Film

Les goofballs

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO How many calories in a Quaalude? Who’s the secretary of the interior? The sexy nurse’s tits pop out of her too-snug latex uniform, a lewd sneer twisting her face, and my mind begins to wander gloriously — up past the ass-licking performance artiste, his cheesy beret slipping sideways as he rapidly splashes acrylic down a huge vertical canvas; over the heads of the middle-aged guys dressed as pirates, ecstatically frugging to a bebop reverb saxophone solo; quick left at the grope-a-clown booth; and through the ceiling of DNA Lounge, into a nighttime of odd ruminations. This is probably dangerous. As leapfrogging fire twirlers quickly suck the oxygen from the club, I realize that I’d simply die if my last, strangulated thought was: wow, the more we upload exotic animals onto digital film, the more they seem to disappear from the earth.

Ladies and gentleman, a bohemian rhapsody.

Appropriate, since me and Hunky Beau are at Bohemian Carnival, the breathtaking, burner-inflected monthly hosted by Boenobo the Klown, ringmaster of local audio headtrippers Gooferman, and Mike Gaines, director of the erotically acrobatic Vau de Vire Society. You want trapezes? They’ll give you trapezes.

Through a series of regular off-the-wall club nights, DNA Lounge has transformed itself into a weekend costume party — goth kids in Doom-era gamer kilts one night, mashup sluts in Santa suits another — and Bohemian Carnival hews to that theme: it looks like Costumes on Haight exploded in here. I’ve never been a fan of store-bought transgression — I’m allergic to polymer pink bobs and rainbow boas, or rainboas. Still, hey, it’s probably really hard for straight people to get freaky and still look cool, so go for it! At least it’s not a bunch of prissy gays in $400 jeans or North Beach guys in swirly shirts with moulding mud-stained collars. Thank goddess for cheap dyna.

The whole vaudeville-circus club thing — a stunning contortionist here, a bearded lady go-go dancer there, bared cleavage everywhere — has blown up big-time. One might even posit that its moment has passed as an underground trend (the $15 cover charge at DNA could be evidence of this if the night weren’t such an expensive-looking spectacle), but since it all sprang from two of our native mainstays, Burning Man and burlesque, it’s not tanking any time soon in San Francisco — and I’m glad for that, ’cause it’s kind of freakin’ fascinating.

Sure, as the carefully staged bacchanal spins before me and the day-job techies get wild, there are the usual thoughts to fixate on: How Burning Man drops the spirituality and focuses on the crudely sexual when translated into a night club. How stereotypes of gender and race — if not necessarily class — collapse and re-form in a swirl of burlesquing desire. How people with amazing muscular tricks can finally find an appreciative audience. How flammable my dress was…. But there are some surprises here too. Imagine my shocked tingle when, on entering, I was greeted by an extended slam-poetic freestyle from MC Jamie De Wolf, hooted on from the sidelines by a crew of suburban-looking gangsters. Has hip-hop — albeit white hip-hop (an upcoming Bohemian Carnival features heartthrob beat-boxer Kid Beyond) — finally entered the Burning Man vocabulary? And a bubbly house set by DJ Smoove brought quite a bit more soul to the dance floor than I ever thought possible at such events. Nice.

Another surprise: more Las Vegas connections on the 11th Street corridor. While uppity clubs like Loft 11 unabashedly pimp Vegas show–style rock nights, Bohemian Carnival’s concept sprang from the legendary 2005 Vegoose Festival, where Boenobo and Gaines hosted VdV’s Twisted Cabaret for 80,000 people. Vegas, hip-hop, house — I guess I should have known. Burning Man’s prime notion is to filter the far-flung fabulosities of pop culture through X-ray goofy glasses; clubs like Bohemian Carnival reduce them to a steamy spot of light. Well, goof on, say I. *

BOHEMIAN CARNIVAL

Third Sat., 9 p.m.–4 a.m., $15

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

www.bohemiancarnival.net

www.dnalounge.com

www.gooferman.com

www.vaudeviresociety.com

www.djsmoove.net

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Unkinking the Armory

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by Amanda Witherell

Looks like you can’t just set up a porno film studio in San Francisco anymore. Neighborhood groups are looking to have more say in how kinky the Armory building at 14th and Mission is going to be now that it’s been purchased by kink.com for filming fetish flicks. So the Mayor’s office and the city’s planning department are scheduling some meetings to hash it all over in fine San Francisco style. It sounds like they sort of wish it became pricey penthouses after all and the mayor’s disgraced flak, Peter Ragone has turned on the spin, lamenting the loss of an opportunity to fill the building with affordable housing. No word yet on when those meetings will be, but we’ll be sure to let you know.

MONDAY

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EVENT

“Page to Stage”: Les Waters and Tony Amendola

A critical and crowd-pleasing hit in New York and London, Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman just opened at Berkeley Rep – and if there’s anything that’s gonna lure me to the theater, it’s the promise of onstage mutilation. Presumably, however, the only thing that’ll be splattering is dish when Berkeley Rep artistic director Les Waters and actor Tony Amendola chat and reminisce as part of the company’s “Page to Stage” discussion series. (Cheryl Eddy)

7 p.m., free
Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage
2025 Addison, Berk.
(510) 647-2949
www.berkeleyrep.org

FILM

Climates

If you want to sit in the dark for 100 minutes looking through the eyes of one of the best living photographers in the world, you’re ready for Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates. Ceylan’s fourth film proves he could give David Lynch a lesson in leaping from film to video – so ravishing it’s threatening, the cinematography captures heat with an intensity that could make you sweat in an air-conditioned theater before blanketing the movie’s potentially cliché love story in snow so heavy and fatal it looks and feels like volcanic ash. (Johnny Ray Huston)

In Bay Area theaters
www.nuribilgeceylan.com

Czar of noir

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

One doesn’t feel far from the dark, stylized universe of classic film noir in Tosca, a long, obliquely angled bar in North Beach. It is where I am to meet Eddie Muller, the man behind San Francisco’s Noir City festival and corresponding Film Noir Foundation, a self-described "writer and cultural archaeologist" with several spry volumes of film history to his credit — alluring, fanatic titles such as Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, Dark City Dames, and Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema.

"There seems to be an almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets are almost always glistening with fresh evening rain … even in Los Angeles," writer-director Paul Schrader writes in his seminal essay "Notes on Film Noir." Now, as the afternoon darkens, the Columbus Avenue strip is dry, but the Lusty Lady’s neon glows while I wait for the bar to open. Noir’s trademark deep focus would lend itself well to the space inside, filled with the stale smoke of yesterday’s cigarettes and deep red and mahogany: it’s a romantic kind of place, a remembrance of things past. One of the many dizzying plot twists in Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 Out of the Past — perhaps the most knotty and melancholy of the noirs, a preeminent example of the genus — has Robert Mitchum’s heavy chasing after a double-cross in a North Beach bar. I think about this as Muller strides in with an easy gait. We settle in to talk, and the jukebox turns to smoky jazz: "Mood music," he says and then laughs.

Setting the mood is something Muller is exceedingly good at. The first time I met him was at the press conference for last year’s Noir City, staged at the York Hotel’s appropriately named Empire Plush Room — deep red, again, with little flutes of champagne. The nightclub decor of last year’s festival may have been sucked up by the cavernous dimensions of the Palace of Fine Arts, but the attempt to establish a kind of interstitial lobby space was a nice gesture, especially since these films are, if nothing else, about atmosphere.

After two years away, this coming installment of Noir City, the fifth, will be held at the Castro Theatre. Muller’s decision to return to the Castro — made difficult by the theater’s firing of programmer and chief Noir City collaborator Anita Monga — speaks to the emphasis he places on the moviegoing experience, as well as his deep respect for Bay Area audiences. "We struggle to get 200 people to the theater in LA," Muller muses before adding excitedly, "I mean, we get five times that many people out here. The studios can’t believe it…. I always have to be careful when I talk about the numbers." He laughs. "You want it to be great, but you don’t want it to be so great that they’re thinking, ‘Wait a second, why are we giving these guys a break on these old films?’ "

It’s no wonder that studios take note of Muller’s successes. Hollywood’s big players trot out old movies on DVD not so much from altruistic preservation impulses as from an urge to fatten the bottom line, the sense that there’s an extra buck to be made from some old holdings. The studios have a long history of neglecting their archives, but when hundreds of people come out and pay their money for Raw Deal (a tough little 1948 Anthony Mann picture opening this year’s festival), heads turn.

Muller is modest when discussing some of the DVD sets he has helped spark, but this propriety does nothing to disguise his missionary zeal. When he describes a preservation victory, such as an upcoming John Garfield DVD set, he beams. But as he mulls over decaying prints, his countenance turns worried. (Though gussied-up imprints like the Criterion Collection give the sense that the classics are safe, the films they release represent only a small fraction of what’s in the vaults.) Muller details his maneuverings for Joan Crawford films ("She is the force behind these films…. She is the auteur as much as John Waters is an auteur") and how he ended up trading 1952’s This Woman Is Dangerous for 1950’s The Damned Don’t Cry for this year’s fest. The urgency in his voice is from more than just trying to score an outrageous Crawford vehicle. "In these last five or six years," he says, "I’ve learned the possibility is very real that American culture can just decay and slip away."

Muller’s experience runs deep enough that it’s easy to forget Noir City is such a babe. A spree through three venues in five years (the festival has also run at the Balboa Theater) has a way of making a festival grow up fast, though the major renovation to Noir City has taken place behind the scenes. Formed in the autumn of 2005, the Film Noir Foundation was originally conceived of as a means to land the best available prints of rare films, something very much on Muller’s mind after his experience booking Edgar G. Ulmer’s gonzo 1945 B-movie Detour for the second Noir City.

"What I came to realize was that there are prints that are circuutf8g prints and there are prints that are archival prints," Muller says. "When we had [Detour ‘s] Ann Savage as a guest that second year, the only print in circulation of Detour was junk. I knew that the Cinémathèque Française had a print that was good, but they would never ship it to the Castro [a for-profit theater]. So that’s where the San Francisco Film Society stepped in, and they said they’d book it for us…. Altruism wasn’t my initial motivation for doing this. It was about getting the good prints."

In the time since, the Film Noir Foundation has blossomed into a vital preservation group. "It achieved a life of its own," Muller explains, "because it became a viable way to create an entity that presents a united front to the studios to show that there was a reason and a value in saving these films. In the case of The Window [a 1949 film that anticipates Hitchcock’s Rear Window] and Nobody Lives Forever [from 1946, a taut con man picture with a typically strong John Garfield performance], we’ve done the restoration and put them back in circulation, and they show at other festivals, and the film carries the Film Noir Foundation logo. It’s a way of saying [to the studios], ‘Look, if we do this, you’re going to get more bookings out of the film.’ We’re almost like a lobbying group for film noir."

For every victory like those films’ restoration — or, for that matter, bringing celebrity writers such as Denis Lehane and James Ellroy on to the foundation’s board — there are many grueling and perhaps futile battles. The foundation, for example, has located the elements and "contacted the people we need to contact," Muller says, to restore 1951’s The Prowler, an edgy feature about a sociopathic cop. The film might be a key noir, but the Film Noir Foundation hasn’t been able to fund the process (which Muller quotes at $40,000). The ultimate trick would be to get the studios to realize the potential and take on these costs themselves, and that is happening but not necessarily fast enough to keep many prints from disappearing. "Even films by major filmmakers," Muller adds. "There are Billy Wilder ones that are questionable…. [1942’s] The Major and the Minor — is anyone preserving that film?"

