Films

The oldest story in the book

-
0

REVIEW It’s the oldest story in the book — and no, I’m not talking about Adam and Eve. Eden is yet another addition to the familiar marriage-in-trouble genre, with no real twist to speak of: after 10 years together, Breda (Eileen Walsh) feels unloved by her husband Billy (Aidan Kelly). Meanwhile, Billy finds himself tempted by the forbidden fruit of infidelity. Rather than stunt the film, this well-trodden subject matter makes Eden’s success all the more impressive. Without reinventing the wheel, director Declan Recks has crafted one of the most captivating films of the year. It helps, of course, that he has two consummate performers. Kelly captures the subtle nuances of his character, who struggles to balance his selfish desires with his familiar obligations. And Walsh, winner of the Best Actress award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is nothing short of heartbreaking. Both actors look — for lack of a better word — real, and their presence enhances the film’s ability to produce a genuine empathetic response. Taken as a whole, there is a beauty in this quiet Irish drama rarely found in the glossiest of Hollywood blockbusters, with each frame thoughtfully composed. Despite the otherwise mundane story, Eden emerges as downright idyllic.

EDEN opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters.

Boot up

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Writing about Umberto D (1952), André Bazin located the intrepid beauty of Italian neorealism in its accumulation of small slivers: "The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis."

The sentence’s movement from careful observation to impassioned ethos is typical of Bazin’s noble endeavor to demonstrate the Italians’ modest profundity. The French critic was no proponent of formalism, but his composite sketch of neorealism — a mixed use of professional and amateur actors, location shooting, long takes, and a situational plotline — remains a given at Cannes.

Looking at the films in the Pacific Film Archive’s series "Moments of Truth," it’s easy enough to see why. Realism is often used as a cover to smuggle ideological biases into narrative, but a movie like Open City (1945) still draws a bracing connection between an economy of means and a strong moral imperative. Filmed in the rubble of Il Duce, the procession of dark apartment corridors and deserted streets submerge suspense into the act of witnessing. Neorealist orthodoxy aside, director Roberto Rossellini surely would have admitted that the truth is a lot more palatable when you have Anna Magnani in the leading role. Her death scene would seem to depart from neorealism in its wrenching montage (and burst of melodramatic strings), but it is Open City‘s most searing breach of moral injustice, around which the quieter scenes of resistance and despair organize their electric charge.

Among the PFA’s selection, I dote most on Il Posto (1961), an ethnography of adolescence that summons vast stores of quotidian melancholy from a backdrop of workaday drudgery. Whenever such a delicate work of neorealism threatens to buckle under the weight of critical piousness, we might look to the French New Wave filmmakers who identified with the Italians more for reasons of intellectual fecundity than partisan rigidity. Jean-Luc Godard and company liked the Hollywood pictures too, of course, but one senses their close affinity to the neorealists in their resourcefulness and flexibility. Instead of film as product, here was film as choice; pictures like Open City and Il Posto may have been branded with ideals of Truth and Reality, but the secret of their success rests in their sense of possibility. *

"Moments of Truth: Italian Cinema Classics"

Nov 29–Dec 21, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

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

Cinemascope baroque

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

"You give your body and you keep your soul." This is the Faustian bargain a circus promoter offers Lola Montès (Martine Carol) in Max Ophüls’ reimagining of the Victorian courtesan’s life. Ophüls, himself something of a ringmaster, inscribes his enchantress in a ravishing purgatory; the film skates complex figure-eights of flashback and reenactment, seduction and spectacle, voyeurism and exhibitionism. Ophüls was known for his 19th century élan, but his swan song is the work of a consummate modernist. A spirit of jubilant decay overhangs his taste for shots that simultaneously sensationalize the cinematic apparatus and lay it bare. Unlike Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981), however, Lola Montès (1955) registers the emotional strain of such stylistic excess. A lavish production process and subsequent bowdlerized edits left Lola a dormant dream for decades, but a new restoration by Cinémathèque Française once again looses Ophüls’ picaresque of novelistic depth and ironic artifice.

