual plea for persistence.

Several other “Crossroads” films successfully hone in on resonances specific to film stock. Curious Light (2011), Charlotte Pryce’s hand-processed illumination of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, provides a tactile 16mm equivalent to the absorption of reading. Scott Stark’s brilliant collage, One Way to Find Out (2012), stretches Hollywood ‘Scope images of desire like so much taffy. Rei Hayama’s A Child Burying Dead Insects (2009) decelerates a short fragment of film (a girl jogs into a leafy frame, tosses up a ball, kneels for the burial, and exits the frame) until the film itself begins to rebel in the frame. The Lumière-like simplicity of the action and swirling soundtrack music opens up a spry meditation on film’s still-startling capacity for reincarnation.

Ben Russell foregoes his “Trypps” film-series tag for River Rites (2011), but the concept of a single-roll invocation of ritual and trance remains. Curving cultural anthropology into the experience of time, Russell generates ontological fireworks and in situ reflection on filming other people. Ben Rivers builds on the fictive anthropology mode last seen in I Know Where I’m Going (2009) for his ambitious Slow Action (2010). His camera picks over “the ruins of ruins” of four island sites elaborated by voiceover narration (written by novelist and critic Mark von Schlegell) rich in invented ethnographic detail and philosophical speculation as to the true nature of utopia. The two Bens have collaborated on the forthcoming A Spell to Ward off Darkness, a film shot in Norway starring the musician Rob Lowe. Fingers crossed it’s ready for the next “Crossroads.” *

“CROSSROADS 2012”

Fri/18-Sun/20, $10 (festival pass, $50)

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St., SF

www.sfcinematheque.org

 

Turn up the dark

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Turn up the dark

FILM So far, 2012 has been a year of mixed blessings for Hollywood, contrasting mega-hits like The Hunger Games and The Avengers with one of the biggest mega-flops of all time, John Carter. But summer’s really when show-biz turns deadly serious. Each week, there’s a new wannabe blockbuster — pasteurized, processed, film-like products so huge they have the ability to make or break entire movie studios — hoping for returns big enough to make all involved even richer, and insure sequels and spin-offs for summers to come.

Of course, living in the Bay Area, we have access to plenty of movie grub beyond the mainstream; from June to October, there are festivals a-plenty, including the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the Silent Film Festival, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and the Mill Valley Film Festival. Plus, there’s always something cooking at art houses and alternative venues like the Pacific Film Archive, any of the Landmark Theatres, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Vortex Room, and the Roxie.

But to truly do summer-movie season correctly, you must witness at least one blockbuster, preferably in 3D, preferably clutching the largest package of Sour Patch Kids that money can buy. Get your schedule in order with this handy-dandy, overtly opinionated list of the most-anticipated upcoming flicks. (Dates subject to change, as always.)

May 16: The Dictator. Sacha Baron Cohen may never top Borat (2006), but this has gotta be more clever than Brüno (2009).

May 25: Men in Black 3. Now with time travel! Also, Will Smith, Comedian > Will Smith, Serious Actor.

June 1: Wes Anderson’s latest, Moonrise Kingdom, does battle with Piranha 3DD. Smart money’s on the one with the sharpest teeth.

June 8: Prometheus. I’m so excited for Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi thriller I cut myself off from watching any of the recent, spoiler-y trailers.

June 15: Tom Cruise sings (in Rock of Ages) and Adam Sandler plays Andy Samberg’s dad (in That’s My Boy). Which one will be funnier?

June 22: Pixar unleashes a kick-ass female protagonist in Brave. +1000 for making her a redhead.

June 29: It’s a Channing Tatum two-fer, with G.I. Joe: Retaliation boasting far less intrigue than the Soderbergh-directed Magic Mike, about Tatum’s not-so-secret past as a male stripper.

July 3: The Amazing Spider-Man. TOO SOON!

July 20: The Dark Knight Rises. With a new villain (Tom Hardy as Bane) and a new Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). C-Bale will prob stick to his trusty sotto voice thing, though.

Aug. 3: Reboot city! Jeremy Renner displaces Matt Damon in The Bourne Legacy, while Colin Farrell takes on the Schwarzenegger role in Total Recall.

Aug. 10: Will Ferrell (with John Edwards-style coif) and Zach Galifianakis (with walrus ‘stache) play rival Southern politicians in The Campaign.

Aug. 24: Michael Shannon and Joseph Gordon-Levitt team up for what might be the first bike-messenger thriller since Quicksilver (1986), Premium Rush.