Muller relishes talking shop about forgotten films (this year 12 of 20 films in the Noir City program guide are marked, in red type, "RARITY!!! Never on VHS or DVD!" with one, 1949’s Abandoned, emphasized as being "RARE AS THEY COME!!!"). But it’s important to note that his programming is also deeply inclusive. Noir, like any singular, involved body of work, has its cult, but Muller’s aims are broad enough to keep the festival from feeling too much like a Trekkie convention. More important to him than his specific love of noir is his audience’s moviegoing experience.

"This is something that Anita really taught me," Muller explains. "When I was first programming, I’d try to load the program with all these rare, obscure things, and she said, ‘No, what you have to understand is that you appeal to people who get it, but they want to bring their friends and say, ‘You gotta see this! " He continues, "She was absolutely right. Show the traditional thing but book it with something obscure. Right out of the gate … [Noir City] showed The Lady from Shanghai with [the 1950 Ann Sheridan vehicle] Woman on the Run, and Woman on the Run was the rarest of the rare. No one had seen that. We filled the Castro that night, and people went nuts for that film, and that’s still the greatest moment we’ve had doing the festival."

Given Noir City’s emphasis on the big-screen experience, it might be surprising to learn that Muller himself first experienced many of the classic film noirs on late-night television. "I saw Detour for the first time at 3 a.m. on Movies ‘ Til Dawn," he reminisces. "You’re hallucinating these films. It’s great…. To have that be your first experience of Ann Savage: 3 a.m. when you’re 14 years old. You’re, like, ‘Who is this woman? ‘ "

It didn’t take long for Muller to graduate to the burgeoning rep scene in ’70s San Francisco, an era he reflects on in an aching piece ("Noir City, Our City") for Julie Lindow and R.A. McBride’s upcoming essay and photo collection about San Francisco’s dwindling movie theaters, Left in the Dark. "Theaters, as much as movies themselves, were landmarks of my early life," his contribution begins. "Films offered wishes and warnings about the life I could lead, the person I could be, but it was the movie houses that guided me through the streets and neighborhoods of San Francisco, introducing me to every nook and cranny of my 49-square-mile hometown."

It was noir that gave shape to Muller’s passion, and he’s hardly alone in this. I’ve often thought that the way the classic femme fatale seduces her doomed prey is the onscreen equivalent of the way films draw in — and obsess — their audiences. A great many movies are stylish and smart to the point of irresistibility; how many times has the promise of hard shadows and unrepentant fatalism at the theater won out over a sunny afternoon in the real world?

Famous for being vaguely defined as a species — as with folk music or modernism, there are common landmarks, but everyone seems to have their own criteria — the dark crime dramas of the ’40s were first christened film noir by French critics when the films flooded Paris en masse following the close of World War II. This was 1946 and, as it turns out, only the beginning. The grittiest, most whacked-out instances of noir, startling films such as D.O.A. and Gun Crazy (both released in 1950), Pickup on South Street (1953), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), arrived as Americans wrestled postwar demons and Hollywood entered an identity crisis that hinged on both Communism and television.

Most experts close noir’s door at the end of the ’50s, classifying related films following 1958’s Touch of Evil as neonoir (e.g., Chinatown, Mullholland Drive). A college professor of mine considered noir less a genre than a virus: a stylish, fatalistic streak infecting normal melodramas, gangster pictures, and even westerns and comedies. This jibes with the different ways noir announces itself: sometimes in the overall tone of a film, other times in a single character or lighting setup. Definitions aside, one emergent truth is a high benchmark of quality for films under the rubric. This film species has survived the decades better than most, especially those born of Hollywood. Schrader put it this way: "Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better-made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, western, and so on."

Schrader follows this with the observation that "film noir seemed to bring out the best in everyone: directors, cameramen, screenwriters, actors." In other words, film noirs are creditable examples of what the esteemed critic André Bazin referred to as the "genius of the system," that strange mix of artistry, economics, and streamlined collaboration that helped to define the studio era. It’s a point not lost on Muller. "There are business factors as well as artistic factors that are brought to bear," he says. "You can’t look at one without the other." During our conversation an implicit criticism of auteurism (the mode of movie critique that is interested in films in terms of their directors) begins to emerge.

Muller has his favorite directors, of course, but he’s more interested in untangling a film’s production history — the messy business of sorting out who did what — than in pontificating about why one director’s style is better than another’s. (Indeed, auteurist debates often have the quality of those childhood arguments over whether Superman would beat Batman in a fight.) There are, of course, those directors who really did shape their own work, exerting an unusual degree of control, but far more typical is someone like Robert Wise, a by-assignment director who turned in salty noirs such as 1947’s Born to Kill and 1949’s The Set-Up (a superior boxing picture that runs circles around Raging Bull ) in addition to better-known schlock like The Sound of Music.

Considering the fact that so many of noir’s characters are fallen (the forgotten man and the spurned woman), it seems all too appropriate that the achievements of many of the form’s major contributors remain unsung. To take a sterling example, cinematographer John Alton is as responsible for the noir look as any director, doing for the city landscape what John Ford did for the open West. "We always have a John Alton night [at Noir City]," Muller says. "The guy is the uncredited director of some of those pictures…. Every director’s best film is with John Alton." Accordingly, this year’s Noir City will double-feature a pair of Alton-shot films, Joseph Lewis’s top-notch late noir The Big Combo (1955) and a new 35mm print of The Spiritualist (1948).

With Noir City showing additional programs spotlighting other little-known noir luminaries such as screenwriter William Bowers (1951’s Cry Danger and 1949’s Abandoned ) and actor Charles McGraw (1949’s The Threat and 1951’s Roadblock), as well as beefcake-era Burt Lancaster (1948’s I Walk Alone and, from the same year and costarring Joan Fontaine, Kiss the Blood off My Hands), it’s clear that Muller’s emphasis on a broadened sense of film production isn’t an abstract philosophy. It’s about recognizing real people and contributions, something crystallized by the fest’s guest appearances. Actress Marsha Hunt (Raw Deal) and actor Richard Erdman (Cry Danger) will appear this year, and past festivals have featured actors Farley Granger, Sean Penn, Coleen Grey (Nightmare Alley), and, of course, Detour‘s amazing Savage.

"The greatest thing to me about having done these festivals with the original people is that it gives audiences a view of noir that is very blue-collar, on the ground," Muller muses. "They never attached the name ‘film noir’ to it, but [it’s important] to talk with the actresses and to hear firsthand what they thought they were doing, and to get the writers’ point of view, which was by and large more politicized … much more so than the directors or the producers, who are a riot because they always say, ‘We shot it that way because we didn’t have a cent.’ "

When I ask Muller how the old-school talent responds to all this attention decades after the fact, he says plainly, "I can tell you in Ann’s case, it was the greatest night of her life. I mean, she has not stopped talking about it since. In some cases, it’s almost overwhelming." Such events are increasingly a challenge to put together; 60 years outside noir’s prime, it’s not getting any easier to find the genre’s original contributors. Robert Altman, who directed one of the first key neonoirs (1976’s The Long Goodbye), died the day before my meeting with Muller. If he’s gone, one wonders, how many of the original lot can be left?

The talent, of course, isn’t the only thing disappearing. DVDs are a wonderful auxiliary format for digesting cinema, but in the case of studio films from the classical era, it seems silly to contend that something isn’t lost without the full theatrical experience. A couple of weeks ago I went to the Castro to see Casablanca, a classical classic, not an extraordinary one like, say, Citizen Kane. I’d seen the film several times but never on a screen like the Castro’s. The moments when I felt its size most acutely were the most intimate ones: those interminable close-ups on Ingrid Bergman that so revel in the star’s introspective glamour. One cannot really grasp what these close-ups were designed to do without experiencing them on this scale. Everything comes into sharper relief in the theater: the close-ups are more wrenching, the dialogue funnier, the fantasy more complete.

Toward the end of his "Noir City, Our City" essay, Muller reflects on programming Noir City: "We tried to connect the audience, in a sort of cinematic séance, with 1940s era filmmakers and filmgoers," he writes. "San Francisco theaters appropriate to such a concept comprised a short list: the Castro and Balboa were the only ones still standing with even a trace of the old-style panache that once was commonplace." According to Muller, we ought to count ourselves lucky for those two. "It doesn’t really happen anyplace else," he says, referring to the electricity of a capacity crowd at the Castro. "New York has nothing like this. The best they can do is the Film Forum…. The Film Forum fills a need, but New York does not have a venue like the Castro. It does not have audiences like this, honestly."

And so, in the end, it’s about sitting alone together in the dark. Noir films possess the dream logic and stylization that make the theater necessary and, as an added bonus, a cynical sting that disintegrates any of the sloppy moralism or cheesy gentility that might otherwise taint our experience of classical Hollywood cinema (Schrader again: they are "an uneasy, exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism"). The work Muller does with Noir City strives toward many ends, but its most important function is also its most basic — strange and seductive, the films of Noir City often remind us why we fell for the movies in the first place. *

NOIR CITY 5

Jan. 26–Feb. 4, $10 per show, $35 for opening night program and reception, $100 for full series passport

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.eddiemuller.com

www.noircity.com

The video guy

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

PREVIEW The public furor set off last November by the imminent publication of onetime football star and Avis flunky O.J. Simpson’s now-quashed book, If I Did It, on the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, and Ron Goldman, demonstrates how pivotal the 1995 Simpson trial was to so many, just as Newsweek‘s recent publication of details from a key chapter shows how much it continues to compel — and how tender the wounds remain on this country’s notions of race, justice, media, and celebrity. To many TV viewers overseas, the trial might have merely summed up the insanity of stateside news priorities when the World Cup telecast was interrupted for the Simpson Bronco chase, but for Kota Ezawa, who had just transferred from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) at the time of the trial, it was ripe, rich stuff.

The televised Simpson verdict announcement — documented in the snippet Ezawa reworked for his brilliant 2002 short animation The Simpson Verdict, now showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City — "was really a shock to everybody, but a very different kind of shock," Ezawa said. "It was a real kind of shock and a very strange shock because it wasn’t a bomb hitting the ground! It was just a court official saying two words, ‘Not guilty,’ and it was enough to send really huge seismic waves through the entire nation. That I find interesting — that it was so psychological, a psychological event."

Sitting at a work table scattered with paper collage scraps of fallen soldiers intended for his 2006 "The History of Photography Remix" project in a spare, white one-room studio at the corner of 16th and Mission streets, the soft-spoken, even-tempered Cologne, Germany, native in a brown hoodie seems like the last person who’d gravitate toward incendiary subject matter such as the Simpson trial. Or the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, which are paired in his 2005 animated short The Unbearable Lightness of Being. From the aforementioned pieces to 2003’s Who’s Afraid of Black, White and Grey, Ezawa’s work boils history-making spectacle down to ultraflat pop shapes and hues — adding another layer of commentary to the race cards dealt in The Simpson Verdict. Though Ezawa’s works mimic the primitive, jerky moves of South Park, they rarely make light of history’s dark corners — rather they are minimalist meditations on memorable images, sampling, quoting, recropping, and editing visual pop ephemera and masterworks culled from our collective memory’s moving-image files.

And Ezawa’s reenvisionings, or remixes, have found a growing audience, eliciting an enthusiastic review in the New York Times for his current exhibition at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. SF Cameraworks recently feted the new Nazraeli Press volume compiling Ezawa’s "The History of Photography Remix" works, and this week the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art includes the artist in its biannual Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Art Award Exhibition.

