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Film Review

For Christ’s sake

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The cultural divide between a supposed gay agenda and faith-based biases is well represented in several features within Frameline’s expansive 2007 program. Its representations run a wide gamut — just as the terms gay and Christian have come to encompass wildly disparate US communities.

On Frameline’s nonfiction side, Markie Hancock’s Born Again deftly mixes home movies, archival news footage, and more to chart the director’s long, often agonized journey away from being the perfect overachieving and overbelieving product of her Pennsylvanian parents’ staunch evangelical faith. At a Christian college and then in wide-open Berlin, Hancock began to question the conservative beliefs that had — along with her family’s approval — constituted her formative-years identity.

The devout Hancock clan members are models of tolerance compared to the subject of K. Ryan Jones’s Fall from Grace. That individual is none other than Rev. Fred Phelps, the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., a man long notorious for his congregation–cum–extended family’s outrageous displays of public homophobia. Most recently, Phelps and his followers found infamy by picketing the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq, a phenomenon they approve of — the notion being that these American military deaths are somehow God’s vengeance for the pipe bomb that student pranksters planted at Westboro Baptist a decade ago.

Yup, these people are cray-ay-ay-azy! Also scary. Two among Phelps’s several estranged children say he used the Bible to justify domestic violence. Unlike most hatemongers, Phelps’s small but fervent clan actually embrace the word hate. Their notion of Christianity is all hellfire and zero forgiveness or compassion. They are pseudo-Christian Antichrists.

A gentler treatment of Bible-based intolerance can be found in Rock Haven, the first directorial feature of San Francisco’s David Lewis. Its titular fictive Northern California burg (played by Bodega Bay) is where Bible college–bound Brady (Sean Hoagland) moves from Kansas with his widowed mother (Laura Jane Coles), who’s opening a Christian school. The moment Brady spies slightly older Clifford (Owen Alabado) striking Grecian postures on the beach, however, unclean thoughts — then nekkid actions — put him on a collision course with his mom’s values.

Deeper yet less serious in tone, writer-director-star Pete Jones’s delightful Outing Riley is a comedy in the Judd Apatow vein, often raucously funny without sacrificing warmth or character dimension. Jones plays Bobby, a 30-ish Chicagoan who loves his Cubs and his beer. And also his male lover — but that is a secret kept well hidden from his three Irish Catholic brothers (including one priest), with whom he’s still best buds. Their sister, Maggie (Julie Pearl), is one among several folks urging him to come the hell out, for Christ’s sake. But doing so doesn’t go down too well at first, not even with the designated bad-boy bro (the wonderful Nathan Fillion, of Waitress and Firefly). Ultimately, things turn around in an agreeable fashion that doesn’t cut corners for cheap uplift.

The result is one of those rare gay movies that should or could be shown to all the straight dudes in America who claim they "can’t really deal with that gay shit." Incredibly, Outing Riley doesn’t have a theatrical distributor yet. Catch it at Frameline, or may the Lord help ya. (Dennis Harvey)

BORN AGAIN (Markie Hancock, US, 2007). June 21, 7 p.m., Victoria

FALL FROM GRACE (K. Ryan Jones, US, 2007). Mon/18, 7 p.m., Roxie; June 20, noon, Castro

OUTING RILEY (Pete Jones, US, 2004). Fri/15, 9:30 p.m., Castro

ROCK HAVEN (David Lewis, US, 2007). June 21, 9:30 p.m., Castro

One-on-one-on-one

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Violent Femmes and wrestling boys. The same boys watching TV, huffing glue, jerking off, playing soccer, dodging water balloons, sharing headphones, and dancing, singing, and drumming at punk rock shows. Listed in this manner, the basic ingredients of Alexis Dos Santos’s Glue don’t sound that different from those of a dozen other teen films. But the way Dos Santos views such material is something else entirely. Glue is that rare kind of filmmaking so attuned to pleasure and spontaneity that it tickles your palate, opening up new possibilities about how to live. The film’s chief subject matter — bisexuality that takes exhilarating form before the constraints of adulthood can arrive — is ideally realized through Dos Santos’s sensual and whim-driven approach.

"If my parents made love before I was conceived, would it be me being born or another boy?" skinny, wild-haired, and sleepy-eyed Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) wonders to himself at the beginning of Glue, before his jock friend Nacho (Nahuel Viale) and their mutual crush, the gawky yet beautiful Andrea (Inés Efron), arrive on screen. When Andrea is eventually introduced, it’s via a poolside scene in which polite kisses through a steel fence provide one typically fleet example of Dos Santos’s ability to land on the right use of foreground, background, and happenstance scenic detail to convey a shot or scene’s emotional temperature.

This symbiosis between director and actors — and perhaps even more important, between actors — results in some extraordinary passages. Glue meanders near its end, when, in true teen spirit, it doesn’t want a good time to end. But in its best moments, Dos Santos’s debut feature is an important and exciting addition to Latin American cinema’s evolving views of masculinity. (Sergio de la Mora’s recent book Cinemachismo is an excellent source for historical background on the subject.) Glue‘s ménage à trois is more radical than the ones in both Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and Fernando Eimbcke’s chaste Duck Season, though one suspects those more commercial movies helped pave the way for the spaces that Dos Santos and his actors discover. Like Julián Hernández’s Broken Sky, in which a trio of young lovers meet and kiss repeatedly in public, Dos Santos’s insular and gutsy film charts territory where people don’t repress their desires.

Thus it’s a shame that, unlike all of the Mexican features mentioned in the previous paragraph, Glue doesn’t have a distributor. Dos Santos’s movie is yet another example of how new Argentine cinema (thanks to talents as varied as Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, Verónica Chen, and Pablo Trapero) continues to stretch the time and space dimensions of the word new. Unfortunately, it’s far from the first film from Argentina in the past few years to be neglected by commercial forces. A French feature such as Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr’s One to Another treats the same elements found in Glue — teen life, bisexual trysts, rock music — in a manner that results in overheated garbage (yes, it stinks), yet it’s been given exactly the type of eminent, if small, US theatrical run that Dos Santos’s movie deserves. That means now is the time to see Glue. (Johnny Ray Huston) *

GLUE (Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina, 2006) June 20, 9:15 p.m., Parkway; June 22, 7 p.m., Victoria

From the ashes

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"They may label you, try to classify you, and even call you a crazy bitch — but don’t flinch, just let them," Honey of Radio Phoenix says to the women of New York City after her black feminist–run station gets bombed by government agents, after her comrade in arms is found dead in her jail cell, as the fireworks are about to go off in a certain tall tower in Lower Manhattan.

There’s no denying the evocative weight of that last image these days. But Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames — and in particular, advice like Honey’s — comes to mind every time I watch a film in which grrrls are running riot in the street or on the radio or in the clubs, a slowly but surely growing subgenre as the decades pass (at least in my home video collection).

In the thin line of plot running patchily through Borden’s vérité-style feature, surfacing at the Roxie Film Center on June 22, the War of Liberation has brought about a single-party system run by Socialist Democrats, the postrevolution economy is in the toilet, and working women are bearing the brunt of the mass layoffs that have ensued. Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) is the leader of the Women’s Army, a loose circle of radical lesbian feminists — or vigilantes, as they’re called on the nightly news — who, among other pursuits, patrol the streets on bicycles with whistles at the ready in search of men behaving badly.

Norris begins to see their basically peaceful efforts to gain equality going nowhere and becomes convinced that armed struggle is the only way to get the government’s attention and force a change. When she dies in jail, the news sends a charge through the gathering underground, bringing together disconnected feminist forces that have long kept their distance. Borden’s aim, perhaps unrealistic and perhaps naive, is to present an expanding patchwork of radicalized women unified across lines of class and race in the face of overarching sexism.

You couldn’t call the women of Born in Flames riot grrrls with a straight face. The spiky commentators at Radio Regazza — trash-talking, white punk-rock counterparts to Radio Phoenix’s Honey — look familiar, but this is the second wave of feminism personified (evidenced, for one, by an unquestioning opposition to sex work). But if Borden’s point in setting Born in Flames in a future United States run by socialists, of all things, is that nothing much has changed for the second sex postrevolution, there’s a parallel in watching as a new clan of young women is born in flames onscreen every few years.

Such latter-day films — Kristine Peterson’s 1997 Slaves to the Underground, documenting the Portland DIY scene of the early ’90s; Barbara Teufel’s 2003 part-fiction, part-doc Gallant Girls, set amid the direct-action anarchopunks of late-’80s Berlin — regularly surface at the Frameline fest. And this year adds a couple more to the pack: closing night’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a tale of teen radicalization by But I’m a Cheerleader‘s Jamie Babbit (who cites Born in Flames as an inspiration), and the Spanish film El Calentito, by Chus Gutiérrez, set in 1981 on the eve of a coup d’état by Fascist vestiges of Francisco Franco’s gang. These, as well as Flames contemporaries Times Square (Allan Moyle, 1980) and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1981), are filled with rude girls hijacking the radio waves or the stage, flinging out slogans and manifestos, and screaming bloody murder. Though only Borden’s future radicals are prepared to cause it. *

BORN IN FLAMES (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983). June 22, 10:30 p.m., Roxie

Hit it or quit it

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Black White and Gray (James Crump, US, 2007) If Andre Téchiné’s The Witnesses colors the early ’80s red, this documentary about Sam Wagstaff (and by extension Robert Mapplethorpe) opts for a relatively bloodless palette. Though its voice-over shows class chauvinism in asserting that Patti Smith brought validity to punk, Black White and Gray perceptively uses its enigmatic subject as a window onto the changing role of photography within the art world. (Mapplethorpe’s objectification of black men is left uncriticized.) Crump brings in some excellent sources, such as Hanuman publisher Raymond Foye. He also brings in at least one horrible blabbermouth: spewing bitter opinion, historian Eugenia Parry deserves every hearty hiss she’s going to get from a Frameline crowd. The film ends on a flat note by allowing Smith to recite one of her pedestrian recent lyrics, but otherwise she’s a trustworthy and likable source on the relationship between Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe. Maybe the DVD version will bring more of her reminiscences and less of Parry. (Johnny Ray Huston)

June 21, 7 p.m., Victoria

DarkBlueAlmostBlack (Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, Spain, 2006). The term Almodóvarian is being thrown around these days with almost the same frequency as the term Hitchcockian (Almodóvar’s Bad Education was called Hitchcockian) and just as vaguely, but screenwriter-director Sánchez Arévalo’s DarkBlueAlmostBlack is Almodóvarian, resembling his postscrewball phase: it has melodrama without histrionics, likable characters doing absurdly unlikable things and vice versa, malleable (different from queer) sexuality, and near-incestuous family dynamics. The only thing missing is a hideously decorated apartment. In a world littered with the fruits of vacant and wild-eyed Almodóvarians (see — or don’t — Frameline 30’s unintentional disaster film The Favor), a disciple with some chops is cause for applause. Bitterly funny and narratively exciting — it toys with an amiable glibness that always comes back from the brink with devastating human emotion —Sánchez Arévalo’s dark but not quite jet-black comedy could be one of Almodóvar’s strongest films. (Jason Shamai)