The plot, later revived in Showgirls (1995) and The Last Mistress (2007), is that of the woman navigating the marketplace. We’re introduced to Lola in spectacle res, exhibited as a circus’ main attraction. The ringmaster crows about her past lovers, moving her through reenactments of former exploits. Lola’s own flashbacks carry the film back to her trysts with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) and Bavaria’s King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook), and the circus stage-sets transmogrify into Ophüls’ equally fantastic uses of Technicolor and CinemaScope.

The ringmaster announces Lola as a femme fatale, but Ophüls doesn’t let us off so easily. Like Citizen Kane (1941), Lola Montès deconstructs biographical tropes. But whereas the flashback structure of Orson Welles’ debut fragments the character of power, Lola‘s jigsaw scheme slips us through the looking glass of desire. Ophüls’ camera movements simultaneously imbue the film with realist fluidity and make us more aware of theatrical, painterly aspects of set design and staging. This dynamism, so important to future melodrama artists like R.W. Fassbinder and Todd Haynes, is crucial to Lola’s crumpled beauty. And if Martine Carol’s porcelain performance gets crushed by the double-sided brilliance of Max and his tracks, it’s not at all clear that he intends for us to feel we’ve broken through her façade.

The film’s rude asides about product placement and the profit margins of scandal ("Especially in America!") give Lola continued currency, but it’s Ophüls’ remarkable use of the still nascent CinemaScope technology that makes the restoration a must for the big screen. Lola is one of the few films of its era to express the contradictory potentials of Henri Chétien’s anamorphic process. Ophüls sows his widescreen images with all manner of obstructions, so that Lola simultaneously seems to expand and shrink into the largesse of her role. Roland Barthes might have been thinking of this shattering example of movie portraiture when he wrote of CinemaScope: "The stretched-out frontality becomes almost circular; in other words, the ideal space of great dramaturgies."

LOLA MONTÈS opens Wed/19 in Bay Area theaters.

Hot flash gallery

-
0

> johnny@sfbg.com

It was the summer of 1974, when shy, skinny, cute Daniel Nicoletta first stepped through the doors of Castro Camera into adulthood and history. His parents were snapshot enthusiasts. In his words, he had grown up "surrounded by Instamatic moments." But he was about to enter the time of his life. "I stopped in to determine where I would be developing my Super 8 film," he remembers. "I couldn’t get over how friendly the two guys [Harvey Milk and Scott Smith] were. I was 19 years old — I had no idea what cruising was at that point. Of course, within two months I was completely up to speed."

Nicoletta immediately captured the speed of life. His vérité photos of Milk, Smith, and San Francisco from the mid-1970s onward are often great and sometimes iconic. He soon sold his first photo out of Boys in the Sand (1971)and Bijou (1972), filmmaker Wakefield Poole’s hair salon-toy store-art gallery Hot Flash. A regular "Mr. Multimedia," Nicoletta was as interested in half-inch Portapak video as he was in still photography. In 1977, using Castro Camera as one of his chief meeting spots, he worked with David Waggoner and Marc Huestis to found the Gay Film Festival of Super 8 Films, an event now popularly known as the Frameline festival.

Nicoletta’s role in Milk’s life and role in queer film history provide some of the subtler facets of Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk. Those viewers familiar with Van Sant’s earlier work know of his focus on the photographic process: for example, a significant sequence within his 2003 film Elephant is spent in the darkroom, observing the efforts of a young photographer who may as well be a 21st century version of the young Nicoletta. "Even though I don’t say a lot, Lucas [Grabeel, who plays Nicoletta in the film] is a constant presence throughout Milk," Nicoletta notes, when asked about the interplay between his life and Van Sant’s moviemaking. "Gus keeps me there in the film as a cultural observer. In life, Gus has an eye for the role of still photography in culture, and he used my entity as a way of cross-referencing that."