"We were all enormously impressed by his practice — its clarity and range, the distinctness of his vision," SFMOMA painting and sculpture curator Janet Bishop wrote in an e-mail. "He was a top contender from the start of the award process." As a SECA award recipient, Ezawa will show parts of "The History of Photography Remix" as well as a two-screen animation, Stereo Stolen Honeymoon, which he described as a trailer for a longer adaptation of the purloined Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee wedding and honeymoon video, which the Guggenheim Museum is in talks to show.

"The Anderson-Lee tape is really most striking for how mundane it is," Bishop continued. "It has only become iconic because of our cultural response to it. Ezawa’s piece holds a mirror to our collective obsession with every tedious detail of celebrities’ lives."

A yearlong project featuring Ezawa’s idiosyncratic, hand-drawn computer animation and aided by assistant Ryan Thayer, voice actors, and assorted interns, the Anderson-Lee piece is also one of the artist’s most overtly comic pieces: the tabloid twosome’s cartoonish lifestyle slips seamlessly into Ezawa’s format as they exchange aggro vows, stroke tats, and chat up their pooch.

"I feel that I’m in the business of making moving paintings more than I’m in the business of making videos with a beginning and an end and a kind of dramatic curve," the 37-year-old self-described "video guy" confessed across his work table. "It’s a different kind of attention that people bring to a gallery or to a museum, and in that way, it almost has to work like a painting, meaning some people will watch it for 10 seconds, some people will watch it for a minute, but it really depends on how they will get grasped or not grasped by the image."

PRIMAL SCENE


The half-Japanese, half-German artist traces his own initial attempts at image-making to ancestors. "If you ask any artist, if they’re really honest, there will be something way, way, way back — even sometimes before you were born," he said with a small grin. The drawings of his great-grandfather Hans Gelderblom, an architect, made an impact, as did his Japanese forbears’ silk paintings and bronze vases.

As a child in rural southern Germany, Ezawa etched his own path with cartoon flip books and hand-cranked panorama boxes resembling TVs. "I think there’s one thing about the countryside that informed or really influenced me and why I am how I am now," he explained. "In the city I think even as a teenager there’s already these peer groups — sometimes it’s ethnic, the Latino kids or the Asian kids, some listen to punk music or some are really good at school or math. In the countryside it doesn’t really work like that — you’re just stuck with your age group, so one of your friends is a fantastic athlete and a piano genius, and your other friend is a borderline alcoholic heavy metal fan, and you all just converge and hang out. And so I think even today … I sometimes think I don’t have any taste, you know?"

That ability to switch from high to low, between mediums and messages, fed his work at the Düsseldorf art academy, where he tried his hand at photography and performance art before scoring an opportunity to study with Fluxus video art innovator Nam June Paik. "He wasn’t there a lot, but to me, he was a really big inspiration," recalled Ezawa, who made his first video in order to be in Paik’s class.

At first he put together "still videos that didn’t move at all": one of his first, I Want to Buy the Empire State Building, was made when the structure was actually for sale. Working pre-Photoshop, Ezawa used a graphic machine to print the title sentence along with his phone number, reproducing the words on a C-print before hanging it on the wall and videotaping it. Paik had the piece, along with other student works, shown at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. "What’s similar to the videos I make today was I didn’t think of video as this entertainment format," Ezawa said. "I thought of video more as a light box. It was really just like this illuminated image coming out of the TV."

TAKING OFF ON HISTORY


Ezawa’s light-box reworking of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void — part of "The History of Photography Remix" — looked down from an otherwise pristine wall above us. After finishing his BFA at the SFAI and his MFA at Stanford, Ezawa began teaching at California College of the Arts. While poring through the school’s slide library for a presentation on the history of photography for an introductory media arts course, he found himself thrilled: "I thought it was almost like DJing. ‘Oh yeah, this one will be really good. Maybe I’ll play this one after this one.’ " He took the Klein image home, scanned it into his computer, made a graphic sketch over the original, and kicked off his own "History," a compendium of transparencies, slides, collages, and intaglio etchings drawing on images as disparate as Ansel Adams landscapes and the surveillance shot of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army at the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. "That kind of became the idea for the work, to make this fake history slide show," he said.

Ezawa’s strategy stirs up the familiar cauldron of copyright issues in this age of digital reproduction. "You could call it visual hip-hop," he quipped. "But you can also call it somehow ripping off." He’s had only a few "sensitive reactions" from the creators of the original images. "I had long discussions, and it all got resolved," Ezawa said. "But with the book it was like, ‘OK, if you’re making this book and you’re ripping off tens and tens of photographs, you don’t want to have 30 angry photographers sending nasty e-mails." So in an effort to avoid a Simpson-like "legal nightmare," he contacted every shooter he sampled, and "the reaction was 95 percent very positive."

The SF artist has understandably mixed, and remixed, feelings about copyright, which he describes as being "really used to protect the interests of Walt Disney [Company] as opposed to actual artists. But then I feel like events like YouTube really help everybody and also the emergence of China as an economic player in the world, where they have Dior handbags that might say ‘Djor.’ I do think copyright might not exist much longer, though maybe long enough to ruin all of our lives."

He gave a compact chuckle. But then, the artist who once sang and played keyboards along with his wife, Karla Milosevich, in the Helen Lundy Trio seems to have his own quirky handle on the problem. "You know, like any hip-hop artist or DJ, I find my ways to manage this." *

SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION

Jan. 27–April 22; call for additional programs; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.)

Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

>

SATURDAY

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JAN. 20

FILM

Ocean Film Festival

You can keep your March of the Penguins — I’m more a
march-of-the-creepy-crawlies gal, so I’ll be happy as
a clam at the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival when I
check out The World of the Gastropods, by Danny van
Belle, a slow-motion video on the deep-sea environment
of the nudibranch and the sea snail. The second
ocean-related film festival in the world, this series
of seven programs of short films ranges in topic from
life in an Australian whaling village to a slumside
surfing school in Rio de Janeiro. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Also Sun/21; see Web site for times
$10 individual programs; $60 festival pass
Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center
Marina at Laguna, SF
(415) 561-6251
www.oceanfilmfest.org

MUSIC

Rhett Miller

Rhett Miller is probably as well known for his great
contributions to alt-country as he is for being an
indie heartthrob. The singer and principal songwriter
for the rock-laced country quartet the Old 97’s wrote
the melodic title track on his recent solo release,
The Believer (Verve Forecast, 2006), as a reaction to
the tragic suicide of his friend, musician Elliott
Smith. Don’t worry: the album has a lighter side. The
rest of The Believer, according to Miller, was
inspired by “sex, war, love, and death … but mostly
sex.” (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

With Gran Bel Fisher
7:30 p.m., $25
Swedish Music Hall
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com

FRIDAY

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JAN. 19

MUSIC

Experimental Audio Research

Experimental Audio Research sounds more like something
that would happen in a top-secret section of Lawrence
Berkeley National Lab, not at a rock show. E.A.R. is
the project of avant-rock eccentric Sonic Boom, whose
bombastic pseudonym conveys his distortion-heavy
musical niche. Boom, one of the founding members of
the now defunct Spaceman 3, brings together science
and rock ’n’ roll, dissonance and structured harmony,
and premeditation and improvisation to fuel the
creative process. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

With LSD and the Search for God and Fuxa
9:30 p.m., $10 Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-9023
www.hemlocktavern.com

FILM

Tales of the San Joaquin and Affluenza

Liberals and conservatives may clash on politics, but
both extremes love hot, sweaty guilt. So when
proactive media comes along to help the wayward masses
channel guilt into action, it’s worth driving past 85
McDonald’s to find out how you too can save our
dissolving, decomposing, and devolving nation.
Humanist Hall’s double feature of Tales of the San
Joaquin (about river pollution) and the snarkily
titled Affluenza (about the sickness of American
consumerism) should help ease the self-reproach. (Sara
Schieron)

7:30 pm, $5
Humanist Hall
390 27th St., Oakl.
(510) 451-5818
www.humanisthall.net

The devil wears Nolan Miller

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TRASH TALKING BIO, TAKE ONE There are so many exquisite moments in steward Desmond Atholl’s tell-all that tells all. This ain’t no roman à clef, in other words; it’s a cutting, richly detailed, tension-filled diary of overseeing the Marlo Thomas–Phil Donahue household. Neither my favorite chapter title (“Free to Be … Me Me Me”) nor my favorite existential dilemma (“Each day as I rode up the elevator, I wondered, ‘Will I be greeted by Joan Crawford or Joan of Arc?’ “) comes close to my favorite anecdote, spilled in the ominously titled Chapter 26, “Who’s Got the Cookies?” Seems Marlo’d gathered her posse (which included Gloria Steinem) for a cruise on the couple’s yacht, the Mugsy (named after Marlo, of course). An oversight by the chef results in a snack smorgasbord that omits Marlo’s favorite dessert. “Nooooooo cookieeeesssss!!!” she screeches at Atholl. “No fucking cookies?” His reaction: “I had an irresistible urge to laugh, overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation. Standing before me was an adult woman throwing a temper tantrum over some forgotten cookies…. I had visions of her floating through the sound, screaming to the seagulls, the fish — any creature that would listen — about her lost cookies.” After reflecting on his knee-jerk desire to spank her, he punch-lines by referring to the That Girl star as “that cookie monster.” And mighty tasty too. (Eddy)

TAKE TWO For anyone who’s been kicked while down, been laid low by an overbearing boss, or simply had to cope with some behemoth beeyatch, That Girl and Phil is the dog-eared paperback to keep by the bedside. Laugh yourself to sleep — or into a tumescent fantasy state over what you might poison-pen someday. My fave excerpt centers on Atholl’s primo turf — party planning — his sympathy for Thomas’s put-upon hubby, and a post–yacht cruise soiree for staffers on the 20th anniversary of Donahue. A disagreement over whether to sufficiently water the guests with cocktails turns into one of the volume’s more memorable tiffs:

“D-E-S-M-O-N-D!!!”

It wasn’t difficult to locate the source of the scream. Marlo was in the dining room glaring at the buffet, her face pale and contorted. “How dare you serve cold cuts in my house!” she exclaimed. “It’s just so low class and common! And white bread and pickles! And, my God, meat lasagna!! Fucker, you’ve done it again!!!”

Tired of her constant abuse, I replied, “Miss Thomas, please do not use the F word in my presence. It is not a word I am accustomed to hearing. In fact, I find it quite offensive. Phil requested this buffet, and these were his explicit instructions.”

Marlo pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen and loudly announced so that all the help could hear, “Take no notice of Phil! He knows nothing about being graceful! And never, never serve cold cuts in my house again! Even if the guests are common enough to eat them!”

Later, waiters hired for the evening express astonishment that the hollering hoyden could really be that beret tosser they had seen on TV. Atholl’s response: “Television is just a fantasy. This is real life!” Drama queens, start your sheep. (Kimberly Chun)

TAKE THREE I was a Borders book-shelving slave, making certain that Fiction, Mystery, and the all-important Film-TV-Radio sections maintained a sterile, organized-by-robots appearance. I did my time in the pre-Amazon, halcyon early days of the business, before it even chain-snaked out of Michigan, back when there were a mere two or three stores. (Oh woe, the lost income opportunities.) Somewhere up near the top of my overstuffed grab bag of Borders memories is the day the hardcover version of Atholl’s That Girl and Phil arrived. Anytime I was literally on my knees with a new batch of Leonard Maltin guides, I could reach over, and there was that girl — looking like she was going to jump out of her skin and race mad-skulled toward me! Nothing cured the Borders boredom of shifting the same books a few inches up and down the same shelves better than a quick look at Atholl’s huffily related tales of cold-cut and cookie rages and a glance at photos of his subject in full-on maniac mode. The only thing funnier: the day one of Paul Harvey’s mass-market paperbacks arrived with a printing error so extreme that the cover photo made him look like his face was melting from nuclear fourth-degree burns. And that, my friends, is the rest of the story. (Johnny Ray Huston)

 

Live free or die hard

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KIDS’ TV GONE WILD There’s a scene in Half Nelson — a top contender for most depressing scene in a movie loaded with ’em — in which Dan, Ryan Gosling’s drugged-out high school teacher, trudges home for a meal with his post-hippie parents. As the evening shuffles into boozy awkwardness, his mom throws Free to Be … You and Me on the hi-fi, and the sounds of "It’s All Right to Cry" fill the house. It’s the perfect choice for so many reasons; for Dan, a product of the 1970s, any song off that iconic ’72 album would signal bittersweet nostalgia. But the Rosey Grier–crooned "It’s All Right to Cry" — which follows the skit "Dudley Pippin and the Principal," an intense two minutes packed with sand table–tipping drama and flute-playing guidance — is also the pitch-perfect choice for an educator on the downward spiral.