June 20, 9:30 p.m., Victoria

Finn’s Girl (Dominique Cardona and Laurie Colbert, Canada, 2007). While other lesbians in the fest ponder whether to start a family, in Finn’s Girl conception is a fait accompli. How exactly it was accomplished is a bit of a mystery, but more pressing questions present themselves. One is whether Finn, a workaholic running a besieged Toronto abortion clinic and mourning the death of her wife, will get her head blown off by antichoice snipers — apparently, religious wingnuts live in Canada too. Another is whether she’s up for single-parenting the charming, precocious, enraged, and increasingly unmanageable Zelly, whose expressive 11-year-old eyes are particularly off-putting when narrowed above the smoke of a joint. Finn’s Girl covers a lot of terrain (grief, reproductive rights and technology, the travails of parenting, tween sexuality) with a fairly light tread, though Zelly’s scenes carry a particular charge of unpredictability. The result is a somewhat involving, sometimes sketchy picture of a family in transition. (Lynn Rapoport)

Sun/17, 12:30 p.m., Castro; Tues/19, 6:30 p.m., Parkway

Fun in Girls’ Shorts (various). Excluding Filled with Water, a smart, beautifully shot animation about a woman who falls for a TV-enclosed ballerina, and Succubus, a semicomedic film about a lesbian couple struggling to have a child, adolescent identity issues and anxieties constitute the major themes of this short-film compilation. With its attractively blurry cinematography, Pariah, about a 17-year-old black girl who keeps switching identities to please her parents and friends, is the most complete example of the suffocative effects that the suppression of one’s identity can have on a person, let alone a teen. (Maria Komodore)

Sat/16, 1:45 p.m., Castro; June 24, 11:30 a.m., Castro

Homos by the Bay (various). Though uneven, this program of shorts by local filmmakers does boast some standouts, including a stop-motion pair by Samara Halperin (who notably queerified Beverly Hills, 90210 in 2001’s Sorry, Brenda): the minute-long rhapsody on hot dogs, Plastic Fantastic #1, and Hard Hat Required, featuring two Lego men who do more than construction on the job. The Clap’s Gary Fembot uses his DJ skills for Mondo Bottomless‘s delightfully vintage pop soundtrack, a perfect match for its 16 minutes of cavorting men in bathing suits. And Nao Bustamante has a joyful punk-rock awakening in the black-and-white suburban fantasy The Perfect Ones. (Cheryl Eddy)

June 23, 1:15 p.m., Victoria

Jam (Marc Woollen, US, 2006). This is a fantastic, fascinating Roller Derby doc about Tim Patten, a local HIV-positive man who ferociously attempted to revive the sport after its virtual demise in the ’70s and, with it, the legendary Bay Area Bombers team. In San Francisco in the late ’90s, Bombers matches at Kezar Stadium were the hottest after-dark tickets in town, uniting swing revivalists, rockabilly fans, queer hipsters, and anyone into exquisitely goofy WWF-type antics but not into scary WWF crowds. Director Woollen takes us behind the scenes of those derby matches, delivering plenty of colorful history and personal drama (along with a few trade secrets) and uniting the disparate stories of the eccentrically flamboyant gang of wheel-heeled dreamers who signed on to Patten’s dream into a rollicking tale of subversive triumph. Now that’s a party. (Marke B.)

Mon/18, 7 p.m., Victoria

No Regret (Leesong Hee-il, South Korea, 2006). If you like movies about sexy orphans who become male prostitutes, you have at least two options at Frameline this year: Twilight Dancers and No Regret. Neither really addresses the issues it promises to (class politics, sex politics, et al.). But No Regret — essentially Pretty Woman for gay male depressives — is at least a better time at the movies. The South Korean film successfully tricks us into thinking its condom-thin melodrama is worthy of our tears, which is nothing to sneeze at. Just don’t expect to come out of the theater having unpacked the psyches of mopey Adonises for hire and their equally mopey rich lovers. (Shamai)

June 22, 10 p.m., Victoria

On the Downlow (Abigail Child, US, 2007) Some of the best pure moviemaking in this year’s festival can be found within this documentary by Abigail Child. Reflecting Child’s background as an experimental filmmaker, On the Downlow finds a lot of poetry and grit in urban Cleveland: a shot of a hooker moseying across the street and a sequence set at a barbecue are great examples of the poetry in motion that can happen when a talented woman with a camera looks at another woman. (Shot by men, these sequences would almost unfailingly be presented in a crude fashion or simply left ignored.) Of course, the main subjects here are men. Child also films them well, adding portraiture to talking-heads segments. On the Downlow‘s somewhat frustrating paradox is that it can’t really directly present its title subject — the guys talking here are either in love with DL guys who aren’t interviewed or they’re young gays- or bi’s-to-be taking awkward first public steps toward an out identity. (Huston)

June 23, 6 p.m., Victoria

Tan Lines (Ed Aldridge, Australia, 2006). The Aussie surfside ensemble drama has deep roots, stretching at least from preasshole Mel Gibson’s 1977 feature debut, Summer City, to last year’s superb, as-yet-unreleased (at least here) crime docudrama Out of the Blue. Landing somewhere between Gus van Sant and shark-bait territory, director Aldridge’s first feature focuses on the few days when 16-year-old surfer Midget (Jack Baxter) falls in first love — or at least first lust — with his best mate’s briefly returned, gay-disgraced brother, Cass (Daniel O’Leary). With its cannily used nonprofessional actors and streaks of absurdist humor, Tan Lines is an offbeat delight for half its length. The charm fades a bit thereafter, but this is still worth a look. (Dennis Harvey)

June 23, 3:30 p.m., Castro

Tick Tock Lullaby (Lisa Gornick, UK, 2006). Flirting with the idea of having a child and confronted with the difficult question of how to go about having it, Sasha (Gornick) and Maya (Raquel Cassidy), a lesbian couple living in London, set out on a sperm escapade. Inspired by the thought process that Sasha goes through as the couple’s hunt progresses, three additional stories emerge and intermingle, representing variations on the potential of becoming a parent. Shot with a beautifully fluid camera, Tick Tock Lullaby is an intimate, complex, and elaborate exploration of sexuality, relationships, and most important, parenthood. (Komodore)

Sat/16, 9:30 p.m., Castro

For more short takes on Frameline 31, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

There’s no business …

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One of the most entertaining books ever written about the commercial theater is Ken Mandlebaum’s Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops (St. Martin’s, 1992). There’s something inherently fascinating about the backstories and eventual fates of big stage musicals. The egos involved and the radical revisions that take place during tryouts and previews (a process far more public than movie retweaking) make for high drama, even before you add the Russian roulette economic factor.

While Mandlebaum wrote from a dedicated fan’s orchestra-seat perspective, the absorbing new documentary ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway goes way backstage — director Dori Berinstein is a Tony-winning stage producer (her latest hit is Legally Blonde) and has privileged access. Her team reportedly shot more than 250 hours of footage, encompassing virtually every Broadway show of the 2003 to 2004 season, then narrowed the focus to the development and destinies of four high-profile musicals.

The quartet spotlighted here spans artistic ranges and commercial fates. The $14 million spectacular Wicked, a schlock-sentimental version of Gregory Maguire’s revisionist Oz fantasy, got no critical love during its closely observed San Francisco tryout — erstwhile Godspell composer Stephen Schwartz admits to making significant changes between that run and the Broadway opening. But while Wicked proved neither a reviewers’ nor a Tony favorite, it’s a rare case in which those factors don’t matter. It’s a massive million-dollar-a-week hit whose geek-empowerment message particularly resonates with younger girls. Those whose parents can afford Broadway prices, that is.

On a whole other plane, the Tony Kushner–Jeanine Tesori project Caroline, or Change was an emotionally complex, stirring, major high-culture event. Its producers, as New Yorker critic John Lahr puts it, "agreed to lose a little money so this very good thing which doesn’t fit the commercial formula [could] be seen." If only for a few months: with its more bitter than sweet emphasis on racial inequity and family dysfunction, no amount of acclaim could turn it into a tourist attraction.

While practically a Broadway bargain at merely $3.5 million in production costs, Avenue Q was considered the season’s longest shot — a Sesame Street parody whose relatively youthful target audience isn’t big on theatergoing. Wags anticipated an off-Broadway show that belonged off Broadway. Its triumphant critical reception and eventual clutch of Tony Awards turned such expectations upside down. Cocreators Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez are the giddiest protagonists here, their can’t-believe-our-luck exuberance offering a contrast to the sober insights delivered by such experienced hands as Schwartz and Caroline‘s director, George C. Wolfe.

Finally, there’s Taboo, a $10 million total loss for producer Rosie O’Donnell, who shepherded it to Broadway after loving a smaller-scale London staging of the gender-bending, Boy George–scored musical. Was it just too gay for Broadway? (No, that’s not an oxymoron.) Was it simply not very good? (A devoted cadre of mostly punk-goth fans would vehemently disagree.) Did negative press attention to O’Donnell and an apparently turbulent production process unfairly brand it a flop before the opening? We may never know — Taboo sure ain’t coming to a theater near you anytime soon. One of ShowBusiness‘s most poignant threads focuses on young unknown Euan Morton, who wins raves in a star part in the huge show. After its closure, his US work visa is revoked; he’ll have to restart his career back in England from square one.

ShowBusiness covers everything from playwriting to rehearsals to street buzz to critics, but one wishes it had more depth. Berinstein’s insiderdom gets her access but perhaps also limits her willingness to bare all. Clocking in at 102 minutes, her documentary is almost a dirt-free zone. It’s refreshing when Marx and book writer Jeff Whitty admit they could barely stand each other while collaborating on Avenue Q — though success certainly improves their rapport. And ultimately, their multiple Tony Award wins provide a dramatic highlight. At the ceremony, Carol Channing and LL Cool J copresent an award. It’s a showy moment whose mix of the sublime and the surreal encapsulates how unpredictable the business Berinstein examines can be. *

SHOWBUSINESS: THE ROAD
TO BROADWAY

Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.showbusiness-themovie.com“>www.showbusiness-themovie.com”>www.sfbg.com

Call the docs

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Now in its ninth year, the San Francisco Black Film Festival continues to expand its scope, with two long weekends of narrative films and documentaries plus several shorts programs. If you didn’t catch The Last Days of Left Eye during one of its recent VH-1 airings, it’s well worth a look on the big screen. After struggling through years of alcoholism and an abusive relationship (you know, the one where she burned the dude’s house down), hip-hop icon Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes found herself, kinda, through rehab and multiple trips to a faith healer in Honduras — the site of her fatal 2002 car accident. Composed mostly of footage shot for a documentary that was in progress when Lopes died, Last Days — directed by Lauren Lazin, an Oscar nominee for 2003’s Tupac: Resurrection — offers an unguarded look at the fragile megastar.

Another doc worth checking out is The Clinton 12, a PBS-esque look at the events leading up to the 1958 bombing of the first court-ordered integrated high school in the South. After segregation was outlawed, low-key Clinton, Tenn., saw an uptick in hate (cue the Ku Klux Klan) and played host to a media frenzy as the first day of school approached; a "home guard" was formed by veterans and other concerned Clinton citizens to help keep peace in the city, though the National Guard soon stepped in as well. Even if you don’t factor in James Earl Jones’s narration (and a dramatic score), Keith Henry McDaniel’s film has plenty of gravitas.

Octavio Warnock-Graham’s Silences also looks at racial tensions, but on a much smaller scale: within one family, all white except for the filmmaker, the mixed-race product of his mother’s short-lived relationship with an African American dancer. In his 25-minute film, Warnock-Graham travels from Ohio to the Bay Area in search of his long-lost father and draws his mother’s family into a discussion of what’s clearly been an elephant in the room since his birth.