And since you can never plan too far ahead, key fall-holiday movies include: Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, a re-teaming with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) star Brad Pitt; Rian Johnson’s Looper, a re-teaming with Brick (2005) star Gordon-Levitt; Paul Thomas Anderson’s “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Scientology” drama, The Master; a beer-chugging James Bond in Skyfall; Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained; Baz Luhrmann’s “I Can’t Believe He Made It In 3D” The Great Gatsby; and a little something from Peter Jackson entitled The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Hard to be a filmmaker

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Hard to be a filmmaker

arts@sfbg.com

FILM In 1987, Soviet critics were polled to create a list of the nation’s greatest films. Landing on top was a movie still little-known abroad, whose maker has completed just five features in 45 years — one of which he doesn’t even consider truly his own work.

My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984) likely wouldn’t have gotten near that exalted status if original, party-line-towing critics had had their way. After its well-received first screening, Aleksei Guerman’s own studio Lenfilm launched a broadside of attacks and demanded half his film be re-shot, though ultimately (more to spare additional costs than anything else) it remained unchanged.

Three years following a belated release, Ivan Lapshin was officially the “best Russian movie ever.” It was a remarkable turnabout for a director whose efforts had been — and in different ways would continue to be — perpetually thwarted, sometimes banned outright. In personal demeanor Guerman has been called “almost comically grim,” doubtless the result of so much uphill struggle. Yet that dour affect runs counter to the tenor of his most striking films, which are anarchic and borderline surreal, couching tragedy in absurdist humor and messy high spirits.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ two-week series “War and Remembrance: The Films of Aleksei Guerman” brings to SF all of this slim oeuvre, little of which has been seen outside Russia save in festival appearances, cut form, or poor transfers that diminish the director’s mastery of complicated traveling shots in moody black and white.

Guerman (sometimes translated as “German”) was raised in Leningrad as the son of Yuri Guerman, a celebrated author who managed never to fall out of Stalin’s favor. Aiming to be a doctor, he hit cinema instead — first as a student and assistant, then co-directing 1967’s The Seventh Companion with the more established Grigori Aronov. The two fought throughout production of this sober drama about a Tsarist military officer converting to Socialist ideals, and Guerman has disavowed the end product.

He had sole credit on 1971’s Trial on the Road, another redemption tale — former Nazi collaborator surrenders to the Red Army, then re-infiltrates Axis forces to destroy an ammunitions train — but one judged insufficiently “heroic” by the government. It went unseen until 1986, when Gorbachev’s perestroika era liberated numerous long-banned films. A second World War II tale, Twenty Days Without War (1976), managed to escape censure with its melancholy portrait of a soldier on hometown furlough. It hinted at the looser, anecdotal, community-as-protagonist approach to come.

Still, Ivan Lapshin was a surprise leap toward humor, incident over conventional narrative, childhood memory as warm, boisterous yet melancholy blur á la Amarcord (1973) or Mon oncle Antoine (1971). (Though no sensibility could be more purely Russian than Guerman’s.) Based on stories by the director’s father, its main event is one that hasn’t happened yet when the film begins — Stalin’s first “Great Purge,” which would sweep away many of the moderately criminal or just eccentric figures portrayed in this fictive 1935 provincial town. Everyone here is a little mad, driven to distraction by the chaos of a grand collectivist experiment, spinning wild as if anticipating the cold smack down they were about to suffer. The amorphous structure some initially found off-putting now seems Ivan Lapshin‘s boldest, defining trait, the thing that keeps it floating in midair.

Despite that precedent, beleaguered Khrustalyov, My Car! — production dogged this time not by Soviet watchdogs, but by unreliable international funders — was greeted with walkouts and “disaster” judgments at its 1998 Cannes bow. Yet many of the same critics, overwhelmed at first by its wholesale abandonment of realism and coherence for phantasmagoria, pronounced it a masterpiece after second or third viewings. Framed like Ivan Lapshin as a child’s memory of (later) Stalinist life, its 150 minutes lunge still further toward a Fellini-like grotesque-carnival clutter of excesses, from the hospital where “unauthorized death [is] prohibited!” to the delivery truck in which our macho surgeon protagonist is shockingly assaulted in a spontaneous gay orgy. He’s ordered resuscitate the already dead Stalin, an impossible task capping an insane rule; the film’s last words (the director’s own?) are a voiced-over “Fuck it all!” Khrustalyov is a monumental clutter of energy and invention, so jerry-built that the fear it might collapse at any moment is part of its indelible rush.