I’m also a child of the 1970s. When I was in high school, a friend made the casual observation that everything he needed to know in life he’d learned from Free to Be … You and Me. And that’s basically true, isn’t it? If everyone took the lessons of Free to Be literally, there would be no gender stereotypes. People would share a lot more, and they’d be kinder to grandmas, parents, and crybabies. My favorite Free to Be cut was always "Ladies First," penned by Shel Silverstein (himself an avalanche of nostalgia material, what with Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, The Giving Tree, and the rest). Read by Free to Be‘s guiding force, Marlo Thomas, it’s the poignant tale of a greedy girl who learns it’s not always best to be first in line — especially when the line ends at the dinner plate of a hungry tiger.

I didn’t realize until years later — when I read That Girl and Phil, poison-penned by her former majordomo Desmond Atholl (with Michael Cherkinian) — that the sweet-voiced Thomas was so worthy of being a tasty tiger snack herself. The knowledge adds a certain cynical slant to lyrics such as "In this land, every girl grows to be her own woman." Her own bitchy woman, that is. It’s unclear whether the artists participating in "Free to Be … You and Me Invitational," the first in the PFA’s "Together Again: Collectively Created Compilations" series, take the personality of Free to Be‘s figurehead into consideration. Curated by Thomas Beard (who’ll be there in person) and Nick Hallett, the 55-minute program features fresh takes and mashups of original 16mm copies of the 1974 Free to Be film by video artists such as Big Noise Films, Nao Bustamante, and Lynne Sachs. Intriguingly, the program also features a short "joint jest" that takes on Mary Worth, one of the more inscrutable soap opera comics ever to take up funny-page real estate. (Cheryl Eddy)

FREE TO BE … YOU AND ME INVITATIONAL

Wed/17, 7:30 p.m., $4–$8

PFA

2757 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

>

The ballad of Carmelo

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

By the time you read this, a whole lot of filmmakers, publicists, journalists, and miscellaneous affiliates from Los Angeles will have once again descended on Utah for the annual feeding frenzy known as Sundance. Just what the aforementioned feed on isn’t always or exactly movies — the original raison d’être can get lost in the general scuffle. Classic old-school festival films — those quiet, starless character dramas and vérité documentaries sans hot-button topic and celebrity endorsement — tend to get elbowed to the back of the crowd by more pushy types.

Such was the case two years ago for Romántico, which finally gets a theatrical release this week. As good as if not better than anything else in Sundance’s 2005 American Documentary Competition, it nonetheless attracted no awards and scant interest. Admittedly, a film about undocumented immigrant Mexican musicians in San Francisco didn’t sound so compelling next to docs about mentally ill indie rock heroes, death row exonerations, Enron, kick-ass jock paraplegics, clergy sex abuse, and every comedian in the world telling one dirty joke. Plus, there had been a lot of documentaries about undocumented Latin Americans in the States of late — like Iraq (and clergy sex abuse), it’s an inevitable subject du jour for nonfiction cinema.

Most similarly themed docs before and since Romántico have had a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, tackling specific issues with activist zeal. Several (Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary and Un Franco, 14 Pesetas among them) have been very good. But despite the concern they share, they’re like well-crafted news bulletins, while at core Romántico seems like something else entirely — soulful and poetic, its tone and narrative oddly reminiscent of ’40s Italian neorealist classics.

Part of the reason is that it simply looks great. A frequent cinematographer on other directors’ projects, Mark Becker shot his own first feature himself. Not only does he have a definite eye, but he also made the deliberate decision to shoot on film (16mm and Super 16) — an approach practically unheard of for a documentary these days. Yeah, yeah, new formats have done a great service in making the so-called seventh art more affordable, immediate, flexible, democratic, and so forth. But anyone who tells you video can look just as rich as film stock is high. It (still) just ain’t so.

Though he’s since moved to New York City, Becker was living in the Mission District when he became intrigued by Mexican émigré musicians who play for tips in the area’s restaurants and on its streets. They form a subterranean "bachelor culture," making enough money to support the wives and children back home they might not see for years on end.

Becker had a short film in mind until he met a protagonist worthy of long-form scrutiny — Carmelo Muñiz Sanchez, who serenades diners with familiar tragic love ballads as half of a duo with Arturo Arias. When Sanchez abruptly returned to Mexico for the first time in four years in late 2000, after hearing that his diabetic mother’s health had worsened, Becker followed.

Romántico was shot sporadically over a three-and-a-half-year span, time enough to capture dramatic changes in the lives of both Sanchez and Arias. When we first meet them, they’re sharing a minuscule flat with two other Mexicans and four Guatemalans who all work at the same car wash. (The number of roommates seems limited only by the amount of floor space on which to sleep.) Our protagonists also log long hours as entertainers, making as much as $50 each on a good night. This might seem a threadbare existence, but it allows Sanchez to support his mom, wife, and two daughters (both preadolescent when he left in 1997) in relative comfort. In their town of Salvatierra, less fortunate families routinely compel female members into prostitution to survive. Sanchez will do anything to shield his loved ones from that and from privation, even if it means painful separation from them. The more footloose Arias has fewer responsibilities. In fact, his tendency to fly off on benders of unpredictable duration is one of Sanchez’s biggest headaches.

A dignified but unpretentious man nearing 60 at the film’s start, Sanchez makes an engrossing hero, and he’s very interested in telling his story. His whole life has been a struggle, its only goal that his children’s lives not be. The reverse immigration journey of sorts that he undertakes is joyous because it leads to a family reunion. But it also soon underlines why he left in the first place: his earning prospects in Mexico, where his job options are limited to playing in mariachi bands and selling flavored ice from a pushcart for far less income, are a fragment of what they were off the grid in the United States. With getting a legal worker’s visa near impossible, he must consider a second dangerous border crossing at an age when many Northern gringos mull retirement. This isn’t a matter of creature comforts — it’s about money to keep his daughters alive, in school, and off the streets.

At just 80 minutes in length, Romántico doesn’t dawdle. Yet it has a contemplative tenor seldom found in contemporary documentaries, and the frequent beauty of its images is amplified by Raz Mesinai’s ethereal instrumental score as well as the mini–passion plays Sanchez and Arias sing. Like those theatrically despairing, sometimes suicidal, and frequently sexist songs of love gone wrong, Romántico is seductive in its melancholy — and so easily overwhelms emotional defenses that you’ll probably find yourself desperate to know what’s happened to Sanchez and Arias since the end of filming. *

ROMANTICO

Opens Fri/19

Lumiere

Shattuck Cinemas

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.meteorfilms.org

>

CineKink 2007

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The simple act of witnessing can transform sex into politics, so it’s not hard to see why privacy (like permission) is sacred. The quaint notion of the boudoir is ingrained in most acts of physical intimacy — whether lovers seek haven in the bedroom or take joy in rejecting it. More like Wild Kingdom than Girls Gone Wild, the CineKink 2007 series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts neutrally observes sexual transgression: the forms it takes, the relief it offers, and the privacy it (often jubilantly) breaches.

More fun than watching actual webcam girls, Aerlyn Weissman’s doc WebCam Girls (Thurs/18, 9 p.m.) looks at three successful mavens and frames their stories with academic analysis. These women all began their journeys in the world of semivoyeurism from a place of corporate exploitation, so it’s ironic that they, like their patrons (commonly nine-to-five cubicle dwellers), are surveyed at work … well, at their home offices. In this surveillance their homes are as public as their patrons’ cubicles — to the 15 people (as opposed to 15 minutes) for whom they’re famous. Their identities are their brands, putting them in vulnerable positions both figuratively and literally.

Almost a brother film to WebCam Girls, Damon and Hunter: Doing It Together is a short feature nested in the Passion Plays Program (Fri/19, 9 p.m.). For the women of WebCam Girls, the issue of individualism is essential (Anna Voog makes Rorschach-inspired videos for her word-association songs, and Ducky Doolittle puts on fashion shows), but Damon and Hunter are like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: porn stars with protected identities as opposed to global brands. Primarily composed of one talking head interview with the two lovers, director Tony Comstock’s documentary intercuts a XXX scene that is more sweet than erotic. The footage feels deliberately contrary to a porn aesthetic, giving the impression that we’re observing, with anthropological so-called neutrality, the well-worn sex life of a couple. One partner asks, "Are you comfortable?" and the request for consent is like a demonstration of love.

Unlike the docs in the CineKink Series, Going Under (Sat/20, 7 p.m.), a sensitive and occasionally vague narrative feature, expressively represents the erotic and ultimately calmative values of nonvanilla sex. Psychoanalyst-turned-filmmaker Eric Werthman’s movie is about a relationship between psychoanalyst Peter (Roger Rees) and his dominatrix, Suzanne (Geno Lechner). Exhausted by her field of work, Suzanne announces her retirement, which signals an opportunity for them to see each other "outside." The two bond over childhood trauma: for them, history is a tragic theme. "I can never forget how we met" is an important sentence: not so much shamed as burdened, Suzanne struggles with the couple’s desires outside the security of her leather-bound workplace.

Fans of Going Under will find a good companion piece in Howard Scott Warshaw’s documentary Vice and Consent: The Art of Wrapping Intimacy in Very Scary Paper (Fri/18, 7 p.m.). Offering a more incisive view of BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism) than Going Under, Vice and Consent initiates a remarkable dialogue about the transcendence that results from this highly rigorous discipline. The hour-long doc has a homespun production value that gives a kind of authenticity to its interviews but also somewhat clouds its dialogue about sex as an exploration of human consciousness. Exhaustively, this film discusses the means by which the community rejects "vanilla" — and poetically, the world outside vanilla is as infinite as the characters who go searching. (Sara Schieron)

CINEKINK 2007

Thurs/18–Sat/20, 7 and 9 p.m. (Thurs/18, 6 p.m. free reception), $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

>

We accept you — one of us!

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I’ve been at the Guardian awhile — it’ll be eight years next month, in fact. I started as a fresh-faced, eager intern, and since 1999 I’ve met many other fresh-faced, eager interns, intent on careers in media or academics or giraffe-tending (for real! If you’re out there, intern-who-reviewed-movies-but-was-also-a-zookeeper, email me and let me know how you’re doing.) But I’ve only known a few who were determined to segue from film writer to filmmaker — and one of ’em was Dina Gachman, who just finished her graduate thesis film at USC.