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/7–Sun/10 and June 14–17, most films $10

See film listings for showtimes and venue info

www.sfbff.org

Candid camera

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Shohei Imamura’s 1961 film Pigs and Battleships opens with the impressive sight of gleaming modern buildings lining the landscape of an industrialized port town. This would-be idyllic image of newfound cooperation between the Japanese and the Americans is swiftly subverted with the upward yank of a crane shot, which ends with a bird’s-eye view of the neighboring area. Our new vantage point reveals the run-down, bustling alleys of the outlying red-light district, conspicuously teeming with carousing American sailors on shore leave and equally garrulous touts who aggressively steer the former at every turn to mob-run brothels, like farmers corralling swine.

Often considered the first real Imamura film, Pigs and Battleships is a wry satire of postoccupation Japan, where MacArthurization had laid the foundations for both a thriving black market and a fledgling democracy. Imamura would continually return to that distant perch arrived at in the film’s opening minutes, to better observe a Japan that lay just outside the established frame. The Brueghelian panorama of black-market profiteers, shopworn bar hostesses, American soldiers behaving badly, and amateur pornographers he captured from the 1960s onward is on full display in the 12 remaining features of the Pacific Film Archive’s current embarrassment of riches "Shohei Imamura’s Japan."

Imamura’s perspective is more akin to that of a child who, having picked up a rock, becomes fascinated with the squirming, dark world that’s thriving underneath than it is to that of a detached anthropologist, which his extended shots and lack of flashy editing sometimes lead critics to take him for. Social critique, while certainly present in Imamura’s films, is always paired with a certain delectation in watching the tawdry and the grotesque.

In early Imamura films like Pigs and Battleships and the black caper comedy Endless Desire (1958), in which five Osaka lowlifes celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Allied victory by plotting to steal a hidden cache of Army-issued morphine, we see a Japan flush with the newfound freedom unleashed and bequeathed by the occupation and emboldened by the collapse of imperial authority.

The long hangover that carried into the late-’60s economic boom, exacerbated by the demands of the revitalized radical left for the government to come clean about the World War II skeletons still in its closet, also was not lost on Imamura’s camera. He was, after all, a member of the nuberu bagu (taken from the French nouvelle vague) rat pack, the iconoclastic children of Jean-Luc Godard and Coca-Cola who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, chomping at the bit of a weakening studio system. His documentaries from the ’70s might be more soft-spoken than Oshima Nagisa’s fiery cinematic indictments against the government (Oshima’s 1968 Death by Hanging is necessary viewing), but they are no less damning.

A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) is, as its title indicates, a prostitute’s narration of a chronicle from which she and those in her profession were largely occluded. The gradually widening distance between Akaza Etsuko’s tale and the official version Imamura contrasts it with via historical footage makes the truism that history is written by the winners feel depressingly deeper than a platitude, despite the director’s clearly felt empathy for the bruised woman speaking before him.

In Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute, made three years later, Imamura interviews Zendo Kikuyo, a former karayuki-san, or "comfort woman," living in Malaysia who was forced to sexually service Japanese soldiers on the East Asian front. Much as Akaza’s recounting in History of her experiences with American soldiers parallels Japan’s submission to the United States, so Imamura here makes it clear that Zendo’s prostituted body became a tool of Japan’s colonial and imperial ambitions. However, the shaming silence that greets her as she attempts to reunite with relatives in Hiroshima later in the film seems far more painful than many of the wartime indignities she recounts with such unnerving calm.

That a Japanese filmmaker would so candidly take on an issue that many feel the Japanese government, even to this day, has not sufficiently redressed — as evidenced by last month’s US-Japan diplomatic tête-à-tête on the matter — let alone more than 30 years ago, is remarkable. In Akaza and Zendo, Imamura found real-life equivalents of Tome, the country girl turned prostitute and antihero of his 1963 classic The Insect Woman. These women who had no choice but to use and be used by the system in order to survive. Imamura may have viewed postwar Japan as something of a carnival, but in his long view we catch sight of his subjects’ humanity, shining through like the glint from an old coin, and sometimes we can even catch glimpses of grace. *

SHOHEI IMAMURA’S JAPAN

Through June 30; $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Oh Mickey, you’re so lame

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In 1938, 13 years before a cinematic Alice visited Wonderland, Porky Pig flew to Wackyland, a Salvador Dalí painting come to life. Determined to find the last dodo bird on earth, he wandered through this surrealist landscape to the rhythm of the marijuana ditty "Feeling High and Happy." In 1931’s One More Time, Mickey Mouse’s ears grew bigger and his tail bushier as he transformed into Foxy, a police officer who then chased the Prohibition-era villains who had kidnapped his girlfriend. In 1943’s A Corny Concerto, Elmer Fudd tried his luck as an orchestra conductor, only to be defeated by his tuxedo, which left him practically naked while he tried to introduce two Johann Strauss Jr. waltzes.

If all this sounds good to you and you’re tired of Walt Disney’s plethora of unimaginative, didactic, and patronizing cartoons, then you’re in for a treat. For more than 25 years, Portland, Ore., film archivist, historian, professor, and writer Dennis Nyback has been searching for rare films in the catalog The Big Reel as well as in thrift stores and flea markets. "F@ck Mickey Mouse" is the title of a 16mm film program Nyback has assembled to showcase, as he puts it, "rare cartoon precursors that beat Disney to the punch, imitators that ripped him off, and parodies that made vicious fun of some of Disney’s greatest animation shorts."

Nyback’s program reveals a world that is funny, bold, and completely out of control. A world that isn’t afraid to turn Little Red Riding Hood into Red, a hot dancer, or Snow White into Coal Black, a maid in 1940s Harlem. It also includes perhaps the most daunting example of Disney’s God-bless-America approach, Der Fuehrer’s Face (1942), in which Donald Duck dreams that he is a Nazi. I don’t want to give away the cartoon’s disturbing ending, so I will just quote Nyback: "It does suggest mindless jingoism."

F@CK MICKEY MOUSE

Sat/9, 8 p.m., $10 (limited seating; RSVPs preferred)

Oddball Film and Video

275 Capp, SF

(415) 558-8117

www.oddballfilm.com

Return to the sixth dimension

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It’s nearly impossible to describe Forbidden Zone to the uninitiated. It’s a musical, a surreal fairy tale, an avant-garde live-action cartoon, and a strangely alluring jab at the boundaries of good taste. It’s black-and-white and nutty all over — and has become a cult sensation since its 1980 release. A film as singularly odd as Forbidden Zone obviously has one hell of a backstory. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sneak through any basement portals to track down director and coscripter Richard Elfman. Now the editor of Buzzine — an entertainment and pop culture mag with a bustling Web site, www.buzzine.com — Elfman e-mailed and chatted with me over the phone about what’s possibly the strangest movie ever made, featuring the first film score by his brother, Danny Elfman.

Surprisingly, Richard revealed quite a few San Francisco ties; he lived in the Haight and in Berkeley in the 1960s and ’70s, playing in an Afro-Latin percussion ensemble that later gigged in Las Vegas. He also spent some time working with the Cockettes, who introduced him to Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons, a Forbidden Zone influence. A fateful trip to a Toronto theater festival introduced him to the Grand Magic Circus, a French troupe that encouraged his eclectic theatrical tastes.

SFBG How did you move from the Grand Magic Circus to form the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo?

RICHARD ELFMAN Shortly [after the Toronto festival], the Magic Circus opened a major show in Paris. I was invited to join the company, which I did, and soon brought my younger brother Danny in. I married the leading lady, Marie-Pascale — Frenchy in Forbidden Zone. The show was billed as an avant-garde musical, but in fact much of it had roots in both turn of the century absurdism and French classical comedy.

After a year of touring Europe and beyond, I, along with Frenchy and my childhood friend Gene Cunningham [Pa in Forbidden Zone], formed the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo back in Los Angeles. My brother Danny, who went from the Magic Circus to a year in the African bush — I’m not joking — joined us shortly thereafter. The Mystic Knights incorporated absurdist comedy with an eclectic mix of great older music, pieces [by Cab Calloway and others] that could no longer be heard live elsewhere, along with original avant-garde pieces by Danny. As the ’70s moved along, I went off to other projects; under my brother’s direction, the Mystic Knights were ultimately bent into a rock band, Oingo Boingo.

SFBG Obviously, several of the performers in Forbidden Zone were from the theater troupe — but how did Susan Tyrrell and Hervé Villechaize get involved?

RE Well, the film had Frenchy [who starred and was the production designer], Gene, my brother, and all of the Mystic Knights, along with Danny’s childhood friend and original Knight, Matthew Bright, who played Squeezit and René Henderson. He also cowrote Forbidden Zone and went on to write and direct films like Freeway [1996]. Matthew’s roommate at the time was Hervé Villechaize, the king. Hervé’s girlfriend was Susan Tyrrell, the queen. Et voilà!

SFBG What were some of the challenges you faced during filming?

RE I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing when I started, but I eventually figured things out and got — over three arduous years — something that gives the sense what our Mystic Knights shows were like. The music was easy, as I had experience staging and choreographing musicals, and my little brother is Mozart. The animation bankrupted me, however. We inked things cell by cell, the old-fashioned way. Susan and Hervé had their occasional spats, although they were both supreme troopers who kicked their Screen Actors Guild checks back into the production. Hervé even helped Frenchy paint sets on weekends.

SFBG How much of the film was scripted?

RE It was all scripted; nothing was spontaneous. In the number "Bim Bam Boom," I had a really shy guy whose lips semifroze when it came time to lip-synch the song. So I had Matthew Bright’s lips superimposed over his. I use that example even today as an admonition for actors to do as I say.

SFBG The film is now known as a stoner classic, so I feel like I have to ask if there were any chemicals involved — and if not, where’d you come up with the story? Were you inspired by other filmmakers or artists?

RE Personally, I don’t take drugs. Wine and women, or woman — I am presently remarried — are as many intoxicants as I can handle. In terms of other inspiration? Along with Max Fleischer, the Cockettes, and Jerome Savary and his Magic Circus, I was influenced by Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Latin great Miguelito Valdez, and Aaron Lebedeff of the Yiddish theater. Design style? Definitely German expressionism, which serves one well if your whole art budget is only 40 rolls of paper and 12 buckets of black and white paint.

SFBG When the film came out in 1980, what was the reaction? Did it have a regular theatrical run?

RE Well, it had a brief summer run of scattered midnight shows. It was banned from the University of Wisconsin and other institutions of higher learning. I remember there was an arson threat in Los Angeles one night. Censorship rears its head in many guises; in our case the politically correct tried to kill Forbidden Zone, although they were not entirely successful.

SFBG Did you have any idea Forbidden Zone would be a cult hit?

RE I had thought the film had totally disappeared. About five years ago, when I put my first Web site up, I received e-mails from fans from around the world. Apparently bootleg videos had been going around for years, picking up new fans. I was knocked on my ass, truly.

SFBG Forbidden Zone 2 — true or false?

RE We’re planning Forbidden Zone 2: The Forbidden Galaxy. Ma and Pa Kettle are driven from the dust bowl along with their kids — gray-haired Stinky and the slutty, lumbering Petunia — and they move to Crenshaw, down in South Central LA, only to purchase that fateful little house whose basement is connected to the sixth dimension. "Just wait until those dead babies start marching!" *

FORBIDDEN ZONE

With Richard Elfman in person

Another Hole in the Head Film Festival

Sat/2, 11:45 p.m., $10

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

www.sfindie.com

This is your brain on drugs

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"When you’re smilin’," Satchmo sang, "the whole world smiles with you." Likewise, when you’re on acid, the whole world is frying with you, like that egg in the Just Say No commercials of the ’80s. After watching Richard Elfman’s black-and-white, semianimated, vaudevillian, blackface, sadomasochistic, surrealist musical masterpiece Forbidden Zone, my dosed-up high school friends and I were convinced that Elfman and the entire cast must have been on copious amounts of mind-altering substances. Because, seriously, how else could you come up with this shit?