Guerman is, logically enough, headed next to outer space — his adaptation of Soviet sci-fi classic Hard To Be a God took five years (starting in 2000!) to shoot, and is still being edited, thwarting hopes for Cannes premiere this month. Adversity may not have invaded his career by invitation, but one gets the sense that by now, at age 75, it is his most trusted collaborator.

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE: THE FILMS OF ALEKSEI GUERMAN

May 17-31, $6-$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

 

How dark was my alley

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How dark was my alley

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The word that comes to mind when thinking of Elliot Lavine’s semiannual film noir programs at the Roxie is inexhaustible. With 30 films packed into 14 days, “I Wake up Dreaming” wisely takes a pass on questions of noir’s quintessence in favor of open-ended research into the mutations and paroxysms of mid-century malaise.

There’s no mistaking genuine masterpieces like The Big Combo (1955) and In a Lonely Place (1950), to say nothing of a still unfathomable crossover work like Detour (1945), but Lavine’s series conspires to induce the genre delirium that first inspired the French critics to call a noir a noir. In spite of the preponderance of dead ends and blind alleys, there’s always a trap door leading into the next movie. So this time around we get Shadow of Terror (1945) rather than Reign of Terror (1949), The Underworld Story (1950) instead of Underworld U.S.A. (1961), Killer’s Kiss (1955) instead of The Killers (versions 1946 or 1964) or Kubrick’s own follow-up The Killing (1956), Shoot to Kill (1947) instead of Born to Kill (1947). Chronologies matter less than interchangeability. You watch Lee Van Cleef’s icy professional in opening night’s The Big Combo (sparkling in a 35mm restoration by UCLA) return as a foaming killer in closing night’s Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (1959). His kind never has time to develop a character on the margins of these already marginal films, but with repetition comes iconography.

John Alton’s rhapsodic cinematography threads four of this year’s selections (The Big Combo; 1948’s Hollow Triumph; 1947’s The Pretender; 1944’s Storm Over Lisbon; and 1948’s He Walked By Night). In the famous finale of Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo, which audaciously sets out to improve upon 1942’s Casablanca‘s even more famous conclusion on the tarmac, the plot seems to exist primarily for the lighting. Cops emerge out of the fog and Jean Wallace’s trophy girl freezes Richard Conte’s sociopath in a spotlight — as pure an effect as anything in F.W. Murnau and in this case providing a perfect echo of an earlier scene of killing as silence rather than light.

Nicholas Ray and Val Lewton protégé Mark Robson lead Saturday’s bill with message movies impugning society’s guilt for a young man’s sins. As with many of the era’s social problem pictures, miles of speechifying script and awkward narrative frames make Knock on Any Door (1949) and Edge of Doom (1950) tough going if still interesting in the particulars. Knock on Any Door is timid next to Ray’s subsequent study in juvenile delinquency, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), but there are premonitions of what’s to come in those moments when the director fully engages his actors’ bodies: when Humphrey Bogart’s world-wary defense lawyer hauls Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano (John Derek) into a back alley to reclaim a debt, for instance, and in the passage when Romano’s wife slumps against the stove after he blows for a robbery. You’re so focused on her balletic movement to the floor that you hardly notice that she’s reaching for the gas.

There’s a similar fascination to Farley Granger performance as a loose cannon in Edge of Doom, lashing out at a world that doesn’t forget about money even when you’re trying to bury your poor mother. As in Ray’s indelible They Live by Night (1949), Granger’s palpable insecurity makes him a key figure for the melancholy shading of noir anxiety.

Prolific director Edward L. Cahn’s Guns, Girls, and Gangsters is the kind of red meat B movie that manages some genuinely weird flourishes in spite of its undeniable limitations as a factory-line commodity. The Vegas heist plot is barely motivation for Mamie Van Doren’s curves, and the film itself blends right in with the roadside motels and cheap nightclubs. It’s a particularly egregious offender in the redundant voice-over category (“It was a moment of great tension for Wheeler”), but then Van Cleef shows up — fresh out of prison with Mamie on the mind. The sight of him lurking outside a motel window at night in his sunglasses is something to remember. Van Doren may be the “merchandise,” as her character says, but Van Cleef conjures noir’s actual libido: leering, desperate, and unpredictable.

The same cheap thrills that Cahn serves up with gusto come under close scrutiny in Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss: here we find pulp as object d’art. Made when Kubrick was 27, the film emulates its Times Square setting in its barrage of perceptual jolts — like a Weegee photograph sprung to life. Plenty of noirs delineate capitalist degradations of the city, but rarely with a cleanness of line as the sequence in which Kubrick cuts between a man being prepped for the boxing ring and a woman making herself up for her nightshift as a dancing partner.