MONDAY

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Jan. 15

EVENT

“Bringing the Noise for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Your day-off tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could stop at couching it and watching a documentary. But seeing as how the civil rights leader was a supremely gifted orator who inspired millions with his speeches, a night of roof-rattling performance seems a bit more fitting, doesn’t it? For the 10th year, Youth Speaks honors King’s legacy with “Bringing the Noise for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Host Chinaka Hodge oversees an action-packed lineup that includes spoken word by iLL-Literacy; hip-hop with the Attik; and DJ J. Period, who rocks the event’s annual “I Have a Dream” speech remix. (Cheryl Eddy)

7 p.m., $5-$12
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater
700 Howard, SF
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

FILM

Absolute Wilson

Though he’s been the most famous American avant-garde stage director for at least three decades, Robert Wilson remains a rather remote, enigmatic figure at home. The surprise of Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s documentary is how accessible – even delightful – he turns out on close examination. Predictably, given his arresting, architectural stage aesthetic, the archival performance excerpts and still photos here are striking. Wilson is funnier than you’d expect as an interview personality – though we also get strong evidence of his tantrum-prone perfectionism on the job. (Dennis Harvey)

In Bay Area theaters
See movie clock at www.sfbg.com

James Broughton’s liberation machine

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AVANT DVD "At an early age I arrived in San Francisco," James Broughton says in his 1974 cinematic self-portrait, Testament. "There I spent the rest of my life growing up." A straight-hearted honesty and smiling irony here lie snug side by side, as they do typically throughout the work of the poet and avant-garde filmmaker. Adults behaving like children are hardly an unusual sight in a Broughton film.

Lou Reed has a line about "growing up in public with your pants down," bemoaning (with his own habitual flair) the inevitable fate of the modern artist. But if becoming one today necessarily means dropping trou, no one ever did it more gleefully, readily, and speedily than Broughton, who died in 1999 at 85. Born in Modesto in 1913, Broughton was what you could call a self-made man — though not the kind his mother had in mind when she pictured him growing beyond the family’s generations of bankers into its first surgeon. Broughton created himself through his art: a playful, deeply erotic, and self-questioning poetry that, in its joyful and childlike (but never naive) reaching out to the world, ended up wedding itself brilliantly to the medium of the century.

Maximum exhibitionism was the idea. As Broughton explains in his lively autobiography, Coming Unbuttoned, he was visited one night as a lad of three by his angel, Hermy, who revealed his destiny and bestowed on him three attributes that would make his job easier: "intuition, articulation, and merriment." And so a liberator of the body and mind was christened a poet in his crib by an angel whose sparkling, throbbing wand made the boy wet his jammies. (Years later that wand was still making magic, as in 1979’s Hermes Bird, an 11-minute film in which Broughton reads a phallic ode over the profile of a slowly wakening penis, bathed in an ethereal light that sets it out shimmeringly against absolute darkness.)

In a film career (and life) that had more than one end and rebirth attached to it, Broughton had originally intended Testament as his epitaph, but he soon followed it with other projects, including an erotically charged close-up tour of bodily surfaces titled Erogeny (1976), after which began what can be considered his third and final period, the films he made with Joel Singer. (It was the prize-winning piece that began his second period of filmmaking, 1968’s The Bed — a multifarious 20-minute romp on a roving outdoor bed involving a large number of naked bodies — that first put full frontal nudity all over the art-film map. With a cameo by the filmmaker meditating naked before a semicoiled snake and another by friend Alan Watts, it’s still a curious, jovial work and leads into Broughton’s explicit mapping of human geography and erotic energy in films such as 1970’s The Golden Positions.)

It’s often pointed out how perennially unfashionable Broughton managed to be through a long career. In an era overshadowed by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, muscular Beat howling, and virtuously inscrutable language poetry, Broughton clove happily to his Mother Goose rhyme schemes (which he endowed with a sly wisdom and ribald play she would not have completely approved of). Although Broughton took his own good advice to "follow your own weird," he never lacked for influences, including giants on the American experimental film landscape such as his friend Maya Deren. His was a singular voice drawn from a merry mixing of lifelong passions: Mother Goose and Lao-tzu, Carl Jung and Alan Watts, Episcopalian ritual and Greek mythology, Jean Cocteau and Buster Keaton. It made him a representative figure in the San Francisco arts scene from the postwar renaissance through the next four decades, even while seeming to frolic forever outside the trends and categories of his day.

Recently, there have been at least three reasons to think about Broughton’s films. One is the release of The Films of James Broughton ($59.95) on DVD by Facets. While not quite complete, the three-DVD set is a pretty thorough overview of his film work, which was as central to the formation of a West Coast avant-garde as it was inherently and persistently individual.

Another reason is the April 2005 passing of Kermit Sheets. A gifted literary and theater artist in the Bay Area for many years, Sheets was a conscientious objector during World War II who afterward joined fellow COs in forming a San Francisco theater company, the Interplayers. In these years he was Broughton’s companion and collaborator on many early projects, including all the films that make up the first period of the latter’s always poetical filmmaking, four of which (out of a total of six, counting The Potted Psalm) are included in the Facets collection, beginning with Mother’s Day (1948) and culminating with The Pleasure Garden (1953).

There’s no end to the pleasure in watching Sheets play a crooning cowboy hero combing the grounds for a gal as sweet as Ma or, for that matter, his Charlie Chaplin–like tramp, Looney Tom, the eponymous hero of an 11-minute film made in 1951. His boyish grin and carefree capering through Golden Gate Park in search of one love after another might have made his career in comedy (or so you can’t help thinking). Over Looney Tom’s gleeful abandon, to the tinkling of a piano, Broughton’s gently raunchy storybook rhyming is merry and fey:

Give me a tune and I’ll slap the bull fife,

I’ll spring the hornblower out of his wife.

Any old flutist you care to uncover,

give me his name and I’ll be her lover.

La diddle la, the hydrant chatted

Um titty um, the milkpail said.

The best reason to revisit Broughton’s work, however, remains the cheering buoyancy and brightness of his vision — a serious tonic to the mordant hostility and hopelessness of the culture’s Apocalypto moment and one that comes close to justifying his definition of cinema as a "liberation machine." (Robert Avila)

Posi posse

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What’s the expiration date on cute? Is it just limited to the length of time you can tag a cat a kitten, pull off head-to-toe pink, tolerate unironic smiley faces, or maintain a Britney Spears fan site? Does anyone older than 21 still strive to be cute — or anyone not in a boy band, not a showgirl, not wearing mouse ears? Maybe cool stole cute’s thunder around the time kindercore and twee pop faded from view, got into Stanford, and sold their Belle and Sebastian albums, because except for the brief bandying about of the posicore label, as embodied by inspirational party starters like Hawnay Troof and Barr, cute has been, alas, the wallflower at the hoodies’ and headbangers’ balls. Even indie kids have generally distanced themselves from the terrifyingly twinkly adjective — cute and all its shiny, blank surfaces just doesn’t fit the grim, grimy tenor of the times.

Perhaps that’s why it’s the moment for Matt and Kim, the Brooklyn drum-and-keyboard successors to Mates of State and the latest, freshest, most upbeat iteration of the rock duo approach to come along since all those bands with "-s" tacked to their names. They’re supercute; get the kids to dance, stage-dive, and generally act up at their live shows; dream up funny, lovable, and yes, cute videos of food fights; and make lots of energetic pop punk (not to be confused with punk pop and Hilary Duff dumpees). The c word has been a hassle, though. "We get cornered into ‘cute’ a lot as a category," says Matt (né Johnson, 24) from Brooklyn, where he and Kim (last name: Schifino, 25) have settled down briefly amid their nonstop traversing of the country, spreading the gospel of fun. "If someone told me a band was a really cute band, I wouldn’t want to see that band. But a lot of people enjoy it — we smile, we have fun, Kim’s cute. I mean, a lot of people say that we’re cute in a really positive way, and that’s fine, but I wouldn’t want a video or photo shoot where we’re swinging on swings. I don’t want to brand ourselves as cutecore."

The "core" suffix is the kiss of death, isn’t it? Worse than the "-s" because it sounds like it might be cool — there might be a community of sorts there, but instead there’s just the distinct whiff of curdling dismissiveness. Similarly, all the bands that got tagged "screamo" should have just fallen on the neck of their guitars the instant they heard that insult applied to their music.

"Kim doesn’t like cute," Johnson says.

Thus the band decided to drench its new video for "5k," from its self-titled debut on IHEARTCOMIX, with fake blood, mock dismemberment, and pseudo gore. The pair aren’t afraid to mix a little jeopardy into their joy — so they’re not too scared of the warm winter that’s throwing down in their Brooklyn neighborhood at the moment we talk. "Over in New York City it’s ridiculous!" Johnson raves. "People are wearin’ T-shirts. It’s 70 degrees. It’s like the end of the world. It’s definitely colder in San Francisco in the summer than New York City in January."

Yet the unseasonable heat fits the sunny dispositions of the two-and-a-half-year-old combo, who haven’t had any time to write new songs since they bought their touring van in October 2005 ("We used to travel in an ’89 Honda Civic sedan and cram in all the stuff to the roof and drive with the back on the ground and the front in the air"). "We’re totally a summertime band," says Johnson, a onetime political punk fan who worked in film production.

"We like fun songs and fun things related to summer. I guess people get a little grumpier in winter, so as far as writing fast and up-spirited songs goes, it’s much better for it."

Never ones to shun the fun times, Matt and Kim still agree it’s the worst of times that stand out. In fact, one of their most memorable tour tales from the last year had to be their first performance in the Bay Area, at Rock Paper Scissors in Oakland.

"We got the show the day before we were playing there, and somehow the word was that we were an acoustic band and we’re a really loud band," Johnson recalls. "And it’s their knitting night, and a bunch of people are sitting around at tables knitting. I think we made it through three songs…." *

MATT AND KIM

With Girl Talk and USA Crypt

Fri/12, 9 p.m.

$13, sold out

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1422

www.independentsf.com

ASK MATT AND KIM

TOURING TIPS


• Choose whom you go with wisely. "If they’re your friend, be ready for them not be your friend anymore," Matt Johnson says. "Kim is the first person it’s really worked out with. We went with another person on one of our tours, and Kim now seems to disdain him."

• Pancakes can be a costly proposition. "I definitely realized that once we went to IHOP," Johnson says. "We just got pancakes, and it cost $20. That was a real realization."

• Check the weather before it wrecks it. "I feel like the hottest place I’d ever been in my life is Colorado — I thought I was gonna die," he bemoans. "And the coldest place was in Arizona. I thought that was the desert and it was gonna be hot. Be careful about thinking the south is always warm, when it really is not. Cleveland, Miss., in February — boy, that was cold."

FAVORITE TUNES


"I often describe what we listen to as a lot of people’s guilty pleasures," Johnson says. "I grew up listening to political punk, and I went from being close-minded in general, and then my mind blew wide open."

• T.I., King (Grand Hustle/Atlantic)

• Beyoncé, B’Day (Sony)

• Best Fwends, next year’s album

• Girl Talk, Night Ripper (Illegal Art)

• Flosstradamus

Fireworks and smoke

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Kenneth Anger and Jean Genet are two greats with outlaw tastes that still taste salty together. So a viewer discovers via a program that marries — for two nights — this pair of master onanists. In compiling the showcase, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts film curator Joel Shepard follows in famous fancy footsteps — none other than Jean Cocteau once showed both Anger’s 1947 Fireworks and Genet’s 1950 Un Chant d’Amour at an event called the Festival of the Damned Film. Presenting a Poetic Film Prize to Anger’s movie, Cocteau said the piece blooms "from that beautiful night from which emerge all true works." Such a poetic evening must have included Cocteau’s own 1930 The Blood of a Poet, because its influence is apparent on Fireworks and Un Chant d’Amour, a pair of vanguard works that arrived roughly two decades in its wake.