The plot involves a hidden door in the basement of the Hercules family home, which — after a jaunt through Monty Python–esque animated bowels — leads into the sixth dimension, home of an ear-eating, tuxedo-clad anthropomorphic frog named Bust Rod; a cadre of hollow-eyed, dry-humping psychopaths; a topless princess; a "little midget king"; a sapphic, ball-busting badass evil queen; and a very musical, Cab Calloway–loving Satan. Oh, and a gorilla who gets his head pounded into a mealy mush by Grandpa Hercules, a former Jewish wrestling star. What’s Grandpa Hercules doing in the sixth dimension? His grandson Flash — a tubby, gray-haired elementary school student in boxers, a Beanie Boy propeller hat, and a Boy Scout shirt — unties his "kosher fart of a grandpa" to help him rescue his sister, Frenchy, and classmate Squeezit Henderson’s twin, René, from the dungeon. Squeezit contends throughout the movie that his sibling is female, to which Flash counters, "He just dresses like a broad. He’s a faggot." Faced with friends like this and an abusive, sailor-humping mom, Squeezit’s only true allies are chickens.

I long ago stopped eating the magic fruit of Sandoz Laboratories and realize you don’t have to be on brain-melting hallucinogens to come up with something wildly creative like Forbidden Zone. As it turns out, Richard Elfman’s only vices are "wine and women" (see "Return to the Sixth Dimension"). However, you can’t blame me for thinking he was on something. I recently watched the movie with my friend Maria after years of blurting out things like "Holy cow, it’s 10 to nine! The queen said she was going to ream us with 20-inch cattle prods, and I’m still waiting!" When the 73 minutes of lunacy had ceased, she looked at me blankly and said, "I think it’s one of those movies that you need to be on acid to really get into."

A horse is a horse?

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HANDS OFF A professor of mine was fond of posing a certain thought experiment. As Martian anthropologists, free from any earthbound cultural conceptions, his students had to come up with a baseline definition of sex. First he’d field their not wholly impartial attempts. Then he’d coolly roll out his description: it’s an involuntary muscle spasm caused by applied friction.

Writer Charles Mudede and director Robinson Devor attempt a similar thought experiment with their beautifully lensed but frustratingly airy documentary, Zoo. Only, in the case of their subject, the applied friction is generated by an Arabian stallion, which brings about not an involuntary muscle spasm but the accidental death of the man whose colon the stud has perforated in flagrante.

Perhaps no one would have known of Kenneth Pinyan, a divorced Boeing engineer initially identified only by his online moniker Mr. Hands, had he and a circle of fellow “zoos” (short for “zoophiles”) who occasionally got together on a remote farm in rural Enumclaw, Wash., to express their erotic attraction to animals not routinely filmed themselves. But in our culture, nothing stirs up a media shit storm like a leaked sex tape, especially when it’s of the interspecies variety.

Whereas my professor tried to get his students to see how inseparable sex is from culture by forcing us to think outside cultural lines, Mudede and Devor attempt to divorce the “horse sex case,” as it was jokingly dubbed, from the tabloid sensationalism that accrued to it. While Zoo gives the now disbanded and publicly shamed circle of men associated with the incident a space in which to explain their desires, they still emerge as ciphers for a yearning beyond the pale.

Indeed, the oblique strategies Devor favors — talk radio snippets and loose reenactments, off-camera interviews with the zoos and with an animal-rights activist and a cop who made calls to the farm — cast his subject in an almost mythological light. Sean Kirby’s lush cinematography certainly does its part to transform Enumclaw into a rustic Eden; the zoos’ slow-motion ambling toward the barns is swathed in the dusty violet blanket of a blooming tree or silhouetted against the ocher smudge of dawn. We could be in a Ford commercial or in an establishing shot from that other American pastoral of unmentionable vices, Brokeback Mountain.

If the link between bestiality and homosexuality seems specious, or worse yet, part and parcel of the kind of relativism frequently trotted out by the religious right, let’s not forget (thanks, Michel Foucault!) that until roughly the 19th century, be it with horse or man, all nonprocreative sex was considered sodomy. There are echoes of this genealogy in the anxiety voiced among Zoo‘s disembodied Greek chorus over the issue of consent (or its absence). In particular, the animal-rights activist’s likening of the horse to “a violated child” is uncannily reminiscent of conservative rhetoric surrounding homosexuals, supposed predators who, pre-Stonewall, were forced to inhabit a twilight world not unlike that of the clandestine community of zoophiles.

These contradictions and similarities point to some recurrent stumbling blocks in our thinking about sex. The most perverse act in Zoo, it could be argued, is the gelding of the offending stallion “for its own protection,” so that it can no longer be a potential object of desire.

Zoo raises such issues with far more frequency than it discusses them. Unlike Werner Herzog, who tersely evaluated his subject Timothy Treadwell in 2005’s Grizzly Man, Mudede and Devor avoid commentary. Zoo is far more fascinated by this supposed limit case of sexuality than interested in fleshing out Pinyan and his world beyond the details already enumerated in what was surely a very curious obituary. (Matt Sussman)

MY RECTUM FOR A HORSE I suspect there will be a lot of walkouts from Robinson Devor’s documentary about the 2005 Enumclaw horse incident, in which an airplane engineer referred to as Mr. Hands sustained fatal injuries while bottoming for a horse. But it won’t be the easily offended who run from their seats.

The revenue that small theaters are surely losing to senior discounts on Away From Her‘s ticket sales will easily be recouped from ill-informed frat boy field trips to what they think will be Internet Horse-Schtupping: The Movie. Barebacking jokes during the trailers will give way to a disappointed silence during a mesmerizing opening shot of what looks like a pixie flying in a field of blackness, slowly expanding and revealing itself to be the light at the end of a tunnel.

Zoo, intriguingly, never really crawls out of that tunnel. The movie, which is about the horse-loving men in Mr. Hands’ community as much as it’s about his death, presents an impressionistic collage of nature images, reenactments, voice-overs, and media samplings. (Turns out Rush Limbaugh and I see eye to eye on some things.) It’s also a collage of emotional cues: some scenes allow the music to suggest sinister qualities in the men’s activities, but there are also images that look like mood lighting was added to Harry Potter’s photo shoot for Equus, hinting at a level of intimacy that boring old queer and straight folks couldn’t possibly understand.

Devor isn’t just allowing for more than one response to the facts — he appears to be courting them all, creating a sort of controlled chaos that, of course, frees him from the restraints of his own opinion. The result is a coolly aestheticized yin to the snickering yang of the online frenzy in 2005.

This may come off as a cop-out to partisans on either side of the debate, inasmuch as it exists, about zoophilia and bestiality (after all, Edward Albee’s 2002 play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? lost no artistic integrity in more directly addressing the implications of interspecies hanky-panky). Devor shouldn’t be criticized for undertaking a detached aesthetic exercise, it seems to me, yet to follow this tack with such a flammable subject can’t help but be a comment in some way. But in what way?

Zoo could reasonably be accused of either acquitting the Enumclaw zoophiles by their mere association with the film’s artsy ambivalence or, a more insidious possibility, fostering a hyperawareness of what is downplayed, implying disgust via a kind of negative-space sensationalism. Whatever the stunt, the film isn’t stunted. While some of the reenactments feel a bit too literal for the tenor of the rest of the film and the actors often seem poorly directed, there is an undeniable harmony to the whole. Zoo emits a quiet, narcotic hum that the gross-out contingent in the audience won’t likely stick around to tap into.

ZOO

Opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.thinkfilmcompany.com

Occupational hazards

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You think your job sucks? Imagine working as an office drone for multinational corporation Palisade Defence, whose slogan is "We’re hitting a home run for freedom and a time-out for terror!" In Christopher Smith’s black comedy Severance, a team-building weekend (shades of The Office) in Eastern Europe (shades of Hostel) goes gruesomely, satirically awry (shades of Shaun of the Dead). It’s not as scary as last year’s The Descent (nor as funny as Shaun), but Severance is yet another indication that the UK horror invasion ain’t ebbing anytime soon.

Severance is clever, but it’s not really that different from a million other bloodthirsty flicks: a bickering ensemble gets lost in the wilderness, where someone or something starts picking off shrieking victims one by one. It’s refreshing to see grown-ups rather than teens pasted into this scenario, and Smith adds political jabs by making the heavily armed, woods-lurking baddies monsters of Palisade’s own weapons-corp making.

Of course, encountering a rogue militia is hardly the outcome our hapless city slickers expect from their forced journey of togetherness. The group members, who all kind of hate each other to begin with, include an uptight snob (Toby Stephens), a kiss ass (Andy Nyman), a no-nonsense blond (Laura Harris), an idiot boss (Tim McInnerny), and a horny stoner (Danny Dyer). The joke is that there’s never a better time to work as a team than when everyone’s life is in danger — yet unity still proves difficult for these yups in the woods.

But I know what you’re wondering, horror fiend: how repulsively creative are the death scenes? Early on, a comically gross encounter with a bear trap foreshadows unfortunate ends met in booby-trapped trees. Smith, who cowrote with James Moran, also gives us a final girl with enough tenacity to fight back against physical opponents and the indignity of being put on hold when calling for help. With its familiar plot points, Severance may not hit a home run for horror — but there’s an undeniably fun energy propelling all those severed limbs.

SEVERANCE

Opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.severancefilm.com

Czech, please!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A faltering economy is the biggest threat to most national film industries, but Czechoslovakia’s had a more distinct misfortune: it was shut down by occupation forces not once but twice. Most famously, the 1960s Czech new wave, in which talents like Jirí Menzel, Ivan Passer, Vera Chytilová, and Milos Forman first flourished, was abruptly dammed by the 1968 Soviet invasion. The type of widespread film-buff culture that brought attention to those directors scarcely existed when — before the Nazis commandeered local studios and permitted only a handful of strictly escapist films to be made for the home market — the country’s cinema had its first golden age.

Before World War II, Czechoslovakia boasted one of the most adventurous and lively — if not widely exported — movie industries in the world. Of course, this meant there was room for a lot of populist fluff. But the 12 features in the Pacific Film Archive’s new series "Czech Modernism, 1926–1949" show why Nazi invaders sensed a celluloid threat: these films are full of playful social critique as well as imaginative stylistic leaps. They assume that an audience is intelligent and that it will enjoy the subversion of authority. These films don’t provide pacification, let alone propaganda.

As playwright and Velvet Underground fan turned president Václav Havel would suggest some decades later, Czech life — at least the urban variety — has long appreciated the intersection of the avant-garde and leftist politics. The region’s geographic location, between the sophisticated capitalist West and the stylistically impoverished Communist USSR, at times seems directly reflected in these films’ colliding influences, from German expressionism to Soviet formalism to an Erich von Stroheim–esque attitude decadence.

The series’ two movies by director Vladislav Vancura apply a mad stylistic energy to subjects that might easily have been played for simple melodrama or pathos. In 1933’s On the Sunny Side, a pair of city children whose friendship bridges the class divide end up dumped in an orphanage when their parents are deemed unfit: first it’s fatherless, accordion-playing Honza, then pigtailed Babula, whose womanizing dad has just bankrupted the family. Frenetic montages contrast the adult worlds of poor and rich, cutting between breadlines and champagne-guzzling flappers. At the progressive home for foundlings, by contrast, equality is ensured by self-government — as a collective, the kids are better able to look after their own welfare than the grown-ups who’ve failed them.

