Film Archives — Page 128 of 168 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

An interview with “Stranded” director Gonzalo Arijon

November 5, 2008

By Mara Math

No one was more surprised than I that Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains proved to be one of my favorite films at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (it opens theatrically Fri/7). Like everyone else on the planet, I knew the notorious story, subject of Piers Paul Read’s 1975 mass-market book Alive, the 1993 Hollywood movie of the same title that followed, and the pop culture residue: the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 survived their arduous ten weeks by way of reluctant cannibalism. Stranded, a thoughtful and meditative documentary by Gonzalo Arijon, which mixes interviews with silent, nearly poetic reenactments, is the anti-sensationalist antidote to the Hollywood version. Formally, the film took four years to make, but a truer reckoning would be 34 years. Arijon grew up with the young team members and had been thinking of this film ever since the event. His lifelong friendships gave him unprecedented access, not only to archived materials but to the hearts and souls of the survivors and their families.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: One source called your films “unabashedly partisan.” Would you say that’s accurate?

Gonzalo Arijon: I agree with this description. It’s true that my most of my films are about social and political issues. And this is like an exception to some people. A lot of friends and [colleagues] don’t understand really why I put so much energy and time in this subject — they don’t understand the political issue of this subject.

Margaret Tedesco

November 5, 2008

Walking down the street the other day, Margaret Tedesco was struck by an oddly inspiring slogan on a slick poster for a Las Vegas spa: Live vicariously through no one.

"I saw that and thought, ‘This is me,’" she says enthusiastically. "I have my own agenda, and the biggest thrill of all is the surprise I find living it myself."

The indie spirit of that comment may sound a bit self-centered, but Tedesco’s approach to that agenda always includes inviting others into the fold. Whatever she puts her mind to, be it performance (often involving film and a persona-altering blonde wig), choreography, photographic works, publications, or, most recently, the cozy, artist-run [ 2nd Floor Projects ] gallery in the Mission, it invariably brings people together in dialogue and shared experience.

Tedesco’s performance and wall-based art are in public circulation — she was included in "Bay Area Now 4" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is contributing a live piece to a program at Slaughterhouse Space in Healdsburg this month, and is currently part of a group show of artist-gallerists at Blankspace in Oakland. There, she has raided her archives to present images of her history, including her participation in political activism in the late 1960s.

But it’s [ 2nd Floor Projects ], which Tedesco debuted in April 2007, which has garnered the most consistent attention, both locally and in the international art press. The gallery is very much her space, and it functions as a Sunday afternoon salon, a place where you can count on finding interesting art and conversation. Chances are, Tedesco will tell you about another event that evening — a notable writer, perhaps, giving a reading in a similarly salon-like setting — or she’ll introduce you to another artist who just came in to see the show. She’s lived here two decades, time enough to know hundreds of creative souls, and she’s worked for years as a graphic designer at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she is as much a mentor to students as a support to faculty.

Tedesco, it seems, knows just about everyone, and not only within a single genre box. Her community is truly multimedia. It includes writers, artists, filmmakers, thinkers, activists, eccentrics, and adventurers of all stripes. And she actively brings people together as a component of her work. Combining her keen interests in art and writing, she produces a limited-edition publication for each of the exhibitions in her space, pairing a writer with an artist. For a randy show of rarely seen drawings and paintings by twin brothers and legendary filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar, poet Eileen Myles created a broadside. Novelist Dodie Bellamy wrote an appreciation of British artist Tariq Alvi for his exhibit at the gallery. For an upcoming show of works by the late filmmaker Curt McDowell, Tedesco has tapped filmmaker/writer William E. Jones, who, she learned, is planning a McDowell biography. I know from experience — Tedesco invited me to write for a show by Nao Bustamante — that the goal is to generate writing that exists outside the standard art magazine form.

This type of matchmaking is one example of the kind of vicarious thrill Tedesco thrives on. "The joy of any exchange is watching it perform before my eyes. I get to be surprised," she says. And so do we.

projects2ndfloor.blogspot.com

Barry Jenkins

November 5, 2008

Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy was one of the biggest successes of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, but it almost didn’t happen.

"We shot the movie fast and thought maybe we could pass it around to friends," Jenkins says. "I started cutting it and said to myself, ‘This is really coming together. Fuck it, let’s try to get it into the San Francisco International Film Festival.’ I looked on the website and the deadline had already passed. But I’d stopped (San Francisco Film Society Executive Director) Graham Leggat coming out of the bathroom at another film festival — it was rude, you should never stop someone coming out of the bathroom — and he remembered me and gave my film a fair viewing. God bless him."

Medicine For Melancholy, Jenkins’ first feature, is a love story about Micah (Wyatt Cinach) and Jo (Tracey Heggins), two black San Franciscans who come together and fall apart over a 24-hour period. Race, displacement, and resentment play into their affair in surprising and subtle ways.

"I had the idea for this movie years ago," Jenkins says, "and I’d placed it in Chicago or New York City, but to me the city had to be a character. That could only be San Francisco. It would be silly for Micah to be so into Jo in New York or Chicago. [Meeting] Jo here makes him like an explorer in the Amazon who has come across an endangered species. He wants to run everything that’s happening, to him and the city, by her. If he would shut the fuck up, he could get the girl."

Though framed as a romance, Medicine tackles one of the most pressing — and overlooked — issues in San Francisco: black people, and the city’s lack thereof.

"Micah is based on this person I became after my first functional interracial relationship dissolved," Jenkins says. "When I moved to San Francisco, I was viewing the city through the prism of this relationship, living in this great, multi-culti San Francisco. When that relationship ended, San Francisco became a different place. There’s a great indie arts scene here, a great indie music scene, but they’re predominantly, if not entirely, white. You don’t consciously become aware of it until one day you look around and say, ‘Oh shit, I’m the Last Black Man on Earth!’

"The question became: Is there a place for me as a black man in San Francisco? Sure, there is. In LA, I couldn’t write for two years. I come to San Francisco and over the first eight months, I’d written five screenplays. One of which became my first film. But it seems like nothing can stem the tide of the migration of all people of a certain economic background — people who’ve had to leave San Francisco, and who are now commuting to keep the city beautiful for people who make tons of money.

"For a time, there was a proliferation of gentrification in San Francisco, but it is shifting to displacement, and not just displacement based on race, but displacement of anyone who cannot afford to live here. And I think the reason it has proliferated is because not enough folks have taken the city to task. There have been folks, like the Guardian, who write about this shit all the time, but a lot of folks have been afraid to speak out."

This writer is here to tell you: it’s not too late.

www.strikeanywherefilms.com

Shift happens

November 4, 2008

› news@sfbg.com

Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Americans have been bombarded with one big concept summed up in one little word: change.

It was Barack Obama’s slogan from day one and represented many people’s hope for the future, an idea that so appeals to beleaguered Americans that the Republicans eventually adopted it as well. Both parties recognized that the country would have to make big adjustments to salvage the economy, environment, schools, and health care system.

They each cited factors that point to the big changes that are coming — but they didn’t mention a huge one that has been bearing down on our species for nearly 5,200 years: the colossal transformation of solar system and our collective psyche that the ancient Mayans and their modern day supporters believe will take place Dec. 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar comes to an abrupt end.

Erick Gonzalez, founder and spiritual leader of Earth Peoples United, a nonprofit organization that works to bridge indigenous values with modern society, says the event will deeply disturb our minds and bodies here on earth. Nearly 300 people from around the world gathered Oct. 31-Nov. 2 during a 2012 conference at Fort Mason Center.

Some enthusiasts predict an apocalypse, while others foresee a shift in human awareness. Yet they all believe that big change is coming.

The Mayan calendar was developed by ancient astronomers who concluded that Dec. 21 was the sun’s birthday, noting that the winter solstice marked the beginning of the sun’s return from around the world.

Gonzalez, who has been studying Mayan culture for 33 years, says Dec. 21, 2012 will be a monumental birthday for our sun, when it will shift to the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, on the galactic equator, for the first time.

The Mayans believed this was the precise spot where the sun — and all life — was created. Followers of the ancient theory claim the Milky Way will give birth to a new sun and a new galactic cycle on this day, marking the beginning of our world’s transformation.

"For the Maya, this is like the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve," said philosopher Roderick Marling, a Tantric yoga teacher who has spent the last 36 years researching yoga meditation and expanding consciousness, in addition to writing numerous papers on religion, mythology, history, and archeology. "The galactic clock will be set at zero point, and a new processional cycle will begin," he said.