Balls-to-the-wall sexuality has never been rendered so tenderly as in Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, a prison scenario from which video-era gay porn Powertool codes have picked up next to nothing in the way of imagination or humanity. (In terms of love triangles in lockup, the one here is rivaled only by the bond between Leon Isaac Kennedy, cutie Steve Antin, and Raymond Kessler as the one and only Midnight Thud in retrospective-worthy Jamaa Fanaka’s unbelievable Penetentiary III — a TeleFutura stalwart flick that might even improve when dubbed into Spanish.)

The phrase "That’s when I reach for my revolver" might be the chief unspoken thought of Un Chant d’Amour‘s repressed warden figure — that is, when he isn’t reaching for his belt. He wields societal control and loses the pride and the power that come with maintaining a strictly straight sense of self while overseeing — or more often spying on — a pair of inmates. The older prisoner, as bristly and worry furrowed as his cable-knit sweater, lusts for the younger one, a muscular cross between Sal Mineo and the young James Cagney, complete with his thieving sneer. (According to Edmund White’s bio Genet and Jane Giles’s Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and Cinema, both prisoners were Genet’s lovers. In an irony the author-filmmaker must have enjoyed, the younger one, Lucien Sénémaud, to whom Genet dedicated a 1945 poem titled Un Chant d’Amour, missed the birth of his first child due to filming.)

In Screening the Sexes, the too-oft ignored critic Parker Tyler locates the antecedents of Genet’s butch characters in Honoré de Balzac, but Cocteau’s influence on Un Chant d’Amour is apparent as well in areas ranging from the whimsically scrawled title credits to the movie’s hallway-roving voyeurism (a more sexual, less effete echo of the dream passages that are the narrative veins of Blood of a Poet). Genet made Un Chant d’Amour after writing his novels and before the playwright phase of his creative life, and as in his novels, the film’s dominant prison setting, with its hated and celebrated walls, creates (to quote Tyler) "rituals of yearning and vicarious pleasure." Some images — such as blossoms (romantic symbols bequeathed by Cocteau?) furtively tossed from window to window — are heavy-handed. Others are as light as a naturalist answer to romantic expressionism can be, as when tree branches seem to echo prison bars. The most vivid and intoxicating visual has to be the prisoners passing cigarette smoke mouth to mouth via a long straw poked through their cell walls. Smoke gets in their eyes and gets them to undo their flies.

Official stories have it that Genet made Un Chant d’Amour for private collectors, and in veteran high-society petit voleur fashion, often fleeced them with the promise that he was selling the one and only copy. The 26-minute version showing at the YBCA is both more explicit than anything that sprung from Cocteau’s less rugged cinema and more graphic than the censored 15-minute version that has often showcased in underground public circles. (According to Giles, a benefit screening for the SF Mime Troupe in the ’60s was raided by the police.) Just as the character Divine in Genet’s book Our Lady of the Flowers gave John Waters’s greatest star, Harris Glenn Milstead, a stage and screen name, Un Chant d’Amour‘s smoke trails and imprisoned schemes have inspired visions from James Bidgood’s 1971 Pink Narcissus to the "Homo" sequence of Todd Haynes’s 1989 Poison.

Still, these same smoke trails came in the immediate wake of Anger’s Fireworks, and both Giles and Anger claim Genet viewed Fireworks before he began shooting his only movie. Unsurprisingly, the child of a midsummer night’s dream in Hollywood Babylon who partly inspired Un Chant d’Amour had his own copy of the film, but tellingly (according to Bill Landis’s unauthorized bio, Anger), he’d edited out the pastoral romantic passage in Genet’s movie because "it’s two big lummoxes romping." Such a gesture, typical of Anger, shows just how wrong it is to assume Genet’s comparatively masculine aestheticism means he is less sentimental.

Greedily inhaled and ultimately drubbed, the cigarettes of Un Chant d’Amour are a not-so-explosive, if no less effective, très French response to the American climactic phallic firecracker of Anger’s landmark first film and initial installment in the Magick Lantern Cycle. Unlike the SF International Film Fest’s once-in-a-lifetime (I’d love to be proven wrong) presentation of the latter at the Castro Theatre, the YBCA’s program features a rare and new 35mm print of Fireworks. It also includes similar prints of Anger’s exquisite, blue-tinted vision of commedia dell’arte, Rabbit’s Moon (which exists in three versions, dating from 1950, 1971, and 1979); his most famous film (with a pop soundtrack that essentially paved the way for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, not to mention music videos), 1963’s Scorpio Rising; and his beefcake buff–and–powder puff soft-touch idyll with a pair of dream lovers in a sex garage, 1965’s Kustom Kar Kommandoes.

Viewed together, these movies cover dreamscapes of a length, width, and vividness beyond past and present Hollywood, not to mention a new queer or mall-pandering gay cinema that even in the case of Haynes’s son-of-Genet portion of Poison remains locked in a celluloid closet of positive and negative representation. Anger’s relationship with the gifted Bobby Beausoleil might be an unflattering real-life variation of Genet’s adoration of murderous criminality, but whereas Un Chant d’Amour resembles almost any page from any Genet novel, Anger’s films are a many-splendored sinister parade. For all of his flaws and perhaps even evil foibles, his films are rare, pure visions. "Serious homosexual cinema begins with the underground, forever ahead of the commercial cinema, and setting it goals which, though initially viewed as outrageous, are later absorbed by it," Amos Vogel writes in the recently republished guide Film as a Subversive Art. Many of the films in that tome seem dated today, but in Anger’s case, the forever to which Vogel refers may indeed be eternal. *

JEAN GENET–KENNETH ANGER

Fri/12–Sat/13, 7:30 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, screening room, SF

$6–$8

(415) 978-2787

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Dark days indeed

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French noir rarely darkened, deepened, or explored more nuanced shades of gray and shadow than in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville. From his breakthrough gangster ode, Bob le Flambeur (1955), through 1962’s underrated Le Doulos to the trio that put Alain Delon’s icy beauty to proper use, Le Samouraï (1967), Le Cercle Rouge (1970), and Un Flic (1972), Melville infused the genre with a rigorous, formal power while simultaneously shooting quickly, stylishly, and on location. In the process he inspired new wavers–to–come with his resourceful quasi-vérité derring-do.

Yet not all of the director’s films were caper exercises: Melville started his career with a 1950 collaboration with Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles — World War II loomed large over the onetime Resistance fighter’s imagination. Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows was the book he waited to shoot for 25 years after discovering it in 1943, and in 1969 the filmmaker applied his eminently masculinized brand of hard-boiled cool as well as his compelling yet oppressive sense of landscape and character — and their interplay — to the text. The stunningly beautiful and shockingly poignant product finally saw its release in the States last year, and it says as much about Melville, his cold dreamscapes, and his idealistic though traumatized response to war (and resistance) as perhaps The Big Red One, Battle Royale, and even Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! might say about the works of kindred battle-scarred directors Sam Fuller, Kinji Fukasaku, and Russ Meyer, respectively. Here Melville, who later told an interviewer he never intended to make a film about the Resistance, and Kessel — also the author of that psychosexual romp into the subconscious of an immaculate bourgeois, Belle du Jour — use wartime experiences the director later described as "awful, horrible … and marvelous" to illustrate a piercingly conflicted existential love letter to the past that fellow Resistant Albert Camus could have signed off on.

The past, as it turns out, was both enthralling and dreadful. Melville’s camera almost vibrates with the morose shock value of Army of Shadows‘s opening long shot: German troops filing through — or defiling — the Champs-Élysées. From there Melville jumps to a van carrying a gendarme and a dark figure in spectacles, and the cop personably remarks on the convenience of their concentration camp destination and how it can now be used to house prisoners of France’s Nazi occupiers — until he spies the handcuffs on his traveling companion and catches himself. The viewer is pulled into the deceptively friendly scene, lulled by the bland banality of evil — and French complicity — while Melville continues swinging between points of view, from the soft gray matter of the forgetful cop to the blunt-object reverie of a French concentration camp commander dealing with the other man in the vehicle: Resistance leader and civil engineer Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura).

The director finally settles mainly in the mind of Gerbier, who, as played by onetime wrestler Ventura, can’t shake an antihero veneer despite his upper-crusty suits. The watchful Gerbier bides his time in the camp, gauges the prisoner demographic makeup, and begins to hatch an escape plan with a young Communist, until he’s suddenly summoned to the area’s Nazi headquarters. His act of daring there — based on a story told to Melville by a Gaullist deputy — almost leaps off the screen. The director calibrates the tension, engineers its release, then does it once again in an exquisitely loaded scene between a Vichy barber and a customer, each playing at normalcy during insanity.

Army of Shadows reveals the rest of Gerbier’s shadowy group with the offhand vibe of a chat with the local gendarme, and they’re more a gang than an army, including the stalwart Felix (Paul Crauchet); former Legionnaire Le Bison (Christian Barbier); the quivering Le Masque (Claude Mann); the boldly heroic, Marianne-like Mathilde (Simone Signoret, portraying a loosely sketched Lucie Aubrac); playboy Jean François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel); and network chief, Jardie’s seemingly ivory-tower intellectual, deep-undercover brother, Luc (Paul Meurisse as a Jean Moulin figure). We find ourselves less in a traditional war film than embroiled in a tangle of arduous trips to England to visit a sequestered Charles de Gaulle, sudden arrests, subsequent betrayals, and then methodical hits, executed by the underground fighters, who operate under a code as rigid as any other gangster’s in Melville’s Guyville.

In an interview for the book Melville on Melville, the director bristled when he was reminded that some French critics equated the Resistants with thugs. Still, anyone familiar with Melville’s films will recognize the fighters’ toughened miens, accustomed to operating outside the law — and the feeling of dread at having to strangle a onetime compatriot quietly with one’s bare hands (when a previously arranged killing floor is now a few audible steps away from crying babes and frolicking schoolchildren). The dread here emerges from the fact that these ordinary citizens are compelled to commit both heroic and horrific acts: much like the jitterbuggers at the USO canteen that Gerbier crashes during a brief trip to England, these underground fighters — otherwise known as "terrorists" to the Nazis — are caught in an exhilarating and ultimately tragic tango with their occupiers.

Melville’s underground fighters resemble thugs because they’re operating in a similar mise-en-scène at the fringes of their occupied country’s laws. "A lot of people would have to be dead before one could make a true film about the Resistance and about Jean Moulin," the director told writer Rui Nogueira. "Don’t forget that there are more people who didn’t work for the Resistance than people who did." Nonetheless, Melville never shies away from his truth, gazing at the foes and fighters with equanimity, as when Gerbier confesses that his only love is for the chief, is forced to run from a Nazi machine-gun firing squad, and orders the death of a deputy who succumbed to weakness.

Though Melville’s cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, who supervised the 2004 digital restoration of the film, did a remarkable job recreating the film’s steely blue, brown, and gray palette, it’s the sound design that stands out today — for example, the rush of the ocean as Gerbier and Felix march a traitor down a small seaside town’s cobbled streets to his death. Wheels, motors, and heels clank like that dread old mechanism, the march toward denouement, a.k.a. death, found in any noirish plot. "You — in a car of killers," Gerbier sighs, regarding his beloved boss at Army of Shadows‘s close, one that reduced Kessler to tears when he read the biting coda added by the filmmaker. "Is nothing sacred anymore?" Melville achieved a sense of closure in making Army, certainly — and it rings true to his sense of manly fatalism like the clang of a cell door. (Kimberly Chun)

ARMY OF SHADOWS Thurs/11, 7:30 p.m., and Sat/13, 8:20 p.m. PFA, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8. (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

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Careers and Ed: Look Ma, no grants

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› culture@sfbg.com

Starving is overrated. No matter how romantic your notions of the long-suffering, misunderstood artiste, it’s hard to get around the fact that you’ll never get that big one-person show if the rain reduces your paintings to gesso mush because you don’t have a roof to put over them.