Vancura’s Faithless Marijka, from the next year, is set in the Carpathian Mountains, with local nonprofessional actors as the leads. But it’s no sylvan idyll. The supposedly central tale of a lumberjack’s cheating spouse is nearly lost amid the struggles of laborers to triumph over their greedy oppressors (whose ranks include a disturbing anti-Semitic caricature).

A similar mix of poetic naturalism and Eisensteinian montage marks Karl Junghans’s 1929 silent Such Is Life. Its titular shrug downplays a vigorous look at some ordinary Prague residents, notably a put-upon laundry worker (Vera Baranovskaya, who played the title character of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 Mother), her loutish husband, and a manicurist daughter pretty enough to attract major trouble. Similar perils await two office girls lured into a lecherous nightlife in 1931’s From Saturday to Sunday, by Gustav Machatý, who would create an international sensation with Hedy Lamarr’s nude swim in Ecstasy two years later. This time romance rather than lust prevails as the more innocent secretary flees a grabby grandpa and winds up meeting her pure-hearted lower-class match.

Mistrust toward the rich and powerful was also a frequent theme in the era’s Hollywood films, in an attempt to please American audiences suffering though the Great Depression, which in turn triggered Czechoslovakia’s economic hardship. But the criticism in such films was usually glib, the solutions fanciful. Not so here. It’s eye-opening to watch a popular hit like Martin Fric’s 1934 Heave Ho!, widely regarded as the best effort from local comedy team Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich.

Werich plays a dissolute multimillionaire informed one day that his stocks are worthless and he’s broke. Teaming with an unemployed laborer (Voskovec) who’d ranted against factory-shutting fat cats on the radio (before being dragged off), he discovers — after making a mess of various odd jobs — that he’s inherited a huge building. Unfortunately, it’s just a bunch of steel girders, so the penniless duo hit on the scheme of collectivizing construction with other indigent workers, who’ll have a home when it’s finished. Naturally, corporate types try to thwart this truly free enterprise, but they are treated to the ol’ titular gesture. A socialist semimusical with sight gags and assorted silliness, this sure ain’t Gold Diggers of 1933. *

CZECH MODERNISM, 1926–1949

Through June 24; see Rep Clock for schedule; $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

The mark of Zidane

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Z marks the spot, whether that spot is the television, cinema screen, museum installation, or the memories of millions of people who’ve borne even cursory witness to the career of Zinedine Zidane, especially its instantly mythic — as opposed to merely controversial — final athletic moments. All of the above spots are touched on by the masterful Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a multiformat work at the crest of a current fascination with athletic documentary. Shadowed by Verónica Chen’s undersung swimmer drama Agua (2006), Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s project reveals sports’ potential as a source for pure cinematic dynamism. Moreover, it taps into a famous athlete’s tremendous resonance as a subject of artistic portraiture.

The presence of the word Portrait in Zidane‘s English title is an important one. The film’s codirectors (the latter of whose recent installation The Boy from Mars is a favorite of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul) shot only one match, from Real Madrid’s 2005 season. But they are portraying both Zidane and this century. If ever there was a solitary — if team-playing — figure up to the task of embodying or at least evoking a universe, Gordon and Parreno have chosen him. To use the vintage words of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Zidane’s actions have transcended the thrill of victory and agony of defeat.

Zidane makes its public SF debut at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, thanks to film curator Joel Shepard. (One can always dream of a future screening at the Metreon, where its Kevin Shields– and Bay Area–influenced sound design, Mogwai score, and panoramic scope would be ideally realized.) Because I’ve only seen it on DVD, in lieu of writing a review, I recently spoke with Gordon. The Turner Prize–winning native of Glasgow, Scotland, began our talk while looking at a Neil Young record in a bookstore, before grabbing a cup of tea, and maintained his casual good humor whatever the topic.

GUARDIAN What led you to choose Zidane as the film’s subject? Were you a fan?

DOUGLAS GORDON Yeah. The first time we met Zidane, it was difficult to try and behave like adults. I can speak French OK, but I tried to introduce myself and sounded like a girl meeting John Lennon in 1960. I fell to pieces.

SFBG The George Best movie Football as Never Before (1971; directed by Hellmuth Costard) has been cited in relation to Zidane. But it comes from a different era, and Best is a different kind of subject or icon, and you’re using different equipment.

DG We developed our idea in blissful ignorance of Costard’s movie. But when we were having trouble figuring out how to deal with portraying the halftime period, someone mentioned [it] to us. At that point it wasn’t available on DVD, so Philippe actually flew from Paris to Berlin to go to the National Film Archive in Germany.

Later, we watched it together and looked into Costard’s practice. Obviously, he didn’t want to engage with the industry of cinema or the vocabulary of cinema — it was almost antithetical to his practice — whereas we wanted to play with the idea of a star and how a star is mediated, to see if we could get under the skin rather than stay on the surface.

SFBG Can you tell me about your tactics in using 17 cameras within one game to capture Zidane? To me, television hasn’t figured out how to present soccer. Some sports translate intimately to television, but soccer is often held at a distance.

DG Most televisual representations of football are based on a kind of theatrical convention of only shooting from one side — you have an entrance-left-exit-right type of motion. By breaking that down, you actually break up the architecture of the stadium. It’s no longer rectangular; it’s become circular in a way.

We wanted to make a portrait of a man: a working man who happens to be Zinedine Zidane, and the work happens to be football. It wasn’t a particularly good day at the office for him — he didn’t score any goals, and he got red-carded. But we wanted what we did to be along the lines of a Robert Bresson picture; to capture the honesty of the everyday.

Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 Tokyo Olympiad was a reference, and — more for me than for Philippe — the NFL. I wasted my youth watching 16mm, fantastically well-photographed NFL [footage]. Beautiful stuff, [shot by] cameramen who’d just come back from the war [in Vietnam]. Seagulls might flap by in front of them, and it wouldn’t be edited out. There was something rough about the NFL stuff that we wanted. There’s a couple of scenes in Zidane where the camera drifts up. That was deliberate, but it’s a reference to the sort of accidental beauty that can happen in that type of footage.

SFBG One thing that the film brings across is that there are long periods of the game when Zidane is meditative and literally just standing. Then when he does move, it’s incredibly sudden and really focused.

DG Some people have said that it’s a little reminiscent of nature programming. He’s definitely on the hunting side of things rather than the hunted.

It’s an exercise in one man’s solitude, though. There happen to be 80,000 people in the stadium, and he’s part of a team of 11, but there are huge periods where he’s completely alone.

Before shooting, we went to about 15 or 16 games and sat on the pitch. One of the big differences about the way we shot the film is that, apart from one camera, everything was on his level. There’s only one aerial camera that we used very sparingly as a backup. We knew the way he would walk around and that he’d pace himself during the game, so when we talked to the [project’s] producers, another reference we used was the corrida. You just don’t know if he’s the bull or the bullfighter.

If you were inside the head of Zinedine Zidane, you wouldn’t see him at all, which would sort of defeat the purpose of the film. But we did want to give his point of view, and there are specific passages where you see him move his head as if he’s a little disoriented. At points like those you don’t really know if you’re looking at the world through his eyes or looking at him.

SFBG What was his response to your portrait?

DG He’s not a man of many words, but he got pretty animated [when he saw it].

We kept him informed. We knew it was going to be a fairly hardcore exercise and that it was better to tell him how we were approaching it step-by-step rather than just turn up after a year’s worth of editing and hit him with [the finished work].

There were a couple of times [during the process] where he was really surprised and said, "That doesn’t look like me, this is not how I look on TV, this is not how I look in a newspaper — this is how my brother looks late at night talking to my mother."

We were nervous about how he felt he was portrayed because of the red card and the violence [in the match]. But he said, "I would do it again. The guy was an asshole."

SFBG That brings me to an inevitable question: what was it like to see things play out somewhat similarly in the final match of the 2006 World Cup?

DG I was in the stadium, and I couldn’t believe it. Of course, you couldn’t see what was going on because as usual there were another couple of Italians lying down feigning injury.

I knew we’d obviously stumbled upon something when, even before I’d seen the incident, people in the English press were quoting our film to make Zidane out to be a baddie.

SFBG Was that frustrating?

DG I think [Zidane]’s been sent out [of matches] more times than anyone else who wore the number 5 in the history of football. He’s a real person; he’s volatile.

It doesn’t really matter what [Italian player Marco] Materazzi said to him; what matters is that he said something to one of the greatest footballers of this generation. There’s five minutes left to go in [Zidane]’s career, and you want to taunt him about his wife?

SFBG How did you come to collaborate with Parreno?

DG Philippe and I have had mutual friends since the early ’90s. We’d pop up in the same group exhibitions around 1990 and 1991. He made a film with Rirkrit Tiravanija and Carsten Höller in 1994 called Vicinato, and then I got involved — along with Liam Gillick and Pierre Huyghe — in [1996’s] Vicinato 2. We’d spent a long time together talking about the script, and we shot it together down in Monaco. We watched a lot of football during that period as well.

But the genesis for the project really happened in Jerusalem, of all places. Philippe and I happened to be in a group exhibition ["Hide and Seek," curated by Ami Barak] there in 1996, and it just so happened the exhibition was under a football stadium, the Teddy Kollek Stadium. We finished our installations very early, and since Jerusalem isn’t a place to go idly wandering, we bought a football and played Keepy Uppy for about a week. During that time we spoke of what we remembered about being kids playing football, watching football, and what we aspired to [achieve]. Then we spoke about cinema and the fact that people had been waiting for us both to make a movie.

We chose Zidane partly because — and I think it’s the same after our film — he’s an incredibly enigmatic character. He has this absolutely impenetrable facade. He’s Zinedine Zidane.

Every time we met him, there was some other family member with him, and they’re all bigger than him. When he’s off the pitch, he’s not as big as he seems when he’s on the field. It’s incredible what happens to his physiognomy and physicality when he’s playing.

He was won over because during the first meeting we had with him, we said, "We want to work with you because, looking back over the past few generations, you represent something more than just another football star, something deeper than [Diego] Maradona or more complex than [David] Beckham." We had reedited some footage of [Manuel dos Santos] Garrincha, the old South American player, from a beautiful film [Garrincha, Joy of the People, directed by cinema novo pioneer Joaquim Pedro de Andrade] shot in the early ’60s. I think the fact that we’d chosen Garrincha and not Pele or Maradona, for example, really struck a chord with [Zidane].

SFBG What you’re saying goes back to the fact that Zidane both triggers and reframes issues of race and nationalism because he’s so powerful as an athlete and individual.

DG Someone told me that in France during the recent election there was a lot of graffiti over campaign billboards for [Nicolas] Sarkozy and Ségolène Royale saying, "Zidane, Zidane." I wish someone had taken a fucking photograph for me, but I could probably restage it somewhere.

Sometimes I think it even comes down to the Z. There’s something about it, like the mark of Zorro.

SFBG What have you thought about the art world response to Zidane?

DG We’ve spoken to a lot of people about sports, and about cinema. People have had a tendency to forget that Philippe and I used to say that we’re trying to drag people from the white cube [of art spaces] to the black box and from the black box to the white cube.

We didn’t lose sight of this, but it got lost along the way that Philippe and I knew [that] by choosing a subject or model like Zidane, we had the opportunity to really mix things up in terms of the audience. Kids could, in years to come, in turn take their kids to see it at the National Gallery in Scotland or the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. For kids who have the DVD, that can work the same way that it does when kids who maybe have a postcard of a painting can see the real thing — they’ll have an affiliation with it.