It’s all so much meat in Kubrick’s unsparing view, and one might add here that the rain of footsteps trailing down a New York canyon is more eloquent than any of the human dialogue (call it an anti-social problem picture). Kubrick acts as his own cinematographer, making great use of his chops as a magazine photographer to scavenge bitter ironies from street locations. His editing knocks things further lopsided, revealing only mirrors where you expect to find character. You know the hour is late watching Killer’s Kiss and The Big Combo, both of them released in 1955 and both advancing a self-conscious apotheosis of the style in the ruins of its bygone glamour — in a word, modernism. 

 

“I WAKE UP DREAMING: THE FRENCH HAVE A NAME FOR IT!”

May 11-24, $11

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

This is your brain on Zulawski

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This is your brain on Zulawski

arts@sfbg.com

FILM To the extent he’s known at all, Polish director Andrzej Zulawski is known in the U.S. for the only movie of his that’s gotten any real exposure here: Possession, a scandalous 1981 Cannes prize-winner considered to have some commercial potential due to its “horror” elements, including a creature designed by FX master Carlo Rambaldi. Its American distributor cut the film from 127 to 80 minutes, radical surgery turning an already logic-defying narrative into a complete madhouse abstraction with its own considerable charms — though don’t tell that to Zulawski, who hated the truncated results.

Thrown into 1983 grindhouse bills, this version flummoxed mainstream horror fans (too arty) and critics (too distasteful), but earned a cult following eventually surprised to learn there was a very different, longer, at-least somewhat-coherent Possession also in existence. One making it clear that for all its bloody, fantastical, even mystical flights, this movie was what Zulawski claimed all along: a portrait of a marriage in painful dissolution, with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill standing in for the director and his first wife (Polish actress Malgorzata Braunek). Even if dramatizing that relationship’s collapse somehow required such metaphorical leaps as Adjani keeping dismembered body parts in her refrigerator and being fucked (happily!) by a tentacled slime monster.

Repaying endless viewings (bonus: after a few you can actually decipher Adjani’s impenetrably accented English), brilliantly acted, and oddly touching despite its myriad outrages, Possession is like nothing else — except, that is, the director’s other films. Five will be shown in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series “From A Whisper to a Scream: Discovering Andrzej Zulawski” this week and next. Watching more than one in close proximity may be hazardous to your mental health, but what the hell.

Now apparently retired at 71, Zulawski was born in Lvov, educated all over Europe thanks to his intellectual family’s diplomatic ties, and assisted Andrzej Wajda on several 1960s films. His first feature, The Third Part of the Night (1971), set the precedent: it was as fevered as its hero, already fragile when the senseless murder of his wife (Braunek) and child by Nazi occupiers turns him into a dervish of frantic motion and impulse. Is he mad? Hallucinating? Already dead? “You behave like the wind,” a friend tells him, a judgment applicable to almost any Zulawski feature or character. This debut won acclaim, but was warily viewed by the Polish government. His next, 1972’s The Devil, an even more berserk Pilgrim’s Progress through war-torn 18th century Poland, was banned outright.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_YOfyMcIwM

Zulawski responded by moving to France, where 1975’s The Most Important Thing: Love, a heated cry against (and of) present-day orgiastic perversity — “Force yourself to look at what revolts you the most,” as one participant puts it — was a success. As a result, Polish authorities invited him back to adapt a great-uncle’s literary sci-fi epic. An allegorical tale of Earth’s civilization grotesquely recreated on another planet, On the Silver Globe was two years into production and 80 percent shot in 1977 when the same authorities shut it down, destroying sets and costumes for good measure. A decade later, Zulawski turned the striking extant footage into both a semi-realized spectacular and a chronicle of its own undoing — 166 minutes’ auto archaeology.

These films are screening at YBCA, though unfortunately the director’s eight French ventures (apart from French-German co-production Possession, showing in an uncut, new 35mm print) were unavailable for inclusion. Most starring subsequent on and off-screen partner Sophie Marceau, they range from 1985’s astonishing Parisian-gangster Dostoyevsky update L’amour Braque to the overblown soap operatics of 2000’s Fidelity, his last work to date.