Enter the grant provider. Part john, part pimp, and possessing all the bureaucratic zeal of the most exacting mafioso, a grant foundation can seem like an ambivalent overlord to struggling creative types: while most artists want and need grant money, they may find expectations frustratingly impossible to meet. When you factor in an ever-increasing conservatism in the arts-funding world, it’s enough to make anyone wonder how to take artistic risks while still being kept in acrylic paint and photo fixer, much less food.

"That’s the thing about the arts these days. It’s so hard to get your project off the ground," Chesley Chen, a 38-year-old independent filmmaker, says over a piece of Safeway strawberry-rhubarb pie ("It’s surprisingly good") in his Sunset District flat. "The vast sum of money goes to sustain these megalithic art houses rather than nurturing local artists." Chen points out that because of today’s conservatism, most organizations are looking for safe projects to fund — ones lacking controversy and with an obvious social relevance.

It’s ironic, then, that Chen’s latest project is about as socially significant as it gets and yet he’s still struggling to secure meaningful funding. After being moved to tears by a piece in Harper’s last year written by a Ugandan woman suffering from AIDS, Chen began an e-mail relationship with Beatrice Were, an HIV-positive Ugandan mother who started the Memory Book Project for similarly afflicted women. Shunned by their communities because of the AIDS stigma, these mothers are given the chance by Were’s organization to share their thoughts and dreams for and with their children.

Chen soon realized what a powerful documentary the story would make. Problem was Chen found that most funding groups require a pitch reel to give an indication of what a finished project will look like — a logistical impossibility given Were’s location. But for Chen, abandoning the project wasn’t an option, so he was forced to look for alternatives.

SCORING DEVELOPMENT SUGAR DADDIES


Some organizations do offer seed money for projects, but these grants are extremely competitive and definitely for those who don’t mind plenty of demands and hand-holding. Creative Capital (www.creative-capital.org) is unique in that it views its funding model not as a philanthropic effort but as a venture capital investment. Founded in 1999 and offering grants in multiple disciplines, the organization usually works with its artists over a period of three to four years and offers advisory services, continuation funds, and even a yearly retreat. In return, each funded artist agrees to share a small percentage of profits with the group, which is used to fund other works — but only if their project turns a profit. The average grant is for $35,000, but out of roughly 3,000 applications a year, Creative Capital only awards about 50 grants.

For filmmakers, the Independent Television Service (www.itvs.org) offers research and development funding on an ongoing basis in conjunction with PBS. The grants cover expenses such as travel, script development, and the crucial fundraising reel. The group concedes that these funds are "extremely limited and highly competitive," but for those lucky chosen few, the ITVS offers something no other grant provider can: a "comprehensive public television launch" that provides marketing, publicity, station relations, and outreach support. In other words, people actually get a chance to see your work when it’s done.

For the record, Chen has been turned down for both. "With the exception of walking my dog, I don’t think I left my home for three or four days," he remembers. After the initial bout of earth-shattering depression, he decided that if he had to, he would shoulder the whole $60,000 budget himself and just go into debt. "Bankruptcy is not the most desirable thing, but there are worse things to go bankrupt for."

PIMPING POTENTIAL DONORS’ INCENTIVES


Chen decided to get a fiscal sponsor, a strategy he used to help fund his documentary Sandman, which aired on KQED last year. On paper, fiscal sponsorship seems like a counterproductive measure — the artist ends up actually paying the sponsor, not the other way around. But sometimes it makes real financial sense. Because of a sponsor’s nonprofit status, any person or organization making a donation will be able to write it off come tax time. Donations are made to a foundation under the project’s name, the foundation processes the paperwork, and then it gives the money to the artist less a fee. Essentially, the artist is piggybacking on the organization’s charity status. Any nonprofit can offer fiscal sponsorship, but it’s a good idea to go with one that knows what it’s doing — this will involve the IRS, after all. Another big benefit: sponsorship allows the artist to apply for grant funding that is usually only available to tax-exempt organizations.

For Memory Book, Chen is partnering with the San Francisco Film Arts Foundation (www.filmarts.org), which takes 7 percent of funds raised for its fee. This is higher than the 4 or 5 percent fee some foundations charge, but Film Arts makes up for it with a speedy turnaround time. Instead of having to wait for his money for up to seven or eight months, Chen will get it "as soon as the checks clear." Attaining a Film Arts sponsorship can be an arduous two- or three-month process, but the organization’s criteria are based more on fiscal feasibility and sound planning than inherent artistic value. If your fundraising outline consists of, as Chen puts it, a "cupcake sale every Saturday," you’ve got problems.

For fiscal sponsorship for all disciplines, check out the New York Foundation for the Arts (www.nyfa.org), which sponsors artists nationwide, offers assistance in everything from fundraising and budgeting to bookkeeping services, and has a detailed online database of available grants, NYFA Source.

SHAKING THAT DIY MONEYMAKER


Now that you’re nonprofited up, what’s the next step? For Chen, that was the $60,000 question. First he made sure his current lifestyle wasn’t going to siphon any money away from his project. "I cut out all luxury items," he says. "I stopped going to movies." He budgeted $20 a week for groceries (including pie). "I let my hair grow," he continues. "People wanted gifts for weddings. That wasn’t going to happen. Their present was me not starving."

Then Chen talked to a friend who mentioned she had experience arranging benefit dinners for various causes and asked if he was interested. "It was such a foreign idea," he says. "But she took care of almost everything." That included securing a private chef (who donated his services and provided his home for the feast), contacting retailers such as Mission District specialty grocery Bi-Rite Market (which donated the meat and produce), and convincing wine wholesalers to donate three bottles of vino per course. Students from City College’s culinary department volunteered to serve the 16 guests, who each paid a minimum of $250 to attend. From the dinner alone Chen raised $3,500. It might not sound like much, but put it in perspective: the Uganda hotel for his crew of four will cost $2,000 for the 21-day duration of the shoot.

Chen soon realized that directly soliciting in-kind donations might be the way to go. "Once I got over that initial reluctance, it was actually quite easy," he says. The dinner invitations were sent via e-mail, but Chen snail-mailed subsequent requests for cash for a more personal touch. First he sent requests, complete with self-addressed stamped envelopes, to the wealthiest people he knew, followed by the mere well-off, and finally, friends who may only be able to pitch in $10 or $20. He figures he’ll have raised upward of $10,000 before heading to Uganda this month.

Soon he’ll have his precious fundraising reel, which he plans on using in pitches to the Sundance Documentary Project and possibly HBO. Then, who knows? Maybe he’ll splurge and treat himself to a haircut. *

For more information on Chesley Chen’s Memory Book documentary or to make a donation, e-mail him at ccc@chesleychen.com.

Careers and Ed: Hard on the job

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› culture@sfbg.com

Just a short walk northeast from the Hall of Justice in SoMa lies an internationally renowned palace of forbidden pleasure.

The nondescript four-story stone building is the headquarters for Kink, an online enterprise specializing in the production of short, sexy, streaming BDSM videos, available for a monthly subscription fee. Started by British bondage aficionado Peter Ackworth about a decade ago, Kink is home to such fetish favorites as Hogtied, Fucking Machines, and Ultimate Surrender (in which the winner of a female wrestling competition in a Greco-Roman setting gets to fuck the loser). It’s also — perhaps surprisingly — a great place to work, according to the people who work there. And that’s not just those strapped down in front of the cameras talking.

Granted, when you were young and dreaming of a fabulous career in film, porn might not have been your chosen niche. But if you’re looking for a job in media and are unenthused by the paltry postings on Craigslist offering the opportunity to work in the lackluster world of industrial video production, you might want to broaden your options. There used to be a steadier stream of work shooting commercials and Hollywood films on location here, but the high costs have caused that flow to taper off. Still, the Bay Area harbors a vibrant industry creating DVD and Internet adult content.

Crack all the jokes you want about the sleaziness of the porn business, but there’s some real dedication behind it. I used to have a job where I regularly interviewed people about their jobs: dot-com jobs, to be specific. Most of the time, the Web guru, marketing guru, or whatever guru I was interrogating would stare at me with a Stepford wife’s eyes and tell me what a blast it was to work at blobbity-blah.com. All the while I could hear the voice in his or her head blaring, "If my stock options end up amounting to nothing more than toilet paper, I’m gonna be pissed!"

Many local erotica production studios, on the other hand, offer a positive and creative work environment, upward mobility, and good pay with full benefits for everyone from customer service representatives to IT workers and video editors.

ONE HECK OF A DAY JOB


As I’m guided through the maze of sets at Kink — a jail cell, a dirty bathroom, a dungeon with vaulted ceilings reminiscent of the Doom video game, even a sci-fi room — I pass workers who are going about the business of making naughty fantasies come to life. Production assistants in black jumpsuits prepare sets for shoots. Set builders in flannels construct a booth in the back lot for the imminent Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. A model naps in the green room before his close-up.

In the office space where the postproduction editors work with the directors to piece together videos on large, brilliant flat-panel monitors, everyone I see looks like someone who could be working at an indie rock record label. They’re hip, young, hard at work, and having a good time.

I get to interview some of them on the canopied roof deck, replete with a bar, heat lamps, and a hot tub. Kelly Schaefer, a young woman with jagged layers of blond locks jutting to her chin, tells me she’s worked at Kink for about a year. Now the lead production assistant, in charge of scheduling and training all the other PAs for shoots and making sure everything runs smoothly, she started out as a model, performing in Kink’s Ultimate Surrender. The former Good Vibrations sales associate still models, because she really enjoys the wrestling. But she’s also working toward becoming a full-fledged producer.

Schaefer has a rep around Kink for being motivated, which is partly why she was able to move into a different role with greater responsibility. Since she didn’t have a background in production, being a model helped her get a foot in the door. For those interested, Schaefer says, "It’s a great company if you’re just getting started in BDSM." Kink follows the BDSM credo of safe, consensual, and respectful play and trains its PAs to make sure that all models are treated well, taking care to stop the shoot when limbs fall asleep during difficult poses involving mouth gags and rope.

Her coworker Guillermo Garcia, a videographer and PA, got his start by taking a number of production and editing classes in Final Cut Pro at City College. In addition to gaining more experience in lighting a soundstage on the job, the dreadlocked musician from Medellín, Colombia, says he enjoyed scoring the theme to Ultimate Surrender. He also has to make sure all the gadgets for the Fucking Machines series are in proper working order and, truth be told, clean the sex toys.

PERKS AND PACKAGES


Over at Colt Studios, which is in a converted warehouse near Potrero Hill that also houses an accounting firm, a team of 19 people works hard to produce slick and beautiful photos, calendars, and videos of handsome, masculine guys.

President John Rutherford, who got his degree in broadcasting at San Francisco State, realized that making internal videos at Hewlett-Packard with straight guys wasn’t in his future. He started working at San Francisco’s famed hardcore gay porn company Falcon Studios just as he was coming out. Rutherford said he aims to run a team of creative and self-directed people who are serious about attaining company goals. He likens working with porn to a nurse working with blood. "I can’t even watch Nip/Tuck, but here I think, ‘Hey, that’s a great picture; that’s a big dick.’ " It’s all in a day’s work.

His business partner, Tom Settle, says, "Our customer service agents get the question at least once a day: ‘Well, what’s it like to work there?’ People have a fantasy that models walk around servicing our customer service agents all day…. We’ve had people come to work here looking for the forbidden fruit. When they find out it’s not what they expect, they think, ‘Well, I could never tell anyone I work here.’ "

Not that it’s dull working at Colt, a company with a 40-year history of male erotica production, mind you. The elegant offices are filled with fine art. Georgia, Rutherford’s beagle, roams freely. The staff is urbane and witty.