SFBG How does the installation version of Zidane differ from the cinematic presentation?

DG It’s two projections — the cinematic one, plus one of the cameras. It seems like a glib deconstruction, but when you see it, it’s a different experience, much more demanding. It’s almost a forensic detail of how we made [it]; if you troll around to 17 different museums all over the world, you’ll see there are 17 different points of view.

Of course, when the one camera is the camera used in the cinematic version, you get this bifocal effect.

SFBG For you to have mentioned Bresson earlier while discussing Zidane is interesting, because the setting and subject matter are not what one would connect to Bresson. Usually when film directors mention him, their work is stylistically aping or imitating him.

DG The cinematography of [1966’s Au Hasard] Balthazar was influential. But more so, there’s a book Philippe sent to me [Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, most recently published in English by Green Integer] that had an impact, in the way he talks about the difference between the model and the actor. This was really clear to us when we were trying to speak about Zidane. People would say he’s an actor, and we’d say, "No, he’s not, he’s a model." He’s not playing a role. He’s doing his job, but with the awareness of being looked at, and that’s very different from the way the actor performs. Some of what Bresson says in his notes almost could have been written specifically for the Zidane film. It’s nice to quote Bresson, because he’s so unfashionable.

SFBG And so great! Some of the best current movie directors also produce work for art spaces. You’ve given a lot of thought to the specificity of DVDs and cinemas and gallery or museum installations, so I wanted to ask you about those distinctions.

DG One of the things that Philippe and I were constantly asked [at Zidane‘s film premiere] was "Were you excited to be working in the cinema?" We weren’t more excited than we would be [working] anywhere else. If there’s anything that would identify a certain practice of our generation of artists, it is that most of us are working with the exhibition as a format, and the context informs the format while the format interferes with the context. A lot of people don’t get that at all. I’m not trying to blow an intellectual trumpet here, but there is a certain amount of practice necessary to understand that. This is why when someone like David Lynch tries to move out of the cinema or TV screen into the gallery, it doesn’t work sometimes. The filmmaker might not do enough with the gallery or the museum. *

ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT

Thurs/17–Sun/19, 7 p.m.; Sun/20, 2 and 7 p.m. (all screenings sold out except for Sun/20, 2 p.m.)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.zidane-themovie.com

Vote or die

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Now that the wave of Asian horror films (and subsequent American remakes) seems to have crashed under the weight of too many spooky kids and ladies with long, wet hair, are Asian gangster flicks the new hotness? Practically everyone in the United States has now seen a Hong Kong cops ‘n’ robbers thriller or at least a film once removed from such, thanks to Martin Scorsese and his Best Picture–winning Infernal Affairs remake. But while The Departed pilfered from director Andrew Lau (this fall look for his English-language debut, the Richard Gere–starring crime drama The Flock), HK’s most exciting director, Johnnie To, remains largely unknown stateside.

For now, that is: with films such as 1999’s The Mission and 2001’s Fulltime Killer, To earned notice among genre buffs. Last year’s Exiled screened at the 2007 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and is due for local theatrical release this summer; I think it’s the film poised to earn To a fan base beyond the cinema-geek crowd. But until Exiled emerges, there’s Triad Election, a.k.a. Election 2, which offers enough stylish direction and underworld shenanigans to tide over the To faithful — and maybe snare a few new devotees along the way.

Haven’t watched the first Election? Me neither, so rest assured that you don’t need to have seen it to follow Election 2. HK’s oldest triad, Wo Sing, puts the organized in organized crime, holding elections for chairperson every two years. Current boss Lok (Simon Yam) doesn’t want to step down, especially for front-runner Jimmy (Louis Koo), whose lucrative ventures in mainland China have left him yearning to leave HK’s crime biz behind. Trouble is, the crooked higher-ups in China won’t let Jimmy continue his dealings unless he becomes head of his mob family; they see his cooperation as an asset they can exploit to everyone’s advantage. So the race is on, and it’s way dirtier than anything Karl Rove could dream up. Campaign strategies include kidnapping, double-crossing, limb severing, and putting assorted hired killers on the payroll.

To aligns the viewer’s sympathies with Jimmy, but he’s as morally ambiguous as they come, as movie mobsters tend to be. And on that note, a few delicious torture scenes aside, there’s not a lot going on here that hasn’t appeared in gangster dramas past. But even if its themes are familiar, Triad Election does feature one particularly unusual element: no gun battles whatsoever. Exiled is as bullet-riddled as the films of John Woo’s late-’80s prime, but Election‘s characters dole out their punishments with an array of blades.

It’s actually appropriate, since you really have to get right up on someone to stab ’em good. This visceral, intimate choice raises the stakes of Election‘s all-in-the-family violence. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer indeed. *

TRIAD ELECTION

Opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Sweet and lowdown

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Scattered throughout Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep are shots in which the camera recedes from the street action — kids throwing rocks, blundering thugs stealing a television — to the yearning treble of the blues-spiritual soundtrack. There are many examples of patterned poetry in Burnett’s 1977 debut, but none are so affecting as these elisions, which literally pull at the viewer, casting the pall of memory over bittersweet scenes of life among the Watts working poor.

This retrospective vision seems all the more acute for the circuitous path Killer of Sheep has taken to a theater near you. Burnett produced the film as his master’s thesis during the heyday of UCLA’s film program, shooting it in his native Watts part-time and, without thought of distribution, artfully arranging his slice-of-life narration over tracks from his rich record collection: selections ranging from Paul Robeson to Earth, Wind and Fire. Word began to spread about Burnett’s lyrical neorealism, but the essential soundtrack proved a sticking point for a commercial release, with licensing costs being prohibitively expensive — a very modern problem that more recently affixed itself to Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation. The film never really went away, winning a major award at the 1981 Berlin Festival and getting selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, but theatrical distribution remained elusive until a coalition of backers came through to ensure that UCLA’s recent 35mm restoration (in its earlier incarnations the film was shown in 16mm, befitting its film-school origins) could tour the country’s big screens.

Thirty years later the film sings. The plot, such as it is, mostly follows Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a broad-shouldered, kindhearted husband and father of two who works long shifts at a slaughterhouse (hence the plainly descriptive title). The family struggles, but not in any particular direction: which is to say, they live. The episodic narrative is borrowed from the Italian neorealists and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, but the sensuous film style is Burnett’s own. His framing techniques — close-ups cut off at the head are thick with characters’ midsections — emphasize physicality, while the use of natural light sends shots into a free-floating daydream. There is always this give-and-take between the earthy and the ethereal, never more so than in the digressions of children playing, in which Watts simultaneously seems depressingly abject and dreamily beautiful: a fragile balance, again suggestive of memory.

It is, after all, important to remember that if Killer of Sheep feels timeless, it’s probably because Burnett made it that way. The film was produced in 1977, but it frequently seems as if it had been made decades earlier: it’s the soundtrack, of course, but also the compositions styled after Walker Evans portraits, the camera movements evoking city symphonies, and the dissolving montage sequences, which link the film to the purest strains of silent cinema.

What makes Killer of Sheep frankly overwhelming is the way Burnett brings this evocative style to every part of his narration — a scene in which two hoods try to involve Stan in a murder gets the same attention as one in which two boys see how long they can stand on their heads. Off-the-cuff humor cuts against plaintive despair, one deepening the other. Aestheticized poverty is always a risky proposition, but Killer of Sheep is miles from style for style’s sake: its nebulous, contradictory beauty reaches out to touch the full variety of experience, leaving the audience to feel everything at once.

In the film’s centerpiece (strikingly paralleled in Lynne Ramsay’s memory of underdevelopment, 1999’s Ratcatcher), Stan and his wife rock in each other’s arms to Dinah Washington’s exquisite "This Bitter Earth." It’s a scene of stark relief and a perfect summation of the smoky mix of emotions everywhere apparent in Killer of Sheep. "And this bitter earth," Washington intones, "may not be so bitter after all." As with the great blues singers, so too with Burnett — the lyrics tell the story, but it’s the voice that makes you cry. *

KILLER OF SHEEP

Opens Fri/18

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Magic stars

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"When we use magical in a positive sense," filmmaker Lawrence Jordan explains, parsing an adjective that is frequently brought up in discussions of his work, "it really means my eye is fresh at this moment and what I’m seeing is a discovery." Jordan’s films — in particular, the animated collages composed of Victorian magazine illustrations, Gustave Doré engravings, and flashing stars and orbs for which he is most famous — are the visual records of such moments of discovery.

The more than 40 experimental short (as well as three feature-length) films Jordan has made over his 40 years in the Bay Area are as much documents of the fanciful flight paths of his free associations — what he calls his "inner world" — as they are fleeting glimpses of a precinematic visual culture that has long since vanished. Thanks to an upcoming program put on by the San Francisco Cinematheque as part of its Bay Area Roots series, audiences will get the chance to discover — or perhaps rediscover with fresh eyes — the work of a filmmaker and advocate (Jordan helped found Canyon Cinema) who truly deserves to be called a Fog City maverick.

Like the cryptically beautiful boxes of Joseph Cornell, Jordan’s films exude a certain innocent surrealism. His poetic assemblages of fantastic fauna, romantic vistas, and hermetic symbols seem aimed at enchanting rather than disturbing the viewer through the kind of sexual shock tactics that were more the métier of Max Ernst. "That part of surrealism we don’t qualify for," Jordan says, referring to himself and Cornell, for whom he worked as an assistant in 1965, filming over the course of his stay at Utopia Parkway in Queens the only extant footage we have of the notoriously reclusive artist and his fabled workspace.

Jordan’s choice of the inclusive pronoun reveals both the slight reserve and matter-of-factness with which he speaks of his work and the strong sense of kinship he projects when talking about the artists — such as Cornell and collagist Jess Collins, who worked under his first name only — who became colleagues, served as inspiration, and, more often the case in a career filled with notable collaborators (Watts Tower sculptor Simon Rodia and Orson Welles), functioned in both capacities.

Following his high school friend and early collaborator Stan Brakhage to San Francisco from New York, Jordan moved into a basement flat below the poet Robert Duncan and his partner, Jess, whose baroque collages of finely crosshatched renderings of his source material shared affinities with Jordan’s then-still-developing aesthetic of assemblage. "[Jess] was the high priest of art magic in the time that I knew him," Jordan says.

Magic, as it turns out, keeps coming up in our conversation, whether in a passing reference to The Wizard of Oz (Jordan owns a complete set of the Oz books) or when Jordan cites that magician of silent cinema, Georges Méliès, as a major influence. Blue Skies beyond the Looking Glass, completed last year and one of the highlights of the cinematheque’s program, is very much an homage to the evocative power of early cinema.

A jubilant séance, Blue Skies resurrects silent-era stars such as Lon Chaney Sr., Lillian Gish, and Mary Pickford via some amazing screen test footage and invites them to tango with intercut animated segments. The film offers a nice summary of Jordan’s cinema of attractions, in which old signs are transmuted into wonders once more, restoring some of their mystery. "I don’t know about alchemy academically," Jordan reflects, "but I am a practicing alchemist in my own way." *

WORKS OF LAWRENCE JORDAN

Sun/13, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

Watered down

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I’ve read more than once that Raymond Carver stories are short and laconic by artistic necessity. Some critics are invoking this dogma in writing of Ray Lawrence’s new movie, Jindabyne, and the story it’s based on, "So Much Water So Close to Home" (also used as a thread in Robert Altman’s Carver buffet Short Cuts). This is, at least where "So Much Water" is concerned, horse puckey. But Lawrence (director of 2001’s wonderful Lantana and 1985’s just-shy-of-brilliant Bliss) and screenwriter Beatrix Christian have only gone half the distance to prove it.