As our planets shift overhead, believers say our awareness of the Earth, political issues, and each other will also change. Conference co-organizer Christian Voltaire says many of the changes in 2012 will be tangible, such as revising our current financial model or switching to alternative fuels. He points to former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who advocated for extreme change in monetary policy — abolishing the IRS and the Federal Reserve, for example — and Obama, who has pushed for transforming the economy with green jobs. "They’re at least conscious of the fact that something has to change," he says. "And, as we’ve been told by our prophesies, change is coming."

But skeptics have their doubts. Wouldn’t we be pushing for green energy anyway? And how could the shifting planets cause the financial meltdown — or even the actual meltdown of our polar ice caps? University of Florida anthropologist Susan Gillespie says the theory is a media myth and nothing more. Susan Milbrath, author of Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars and curator of Latin American art and archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, believes it’s unlikely the Mayans could have predicted such events.

Believers remain undeterred. Last Gasp Books employee and conference attendee Eliza Strack says her 2012 obsession started as an innocent topic of conversation many years ago. She believes alternate realms of existence and multiple dimensions of time could collide, allowing us to access our past, present, and future in one moment. "We spend a quarter of our lives in a dream state where alternate realities are playing themselves out," Strack says. Gonzalez backs her up, arguing that the alignment of the sun in 2012 will create a powerful magnetic force, and human protons and electronic will react to it.

Lifelong Mayan researcher John Major Jenkins, who has written several books on 2012, brings up the possibility of the sun inverting the earth’s magnetic fields. But according to Vincent H. Malmström, professor emeritus of geography at Dartmouth College, there’s no hard evidence to support Strack’s claim. Besides, how could a magnetic pull bring our dreamlike realities to life? Malmström writes in his paper The Astronomical Insignificance of Maya Date (www.dartmouth.edu/~izapa/M-32.pdf): "It would seem that Jenkins has advanced our understanding of the Maya from the sublime to the ridiculous."

Although we have four years before the astral shift, Voltaire says it’s crucial to hold 2012 conventions now. "The weekend before the election carries a vibration of anticipation of the future. We wanted to connect with that." The Southern Californian didn’t know much about the 2012 theory before last March, but he says he’s constantly alert and keeps a subtle ear out.

"I kept hearing the subject of 2012 in my consciousness — at events, on the radio, at yoga class," he says. "Everyone was talking about it." After making a few phone calls, he partnered with 2012 author and filmmaker Jay Weidner, a native Oregonian who has been studying the subject for nearly 20 years. Sponsored by Weidner’s company Sacred Mysteries Live, they organized their first convention in Hollywood in March 2008 and were blown away by the response.

Their conference last weekend was even bigger. With interactive panels and community circles, participants could share their ideas about 2012. Voltaire and Weidner say it represents something different for everyone: change, chaos — even beauty. In the midst of it all, the organizers premiered 2012-themed films and documentaries that filmmakers submitted along with an entry fee of — $20.12.

The conference also offered critical analyses of some related prophecies: the Mayans, Tibetan Buddhists, Incas, and the mysterious Cross of Hendaye. They lived in different times, and had different notions about the events that would take place around 2012. Conference organizers say Inca texts prophesized "a world turned upside-down" around that year, while Tibetan Buddhists predicted the mythical city of Shanballad would be constructed at the end of the current era.

Voltaire says the Cross of Hendaye — a 400-year-old monument in the coastal town of Hendaye, France — holds the key to the paradigm. The cross was first described in the 1926 book The Mystery of the Cathedrals, written by an alchemist named Fulcanelli. In 1995, before learning of the 2012 stories, Weidner was hooked on this book. He worked for years to decipher the messages behind the cross, deconstructing a Latin inscription carved into its top, and finally claims to have discovered its meaning: "It represents a world crisis that will end this time period.

There’s exactly one presidential term left before the end of this time period, which has witnessed everything from financial crises to homelessness to global warming. But will a new era end the problems of the current one? It’s hard to imagine how thousands of San Francisco’s poorest residents will acquire homes, or how our ozone layer will suddenly thicken.

After rifling through more books, Weidner says he discovered another secret behind the cross: that the Earth’s greatest changes will take place between 1992 and 2012. During that time so far, we’ve seen the birth the Internet, economic globalization and overextension, mass extinctions and global warming, terrorism and imperial hubris, exploding populations and rising discontent, and the end of the age of oil coming into sight. Then again, 20 years is a long time and life moves fast these days, with or without a mystical cross.

Nevertheless, since his supposed discoveries, Weidner has written two books and one film about the Cross of Hendaye’s secrets. In addition to a simpler belief that attributes a natural, geological pattern to these changes, three other prophecies predict some version of disaster or shift around 2012. Weidner admits this could be an incredible coincidence, but he thinks we should be aware of today’s experiences anyway. "There’s no doubt this is one of the most incredible time periods in human history."

While no one knows what will go down Dec. 21, 2012, Strack likes to put a positive spin on the brewing events. She wonders if 2013 will bring sweet-smelling city air, friendly neighbors, and tricycles for old folks to ride to the grocery store. After all, who believes that a shift in consciousness would be a bad thing?

Many followers even look forward to the date and equate it with the second coming of Christ, when they will be blessed with knowledge and euphoria. "Those are the happy thoughts," Strack says. "Yin-yang that shit and you find the darkest, most terrifying possibilities." She says she has had multiple apocalyptic dreams, leading her to ponder World War III, death, chaos, betrayal, and everything else that could hit the fan in 2012.

This sort of anxiety has led some people to use the term "doomsday" when describing the last day of the Mayan calendar. Although the theory has no solid academic backing, it is catching on. YouTube hosts countless videos of asteroids striking earth, tsunamis, tornados, and incidents of chaos linked to the date. Many devotees are preparing for hell on earth. But Voltaire says 2012 isn’t all about doom and gloom. "Our prophecies are about facing the facts and bringing up new ideas, acknowledging indigenous cultures of the past and present and truly listening to what they have to say, not brushing them off."

During our country’s time of change, we may not have heard many full-blown prophecies coming to pass, but we have all witnessed powerful people raising fresh ideas, such as rapidly shifting to new energy sources, developing international standards of human rights and controls on the use of force, and attacking poverty and disease worldwide. Like the 2012 followers, we’re listening and trying to remain open-minded.

If you chose to listen — to the prophecies or the new president — you might ask yourself how you’re supposed to prepare for the future. Voltaire says that "if you’re conscious of the changes, you’ll be able to roll with them, like if you’re in the ocean swimming with the tide. But if you’re unconscious and you suddenly wake up, it’ll be a lot harder to deal with."

Voltaire and Weidner say that our president will need to prepare too. They think that for him to be successful, he will have to address issues such as green energy and global warming brought forth at the 2012 conference.
Whether we’re believers or not, our country’s in for some big changes, whatever the solar alignment.

Editor’s Notes

November 4, 2008

› tredmond@sfbg.com

In Milk, the new Harvey Milk movie, the hero (as in real life) is well aware that he’s a target and faces regular death threats. He also makes the point – and it’s kind of a theme in the film — that the movement he represents is far bigger than he is. It’s about the movement, not any one person, he keeps telling his supporters.

And that’s what we have to remember now that the Nov. 4 election is over.

Thanks to the weirdness of old-fashioned print publishing schedules, I’m writing this well before election day, and by the time you read it, Obama will have won the election. It’s a giddy feeling, actually winning a campaign on this level after so many bitter disappointments. And that’s fine — we should celebrate while we can.

But we should also remember that the real work starts now — and that’s the work of making sure that President Obama is accountable to the people who put him in office.

No other candidate in my adult life has had the kind of grassroots support that put Obama over the top. From the early days of the primaries, he has raised money on the Internet from tens of thousands of small donors. People who have never worked in a political campaign came out to volunteer for him. He has offered hope — and that’s a dangerous commodity. Because now he has to deliver.

We can’t expect too much too fast — but we can demand that he gives the progressive side of the Democratic Party its due. We don’t want the war to drag on. We don’t want the rich to keep gaining market share. We don’t want big business to derail environmental programs. We actually want change, real change — and we have to keep pushing for it.

Electing a president is necessary, not sufficient. It’s still about the movement.