Some of Nicoletta’s photos of Milk and Smith inform or inspire the look of particular scenes in Milk, such as a pie fight between Smith and Milk. "The art department was immersed in stills of all kinds," says Nicoletta, who switched to digital photography to document the making of the film. "I was impressed with all the things pinned up to their walls — the checkerboard analysis was lovely to look at." Nicoletta also lent his copy of the August 1974 San Francisco issue of the barely-subtextual gay culture magazine After Dark — a publication partly defined by the studio portraiture of East Coast gay photographers such as Ken Duncan and Jack Mitchell — to Milk‘s costume designer, Danny Glicker. "He [Glicker] creamed himself over that," Nicoletta says with an affectionate laugh. "There’s a postage stamp-sized photo of Victor Garber [who plays George Moscone in Milk] in it. I’d never noticed, but it took Danny Glicker a second to zero in on that. It was hilarious."

The Milk crew’s devotion to verisimilitude extended to Nicoletta’s camera — and to one of Milk’s two main cameras, one of the first Nikons ever made, which Nicoletta now owns. "They literally had me take jpgs of my camera and Harvey’s camera so they could cast those instruments to the letter," he says. "Harvey’s camera has his name engraved on the bottom. Scott’s [Smith] mom gave it to me when Scott passed away. It’s a real treasure. I never use it, but I saw him use it. Harvey and Scott also had a second Nikon that was their primary camera, and I did use that one quite a bit. We both passed film through the same camera, which was kind of cool — kind of incestuous."

This radical sense of brotherhood informed both Nicoletta and Milk’s photography. "Harvey took great joy in photographing people," Nicoletta observes, noting that a chance to take aerial photos of Christo’s Running Fence was one of Milk’s artistic and free-spirited moments as his political duties increased. "If you look at Harvey’s body of work, one thing that comes through with political potency is that a presiding aesthetic in his life was male-to-male love. You can then zoom out even further and say that the stimulus for his political activism was the sanctification and preservation of male-to-male love."

It’s characteristically modest of Nicoletta to turn an interview about his photography into a discussion of Milk’s endeavors with a camera — everything he says about Milk’s photos is true of his own work, which captures Milk and Smith’s relationship, for instance, with great warmth. He gives vivid background to some of his best-known Milk photos, such as an image of the inaugural walk to City Hall in January 1978. "We were just arriving at the steps," he remembers. "What’s great about that photo is that it’s just one of so many details of the history of the queer community that have unfolded on those very steps. I think I could do a whole book on the steps of City Hall at this point."

The prospect of a Nicoletta monograph is something to savor, even if he jokes that his friends "all roll their eyes to the back of their head and say, ‘There she goes again about her book’," whenever he mentions the prospect. As a documentarian of history, Nicoletta understands the necessity and gravity of a book of his work. He has other excellent ideas, such as an era-based collection that would bring in stylized images by Steven Arnold — like him, one of the chief people to visually capture queer artistic forces such as the Cockettes and Angels of Light. "I loved working with Reggie [of the Cockettes] because the first photo I ever saw of him was in Gilles Larrain’s [1973] Idols," Nicoletta says. "That book just rocked my world. I thought, ‘Who are these people, and where can I find them?’ And I found them."

Nicoletta found those people — the evidence is in books such as Gay by the Bay and Adrian Brooks’ new Flights of Angels (Arsenal Pulp Press, 224 pages, $24.95), and in the photo collection of the San Francisco Public Library. As a chronicler of gay life, he can be seen as a West Coast public counterpart to East Coast photographers such as Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, and David Armstrong, and Nan Goldin. "In a sense I’ve sort of stayed provincial. That’s a little bit self-preservationist," he says, after mentioning the direct influence of the Bay Area studio photographer Crawford Barton on his work. "It’s so great to have a 30-year arc and be mindful of where you are and grateful for things like the mentorship of people like Harvey Milk and Scott Smith, and the inspiration of people like the Angels of Light. I’m for slow growth."