A sole later Polish endeavor completes YBCA’s quintet. Szamanka‘s sheer extremity — of cinematic and performance frenzy, of often literal wrestling with sex, violence, religion, philosophy, and politics — crystallizes the best, worst, and most purely Zulawskienne (an actual French coinage meaning “over the top”) of this singular career. An older anthropology prof (Bouguslaw Linda) and gorgeous, unlikely engineering student (Iwona Petry) fuck, fuck, fuck around Warsaw, as compulsively and destructively as the duo in 1976’s In the Realm of the Senses, with an endpoint anticipating Hannibal’s cannibal-licious last supper.

Reviled in Poland, barely glimpsed elsewhere, the 1996 film was notorious before it was finished, with Zulawski accused of wildly mistreating 20-year-old “discovery” Petry. She refused to comment, but immediately abandoned acting and reportedly sought spiritual succor in India. Even the sturdier Adjani said it took her years to get over making Possession. What to say about a director who drives actors over the brink? Only that the emotions — as is sometimes said of the millions spent on lavish productions — are all right up there on screen.

“FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM: DISCOVERING ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI”

May 3-13, $6-$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2878

www.ybca.org

Truth or consequences

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Truth or consequences

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF It’s possible to have an almost perfect Sundance Film Festival viewing experience if you hew to one simple rule: only go to the documentaries. Sure, see some of the dramatic entries too, after the 40th person has told you such-and-such title is great. But you can rarely go far wrong with the documentaries. Sundance has its pick of the annual crème de la crème in that genre (among U.S. if not necessarily international films).

As pretty much a “best of other festivals” festival taking place in late spring — thus perfectly situated to grab the best docs not just from Sundance, but also Berlin, Rotterdam, South by Southwest and elsewhere — the San Francisco International Film Festival can potentially offer the crème de la crème de la crème. Thank god documentaries, unlike that imaginary dairy substance, are not high in saturated fat or cholesterol. You can consume them for SFIFF’s entire span and remain your slim, lovely self, mentally refreshed by enormous quantities of new information ingested the fun and easy way.

Actually, a portrait of conspicuous consumption in its most corpulent form was among Sundance’s opening night films this January, and will duly boggle your mind at SFIFF. Lauren Greenfield’s obscenely entertaining The Queen of Versailles takes a long, turbulent look at the lifestyles lived by David and Jackie Siegel. He is the 70-something undisputed king of timeshares; she is his 40-something (third) wife, a former beauty queen with the requisite blonde locks and major rack, both probably not entirely Mother Nature-made. He’s so compulsive that he’s never saved, instead plowing every buck back into the business.

When the recession hits, that means this billionaire is — in ready-cash as opposed to paper terms — suddenly sorta kinda broke, just as an enormous Las Vegas project is opening and the family’s stupefyingly large new “home” (yep, modeled after Versailles) is mid-construction. Plugs must be pulled, corners cut. Never having had to, the Siegels discover (once most of the servants have been let go) they have no idea how to run a household. Worse, they discover that in adversity they have a very hard time pulling together — in particular, David is revealed as a remote, cold, obsessively all-business person who has no use for getting or giving “emotional support;” not even for being a husband or father, much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM43Wyulc7w

What ultimately makes Queen poignantly more than a reality-TV style peek at the garishly wealthy is that Jackie, despite her incredibly vulgar veneer (she’s like a Jennifer Coolidge character, forever squeezed into loud animal prints), is at heart just a nice girl from hicksville who really, really wants to make this family work.

Other docs pipelined from Sundance to SF include acclaimed ones about dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry), Ethel (as in Kennedy), pervasive rape in the U.S. military (The Invisible War), and the Israeli military legal system that governs civilian Palestinians under occupation (The Law in These Parts). Of particular local interest is David France’s excellent How to Survive a Plague, about how ACT UP virtually forced the medical and pharmacological establishments into speeded-up drug trials and development that drastically reduced the AIDS epidemic’s U.S. fatalities within a decade. Don’t expect much about SF activism, though — like so many gay docs on national issues, this one barely sets foot outside Manhattan.

Of actual local origin are several SFIFF nonfiction highlights, not least festival closing nighter Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey, Ramona Diaz’s film about the incredible journey of Filipino superfan Arnel Pineda, from fronting a Journey cover band to fronting the actual Bay Area outfit itself as its latest lead vocalist. There’s also Micha X. Peled’s last globalization trilogy entry Bitter Seeds, focusing on hitherto self-sufficient farmers in India increasingly driven toward bankrupting debt (and widespread suicides) by costly biotech “advances;” Peter Nicks’ The Waiting Room, which sits us right there at Highland Hospital in Oakland, illustrating the heroically coping status quo and desperate need for improvement in a microcosm of U.S. healthcare; and Jamie Meltzer’s world premiere Informant. The latter’s subject is activist-turned-FBI snitch Brandon Darby, whose testimony got two anarchists imprisoned — and who fully participated in this portrait, even its re-enactments of his protest-group infiltration. Darby is expected to attend the festival; given this town’s political leanings, he might want to wear a raincoat.