As Carver wrote the story, a woman struggles with the knowledge that her husband and his buddies decided to continue their fishing trip after finding a woman’s body in the river, not reporting the discovery for two days. Lawrence transplants the American story to Jindabyne, a second chance of a town in Australia’s New South Wales, relocated from its original spot, which is now under a human-made lake. The film adds characters and gives those original to the short story more unpleasantness to remember and more to look forward to, but it does substantially more in this undertaking than read Carver’s tea leaves. Particularly successful is the invention of an authority-undermining mother-in-law, whose strain on the already precarious marriage of Claire (Laura Linney) and Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) is no mere device. But the best-directed relationship in the movie is the one between the fishers and the river: the act of fishing is so lovingly captured as to implicate the audience in their decision to stay.

Overall, however, Lawrence’s style is so highly pitched (slow tracking shots of the mystery that is nature, indigenous wailing in the soundtrack, hypnotized stares aplenty) that the ugly power of the men’s decision is undercut by the film’s bigness. It waters down the shame — my preferred reading of the dammed-up Jindabyne metaphor — by elevating it. This same style was so much better suited to the tinier, coincidence-laden universe of Lantana, which actually held the mystery and danger that the editing and sound design so unaccountably try to re-create in Jindabyne.

Then there are the two megafuckups. Fuckup numero uno: the woman’s killer, ridiculously, is kept around in the movie to ooga-booga the proceedings at 20-minute intervals. He smacks strongly of the psycho in 2005’s limbs–torn–asunder–from–Down Under anatomy lesson Wolf Creek, but he lacks that character’s bitterness and intelligence. He also lacks any relevance to the story once he’s served his unfortunate inaugural purpose. But fuckup number two is a far bigger betrayal of the otherwise remarkably nurtured primary text: Lawrence and Christian graft race and class politics onto the self-contained family drama in the form of the discovered body, an Aboriginal woman, and her angry family. (For a lesson in subtly handled class politics, Wolf Creek, hand to god, is the way to go.) At first Claire’s quixotic attempts to connect with the woman’s family are good for the film’s battered soul: the men’s shameful negligence is followed by her flailing, insensitive attempts to make things right. But the film actually gives Claire and Stewart (and hell, everybody, in an end-of-the-movie congregation worthy of Scooby-Doo) their closure, and no less in a final sequence that is also blatant cultural voyeurism. An intended irony can be argued, I suppose, but some ironies are a lot more convenient than others. *

JINDABYNE

Opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sonyclassics.com/jindabyne

It’s a mad, mad about Mads world

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Mads Mikkelsen has excessively high cheekbones on very long, flat facial planes, making him the kind of handsome actor suited for morally untrustworthy roles. Hence his casting as a charismatic antihero in the violent Pusher series (sort of Denmark’s big-screen Sopranos) and as the villain who inflicts improbably impermanent damage to chairbound James Bond’s weenus in 2006’s Casino Royale. Mikkelsen has been voted his country’s sexiest man, or something similar, two years running, and he was wonderful as a prim apostle of third-world charity atoning for an asshole past in Suzanne Bier’s After the Wedding (2006). Perhaps because he projects a certain tense ambivalence, saintliness also works for him — it’s something we have a hard time believing in now, so the unlikelier the casting, the better.

After the Wedding and many other excellent Danish films in recent years were written by Anders Thomas Jensen, who also directed Adam’s Apples. It has Mikkelsen as Ivan, the vicar of a country church whose congregation barely extends beyond the criminals he takes in for their community-service sentences. The latest to arrive is Adam (Ulrich Thomsen, who’s also played a Bond villain), a paunchy, shaved-head neo-Nazi who prefers to communicate by mute snarl or fist. Adam’s paperwork actually calls him evil. Ivan chirps, "There are no evil people!" His glass is forever half full, suffused with God’s forgiveness. He is the biggest fool Adam has ever suffered, and no amount of verbal or even violent physical abuse seems to shake his belief that God is on his side.

Because so many outrageously terrible things happen in it, Adam’s Apples has been called a black comedy. Fair enough. It’s often very funny, with the script’s continually surprising developments served up in a perfect deadpan by Anders’s direction, the classically handsome CinemaScope compositions, and a keening string score. But where it ends up is so far from cynicism that I pray no Hollywood remake arrives to desecrate its memory. Anders has worked more than once with most of his cast and crew. They should never be allowed to stop: James Bond production schedules should have to fucking wait until each Anders project is done. If Adam’s Apples isn’t the best movie I see in 2007, whatever movie is will be really, really, really good.

ADAM’S APPLES

Opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.adamsaebler.dk”

Stalk tips

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> cheryl@sfbg.com

Nothing is what it seems in Red Road, a wonderfully restrained thriller that marks the feature debut of British writer-director Andrea Arnold. Jackie (a fierce Kate Dickie) works as a surveillance camera operator, studying closed-circuit feeds streaming from Glasgow’s streets. Her life is mysterious without being spectacular; for one thing, she lives alone but wears a wedding ring. Clearly, she’s had a tragic past, and her present is haunted by the specter of unfinished business – but what, exactly? And who is the mysterious man (Tony Curran) she pursues after spotting him on one of her monitors?

"The feedback I’m getting is that a lot of people don’t work it out exactly until the end," Arnold told me over the phone from Canada, where we missed meeting at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. "I do sometimes think, ‘Oh god, was I too subtle?’ "

Being too subtle is a problem more directors should have. Arnold’s gift for capturing complicated characters and gritty urban settings was first displayed in Wasp, her 2003 Oscar-winning short film. In it impoverished young mother Zoe (Red Road costar Nathalie Press) parks her unsettlingly large brood in the parking lot of a pub after she determines it’s high time for a child-free date night. Near-tragedy ensues, but through it all Zoe remains sympathetic, not pathetic, despite the questionable decisions she makes along the way. This quality is shared by Red Road‘s Jackie.

"I knew I was taking things far by her behaving in a way that you didn’t completely understand. That was a risk of people running out of patience [with her]," Arnold said of Jackie, whose aloof demeanor makes her actions, including hooking up with a man she apparently hates, all the more surprising. "I think it takes a while to get to know her. But I like characters that are not so easy or straightforward."

Arnold’s interest in complex characters brings depth to her stories, which on the surface seem to simply follow the daily lives of rather ordinary people. "I think all human beings are very complicated in their circumstances and their environments – sometimes people don’t always behave in the best way. It doesn’t mean to say that they’re bad," she said. "I like seeing people that may not be easily likable to start. But then when you get to understand them more, when you see them in a more three-dimensional way, then you at least understand them, or you have empathy for them rather than immediately making a judgment about them."

Though she fielded suggestions to turn Wasp into her first feature, she was set on Red Road – even after she won the Oscar. It’s the first product of Advance Party, a concept project in which three directors will make films featuring the same group of characters, but each with distinct stories.

"Zentropa [cofounded by Danish director Lars von Trier] and [Scotland’s] Sigma Films had the idea of making films with rules, a bit like the Dogme films. Zentropa were very much involved in the Dogme thing. They were looking for filmmakers who hadn’t made a feature film before, and they saw Wasp when it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival," Arnold recalled. "They rang me up, and it went from there."

Danish filmmakers Anders Thomas Jensen and Lone Scherfig sketched out the characters, who are required to appear in all the films and be played by the same actors. Arnold and the other two Advance Party participants – Dane Mikkel Norgaard and Scot Morag McKinnon – cast together and discussed story lines that each would pursue, but the films are stand-alone narratives in which "the other directors are free to create their entire universe."

Red Road‘s universe is bleak enough even before Jackie explores its seedier pockets, first through TV screens and then by physically visiting the places she’s seen on video. The surveillance theme is a nod to classic cinema (think Rear Window, The Conversation) and the information age.

"I’ve read we’ve got 20 percent of the world’s cameras in the UK," Arnold said. "There’s a lot of CCTV – it’s kind of a fact of life in this day and age. But my character uses it in a way that people are not supposed to use it. It’s supposed to be a crime-prevention tool; you’re not supposed to be following people. But who wouldn’t be tempted? I find just watching people fascinating, people going about their lives and doing ordinary things. I find it riveting." *

RED ROAD

Opens Fri/4

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.myspace.com/redroadfilm“>www.myspace.com/redroadfilm”>www.sfbg.com

www.myspace.com/redroadfilm

Cerebral vortex

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Guy Maddin, that demented dealer in antiquities responsible for such cinematic curiosities as The Saddest Music in the World and the much-loved short The Heart of the World, has a new film showing at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. The semiautobiographical Brand upon the Brain! – a silent quasi-horror film about an orphanage that harvests life-giving brain juice from its wards – will be accompanied by a live orchestra, Foley artists, a castrato, and narration by local star Joan Chen. Maddin, winner of the Persistence of Vision Award at last year’s festival, spoke with the Guardian about his new film and a whole lot of other stuff.

SFBG How involved were you in orchestrating the live performance of Brand upon the Brain!?

GUY MADDIN Well, I was pretty involved in insisting on it. I really, really, really wanted it. In its first incarnation at the Toronto Film Festival, the directors of the festival were good about it. They were gracious, and they made it possible, and then it sort of set the standard for subsequent shows…. I never worried before. You know, when you’re a filmmaker, there’s something in the word film that almost seems to imply the creator is making it more for him or herself. But when you’re putting on a live event, you just automatically …

SFBG You think more about the audience?

GM Yeah, I’ve become more of a showman…. I sort of staged it as an event as a form of boredom insurance, because I do know that you only buy so much audience goodwill with live performances. But then that wasn’t enough for me – I had to add Foley and an interlocutor, and I’m lucky enough to know a bona fide castrato.

SFBG Wait, this is a bona fide castrato?

GM He is, but, well, you know, he wasn’t castrated by the pope [laughs] or anything like that…. He’s an old friend of mine, and I met him many years ago in a steam bath in Winnipeg. I just heard from out of the thick steam a very unearthly voice and for a few nanoseconds thought I was in the wrong steam bath. He sings in a boys’ choir still to this day even though he’s 45 years old. I think his voice just never changed.

SFBG What are you working on right now?

GM I’m pleased to tell you I’m finishing up a documentary on my hometown of Winnipeg. And I’m collaborating with a poet, John Ashbery, on a feature-length Internet interactive movie labyrinth, so that’s kind of exciting for me. And I’m also collaborating on a script in its early stages with Kazuo Ishiguro.

SFBG I heard on some commentary track that you put together features in 20 days or something nuts like that.

GM Yeah, I really like to work quickly. But though most people would never suspect this of me, I really care about scripts being in good shape. And I’m especially proud of the script for Brand upon the Brain!. I feel it’s accessible without at all compromising anything I’ve ever wanted to do. One thing I’ve learned how to do is to become more honest about myself, about how horrible a person I’ve been over the years, and somehow the more honest I am, the more literarily solid my scripts feel.

SFBG Yeah, that’s the dirty secret of film and literature: the nastier you are about yourself –

GM Yeah, the more self-loathing you are, the more self-loving you come off. In this case the protagonist in the movie is actually named Guy Maddin, so it enabled me to be supermasochistic. I just don’t have the imagination to think up the kind of things that are in this movie. There are things that I’ve just outed my family on.

SFBG Really?