>>Back to the Milk Issue

Political Theater

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

Pair an effusive and extroverted, larger-than-life politico like Harvey Milk — complete with community-forging charisma, panoramic outlook, and labyrinthine City Hall machinations — with a reserved, perpetually-outside-looking-in independent, à la director Gus Van Sant? That feature-film odd-coupling might have understandably strained some brains in Hollywood. Making the seldom-seen moments of otherwise-secret or neglected lives visible has seemingly been Van Sant’s calling, and his most memorable films — 1985’s Mala Noche, 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, 1991’s My Own Private Idaho, 2003’s Elephant, and even the Oscar-gathering 1997 Good Will Hunting — have relied on his coolly unblinking, surprisingly cerebral yet gently empathetic eye, whether focused on Mexican immigrants, ’70s-era oblivion-seekers, Northwestern hustlers, a hidden savant, or disaffected teenagers.

Still, those leitmotifs — entwined with Van Sant’s terrible, tangible sense of romance with his outsiders, artists, and lost souls, as well as the way his camera seems to fall head over heels for his characters — made Van Sant a natural to make Milk, after Oliver Stone’s aborted feature-film attempt to tell the slain San Francisco supervisor’s story. "There is always that question: why I haven’t done a film like this earlier," Van Sant confessed, clearing his throat for the umpteenth time while agreeing that he hasn’t ever quite done a film like Milk. "Yeah, I hadn’t done a big movie, so there were people around who were like, ‘Can you handle it? Can it be done?’ They think that way. Since there was no business model, they were like, ‘No, he can’t, because he makes these scruffy, little movies. Too big a gamble, you know.’

"That’s a part of Hollywood, but it’s kind of like safe bets: it can make bad stuff happen as easily as good stuff, and it has its own closed policies like the old conservative City Hall-type policies. ‘New supervisors who haven’t handled the job before are incapable and they’re screwing things up.’"

Thankfully the gamble paid off and the tale of California’s first openly gay politician has been told with elegance, poetry, and not a little heart-stirring, inspirational grace, by the man whom biographer James Robert Parish describes as "the standard bearer of America’s ‘queer cinema’" — one who fuses extreme close-ups, handheld shots, and found footage in a collaborative, textural approach that lends a Kodachrome pop-culty feel to his films. The process makes for "beautiful pictures every time," as a windblown Sean Penn put it at a Ritz Carlton press conference after Milk‘s Oct. 28 world premiere at the Castro Theatre.

Seated at the middle of a long table between Penn and Josh Brolin, who portrays Milk’s killer Dan White, as they traded friendly jabs, Van Sant remained mostly silent — physically at the center, but an observer apart at the same time. Later in a hotel suite, face to face with a single interviewer, the director seemed equally out of place, folded uncomfortably into a plush chair, arms tightly crossed over a tan jeans jacket sporting a "No on 8" sticker, with a small, nylon, bright-blue dollar-store-style backpack by his side. He more closely resembles a 56-year-old teacher or elder-care worker than a Hollywood insider.

The latter role is evidently still alien to him. His first brush with Milk came in 1978 while he was driving across the country and heard on the radio that the supervisor was shot. Though he later saw the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, it never occurred to him to make a film about the politician. "It seemed like a very big story," Van Sant said. Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy "were stories that were devised to be made with really low budgets, like $20,000. So it was never like, ‘Oh, we can make a story about City Hall with $20,000.’ I guess I was always coming at filmmaking from not really being in the business, but knowing that I could get a hold of or save up my own money to the point where I’d have $20,000 and I could actually make a feature."

In the process of making Milk, the filmmaker admitted that he had to leave out many details that "I really like and things that sort of explain the situation. We suggest things. We explain this new law that enabled people to elect their supervisors from their districts, but we didn’t explain that the people up to that point that had to run city-wide resembled a different and maybe more antiquated type of politician. They were more, I guess, conservative. They were more business-oriented."