(And if I’m all wrong, and John McCain is the next president, we all better start singing "O Canada")

The Thousand Faces Ball

November 4, 2008

PREVIEW Imagine the unsavory digs of the Mos Eisley Cantina of Tatooine stormed by a horde of previously barred droids and miscreants and forced to hold a variety show to stave off certain destruction — it’s a scene reminiscent of those generated by San Francisco’s OmniCircus, which has been simultaneously thrilling and troubling audiences for two decades. Founded by local surrealist artist and roboteer Frank Garvey, first as a film project, then as a live performance troupe, OmniCircus combines the high tech with the lowdown, propagating an environment where down-and-out robot performers and their human counterparts can come together under one roof, creating a spectacle part Transmetropolitan, part Captured! By Robots, and part The Black Rider. No mere vehicle for cream pies and contortionists, this darkly subversive one-ring circus has all the hallmarks of an ecstatically apocalyptic experience: music, mayhem, and mechanical mendicants. The Thousand Faces Ball marks the latest incarnation of the project, introducing the Moth nor Rust band starring OmniDiva Joan Loon, and retaining the talents of longtime DeusMachina collaborators, including Daniel Berkman and Geoffrey Pond, as well as an army of robotic riffraff: junkies, beggars, street preachers, and whores. Billed as the world’s first robotic theatre ensemble, OmniCircus is nevertheless no ephemeral vision of the future, but a thorough examination of the present through an unsentimental, yet curiously life-affirming lens.

THE THOUSAND FACES BALL Sat/8, 8 p.m., $10 donation. OmniCircus, 550 Natoma, SF.

(415) 701-0686, www.omnicircus.com

Vampire romance

November 4, 2008

REVIEW If you see but one preteen vampire romance this year, make it Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Rumor has it that Hollywood is looking to remake Alfredson’s adaptation of a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, with Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves in the director’s seat. While Reeves might bring boffo box-office numbers, it’s safe to assume that he’ll either overlook or sledgehammer Alfredson’s sleight-of-hand talent for finding the art in pop iconography and vice-versa — areas where Alfredson rivals Bong Joon-ho. He brings fiery Carl Theodor Dreyer undercurrents to a Spielberg revenge of the nerds scenario, mining the dark heart of childhood with the same revelatory and musical assuredness that fellow Swedish director Lukas Moodysson (1998’s Show Me Love; 2002’s Lilya 4-ever) exhibited before falling into a digital black hole.

The story is simple: loner outcast Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) falls for Eli (the superb Lina Leandersson), a pale girl with a big secret. The pleasure of Let the Right One In resides in its flair for surprise, from the uncanny performances of the lead actors to humorous surreal motifs such as an enormous white poodle lapping at a plastic jug of blood abandoned in a forest. In one standout set piece with direct connections to the film’s title, Alfredson reverses the genuinely creepy window-tapping found in the original 1979 TV version of Salem’s Lot. Throughout, he explores the subversive age-spanning love scenarios in Lindqvist’s story with just the right amount of restraint, so that instead of provoking outrage, he unsettles assumptions. He’s not bad at executing decapitation and immolation scenes, either.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN opens Fri/7 at Bay Area theaters.

The trouble with hairy

October 29, 2008

HALLOWEEN SCREENING What’s most shocking about Oliver Stone’s W. — beyond anything in the too-mild movie itself — is that it’s simply dramatizing a still-seated US president. That still feels like a breach in our near-extinct public decorum, however much Shrub has degraded the office’s dignity.

Yet there’s precedent: one prior era brought a slew of movies about its Disaster-in-Chief. Once Watergate broke, filmmakers from late radical-left documentarian Emile de Antonio to future Roller Boogie (1979) director Mark L. Lester weighed in with parodies.

Little-noticed then, these films have only grown more obscure since. But one gets revived as the Pacific Film Archive’s Halloween choice this year. Despite all its flaws, it remains one of the more hilarious metaphors ever for political corruption. We’re talking The Werewolf of Washington.

Werewolf was the second and last feature by writer-director Milton Moses Ginsberg, whose Coming Apart (Rip Torn as a psychiatrist having sex with his female patients) created a minor splash in 1969. That film was an early exercise in faux-found footage narrative à la The Blair Witch Project (1999). By contrast, his hairy 1973 follow-up looks as stylistically square as the Nixon White House, last bastion of political Lawrence Welk-dom.

This is one of those movies hinged entirely on a crazed lead performance. Dean Stockwell, old-Hollywood child actor turned counterculture collage artist turned weirdo cult actor (1986’s Blue Velvet, 1984’s Dune) plays Jack Whittier, youngest member of the White House press corps. Sweetheart to the president’s daughter, Whittier jilts her by taking an assignment in Hungary — where something not-quite-human bites his ass. Returning stateside, he’s recruited as press secretary to a president (Biff McGuire) unlike Tricky Dick in look or manner.

But Werewolf‘s satire is indirect, if not exactly subtle. Despite pleas to be fired — even arrested — Whittier keeps getting kicked upstairs. He’s too much an asset to a paranoid administration under scandalized fire. That value is not unrelated to mysterious man-beast slayings of various loudmouths exposing the administration’s ethical canyon-gaps. Victims include critical journalists, inconvenient political wives, and ill-fated DC residents who stumble across supernatural murder scenes.

The Werewolf of Washington is crude, sloppy, aesthetically ugly, and deliberately ridiculous. But Stockwell is hilarious, particularly during those twitchy lycanthropic transformations where he turns shock-white haired and fanged. This genius turn floats an otherwise flimsy film.

THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON

Fri/31, 8 p.m., $5.50-$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Future present

October 29, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I remember in the beginning I used to fuck around and not care about anything at all," says Steven Ellison, who records under the guise Flying Lotus. "But now it’s, like, Thom Yorke likes my music, dog. Now I think, oh shit, will Thom like this beat?"

It must be a happy conundrum to wonder if one of the world’s biggest rock stars will like your new song. Tinkering around his studio in Winnetka, a sleepy suburb in the San Fernando Valley, Flying Lotus works on a long-distance project with Burial. When he’s done, he’ll send the track over to the United Kingdom for the junglist producer to tweak. News of Flying Lotus collaborating with Burial, two of electronic music’s freshest new stars, will probably make some fans smile with pleasure. From Radiohead’s Yorke and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow — who recently noted in an interview with Remix that Flying Lotus makes "pure, mad music" — to the beat heads who ravenously scoop up any new Lotus material, everyone seems to love FlyLo.

So how did Flying Lotus become the so-called Chosen One? Los Angeles teems with a renaissance of kindred spirits. Carlos Niño (whose range includes Gaby Hernandez’s progressive folk valentine When Love [Armed Orphan] and Lil Sci’s rap treatise What’s the Science? [Shaman Work]), Daedelus (who blends early 1990s zoo rave with film soundtrack compositions) and Nobody (whose Nobody Presents Blank Blue: Western Water Music Vol. II [Ubiquity] eyes ’60s-ish psychedelic pop) all use electronic music as a starting point for forays into various genres.

Andrew Meza, who hosts BTS Radio on CSU-Fullerton and was an early champion of Flying Lotus, compares the scene to the vaunted "New Hollywood" wave of American directors in the early ’70s. "It’s a really small group of people doing really cool things," he says. In his opinion, Flying Lotus stands out in part because of his studio techniques. Although the artist records in a bedroom, his music sounds as polished as a major label product.

"People used to say this about Dilla — and I’m in no way comparing him to Dilla — that [when he finished beats] it sounded like everything was already EQ’ed and mastered," Meza says. "With [Lotus], his shit seems so much louder and bass-y."

Now, as a leader of the flourishing beat movement, Flying Lotus has launched a digital label, Brainfeeder, to issue projects from like-minded friends such as Samiyam and Ras G. To promote the label, he’s throwing a Brainfeeder Festival Nov. 8 at 103 Harriet St.

The best music often sounds like everything and nothing before it. Flying Lotus’ work evokes comparisons to J Dilla and Madlib and fits neatly into flavor-of-the-moment trends like 8-bit and dubstep, yet it is also excitingly unique. He utilizes standard bedroom production equipment, including a MacBook Pro and a Novation 25 MIDI controller, to make hauntingly fluid and improvisatory sounds. "My whole setup is probably less than a couple of Gs, man," he says by phone from Winnetka.

He samples other people’s work, then renders the sounds so unrecognizable he often can’t remember what they originally were. On Los Angeles (Warp), Flying Lotus pays homage to his late aunt, the great jazz pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, by appropriating material from her 1968 debut, A Monastic Trio (Impulse!), for "Auntie’s Harp." "I tried my best to transform all the harp stuff so it didn’t sound like the original, but still had the essence," Flying Lotus says. "SexSlaveShip" builds on a more obscure source: ambient/acoustic folk artist Matthew David’s Spills (Plug Research). Another track, "GNG BNG," draws inspiration from DJ Shadow’s breakbeat experiments of the late ’90s.