GM It’s all there. I just don’t have the time or the genius to –

SFBG To think of nasty things that aren’t true?

GM Yeah, I just had to transplant them pell-mell and wholesale into the body of this thing, and then it was just a simple matter of putting them in order. *

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN

Mon/7, 8 p.m., $20

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

For a longer version of this interview and for short reviews of other films from the second week of the San Francisco International Film Festival, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Full of Zizek

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Despite Sigmund Freud’s strong distrust of cinema ("I do not consider it possible to represent our abstractions graphically in any respectable manner," he firmly wrote in a letter to an inquiring film producer), Freudian psychoanalytic theory – primarily as reread by the French analyst Jacques Lacan – has come to form the bedrock of much academic film criticism and theory since the 1960s. Anyone who has had a brush with a film class in college has probably gotten an earful of 50-cent concepts such as scopohilia, suture, fantasy, and everyone’s favorite chew toy of power, the phallus.

If you didn’t take notes the first time around, you might want to while watching Sophie Fiennes’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a veritable crash course on what film can tell us about psychoanalysis and what psychoanalysis can (and sometimes can’t) tell us about film. Fiennes may be listed as the director and producer, but this monster of a clip reel is really the baby of its host and our tour guide, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek.

Ursine in stature and always slightly disheveled, Zizek is no stranger to the camera. In Astra Taylor’s somewhat worshipful documentary, Zizek! (2005), he delivered his mile-a-minute thought trains, encompassing everything from ethnic jokes to Hegel, with a brusqueness befitting a football coach and the on-the-fly reflexes of a standup comic. Zizek is in similar form in Pervert’s Guide, which isn’t so much a guide as a meandering recapitulation of some of his major talking points, first laid down in books such as Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Sinthome!

Zizek’s central thesis is that film is our most perverted art form, since it doesn’t really tell us what to desire but rather how to desire. Using an array of snippets – from The Exorcist to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Charlie Chaplin films to vintage Disney cartoons – Zizek illustrates how cinema is the ultimate fantasy machine (which sometimes produces films about fantasy machines. See: Tarkovsky). We project our desires onto the events and characters we watch, Zizek explains, inasmuch as those desires are already psychically inscribed long before they are played out onscreen. Film often literalizes these psychic structures or, at the very least, sets them into relief.

As in his books, here Zizek will often take a basic question or proposition (such as "Why is the only good woman a dead woman?" – when discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and turn it inside out, revealing the hidden issue that was actually being addressed or occluded all along ("Because men contain the threat of desire by mortifying their objects of desire: women").

Hitchcock and Lacan make many appearances, being that they are two of Zizek’s favorite bedfellows – the man wrote a book about both. (Zizek has a go at David Lynch now and then, but his readings of Lynch’s "primal scenes" and "terrorizing, clownish father figures" are a little pat.) It is not surprising, then, that some of his most brilliant insights and close readings are delivered on his many return trips to Bodega Bay, the decrepit Bates’s manse, and Judy Barton’s neon-illuminated room at the York Hotel in Vertigo.

Fiennes’s one trick (and granted, it’s an effective one) is to do this literally, casually placing Zizek within mock-ups of the scenes that he has discussed. We see Zizek in Melanie Daniels’s skiff puttering across Bodega Bay; next he’s alongside Regan’s bed from The Exorcist; later he’s speaking from the fruit cellar of Norman Bates’s house, or Dorothy Vallens’s apartment in Blue Velvet, or the dimensionless white field where Neo instantaneously summons weapons in The Matrix. This playful technique helps cut through some of the density of Zizek’s more arcane points, and occasionally, we catch the man off guard, cracking cheesy Freudian one-liners about the inherent obscenity of tulips (while watering a garden a la the opening scene of Blue Velvet).

It is not just that Zizek is as well-versed in Lacan as he is in Hitchcock – or that he casts his critical eye toward topics both high and low – that has made him such a popular figure, even with nonacademics. (Zizek is, as far as I know, the only intellectual to be interviewed for Abercrombie and Fitch’s now-defunct Quarterly). This intellectually challenging, often entertaining, and at times draining lecture-posing-as-a-documentary proves at least one thing: Zizek’s combination of disarming charisma and utter seriousness makes him as entrancing as his arguments are compelling.

THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA

Thurs/3-Fri/4, 7 p.m.; Sat/5, 2 and 7 p.m.; Sun/6, 2 p.m.; $6-$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

Ponder or ignore? Enjoy

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> johnny@sfbg.com

The oldest film festival in the United States and Canada, the San Francisco International Film Festival reaches its golden anniversary this year. That’s half a century of bringing movies from all over the world to one area of America that doesn’t assume America is the world.

At this moment a solo videomaker has to kill at least a few dozen people to storm the multinational media palace. Yeah, this thought crashes the SFIFF’s party. But it adds context to the fest’s contents. One Guardian contributor recently forwarded me a news story that drew specious links between the Virginia Tech tragedy and Park Chan-wook’s 2003 movie Old Boy. The presence of The Bridge (a documentary that uses images of death in a problematic manner) at last year’s SFIFF proves that film festivals also face ethical dilemmas about what they present. Does increasingly pervasive digital imagery correspond with a decrease, rather than an increase, in imagination? Does it prompt a lazy way of seeing and corrupt the meaning of an image?

The SFIFF offers a chance to enjoy – not just ponder or ignore – such questions. As a major progenitor of the festival model that has come to dominate cinema outside of Hollywood, this event often celebrates and represents the establishment, as Sam Green and Christian Bruno’s 2000 short film Pie Fight ’69 makes clear. But unlike many younger festivals, the SFIFF’s programming favors substance over sensation.

George Lucas, Robin Williams, and Spike Lee will be feted this year, but the Guardian‘s SFIFF 50 coverage has an eye for diamonds in the rough: great, quiet films such as Heddy Honigmann’s Forever; a definitely maddening but possibly classic work of art, Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth; and digital animator Kelly Sears’s hilarious short works – in step with hallucinatory digital mind-blowers and eye-blinders such as Paper Rad – which feature in the type of one-time-only SFIFF collaborative event that can yield a memorable night.

I’d like to draw attention to the SFIFF’s two entries from the New Crowned Hope series recently curated by Peter Sellars (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt and Garin Nugroho’s dazzling Opera Jawa) and to close by freestyling the praises of Veronica Chen’s gorgeous Agua. In its regard of two generations of men, of male physicality and psychology, it is a pleasurable, less-austere improvement on Claire Denis’s highly acclaimed Beau Travail and part of a possible new wave of cinema – led by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane – that trailblazes the cinematic potential of contemporary sports performance and its portraiture. Dive into it and SFIFF 50. *

Cinema brut

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Early on in A Parting Shot, Isild Le Besco’s character curls up at a bar, crowded by two leering men ordering her the hard liquor with which she courts abnegation. A couple cuts later, she’s teasing one of her throwaway lovers for asking her to be tender, warning the next in line that she’s "pas douce," or "not soft." Pas Douce is the original title of Jeanne Waltz’s finely calibrated debut, though it could pass for several French offerings with similarly bruising and bruised heroines at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.

French art cinema has been rife with sex of the pas douce sort for years now: a diverse group of filmmakers (Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Francois Ozon, and more recently, Jean-Claude Brisseau, of Exterminating Angels infamy) has coalesced, marked by the provocative blend of hyperrealism and hardcore. The French have never shied away from showing a little skin – it would be silly to think the original new wave didn’t owe some of its cachet to it – but these latter-day sexual misadventures represent something pointedly unpleasant in form and content. Critic James Quandt dubbed it new French extremism, though cinema brut works just as well.

In SFIFF films such as On Fire, 7 Years, and Flanders, this tendency is toned down but still embedded in narrative and character. Being French, all three feature some manner of love triangle: in Claire Simon’s On Fire, teenage Livia (Camille Varenne) plays like Lolita, teasing a boy her age while imagining herself the object of a swarthy fireman’s desire (hello metaphor!); in 7 Years, Jean (Valerie Donzelli) has sex with her prisoner husband’s warden on tape, nominally for hubby’s benefit; and in Flanders, sad-eyed Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) opens her legs to two neighbors going off to fight an unnamed war in the Middle East.

They are all Mouchette’s daughters, these women. Mouchette, the title character of Robert Bresson’s stark 1967 film, is perhaps French cinema’s gold standard of female suffering (with all due respect to Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc). She’s there in the shots of Barbe on her back, staring skyward in full surrender to a man’s grunting weight; in the way Livia sighs while putting a cup of coffee on for her father; and certainly when Le Besco’s Frederique rides her bike into a lake in a fit of ecstatic despair (Mouchette ends her own life rolling into a bog).

Bresson’s content was indivisible from his unadorned film style, and here too these new directors toe the line, shooting in long takes, often on location, with a handheld camera and a resourceful approach to sound. As far as formulas go, this one’s a pretty safe bet in film festival circles (see: the Dardenne brothers and Abbas Kiarostami). Flanders director Bruno Dumont (The Life of Jesus, Humanite) is already well established in this regard, and while On Fire, 7 Years, and A Parting Shot all have their good points, his latest film is the clear standout among the SFIFF’s cinema brut. It strikes me as Dumont’s version of (and perhaps, improvement on) Michael Cimino’s 1978 The Deer Hunter in the way it mediates battleground and home front as two complementary parts of one continuous, damaged landscape. The Flanders segments work better than the ones in the desert, both for Leroux’s unnerving performance and for Dumont’s painterly compositions (the director grew up in this part of northern France). Flanders occasionally breaks down in its long silences, but it’s a beautifully wrought film, full of carefully plotted mirroring and harrowing disruptions. It’s also unremittingly physical – the sound design of boots squashing and sucking the Flanders mud is all the exposition we could ever need.

Flanders possesses a formidable style indeed, but the closing lines of Quandt’s essay still demand satisfaction: "The authentic, liberating outrage – political, social, sexual – that fueled such apocalyptic visions as Salo and Weekend now seems impossible, replaced by aggressiveness that is really a grandiose form of passivity." Or maybe there are simply too many of these films and scenes piling up, diluting the resonance of any one effort. An uncomfortable question: how would we respond to Mouchette if it were released in this deluge?

It’s impossible to say, but I have little doubt that burnout had something to do with the pleasure I took in Christophe Honore’s new wave-meets-J.D. Salinger yarn, Dans Paris. Honore’s film is steeped in Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer, and while individual bits feel too cutesy (e.g., Louis Garrel skipping down a Paris street in fast-motion), most of this nervy technique has retained its bite, thanks to the staid but lurid minimalism of new French extremism. Honore’s characterizations are tenderly muted rather than brutishly absent; he’s more concerned, in proper new wave fashion, with the talk before and after sex than the act itself. Rather than aiming for extremism (and let it be said that 2001’s Amelie represents, in its own way, as extreme a vision as that year’s Fat Girl), Honore charges Dans Paris with eclecticism: of tone and thought and most likely meaning too. *

DANS PARIS (Christophe Honore, France, 2006). May 4, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 7, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki

FLANDERS (Bruno Dumont, France, 2006). May 6, 5:15 p.m., PFA. Also May 8, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki

ON FIRE (Claire Simon, France/Switzerland, 2006). May 5, 1:45 p.m., Clay. Also May 7, 7 p.m., PFA

A PARTING SHOT (Jeanne Waltz, France, 2006). May 5, 7 p.m., Clay. Also May 7, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 8, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 10, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

7 YEARS (Jean-Pascal Hattu, France, 2006). May 5, 9:30 p.m., Clay. Also May 7, 7 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 1 p.m., Kabuki

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