If San Francisco is palpable as a character in Milk, then City Hall is that elegantly shambolic figure’s brain, and Van Sant effectively used the Beaux Arts space, which harks back to classical forms, to his own dramatic ends. A down-the-rabbit-hole corridor leading to supervisors’ chambers becomes a pulsing nerve center visually rhyming with the characters’ stratagems. The sweeping staircase and balconies become the backdrop for Milk’s and White’s clashing trajectories, and the building itself becomes the spotless stage for Milk’s political birth and death.

"What I usually try and do, in general, is to connect the characters to a timeless quality, so it’s not necessarily situated in the specific time they’re in," said Van Sant. "So if they’re in City Hall and there’s a beaux-arts classical relief on the ceiling, if you frame it correctly, they can kind of look like Roman senators. You can get this timeless quality of people trading votes and betraying each other for as long as there’s been a forum and a senate.

"There were certain things in the script and in Harvey’s life — the famous line is ‘How do you like my new theater,’ which is what he says to Cleve [Jones, played by Emile Hirsch]: ‘Always take the stairs, never dress up, never blend in, make a show of it, use the whole space.’ I thought of that as a centerpiece of the whole film. That scene is one of my favorites because it was kind of like Harvey, who was a stage manager and was in theater. This was his new forum, his new theater, his new proscenium, with which to create new stuff — in this case, gay rights and other things that he thought were important, like education and help for minorities and seniors."

The question that arises so often among those who care about gay rights is: Why wasn’t Milk released before the Nov. 4 election, when it might have energized voters to shut down Proposition 8, a battle so similar to Milk’s charge against Proposition 6? As Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black said, "I didn’t know this [movie] would be about Prop. 8, but I don’t think this fight is over."

"I don’t really decide when movies should come out," said Van Sant. "The distributors came up with that." He spelled out some of the thoughts behind the Nov. 26 theatrical release: worries included "whether or not the elements of the story were so like the political moment that the film wouldn’t have a life after the election," and "whether people are too busy with the election to go see the movie. Are people overtaxed with politics to go see a political movie?" As a compromise, the late-October Castro Theatre premiere was arranged to get Milk and its overall message into the media eye, while still opening it into November through January, the Academy campaign season.

"Yeah, I didn’t make the call," repeats Van Sant, somewhat regretfully and shedding perhaps a smidge of that cherished detachment. "Harvey would have opened it in October."

Milk opens Wed/26 at the Castro Theatre, with additional Bay Area openings Fri/28 and Dec. 5.


>>Back to the Milk Issue

Danny Boyle on Bollywood, game shows, and Indian fairy tales

-
0

SFBG’s Louis Peitzman interviews Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle on the eve of the release of his latest flick, Slumdog Millionaire

slumdog1.jpg
L-R: Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor. Photo by Ishika Mohan

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Slumdog Millionaire is a very colorful and vibrant film. Obviously much of that has to do with the art direction and cinematography, but what was your role, as a director, in creating that look?

Danny Boyle: It was all linked to the central approach of this, which is, we didn’t try — because you can’t, is the real reason — to control it or recreate bits of it or change it. You’ve got two approaches as far as I can see. You either stand back and look at it sort of pictorially, which I didn’t really want to do. We did some tests like that and that is an approach, and you can see that, especially in photography about India. It is extraordinary to look at sometimes. But I didn’t really want to do that. I just wanted to dive in there and I thought that by the time the story’s over, you’ll have got that pictorial sense of it. You’ll have accumulated it rather than actually be introduced to it bit by bit. So that was the idea, that we would film on the streets, use live sync sound as much as we could, and actually not change things, not redesign things, and if they did change, which they did — they’d change in front of your eyes, literally — we’d go with that change. So there wouldn’t be any obsession with continuity, like there is normally on films. And we just accepted the fact — if you see it again, you’ll notice there are lots of people looking at the camera, and there’s guys saying, “No filming here” to the camera, things like that, which are all left in. And you just go with that as an approach, and you benefit from it. It drives you mad in one sense, in the controlled, precise think, but in the other way, you get life. You get a sense of it, or I hope you do. You get a bit of the flavor of what Mumbai is like as this electric city. So that was the idea; that was the approach.