As a result, Los Angeles, released in June, is part modern-day homage to California’s holistic vibes and progressive utopianism, and part science-fiction film, making for an arresting future present. "It’s the classic hero’s journey kind of thing, basically a story like a film," Flying Lotus says, adding that the movie that initially inspired him was Ridley Scott’s classic 1982 dystopia Blade Runner. "It’s the soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist."

The recording’s mood ranges from the deeply reflective vibes of "Golden Diva" to the steel drum-speckled techno funk of "Parisian Goldfish." There are a few vocal pieces on Los Angeles, particularly the lushly sensuous "RobertaFlack" with Turkish artist Ahu "Dolly" Keleslogu, whom Flying Lotus met online. For the most part, however, its liquid hip-hop instrumentals sing louder than words. As FlyLo puts it, "I wanted to make music that didn’t need a voice."

BRAINFEEDER FESTIVAL
With Flying Lotus, Gaslamp Killer, Kode 9, Hudson Mohawke, Ras G, Samiyam, Kutmah, and Martyn
Nov. 8, 9 p.m., $15 advance
103 Harriet, SF
www.blasthaus.com

Speed Reading

October 29, 2008

WOLFGANG VOIGT — GAS

By Wolfgang Voigt

Raster-Noton

128 pages with CD

$46.49

One of many noms de guerre of Kompakt Records founder Wolfgang Voigt, Gas represented the vanguard of a techno-ambient hybrid that flourished throughout the 1990s. The cryptic methodologies of Stockhausen, the operatic pretensions of Wagner, and the libidinal energies of Deleuze were bandied about in this subculture of citation and pastiche. The result was an interdisciplinary flourishing of art beyond the strict borders of musical formatting into mixed media.

Voigt’s newest release — a book of photographs taken throughout the forests surrounding his native Cologne — is finally gaining international renown for the record boss, composer, and aesthete. The book is a cousin to the landmark Nah und Fern box set released earlier this year by Kompakt. As with Nah und Fern, Voigt’s photography centers on the forest and the sky — potent artistic and political signifiers of nature in the German psyche.

"Gas is Hansel and Gretel on acid … a seemingly endless march through the under woods — and into the discotheque — of an imaginary, nebulous forest," Voigt has said. In reality, Voigt’s images are much less jejune or ambulatory than such a quote might imply. The dense forest tableaux combine the beauty of Lee Friedlander’s desert brambles with the sinister fluorescent emulsions of Warhol’s "Death and Disaster" series. The ingress of techné that — through serial repetition and fractals — dominates these images in turn triggers a surreal aura: the natural and mechanical blend effortlessly in Voigt’s lens. To say these representations of the magic forests of Germany are disturbing is an understatement. But they are also meditative and inspiring. (Erik Morse)

THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR

By Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley

Harper Paperbacks

432 pages

$14.95

Calling The Book of Lists: Horror a reference book seems a bit unfair, if only because that designation makes it sound like something you don’t read front-to-back — something that probably doesn’t have a section titled "Eli Roth’s Ten Nastiest Horror Movie Genital Mutilations." Roth’s ouchfest is only one of the many such lists the book offers in its five sections. Film and literature receive special attention, but other horrific areas don’t go ignored. The result is a playful, comprehensive, and immensely readable work. Seasoned horror gurus will appreciate veteran list guru David Wallechinsky’s annotated look at a half-dozen overlooked horror films, while anyone who’s not too sensitive can enjoy "James Gunn’s Nineteen Favorite Reason God Made Humans So Squishy."

Authors and editors Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley have attracted an impressive array of talent to make contributions: Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and a posthumous Johnny Ramone all make appearances, and most have something interesting to say. With so many lists, not all can be as entertaining as "Davey Johnson’s Account of the Involuntary Reactions of Ten Dates to Ten Horror Movie Moments." But since the format allows for plenty of skipping around, misguided entries can be easily avoided. If there’s one real complaint to be levied against The Book of Lists: Horror, it’s that the visual content is underwhelming. Images should certainly accompany lists like "Steve Niles’s Top Twenty Horror Comic Covers." Sure, you’d have to lose some text, but it’s like they always say — one picture of disembowelment is worth a thousand words. (Louis Peitzman)

Bump(s) in the night

October 29, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the new animated horror film Fear(s) of the Dark, artistic director Etienne Robial convened some of the most influential graphic artists of the modern era and dared them to respond to a simple question: "What scares you?" Working under minimum guidelines of time limit and color (monochrome was required), the selected comic and graphic novel artisans — including cartoonist Charles Burns, The New Yorker illustrator Blutch, British designer Richard McGuire, and others — produced highly personal vignettes that were woven into a Sigmund Freud-meets-William Gaines omnibus. But as with 2006’s celebrity smorgasbord Paris, je t’aime, the ambitious conceit of Robial’s film exceeds the individual contributions, which often drift into misguided forms of pop-psychology and self-conscious pleonasm. Never more terrifying than The Interpretation of Dreams, and never more enlightening than Tales from the Crypt, Fear(s) of the Dark is nonetheless an interesting exercise in atmosphere.

Structured as a frame story of sorts, the film begins with a pack of four voracious hounds, tethered to a sadist, who set out across the countryside in search of blood. Positioned along the backdrop of this chase are four vignettes of horror that center on popular phobias. The opener, created by Charles Burns, follows a social outcast whose childhood fascination with entomology comes to haunt him as a young man. When maladjusted student Eric finally meets the girl of his dreams, Laura, the creepy twitch of insects from his bed threatens to wreck his chances. Burns’ beautiful comic-book drawing style, a black and white relative to Lichtenstein’s panochrome creations, perfectly captures the frenzy of young lovers destined for doom.

The second tale, by far the most underdeveloped and least satisfying, centers on a young Japanese girl possessed by an Edo samurai. Drawn in the fast-paced anime style, Marie Caillou and Romain Slocombe’s use of proleptic slippages — although common in the anime genre — are often more confusing than frightening and gives the sequence the overall sense of an abridged sketch. In contrast, Lorenzo Mattotti’s contribution is much more mysterious and subtle in tonality, using a less op-art form of shading and pencil strokes. His story focuses on a young boy whose town is terrorized by a nocturnal beast, a literal bête noire. When a school chum claims to know the monster’s location, he suddenly disappears and the boy joins a search party to slay whoever or whatever is responsible.

The fourth vignette, contributed by Richard McGuire, deserves special attention for its innovative use of silence and darkness to instill a particularly effective kind of horror. A man stranded in the middle of a blizzard forces himself into a darkened house for shelter and finds a mysterious presence waiting for him. Forgoing the loquacious first person device used in other chapters of the film, McGuire explores the muted setting of the house itself, which may or may not have its own sinister character. The genius of McGuire’s piece rests in its celebration of the virtual and inanimate through mere suggestion — the creaking of the stairwell, the slamming of a door, the momentary pall of a silhouette. Inspired by the likes of James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) and Roman Polanksi’s The Tenant (1976), McGuire seems keenly aware that the trope of the haunted house is as indebted to the semiotics of the domestic as it is to the novelty of the transmundane.

As the highlight of Fear(s) of the Dark, this final vignette actually challenges many of the oedipal motifs that imbue the bulk of the film. The recurring use of first person confessional lends the vignettes in question a trademark French patina of Godardian psychoanalysis à la King Lear without any real artistic consequence. In other words, Fear(s)‘s theoretical misstep lies in its linking phobia with strategies of therapy — declaration, repentance, and ultimately, resolution — the hallmarks of the "healthy" adult, not the fantasizing child. Its redeeming beauty only arises when the collection of haunted scenarios aims for the viewer’s callow spine rather than his existential brain.

Fear(s) of the Dark opens Fri/31 in Bay Area theaters.

XXX-tant love

October 29, 2008

Platonic buds Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) live together, are completely devoted to each other, and yet loudly maintain that they are just friends — until they decide to sleep together on camera to pay off their debts. Oh, and sleep with other actors too, because that’s what you do in a porno. Ah, nothing like white-hot jealousy to make a long-dormant heart start beating, eh?

Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Kevin Smith’s latest, reminded me of his previous feature, 2006’s Clerks II. It elicited the exact same equally powerful, and seemingly contradictory, reactions. During the film’s first half, I guffawed at such moments as Zack and Miri’s discussion about sex toys for men versus those for women, during which Zack refers to his ability to pleasure himself with the help of two Popsicle sticks and a rubber band, like "a filthy MacGyver." But the off-color hilarity is all but buried by the film’s final third, which is full of typical romcom misunderstandings and mush. Writer-director Smith stands alone in his ability to create films that contain equal parts raunch and sap — and while Zack and Miri has a few shining moments, overall it never quite (ahem) comes together.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno opens Fri/31 in Bay Area theaters.