Kim Ionesco, a Colt customer service rep who is starting to work more in marketing, jokes that she never thought her career would flourish in male porn. "I didn’t hit the glass ceiling," she exclaims, sipping a Red Bull. When she started working at Colt, all her lesbian friends began clamoring for DVDs starring Chris Wide, a hot property in Colt’s exclusive stable. She had no idea her girlfriends would know who he was. Then again, she quips, "I appreciate nice, polite, good-looking gay men." So why wouldn’t other dykes feel the same way?

Even straight IT professionals such as Aaron Golub find working in male, mostly gay porn surprisingly refreshing too. Previously, he worked as an IT director at a multinational company but quit because, as he explains, "I did not feel like what I was doing was noble. I feel more guilty about generating junk mail. I’ve never sat there and said, ‘Oh, I need some advertising,’ but I’ve definitely felt like I needed porn. I feel like what we’re doing is for people who really, truly want it. Where I worked before, I didn’t feel like that was truly the case."

Aside from working toward the common goal of providing customers with images of Colt’s much-admired, wood-chopping manly men, the twentysomething IT whiz gets to work with technology on the cutting edge. "We’re doing things you don’t do when you’re developing a site for IBM." He wouldn’t tip his hand, but basically he means that by making downloads and streams seamless and infallible, online porn is on the forefront of content delivery.

When I ask him if working in porn might cause some stigmatization with future employers, he says, "I’m in a different boat than actors or directors, because my skills are very transportable. I’m not in a situation where I’m going to have to present a reel." He also echoes what every other worker I interviewed told me.

"I wouldn’t want to work for someone who has a problem with what I do." *

www.kink.com

www.coltstudiogroup.com

TUESDAY

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Jan. 9

MUSIC

Bulbs

It gets increasingly difficult to describe how Jon Almaraz and William Sabiston make their electronic drum pads and guitar effects do what they do, probably because they keep getting weirder. Without a record or even a MySpace page to speak of, Bulbs hole up and practice like maniacs for their all-too-rare live shows. I would say Bulbs are underrated, but it’s unclear what rating system they even register on. Maybe tie a hypercolor shirt to a Geiger counter and then melt a bunch of John Fahey records till they look like a Frank Gehry building. Opener East Bay wunderkinder Robin Williams on Fire do the Arab on Radar gambol with excess energy and a fulsome ruckus. (George Chen)

With Man vs. Nature, Yvonne, Child Pornography, and Operation
9 p.m., $5
Parkside
1600 17th St., SF
(415) 503-0393
www.theeparkside.com

FILM

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes

Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes may take rap lyrics to task for being needlessly violent, homophobic, and misogynistic, but filmmaker Byron Hurt isn’t a hater – he’s a lifelong fan. His occasionally academic investigation into how masculinity figures into hip-hop culture is therefore rooted in a certain amount of concern: he’d sure like to find a silver lining among all the bitches and bullets, but the stereotype is proven as fact at nearly every turn. It’s a thought-provoking doc that’s worthy of further discussion, so stick around after for the panel of activists and artists. Youth Movement Records and Youth Speaks also perform. (Cheryl Eddy)

5:30 p.m., free
San Francisco Public Library
Koret Auditorium
100 Larkin, SF
www.itvs.org

MONDAY

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MUSIC

Kronos Quartet

Christmas is brushing off rocks in the rear-view mirror and New Year’s is coughing up exhaust. ’Tis the season for Scraping Foetus off the Wheel. More specifically, it’s the time to hear a composition or two by J.G. Thirlwell, whose many musical noms de plume include quite a few that capitalize the word foetus, as well as genius tags like Manorexia and Steroid Maximus. Only one foursome could bring the sound of Thirlwell into a setting such as Temple Emanu-El: namely, the Kronos Quartet. (Johnny Ray Huston)

7:30 p.m., $17-$20
Temple Emanu-El, Martin Meyer Sanctuary
Two Lake, SF
(415) 355-9988, ext. 11
www.emanuelsf.org

FILM

“Cinema Drafthouse”

The biggest problem with most movie theaters is that they don’t serve booze. Luckily, the good people at the Independent put on “Cinema Drafthouse,” where you can live the dream. This week they are showing instant indie classic Little Miss Sunshine, which was one of the best movies released last year. Idea for a drinking game: drink whenever the little girl talks. (Aaron Sankin)

8 p.m., free (2 drink minimum)
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
(415) 771-1422
www.independentsf.com

SUNDAY

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Jan. 7

STAGE

Chinese New Year Spectacular

This touring New Tang Dynasty TV (NTDTV) production arrives in San Francisco just in time to usher in the Western new year with a Far East twist. Combining classical Chinese dance, Western ballet, orchestral accompaniment, and a cast of hundreds, the full-blown pageantry of “Myths and Legends” kicks off the year in a grand manner. You’ll watch cherry blossoms dance below the branches, serpentine dragons writhe across the stage, and teams of synchronized sword fighters prepare for the fray. (Nicole Gluckstern)

2:30 p.m., $28-$168
War Memorial Opera House
301 Van Ness, SF
(415) 392-4400
www.cityboxoffice.com

FILM

Notes on a Scandal

An educated woman in need of some distraction from her same-old domestic lot, Sheba (Cate Blanchett) decides to try teaching art at the local secondary school. There she makes two friends: Steven (Andrew Simpson), a working-class boy with some drawing talent; and spinsterish Barbara (Judi Dench), an imperious history teacher not liked much by students or staff but taken into confidence by the breezily trusting Sheba. Imagine prissy Barbara’s shock when she discovers that Sheba hasn’t really been so frank with her after all – she is, in fact, having a reckless affair with Steven. This juicy psychological near-horror story is adapted from Zoë Heller’s excellent novel What Was She Thinking? The movie’s minor flaws are more than compensated for by a gold-plated cast. (Dennis Harvey)

Now playing in Bay Area theaters

TUESDAY

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Jan. 2

film

The Painted Veil

Flapperish English socialite Kitty (Naomi Watts) marries bacteriologist Walter (Edward Norton) because – well, he asked her, following a brief but fervent courtship. Once Kitty settles into the reality of being a workaholic medical researcher’s wife – based in China – she looks for diversion, as so many bored expatriate wives often do in English literature of the early 20th century: she cheats with another cheater (Liev Schreiber). Hell hath no fury like a workaholic medical researcher who discovers his wife between the sheets with a hairy American diplomat. As revenge, he drags her along on a dangerous mission of mercy: tending a cholera outbreak in a remote area far from the amenities and infidelities available in Shanghai. Based on a 1925 W. Somerset Maugham novel, John Curran’s film takes a while to warm up to. But the beautifully mounted and photographed movie opens up emotionally just like its characters do. (Dennis Harvey)

In San Francisco theaters
www.thepaintedveilmovie.com

music

YACHT

Don’t bother knockin’, because the yacht-rockin’ good times are sure to be had when Portland, Ore., one-man party machine Yacht meets Oakland one-man party machine Hawnay Troof.

With High Places
9:30 p.m., $6
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-0923

Rapists and fishwives

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Popular cinema places a lot of stock in stories about the redemptive power of love — stories in which love turns a skeptic into a true believer, an ill-tempered miser into a philanthropist, or a broken spirit into an undamaged specimen free from the taint of failures past. This year’s Berlin and Beyond Film Festival offers two very different takes on the theme: Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will (Der Freie Wille) and Doris Dörrie’s The Fisherman and His Wife — Why Women Never Get Enough (Der Fischer und Seine Frau — Warum Frauen Nie Genug Bekommen).

No Berlin and Beyond would be complete without at least one film that turns the concept of redemptive love upside down and inside out with relentless aggression. In 2005 that film was Head-On (Gegen die Wand), directed by Fatih Akin. Its gritty exploration of a mutually destructive downward spiral forged within a marriage of convenience was mercilessly high impact and emotionally challenging. This year’s contender for most controversial confrontation with the devil inside is The Free Will, a movie about an unlikely love affair set within the context of a current hot-button topic: the effectiveness of rehabilitation for repeat sex offenders.

Opening with a scene of brutal rape, The Free Will doesn’t immediately elicit much sympathy for its protagonist, Theo (Jürgen Vogel), a marginalized dishwasher in a middle-school cafeteria. Cut to nine years and four months later, as Theo is being released from a mental institution into a halfway house for a crew of equally wayward characters. "They tell you at the hospital it’s a new chance," the home’s caretaker, Sascha (André Hennicke), cautions him. "But the others call the front door the gateway to hell." Nevertheless, Theo seeks to refamiliarize himself with normality. He lands a job in a print shop, buys himself new clothing, eats his dinners at the neighborhood trattoria. He forces himself into a punishing exercise regime, while down the hall his flatmates cry out at night and blast heavy metal through the walls. He and Sascha become fast friends and sparring partners at the local dojo, and for a time it seems as if Theo’s demons have moved on to more susceptible prey.

Enter Nettie (Sabine Timoteo): awkward, unsmiling, and living on her own for the first time at the advanced age of 27 in an attempt to break away from her overbearing father’s influence. After an initially unrewarding encounter with Theo during which she tells him she hates all men (and he lets her know he’s not that fond of Frauen), they begin to reach out to each other and eventually become a couple.

Naturally, the tensions of their unspoken personal histories remain, seething below the surface of a tenuous bond based on mutual loneliness. At the end of this unflinchingly deliberate two-and-half-hour film, director Glasner leaves the audience grappling with almost the same conundrums he presented in the beginning: can forgiveness be granted even when unsought, and can the unforgivable ever truly be redeemed?

On the opposite face of the aggression-versus-love coin is Dörrie’s reconstruction of an old Grimm’s fairy tale. Otto (Christian Ulmen) is a soft-spoken fish parasitologist whose unlikely whirlwind romance in Japan with a backpacking fabric designer results in a marriage of mismatched expectations. His new wife, Ida (Alexandra Maria Lara), quickly asserts herself as a woman of ambition, designing first scarves and then dresses based on the various distinctive markings of the koi fish she encounters through Otto. Soon her material desires outstrip Otto’s modest means, and the two find themselves locked in a passive-aggressive struggle that is both familiar and poignant. Ida has no difficulty defining what she wants, but what does Otto want? Does he even want to be with her? Why can’t he say so? For Otto, Ida’s insatiable aspirations are baffling. Why can’t she be content with what they have at the moment? "Why is the here and now an obstacle that has to be overcome?" he asks, not understanding that her relentless quest for more is an attempt to compensate for the affection Otto has trouble articuutf8g — and that she has trouble detecting in his actions.

Like those of the demanding fishwife in the fairy tale, Ida’s dreams soon outstrip all realistic measure, and her seemingly endless good fortune catapults them from camper van to condo to country home in quick succession. The more preposterous their prosperity, though, the greater the gap becomes between their understanding of each other’s emotional needs, and it’s increasingly apparent that something will have to give if love is to be preserved. Narrated in part by a chorus of tategoi who await their own transformation, The Fisherman and His Wife examines the age-old dilemma of miscommunication between the sexes and the modern-day struggle for a balance of family, career, and koi — a word that means not just fish but love. *

The 12th annual Berlin and Beyond Film Festival runs Jan. 11–20 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF; and Point Arena Theatre, Hwy. One, Point Arena. Tickets (most shows $5–$15) are available at www.ticketweb.com; for additional information, visit www.goethe.de/sanfrancisco.

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