SFBG: Going back to what you said about people looking into the camera and other moments like that, it feels like the movie goes back and forth between fantasy and realism. It’s almost a fairy tale but with elements of real life. Was that something you were going for?

DB: It’s just India, that. Their movies are fantastical, kind of like ridiculous things, and the life on the street is brutal in one sense, and yet the two sit together. That’s the whole point. It’s why they sit together really. So you’re infected by that. It’s so melodramatic, the story, in one sense. It’s two brothers, of course — a good brother and a bad brother, and that is absolutely key to Indian cinema. That idea of good brother and bad brother. And they usually lose sight of their mother — their mother is kidnapped or lost — and then they find their mother again at the end when they’re reconciled. But the bad boy has to die. And then there’s always this thing about eternal love, which is also key to cinema there, which is this everlasting love that’s pure and will overcome all obstacles. So those are the kind of things that you kind of get infected by. It’s a bit like coming to America and you make a crime film, because crime and the way the country’s been built, crime has been so linked to the way the country’s been built, so inevitably, there is a reason why there’s so much crime in American movies, why it’s so key to American movies, because it’s a part of the culture.

dannyboyle.jpg
Director Danny Boyle. Photo by Ishika Mohan

So you end up, as a foreigner coming here, your film would be partly about crime inevitably. There are certain things that you just accumulate from the place, and you can’t resist or avoid. And Simon [Beaufoy] got that in the writing; he got that partly from the book, but also from his own experiences, ’cause he toured India 20 years ago and he’d always wanted to write about it and never been able to find a key way in. He’d always wanted to write about it, and like me, he’d never wanted to do a Westerner in India. And I would never do a film like that. I don’t want to watch Western guys wandering around India or anything like that. I sort of made a film like that, The Beach (2000), and I found it a very unsatisfying way of dipping into a country and just taking from a country for your own purposes. I much prefer to go there and try to submerge myself and the story in the place, and then come out of it. There are problems because studios say, “Well, there’s no white guys in it, there are no recognizable names,” but that’s the way things are gonna go. Fortunately, I think that more of the world is opening up. We’re gonna hopefully share more in a way. I think that’s the way it’s going.

Last stand at the Harding Theater!

-
0

Richard Reineccius says “Don’t mourn, renovate the Harding” theater and save this historic landmark

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, hopefully this isn’t the last stand for the Harding Theater in the Western Addition. But I wanted to use the line that we used for years in the passionate and unending battle to save the Goodman Building off of Van Ness Ave.

The battle was lost to save the original building but there was a complicated deal done in which the people in the Goodman Building ended up in the Thick Description Theater Building at 1695 l8th st. on Potrero Hill.
The theater is the lineal descendant of the old Julian theater, one of the city’s finest and most avant garde neighborhood theaters founded by Richard Reineccius and Doug Giebel.

It most fitting that Richard is now a leader in the fight to save the Harding theater. Here’s his call to arms on a hearing for the latest proposal to demolish the building at a hearing on Thursday (11/13/08) before the city planning commission.

A FULL HEARING FOR THE HARDING

by Richard Reineccius

The SF City Planning Commission will this week hear the latest proposal for demolishing much of an historic theater at 616 Divisadero Street, erecting a multi-story apartment building plus retail space on the premises. The hearing will be on Thursday afternoon 11/13, Room 400 City hall. (www.sfgov.org/planning)

The Harding Theater in SF’s once artistically vibrant and stylish Western Addition hasn’t seen audiences for live performances or films in a number of years, but is an excellent candidate for saving, not only as an arts space but as a development catalyst for the neighborhood. While not currently listed as a historic landmark, it in fact is one, being the last intact theater remaining in the city designed by the famous Reid Brothers firm (Fairmont Hotel, Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, SF’s Roosevelt and Castro Theaters, Byron Hot Springs Spa Hotel, more)