Book art

October 28, 2008

PREVIEW San Francisco Center for the Book makes an ideal SF setting for "Banned and Recovered," a group exhibition devoted to censored literature. (The exhibition also has an East Bay installment at Oakland’s African American Museum and Library.) Not all the contributors present examples of book art, though. Enrique Chagoya’s large painting Double Portrait of William Burroughs turns its subject’s face into, among other things, a pizza of disconnected Peter Bagge-like facial features. Appreciative of Burroughs but far from worshipful, Chagoya also taps into 1950s horror film iconography, depicting the author as a little fly excreting waste.

Among those artists who work directly with books as materials or create them, standouts include: Wendy Miller’s Joseph Cornell-like sewn-shut Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Barbara Kossy’s The Origin of Species (which makes use of an old illustrated guide to birds); and Brian Dettmer’s Brave New World (which draws upon Aldous Huxley’s tome to create a brain facsimile that also looks like an retro-futurist temple).

The exhibition is well arranged — it’s a smart move to place Emory Douglas next to Favianna Rodriguez, who continues Douglas’ graphic tradition. But the presentation of most works is too heavy on exposition, to a degree that can inhibit one’s interpretive, um, readings. Some pieces dodge this restrictive feeling through playful, imaginative approaches. Jonathan Burstein, who recently had an excellent show at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, dolls up the Marquis de Sade so he becomes a cherry-cheeked Mona Lisa. Nigel Poor’s Washed Books makes good on its title, putting nine prose works about women — including Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita and Stephen King’s 1974 Carrie — through the washer until poetry emerges from the lint.

BANNED AND RECOVERED: ARTISTS RESPOND TO CENSORSHIP Through Nov. 26. Mon.–Fri., 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sat., noon–4 p.m. San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro, SF. (415) 565-0545. www.sfcb.org

The two Colin Powells: Obama’s and W’s

October 20, 2008

Colin Powell and Jeffrey Wright

By Steven T. Jones

It was weird to watch Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama for president on the same day that I saw Colin Powell (as played by actor Jeffrey Wright) help lead the country into an ill-fated war in Iraq, despite privately expressing all the right concerns and misgivings, on the big screen in Oliver Stone’s new film W.

Powell, the real one, was eloquent and insightful as he endorsed Obama on Meet the Press, in the process calling his own Republican Party to task for the nasty tactics it’s using to smear Obama. And perhaps the best scene in W is when Powell butts chests with Dick Cheney over the reasons for going to war as Karl Rove lurks in the shadows.

The mirage

October 14, 2008

>johnny@sfbg.com

America is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.

— Dave Hickey, "A Home in the Neon"

If, as Oscar Wilde once claimed, a lie can tell the truth, then what Dave Hickey writes is truer than ever: looking at Las Vegas is a terrific way to see the United States. Paul Verhoeven knew as much when he made Showgirls (1995). The fact that his old-school Euro-Hollywood auteur vision of Sin City offended so many bourgie film critics only proved its lasting, um, value. Like Verhoeven, the Italian artist Olivo Barbieri also appreciates Las Vegas from a distance. But while Verhoeven maintains his distance even in the middle of a lap dance, with site specific_Las Vegas 05 (2005), Barbieri prefers literal remoteness. He appraises the bright colors and the neon glow of Las Vegas from up above, via a helicopter.

The resulting view of the Entertainment Capital of the World, another chapter in Barbieri’s ongoing project of urban portraiture, is one half of Henry Urbach’s well-timed exhibition "Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas." Within Urbach’s black-box presentation, Barbieri’s long-distance perspective trades off with the Tetris walls, distorted mirrors, and repetitious gambling-addict flurries of Stephen Dean’s warmer yet less resonant No More Bets (2004). At first glance, the amazing thing about Barbieri’s videos is how unreal and utterly toy-like the cityscapes appear, and Las Vegas is no exception — thanks to his tilt-shift lens 35mm photography, a rooftop antique-car rally looks like a kids’ collection of model cars, and the Luxor’s Sphinx and white-nippled Pyramid are mere parts of an elaborate toytown.

Today, as the US dollar seems more abstract and illusive than ever, Las Vegas’ playland presentation of all that money can buy has attained a new level of honesty. (It also seems endearingly quaint in comparison to 21st century "evil paradises" — to quote Mike Davis — such as Dubai.) "The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication," Hickey writes in "At Home in the Neon," from Air Guitar (Art Issues Press, 216 pages, 1997). When Vegas resident Hickey notes that "there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert," he may as well be writing a description of Barbieri’s video, though site specific_Las Vegas 05‘s helicopter hovers like a dizzy bird above an old McDonald’s and the Stardust’s ’50s-luxe marquee (where Wayne Newton is missing an e). Barbieri’s debt to a site-specific avant-garde film tradition (such as pat O’Neill’s 2002 The Decay of Fiction) becomes clear when he reaches the fountains of the Bellagio. There, he wryly connects waterworks out of Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice (1953) with soundtrack detonations that evoke Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976). Bathing in the sensory overload of "Double Down: Las Vegas," one suspects that — like the arcade in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s apocalyptic Pulse (2001) — Las Vegas would go on glowing and chiming long after all the people are gone.

Dave Hickey begins Liberace: A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz (BükAmerica, 16 pages, $1.49), a tribute to the ivory-tinkling owner of the world’s largest rhinestone, by describing his own balcony view of the Strip, where the neon logos of the Desert Inn, the Stardust, Circus Circus and other sites make the surrounding nature look "bogus as hell." As Hickey puts it, more wittily than Jean Baudrillard, "the honest fakery of the neon" trumps "the fake honesty of the sunset." Perhaps we should replace the face on the one-dollar bill. George Washington has done his time. Bring on Liberace.

DOUBLE DOWN: TWO VISIONS OF VEGAS

Through Jan. 4, 2009; $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

The land of the screen

October 14, 2008

>johnny@sfbg.com

My flight to Canada was delayed, so I missed James Benning’s RR, the first film I planned to see at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Plane snafus kept me from seeing Benning’s film about trains, which had graced the cover of a recent Guardian issue devoted to life on the rails (and by extension, American capitalism off the rails). The first face to greet me in Canada was that of Sarah Palin, on TV screens by the arrival gate and above the luggage carousel. There she was, again, this time at the Vice Presidential debate. Since the airport TVs were muted, her lines of dialogue took the form of subtitles.

Even though I missed RR, Benning’s influence was present in a pair of sharp-eyed features by women who map personal visions of the United States. Train-hopping figures in the beginning and end of Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to 2006’s Old Joy. At the start of the film, Wendy (Michelle Williams, in a role that’s taken on an added subtext of grief) and Lucy (played by Reichardt’s dog of the same name) walk into a beatific but beat-up nighttime campfire scene that’s like a Polaroid Kidd photo come to life. By the end, at least one of them has forsaken fuel car for train car.

A different story involving one woman, a camera, and the land, Lee Anne Schmitt’s California Company Town takes a more direct look at the American landscape. Schmitt’s documentary adds another volume to a growing collection of rural and urban US portraits by Cal Arts alumni, from Benning to Thom Andersen (whose 2003 Los Angeles Plays Itself shares Schmitt’s focus on California history) and William E. Jones (whose increasingly significant 1991 Massillon might be the precedent for Schmitt’s mix of voiceover and radio chatter, as well as her use of 16mm film). No doubt about it: Schmitt’s dry, scathing report on the fatal nature of California capitalism and the greater American dream was the festival’s timeliest film.

The unsentimental relevance of California Company Town hasn’t kept some viewers from blaming the messenger, who aims to provoke by capping her survey of the state’s ghost towns with a voiceless look at Silicon Valley, where even nature takes on a sterile, cult-like ambiance. At Vancouver and elsewhere, Terence Davies has been praised for Of Time and the City, his voiceover-heavy screed against capitalism’s facelifts for Liverpool, yet Schmitt’s relatively low-key approach to similar subject matter pisses off more people. For some, maybe the truth — especially when accompanied by Irma Thomas’ "Time is on My Side"— stings most when spoken by a woman. Andersen and Fred Halsted have demonstrated that Los Angeles plays itself. Schmitt shows how California plays us.

Both capitalism and socialism are skewered with no mercy and maximum mirth by Jim Finn’s The Juche Idea, which takes the published film theories of none other than Kim Jong-Il as its point of entry. If the extreme solitude of Schmitt’s film demonstrates one type of (autobiographical) radical filmmaking ideal, then Finn’s madcap feature demonstrates another. It’s a playfully braided collaborative effort. The main actresses (Jung Yoon Lee, and Daniela Kostova — a painter, video artist, and "the lesbian" on Big Brother Bulgaria 4) wryly insert their authorial voices and visual creativity into the film’s world. And what a mad, mad, mad world it is: one where Korean language courses teach kids how to pronounce "Karl Marx was a friend to children" and instruct adults on how to relieve their "loose bowels."