Speaking of audiences hurling things — abuse, at the least — Caveh Zahedi (plus his lawyer) was evidently met with a shitstorm after the SXSW premiere of The Sheik and I. You, too, may feel the spasmodic urge to throttle him during this latest naughty-boy’s own adventure, in which he accepts a commission to make work for a biennial perversely themed around “art as subversive act” in the far-from-liberal United Arab Emirates. Professed fans, the curators had duly seen his prior work; surely they knew they were inviting trouble in these circumstances?

Nonetheless, they play perfectly into his hands, expressing dismay and barely masked fear as Zahedi faux-naively proceeds to do everything he shouldn’t. That includes ridiculing Islam and the host sheik, stereotyping Arabs in general, putting everyone (including himself and his two-year-old son) in potential danger, all the while claiming his aim is “a critique of imperialism.” Is he really the very model of the privileged Western artist, railing about artistic freedom while ignorant that sometimes, some places, some things (like blasphemy, and prison) must take precedent? Or is the whole act just a deliberate provocation (hardly his first), albeit one with disturbingly dire potential consequences? Alternately very funny and completely infuriating, The Sheik and I is one movie you might want to attend just for the Q&A afterward. Odds are, it’s gonna get ugly. 

www.sffs.org

 

A hundred visions and revisions

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
A hundred visions and revisions

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF R. Buckminster Fuller was born before the turn of the last century, and died before the start of this one. But place his philosophical and practical output next to any contemporary thinker, and something seems a bit off.

“He was totally out of sync with his time,” says SF-based documentarian Sam Green (2004’s The Weather Underground). “He was talking about green building in the 1930s or ’40s.”

You might know Fuller as the designer of the geodesic dome or the namesake of buckyball molecules, but Green, in conjunction with a new exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is working to establish his reputation as a precursor to modern progressive-tech culture. On May 1, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Green will regale audiences at the SFMOMA with a “live documentary” presentation, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, featuring a live score by Yo La Tengo.

The exhibit, “The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area,” is already open, and features an installation called Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area: A Relationship in 12 Fragments (inspired by the Dymaxion Chronofile), a collaboration between Green and SF projection-design firm Obscura Digital. The installation is a collage-like film projected on a sculpture inspired by Fuller’s “Dymaxion Map” of the world; the film is an exploration of Fuller’s maddeningly comprehensive personal archive, acquired by Stanford University in 1999.

“Fuller never built anything in the Bay Area, although he proposed a couple projects, and he never lived in the Bay Area, but his influence actually is pretty profound,” notes Green. “Especially on the counterculture, and specifically on the part of the counterculture that eventually morphed into early computer and Silicon Valley culture.” His drive to create efficient, waste-free systems through design and architecture inspired information technology as much as it foreshadowed the green movement.

So what makes Fuller anything more than just a fascinating mad scientist? “We’re not driving the [Dymaxion Car], and most of us are not living in domes or the Dymaxion House. So in some sense you could say he didn’t succeed,” admits Green. “But to me, what’s most relevant and most valuable about him really is that he was inspired to do everything he did by a belief that, through [better design], one could solve the problems of the world.”

“At the heart of all of his activities was a really simple idea, and he was saying this since the ’20s: there’s more than enough resources in the world so that everybody on the planet could have a very comfortable life,” Green muses. “And he really passionately believed that was possible. In some ways, to me, that’s the love song of R. Buckminster Fuller — love of humanity — which sounds a little corny but I really do feel like that was what drove him. He was a person of incredible energy and was on a mission for 50 years, and at the heart of it, I think, was that.”

This is Green’s second foray into the format he innovated with Utopia in Four Movements for SFIFF in 2010, which featured music by Brooklyn band the Quavers and is still touring around the world. “I’m charmed by the format and feel like there’s a lot of potential, a lot more I want to try with it,” Green says of this return to live documentary. “It also seems very appropriate for Fuller; he was somebody who was just a phenomenal speaker. So there seemed to be something about him that fit with this idea of a live documentary, the performative aspects of who he was.”

“It’s only through doing a live piece that you learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s almost like a comedy routine,” Green observes. “You do it and you feel that people respond to certain parts, they don’t respond to other parts, and you grow it and edit it and shape it based on that.”