This world — where shoveling duck dung together makes for a romantic first date — looks like North Korea, one has to guess, or at least "Dear Leader’s" ideal version. Still, reviewers who assume capitalism emerges unscathed from the uproarious Juche Idea are watching the movie with one eye closed. Finn spotlights hilarious propagandistic turns of phrase such as "the tiny dentures of imperialism." But with one capitalist land outside the movie screen saddled with a 700 billion dollar debt, a viewer is left to wonder who’s zooming who when passing through the film’s multi-faceted looking glass. Jaw-dropping stadium-size spectacle, punch line-worthy blue screen backdrops, a mural by SF painter Carolyn Ryder Cooley, and the type of absurd corporate training footage beloved by Animal Charm all figure within Finn’s one-of-a-kind picture. The closing titles credit more than one person with "Kim Jong Il Flyface Assistance." Make no mistake: The Juche Idea is a communal effort.

Communal cooperation and journeys through the looking glass are also at play in Albert Serra’s Birdsong and Vancouver International Film Fest programmer Mark Peranson’s documentary about Serra’s movie, Waiting for Sancho. If Schmitt’s California Company Town is near-academically reductive and definitive in its approach to land, Serra’s Birdsong couldn’t be less prescriptive: with help from Google Image, the director chose the Canary Islands as a last-minute setting for his idiosyncratic retelling of the birth of the Christ child.

Process is to the fore of Serra’s filmmaking, which combines Andy Warhol’s and Apichatpong’s interest in boredom (and Warhol’s carefree neglect of camerawork) with a comic view of the heroic quest. Serra’s more immediately pleasurable Honour of the Knights (2006) updated Don Quixote; this time, the Three Wise Men verge on Three Stooges trapped in a Beckett scenario. Birdsong improves after one observes its filming through the video camera of Peranson (who plays Joseph in Serra’s movie). The ancient Three Wise Men of Serra’s film multiply to become a contemporary crew in Peranson’s documentary, which charts an aimless yet instinctive search for just the right cinematic moment at just the right site.

Communal cinematic spirit also enlivens Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis, a day-in-the-life melodrama about a family that operates — and lives within — a soft-core porn theater where hustlers ply their trade. At Cannes this year, Mendoza’s movie inspired panty-twist outrage from critics rich enough to be proudly unaware that people have bodies and sex costs money. While Serbis definitely owes a debt to Tsai Ming-liang’s masterful Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2004) and Jacques Nolot’s Porn Theatre (2003), Mendoza charts out and navigates a unique meta-cinematic space that is somehow even sun-dappled. He’s helped considerably by the superb actress Gina Paredes — and by a last-minute cameo from a goat.

Cooperative efforts aside, Vancouver didn’t lack commercial films powered by old-school singular auteur visions. One such standout was Hunger, the directorial debut of the English artist (not the deceased American actor) Steve McQueen. The formal daring of McQueen’s rendering of Bobby Sands and the IRA — which veers from wordless passages into a one-take presentation of an extended conversation — doesn’t become apparent until the very end, when his film suddenly embraces the award-grubbing political docudrama clichés that it’s avoided. Regardless, McQueen’s talent for framing shots and constructing scenes is prodigious. Tomas Alfredson makes no such missteps with Let the Right One In. If you see only one Swedish preteen vampire romance in your life, make it this one. The planned US version by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves will almost certainly lack Alfredson’s pop translations of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s desire and fire. Likewise, the subversive preteen sexuality of Alfredson’s original is unlikely to make the trip from Sweden to California. Vampires bite, but Hollywood remakes really suck.

Looking in at outsider art

October 14, 2008

Midway through I’m Like This Every Day, friends of underground musician Peter Stubb debate whether or not Stubb is actually a werewolf. Such is the unverifiable quality of Stubb’s legend. Since the early 1990s, between trips to the state mental hospital in Georgia, Stubb has made nearly 100 rare but highly sought after home-recorded cassette tapes of his often catchy, but lyrically death-obsessed, violent, and sad acoustic music. Stubb’s lo-fi tapes, some available only in editions of one or two, have the eerie, timeless, and deeply lonesome feel of old Alan Lomax field recordings. When director Mitchell Powers goes to the haunted, piney, Civil War blood-soaked hills of northwest Georgia, he finds that Stubb’s story shares some of the epic and tragic quality of the old bluesmen at the crossroads.

As the film opens, we see home video footage of a young and fresh-faced Stubb looking into the camera and saying, "Music is basically my life." The first shot of contemporary Stubb is of just his arm, lined from wrist to elbow with scars from self-inflicted knife slashes, as he strums the guitar. The story of the rough years in between is told chronologically by interviews with Stubb and childhood friends from defeated, dead-end factory town Dalton, Ga. — known as "the carpet capital of the world." Along the way we learn tales of Stubb painting his own child in blood and fucking a can of cranberry sauce during the making of his classic "Blueberry Masturbator" tape, while we meet characters like a shirtless, neck-tattooed friend of Stubb’s named Number Two, who cheerfully makes his screen debut trying to piss into his own mouth with one hand while carrying a tall can of Steel Reserve in the other.

Yet when Stubb’s ex-wife remembers fondly, "No one had ever sang to me like that before," it is achingly sweet. The film is so compelling because debut director Powers never sensationalizes these characters, but instead presents their stories with generosity and warmth. By refusing to diagnose Stubb or dismiss him as mentally ill, Powers suggests that the struggle to stare down our demons is one we all share. In only 19 minutes, Powers’ sympathetic short probes the uncomfortable border between being an artist and being insane. Stubb’s friends speak of him with reverence, awe, and a loving acceptance: "Peter gets obsessed with these shadow demons that inhabit his body," explains Number Two, with suddenly sober conviction. "And the only way he can get them out is to cut them out."

I’M LIKE THIS EVERY DAY PLAYS WITH BIGFOOT: A BEAST ON THE RUN

Sat/18, 5 p.m.; Oct 22, 9:30 p.m., $10.50

Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF

www.sfindie.com

THE SEVENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL runs Oct. 17–Nov. 6 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF and the Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. For tickets (most shows $10.50) and more information, visit www.sfindie.com>.

Land of the free, home of the brave

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October 14, 2008
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By Cheryl Eddy

> cheryl@sfbg.com

Things I learned while screening a double-wide stack of DocFest discs: there’s a perilously thin line between superfan and super-stalker. Bacon and Miracle Whip wrapped in a tortilla makes a pretty tasty snack. It’s possible to be pro-bird, but not anti-cat. When uttered in the context of The Price is Right, the words "a new car" and "come on down" battle for the title of three greatest in the English language. And there are two passionate schools of thought that divide the Bigfoot-is-real community: flesh-and-blood vs. supernatural.

America may be super-fucked in many ways, but we’ll never be short on weirdos, nor will documentary filmmakers ever tire of recording their antics. DocFest’s 2008 slate is roughly three-fourths devoted to the United States of Oddballs. And why not? Seriously, it’s fascinating stuff. One of the best films is by Swiss filmmaker David Thayer, who travels across the Northwest in search of men who’ve devoted their lives, or at least a good chunk of hobby time, to studying the region’s most elusive life form. Bigfoot: A Beast on the Run is as deadpan as anything in the Werner Herzog canon; it never once mocks its subjects, even when talk strays from giant footprints and muffled audio recordings to men in black and photographs of the creature in "interdimensional orb form."

A different type of hunt is the focus of Andy Beversdorf’s Here, Kitty Kitty (2007), filmed in the trenches of Wisconsin, circa 2005, amid the great should-feral-cats-be-declared-"non-protected" debate. In other words, should you be able to shoot that stray cat that’s been yowling around your garbage cans? In this corner: the slightly befuddled academic who published a study blaming free-ranging felines for the state’s declining songbird population. In the other: kitty-rights activists. Cute, furry peril is also a theme of Bunnyland (2007), in which filmmaker Brett Hanover trails Pigeon Forge, Tenn. resident Johnny Tesar, a.k.a. "Johnny Rock," a singular character who implausibly finds Native American artifacts every time he looks at the ground — and was suspected of slaughtering a golf course’s 73 cotton-tailed mascots, among other misdeeds.

Another strange pocket o’ Americana surfaces in Elvis in East Peoria (2007), which is kind of about Jerry, an unambitious Elvis impersonator, but is also about the platonic yet curiously close relationship he has with his manager, Donna, who truly believes Jerry "oozes Elvis." (In case you’re wondering, this is where I learned about the magic of bacon plus Miracle Whip plus tortillas.) Crave more creepy fandom? Sean Donnelly’s I Think We’re Alone Now, about a pair of obsessed Tiffany fans, is among the more unsettling films I’ve ever seen. Despite a slight whiff of exploitation — one of the subjects has Asperger syndrome, the other is an alcoholic, and both are on disability — the film is a jaw-dropper, filled with trainwreck moments and revelations. Like, did you know Tiffany can time travel and communicate with aliens? More important, does she know?

Lest you think this entire festival focuses only on backwoods crazies, let me assure you that Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, an insider’s look at New York’s storied Chelsea Hotel, presents urban eccentrics galore — plus footage of the burning Twin Towers as shot from the hotel, and much lamenting about how the building’s recent change in ownership has affected its longtime residents. But not every DocFest pick has a dark flipside: Jeruschka White’s Come on Down! The Road to the Price is Right is a joyful tribute to the game show, with most former contestants admitting that their time onstage with Bob Barker ranks among the best in their lives — no matter how embarrassing the Showcase Showdown outcome, or how tacky the consolation prize.

THE SEVENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL runs Oct. 17–Nov. 6 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF and the Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. For tickets (most shows $10.50) and more information, visit www.sfindie.com>.

Doc workers

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October 14, 2008
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More DocFest:

>>A cockeyed view of a kooky country

>>Musical outsider may be genius, werewolf

>>DocFest Web site

> cheryl@sfbg.com

The first thing I noticed about the 2008 San Francisco International Documentary Film Festival was its enormous size. Well, OK, I actually squealed in delight over the inclusion of a Bigfoot doc. Then I took stock of how many films were contained in this year’s program. DocFest’s seventh incarnation is actually larger than its parent fest, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. Along with the Another Hole in the Head horror festival, both are headed up by founder Jeff Ross.

"It’s the biggest festival I’ve ever done — it’s three weeks long, 48 programs, 107 screenings altogether," Ross explains. This year, DocFest also unfurls a week of films at Berkeley’s Shattuck Cinemas. "I think there’s going to be a strong audience in Berkeley. I just moved to the East Bay, so it’s kind of part of my personal agenda to bring more of my stuff over there." For the first time Ross is also giving an award, naming filmmaker Melody Gilbert "Someone To Watch" based on the strength of her small but growing body of work.

DocFest’s 2008 line-up represents the work of programmers Bill Banning (owner of the Roxie Cinema, the chief venue for Ross’ festivals) and Fay Dearborn, a former programmer at Cape Cod’s Woods Hole Film Festival. She met Ross while working at IndieFest; after what she calls "one of those festival romances," the two married earlier this year.

Dearborn and Ross are obviously in synch, but Dearborn and Banning are also complementary, at least in terms of their programming styles. Banning culls most of his picks from films he scouts at fests like Washington, DC’s Silverdocs, while Dearborn sifts through DocFest’s hundreds of unsolicited submissions.

"I think Fay found most of the fun docs, though [I chose] Hi My Name is Ryan, which is really fun. I saw it at Silverdocs, and the audience was literally in stitches," Banning says. "The idea is to mix it up. There were two really good boxing films I saw at Silverdocs, and we took the better of the two, Kassim the Dream, which is an incredible film. But we’re also looking for good docs from the Bay Area, and there are a number of them in [this year’s program.]"

Banning and Ross agree that the increasing popularity of documentaries is due to multiple factors. "Digital filmmaking has totally changed the documentary landscape," Banning says. "It used to cost so much money to shoot 10 minutes of film on 16mm film. Now you can buy a really great camera for $6,000 and shoot forever on it."

Ross points to films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me (both 2004) — as well as past DocFest hit Spellbound (2002) — as exposing non-narrative films to a wider audience. But as Dearborn explains, the DocFest audience isn’t necessarily looking for films that have mainstream appeal. "I think there’s a certain core DocFest watcher who comes to see slice-of-life documentaries about people who are just inherently interesting, but not in a National Geographic kind of way — sort of a human interest story that’s maybe a little more offbeat," she says, citing the weirdly compelling Elvis in East Peoria and Bunnyland (both 2007) as films she’s particularly excited to screen.

For the first time, DocFest has a presenting sponsor in San Francisco-based Current TV, a doc-focused channel co-founded by Al Gore. Ross sees the partnership as a good match, but he’s hesitant to predict what’s ahead for DocFest. Despite the sponsorship, Ross says that DocFest and IndieFest are still funded 85 percent from their ticket sales, "which is unheard-of in the film festival world."

"I do not have a plan for 2009," he says. "I’d like to see how the festival works [at a larger size]. Everything I do is kind of an experiment. We try different things — this year’s it’s the expansion to Berkeley, so we’ll see how it goes."

THE SEVENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL runs Oct. 17–Nov. 6 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF and the Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. For tickets (most shows $10.50) and more information, visit www.sfindie.com>.

A touch of Grayson

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October 14, 2008
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SHOCKING PROFILE When I informed John Epperson, aka Lypsinka, that there was a biography of Grayson Hall, he said, "Of Grayson Hall?! God." Then I told him the title of the book, by R. J. Jamison: A Hard Act to Follow (iUniverse, 224 pages, $18.95). "A hard actress to follow," Epperson observed.

Epperson and I had reached the subject of Hall through a discussion of the thespian skills of Joan Bennett, whose plum-flavored line readings took on an extra coating of irony in Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria. The leap from Suspiria to a different sort of horror classic, the soap opera and movie series Dark Shadows, where Bennett and Hall were part of the cast, was natural — even if the actresses are two of the most artifice-laden in TV and film history.

Hall is entwined with her Dark Shadows character, Dr. Julia Hoffman. Yet she also garnered an Oscar nomination for her performance as Ava Gardner’s nemesis in John Huston’s 1964 The Night of the Iguana. (According to Jamison, though she wasn’t in the movie, Elizabeth Taylor was on set, sporting flowers made out of human hair.) Huston gave Hall the role because of a likeness to Katharine Hepburn, but there was also a bit of Kay Thompson to her onscreen presence, a characteristic photographer William Klein must have noted when he had her caricature his former boss Diana Vreeland in the fashion satire Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966).

Hall — real name: Shirley Grossman — is a camp and cult icon. "In death as in life," Jamison writes in A Hard Act to Follow, "she remains adored by a mixture of gay men, drag queens, and Dark Shadows enthusiasts." Hall’s arched brows and piercingly intelligent eyes were the standout features of a one-of-a-kind visage. Her mannerisms and cigarette-smoky voice telegraphed a complicated — dare I say neurotic — intelligence.

As Jamison’s book makes clear, Hall’s genius stroke in Dark Shadows was deciding to play her scientist character as if Hoffman was secretly in love with vampire Barnabas Collins, a facet that wasn’t explicated in the script. This week’s Shock It to Me! Film Festival spotlights Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis’ movie offshoots of the one-of-a-kind gothic soap opera, 1970’s House of Dark Shadows and 1971’s Night of Dark Shadows. In Night, Hall adds another Dark Shadows role to her turns as Hoffman and the gypsy fortune teller Magda Rakosi with housekeeper Carlotta Drake. Whatever the part, Grayson Hall made an impression.

"SHOCK IT TO ME!" DARK SHADOWS TRIBUTE

See Rep Clock.

www.shock-it-to-me.com

The Infinite Operation Iraqi Freedom

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October 14, 2008
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REVIEW It has been seven years since W. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in that time enough documentaries about the war have been made to warrant a Wikipedia page on the subgenre. From its explosive opening sequence, in which an Iraqi village endures a surprise attack from insurgents, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’ documentary Full Battle Rattle could be placed alongside Gunner Palace (2004) or The Ground Truth (2006) as another vérité-style portrait of daily life "on the ground." It’s when the smoke clears and an ice cream truck pulls up that we realize something’s amiss. This isn’t Iraq, but Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, and what we’ve just seen is part of a three-week long, intensive simulation meant to prepare US soldiers for conditions overseas.