As to whether or not he thinks there’s more to explore in the world of Bucky Fuller, he says, “With this I’m doing a live piece and an installation, and I may at some point do just a regular documentary about Fuller. I’m open. I’m certainly not done with him yet.”

www.sffs.org

 

Into new territory

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Into new territory

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF How to account for the desire for difficult terrain that runs through so much contemporary art cinema? Exploring the margins and crevices of what’s readily visible is just what good filmmakers do, but extremes have become commonplace. The irony that these far-flung films live on in the cosmopolitan vapors of the festival circuit cannot be lost on the filmmakers themselves. Remoteness may be a relative matter, with patience revealing islands everywhere, but inaccessible landscapes nonetheless guide a handful of interesting features showing at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.

>> Read our complete coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival here.

The bourgeois couple stripped bare by vacation is a standby of modernist cinema, with Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) still the gold standard and Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009) the best in recent memory. Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet is an almost classical work in this mode. An engaged couple (Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) hire a local guide (Bidzina Gujabidze) to lead them through the magnificent Georgian steppe, and so the psychological roundelay begins. Fraught staging, language difficulties, Gerry-rigged tracking shots, and significant pocks in the Caucasus landscape are all worked out with great expertise but little verve.

Where The Loneliest Planet draws on landscape to reveal repressed instincts, Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness drifts towards further occlusion. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the obvious reference point, though here it’s a black European who pursues a white man gone native. In the film’s first half we watch as rueful Dr. Ebbo Velten (Pierre Bokma) prepares to leave Cameroon’s lush danger with his wife and daughter. The imminent departure emboldens him to accuse the local authorities of bilking international aid donors for a nonexistent sleeping sickness crisis. Then Alex Nzila (Jean-Cristophe Folly) arrives in Cameroon to evaluate the medical program and finds Velten changed: he’s in a business partnership with a man he openly despised in the first half of the film, and we hardly hear any mention of his European family. Berlin School director Köhler works displacement as a figure of psychology, politics, and narrative and smartly uses the international aid question as a frame to plunge deeper mysteries of identity.

Conrad is a significant presence in The Rings of Saturn, the peripatetic novel by W.G Sebald that’s also the focus of Grant Gee’s suitably oblique documentary portrait. Patience (After Sebald) offers astute commentary on the moods of Sebald’s prose from thinkers like Adam Phillips, Robert Macfarlane, and Tacita Dean, though Gee succumbs to the spectacle of Google Earth mapping of the novel and some decidedly sub-Sebaldian spiritualism. Still, hearing the author speak his own mind on Virginia Woolf’s moth and the phenomenology of walking is worth the price of admission for fans.

Gonçalo Tocha eschews the Google’s eye view in It’s the Earth Not the Moon, his resplendent study of Corvo (the tiny northernmost island of the Azores, close enough to being in the middle of the ocean and a far outlier of European Union). Tocha and his sound man Dídio Pestana dropped anchor there to capture every face, bird, and rock on the island — a self-consciously grandiose goal with something of the 19th century about it. The film first approaches Corvo with statistical lyricism: dimensions, number of residents, number of roads, and so on. The notion that you could hold the entire island in your head at once is an illusion, of course, but a sustaining one. Corvo is an island such as you might have imagined as a child, which is not to say that It’s the Earth is innocent of the world. As economic math and electoral politics sweep the second part of the film, Tocha proves himself an inheritor of the French essay-film tradition of Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The film’s three hours pass easily in the intimacy of encounter, but one still admires the desire to give the film experience some qualitative measure of being marooned.

Corvo’s aging population might well feel at home in the timeless Brazilian village of Found Memories, the fable of a young woman born in the wrong time coming to a community of people who have forgotten to die. Along with It’s the Earth and other SFIFF selections Palaces of Pity and Neighboring Sounds, Júlia Murat’s first narrative feature seals a particularly strong year of Portuguese-language films. She delineates time and space through routine, patiently unfolding characterization in the adjoining repetitions. Lucio Bonelli’s cinematography is beautiful work in itself, fearlessly embracing darkness and shadow (the rural village must have seemed like easy street after lensing Lisandro Alonso’s formidable landscapes). Found Memories doesn’t break the mold of slow cinema — its melancholy mingling of photography and myth is especially reminiscent of Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) — but a late passage of clipped post-punk demonstrates that Murat can handle a sudden swerve.