Gerber and Moss follow one unit, led by the even-handed Col. McLaughlin, through the entirety of a training session as they attempt to win the hearts and cooperation of the fractious village of Medina Wasl. The villagers are actual Iraqi refugees, who despite their Shia, Sunni, and Christian backgrounds, have formed a genuine communal bond. As the deputy mayor, who used to be a Baghdad playboy in the ’70s, says: "I can’t even tell my wife, but after three years this feels more like home." The insurgents, on the other hand, are played by fellow American soldiers, and contribute to some of the most surreal moments in the film when they speak of taking out McLaughlin’s unit with unrestrained glee. The topsy-turvy world of Fort Irwin is further underscored by a commanding officer’s seemingly-contradictory comment that he hopes "the soldiers get lost in the reality of the simulation." Indeed, Gerber and Moss happen upon some unexpectedly candid moments amid all the play-acting: the tears shed at a mock funeral service for "fallen" comrades are real. Unfortunately, reality truly hits when the soldiers have to board an Iraq-bound plane at the end of the training. For some it will be a return trip. In the strange feedback loop between Iraq and the Iraq of Fort Irwin, Full Battle Rattle captures the seeming endlessness of the war.

FULL BATTLE RATTLE Fri/17, 7:30 p.m., $12.50. Premiere Theatre, Letterman Digital Arts Center, Presidio, SF. www.sffs.org

Pop Montreal, part one: Hot Chip heats up, Sic Alps smashes, Woodhands sweats

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October 10, 2008
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Great Northern: Mixylodian.

By Laura Mojonnier

Montreal is the kind of city you only appreciate once you leave for an extended period of time, as I did when I relocated to the Bay Area for a few months this past summer. Living here spoils you – it makes you think that all cities have vibrant art and music communities and cheap rent, that all cities serve poutine (fries, gravy, and cheese curds) at every 24-hour corner food joint for your drunken feasting.

Sure, there are drawbacks: the five-month winters, the unchallenged hegemony of skinny jeans, the fact that the gravely pit in front of my stairwell probably won’t return to its former state as a sidewalk until early 2009. But, at its core, this city has a fiercely independent nature that makes festivals like Pop Montreal possible.

What began in 2002 as a series of shows all booked in the same weekend has exploded into a five-day extravaganza that takes over every venue in the city every year in early October. The core of the festival remains the music, but now there’s Film Pop, Art Pop, Puces Pop (a craft fair/exhibition), Pop Symposium (panels, discussions, lectures), and Kids Pop. And though a small corporate presence has arisen – rumor has it that all staffers received a fresh pair of Converse this year – Pop is still run mostly by hip 20-somethings and a hoard of volunteers jockeying for five-day wristbands. As a result, the festival has a refreshingly laid-back, organic vibe, even if the published set times are occasionally unreliable.

New new wave

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October 7, 2008
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Everything changes, civilizations collapse, end times approach and recede, but there are always good movies from France. How can this be so? Every film culture has its periods of pervasive suckingness. France perhaps had one: the 1950s, when the stagnation of vapid costume epics and such made bores of icons like Jean Gabin, provoking the nouvelle vague as creative protest. But even then you could find some gems every year, by the not-shabby likes of Ophüls or Tati.

Thus the addition of yet another annual film festival to the Bay Area’s crammed calendar seems not only right, but bizarrely overdue. Surely there was some local equivalent to "French Cinema Now" before San Francisco Film Society hatched it? Non? Quelle horreur.

The spotlight this inaugural year is on attending writer-director Arnaud Desplechin (2004’s Kings and Queen). His latest, A Christmas Tale, which opens the event, encapsulates certain familiar Gallic cinema values: it’s an all-star dysfunctional-relationship blowout in which gaping verbal wounds are inflicted in a tone of light badinage, often amid lengthy meals enjoyed no matter how high the crises pile.

Catherine Deneuve is a matriarch whose health emergency necessitates the entire, drama-packed yet insouciant clan gather for Xmas — including Desplechin’s muse Mathieu Amalric (2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) as Henri, the son who’s such an obnoxious screwup he’s been "banished" from such gatherings for five years. The inevitability with which Henri will make everyone want to smack him is just the funniest of the myriad storm fronts brewing. You can get another big dose of Amalric as cause for multiple characters’ complaints in the director’s 1996 My Sex Life … or How I Got Into an Argument. There will also be a rare screening of his 1991 debut feature Life of the Dead.

That classically French template of character, ensemble, and dialogue-based seriocomedy — not to mention Amalric as a tantrum-prone theater director — is also on display in writer-director-star Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s amusing carnival of neuroses, Actresses (2007). Straddling fiction and nonfiction terrain is the closing night film by Laurent Cantet (2001’s Time Out), The Class. It’s a vérité-style urban schoolroom drama that arrives in SF preceded by sky-high praise and a Cannes Palme d’Or. Benjamin Marquet’s documentary, Lads and Jockeys, observes kids in a different educational setting: high-pressure training for a career in horse racing.

As in so many countries — though France’s industry holds its own pretty well — there are debates about whether Hollywood’s influence is snuffing out native culture or, conversely, whether homegrown product is too boring, arty, and lacking in explosions. Actually, that latter complaint grows less credible amid an emerging generation of interesting genre talents, even if many — like Alexandre Aja (2003’s Haute Tension) or Christophe Gans (2001’s Brotherhood of the Wolf) — all too quickly bolt for you-know-where. Franck Vestiel joins their ranks with Eden Log (2007), a dystopian fantasy boasting lots of dank atmosphere, almost no dialogue, and a serpentine plot that starts like 1997’s Cube and ends up more like The Matrix (1999).

Less edgy but likewise certainly not catering to art-house snobs is Pascal Bonitzer’s Alibi, a starry whodunit so old-school it’s actually got an Agatha Christie pedigree; while Dany Boon’s Welcome to the Sticks is a fish-out-of-water comedy that’s become the biggest hit in French cinematic history.

Last but not least, a screening of 1965’s seldom-revived Six in Paris flashes back to New Wave’s heyday and that once-ubiquitous art house animal, the omnibus film. Its half-dozen miniatures (by Rohmer, Godard, and lesser luminaries) set in different City of Light districts range from the playful to the shocking, ending with a 10-minute distillation of all things Claude Chabrol: gruesome death arrives as a sardonically just punishment for the irksome hypocrises of the petite bourgeoisie. *

FRENCH CINEMA NOW

Wed/8–Sun/12, see Rep Clock for schedule

$10–$15

Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF

(925) 866-9559, www.sffs.org

Dirty deeds

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October 7, 2008
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SIN-EMA Though he’s lived in Denmark since 1993, time and distance have only drawn author-archivist Jack Stevenson closer to his erstwhile home’s filmic arcana. Proof arrives via "The Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of San Francisco Amateur Sex Cinema." This Yerba Buena Center for the Arts–commissioned series flashes back to SF’s smutty ’60s, when the sexual revolution dragged "adults only" movies semi-overground. Its variably silly, serious, silicone-y, and psychedelic excavations prelude hardcore porn as legal reality, let alone professionalized industry. Back then, investment and commercial stakes alike were so low, anybody could make a "dirty picture" — and many pseudonymous anybodies did.

Indeed, even some titles are only guessed-at on Stevenson’s initial "Home Movies" bill, a quartet of 1968 16mm films whose performers and crew remain known perhaps nowhere beyond a few wild grammas ‘n’ grampas’ memories. In one, an Avon lady drugs a housewife for lesbi-manhandlin’. In another, Mommy does more than kiss Santa Claus.

Roving beyond SF, the "Flaming Striptease" program embraces celebrity ecdysiasts (Bettie Page, Jayne Mansfield), but also includes vintage faves (Batgirl!) from still-shakin’ Big Al’s in North Beach. But the destination baloney filling this greasy curatorial sandwich is The Meatrack, a first-last feature by "Richard Stockton" — a.k.a. future Market Street grindhouse-to-rep-house entrepreneur and Strand Releasing co-founder Mike Thomas. Made in 1968, it was blown up to 35mm and re-released to some 1970 success as "the poor man’s Midnight Cowboy."

Meaningfully monikered, abdominally defined protagonist J.C. (David Calder, briefly flashing the XXL package onscreen admirers pay for) is a young drifter who splits when anyone gets too close. That mistrust is rooted in flashbacks to a shrewish mother ("All men are alike!") and delinquent dad ("You’ll be boozin’ too after they’ve given you the purple shaft right up the old kazoo!")

Too damaged to separate being viewed as "a piece of meat" from offers (male and female) of real love, J.C. is a withdrawn bisexual hunk of some complexity. The film’s avant-garde editing, stereotyped yet sympathetic psychology, Warhol-esque drag improv, and vivid SF street-life glimpses turn Meatrack‘s "perversion" bouquet nostalgically fragrant.

THE SUPERSTARS NEXT DOOR: A CELEBRATION OF SAN FRANCISCO AMATEUR SEX CINEMA FROM THE #60S: See Rep Clock for schedule. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

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