That leaves little space for Davy Chou’s assured debut, Golden Slumbers, and it deserves an article of its own. The remoteness we experience here is that of phantoms: Chou’s film excavates the thriving Cambodian cinema that was rubbed out by the Khmer Rouge. All that remains are fugitive traces of printed ephemera and soundtracks of curling orchestral ballads and psychedelic nuggets — and the memories of those people who made or relished the films and survived Pol Pot. Most of the films discussed in this article use offscreen sound to develop a sense of place beyond the frame, but Golden Slumbers is a special case, with the poverty of archival materials turned to an advantage as elegy. Chou’s gliding Phnom Penh interludes and spaciously staged interviews reflect the influence of Jia Zhangke and Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), but these cinephilic touchstones never overwhelm the personal, defiant accounts of moviemaking at the heart of the film. Ever after is the tragic refrain of Chou’s film, but the once upon a time is as golden as he says. 

 

www.sffs.org

Diva in the headlights

Andrew Lam
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0
Diva in the headlights

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It’s a bit difficult from hereabouts to get a hold on what kind of star Paprika Steen is in Denmark, beyond being a kinda huge one. Here, she’s at most a familiar face from the Dogme 95 movies of a decade or more ago, having appeared in such significant entries as Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998), Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), and Susanne Bier’s Open Hearts (2002), as well as subsequent non-Dogme films by those and other leading directors. From those you might figure she’s a leading light in a sort of loose stock company of people who constantly work in each others’ emotionally unruly, sometimes outrageous, usually satisfying movies.

But at home it seems she’s more ubiquitous, in various media and as an all around personality. There they’ve gotten to see her in films we haven’t (particularly envied is 2007’s The Substitute, in which she plays a space monster posing as the world’s worst elementary school teacher), in TV series, as a skit comic, stage actress, and god knows what else — there’s a mystifying YouTube clip of her gyrating through a “Single Ladies” cover on some awards show, and it does not appear intended as a joke.

The new-ish (it’s taken its sweet time crossing the Atlantic) Applause distills what we might already know and guess at about this skillful, somewhat larger-than-life actress. She plays Thea Barfoed, a duly larger than-life actress undeniably skillful at her job — a flunky gushes she’s “one of the best in the whole country,” causing Thea to bristle not just at “one of,” but at the dinkiness of said country — but a floundering mess everywhere else.

We first see her playing Martha, natch, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? onstage (sequences shot during a real-life production of the Albee play Steen starred in), boozing and yelling, reeling and lashing about. It’s typecasting: offstage, Thea is just out of rehab, having hit a bottom that ended her marriage and handed her husband (Michael Falch) sole child custody. Yet she’s still sneaking booze, even during performances; attending AA meetings she yawns and smokes through while others bare their souls. Snapping “I hate ordinary people” — no one is convinced when she claims that was a joke — she has that unpleasant brat-egomaniac’s manner of suggesting everyone else is wasting her time with their stupidity, and that any attempts to be civil on her part require a Herculean exercise in acting. It’s hard to pity her evident self-loathing when she’s such a complete asshole.

Still, she wants to be better, sort of, and others are trying to help. Ex spouse Michael and his infuriatingly reasonable new partner (Sara-Marie Maltha) have decided it’s best for all that she have visitation rights to her young sons, despite the past (which included unspecified maternal physical violence). When Thea sees the boys for the first time in 18 months, they’re understandably skittish. Struck by their fearful distance, she goes home and pours every intoxicant down the drain. But she still has the overpowering and impulsive needs of an addict — whether exercised in her way-too-soon demands for custody, a weird and unwise bar pickup (Shanti Roney), or the rant directed at a dim Toys R Us salesgirl who momentarily gets between Thea and the impossible dangling carrot of happiness.

Rather incongruously nostalgic in its Dogme-style aesthetic of shaky camera and jump cuts (editor-turned-director Martin Zandvliet has since made a much more classically polished second feature), Applause is a good movie that’s unimaginable without Steen. Yet it might have been better still if less overwhelmed by her. Like a salad plate supporting an entire roast turkey, its narrative framework is underscaled for such a glistening mass of banquet-sized acting meat.

With her great mane of hair looking magnificent one minute and Medusa-like the next, she’s a glam gorgon, both utterly credible and nearly Joan Crawford-esque in determination to stare the medium down. Paprika Steen is the kind of actress who revels in making herself unattractive, though the ravaged result is less “plain” than its own kind of masochistic spectacle. (Thea is the very picture of a proud 25-year-old beauty two decades and umpteen cosmos later.) It’s a flamboyant, arresting, faultless star turn — even if Applause itself is finally just a vehicle. To really gauge what she’s capable of, we’d probably need to see that Virginia Woolf? in its entirety. 

APPLAUSE opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

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