SFIAF: Zap your peepers with animated wonders

-
0

Trailer for Sita Sings the Blues, which opens the San Francisco International Animation Festival on Thu/13

At last the third annual San Francisco International Animation Festival is upon us — and this year seems to be the best yet, what with the recent explosion of seriously entertaining animated feature films. Gone, mostly, are the slightly entertaining but also slightly masturbatory jaunts through the latest software capabilities. Gone, mostly, too are low-fi mumblecore-like doodles that half-heartedly combine anti-narrative blahs with dime-store angst. (Although one short, “Fantaisie in Bubblewrap” — with the voice of Scarlett Johanson of all people — could be said to be the epitome of such: individual pop-bubbles casually yet disturbingly bemoan their fate as one by one they’re eviscerated by a shapened pencil.) That little piece of ennui/terror is included in the “Control Freaks” program of shorts, and is nicely balanced out by Australian Dennis Tupicoff’s “Chainsaw” — a 24-minute violently sexual hoot that rotoscopes a poetic descent into love and madness in the bush. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner are implicated.

Huge on the hipster list will be Friday night’s “Play it by Eye” program, which showcases a delightful menu of indie rock and dance videos that utilize animation. Tunes by Chemical Brothers, Gnarls Barkley, Chromeo, and Hot Chip all make appearances, as well as this little gem

Grizzly Bear, “Knife”

In this squinty YouTube world of ours, it’s a rare chance to see these melodic whoppers fill the big screen. The above vid was directed/conceived by former Bay Area-based geniuses Encyclopedia Pictura, who get an entire documentary on Saturday afternoon. Here the EP studio is making their breakout vid for Bjork’s “Wanderlust”:

But a couple of the features are really what turned me on.

An interview with “Stranded” director Gonzalo Arijon

-
0

By Mara Math

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

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

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

kino21

-
0

There is an Alfred Jarry quote at the top of kino21’s Web site: "It’s always those who can’t who try." Jarry’s pithy observation might seem like a backhanded compliment on what motivates the underdog, but it also nicely encapsulates the risk-taking and politically provocative sensibility that kino21 founders and organizers Irina Leimbacher and Konrad Steiner bring to their screenings. "We wanted people to see films as a community, to talk about them as you see them, rather than about them, privately," reflects Steiner over the phone. "It’s always hot and cold — it depends on the show. It’s hard to say if the goal is ever reached, but the point is that we have consistently been showing these films."

Leimbacher and Steiner joined forces in February 2007 to create a more moveable and multivalent forum for the kind of curatorial work they had been doing together at San Francisco Cinematheque from 2003-06, when Leimbacher was associate curator, and then artistic director, and Steiner was on the curatorial committee. Since their inaugural screening of Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980), a freewheeling personal investigation of the psychic and political fallout of violence, kino21 has presented films by canonical members of the avant-garde such as Chris Marker and Warren Sonbert. They’ve also expanded cinema through events such as the New Talkies or Neo-Benshi Cabaret, and their multimedia reinterpretation of Jarry’s The 10,000 Mile Bike Race.

While kino21’s array of events is certainly eclectic, Leimbacher and Steiner pay attention to the order of things when filling out their calendar: the question of how different screenings will resonate with or deflect off each other is always kept in mind. One example: Schindler’s Houses (2007), Heinz Emigholz’s meditative portrait of modernist architect Rudolf Schindler’s constructions, was screened on the heels of a double bill consisting of Kamal Aljafari’s The Roof (2006) and James T. Hong’s This Shall Be a Sign, which both investigate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by way of architecture and urban development.

Even when programming older work, such as last April’s screening of Bruce Baillie’s rarely-exhibited 1970 Quick Billy or Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1973), Leimbacher and Steiner aren’t, in Steiner’s words, "trying to recuperate or resuscitate someone’s reputation, but to show their continuity with the present moment." As he puts it: "To draw historical work back and make it relevant, rather than nostalgic — that’s what we hope to accomplish."

Kino21’s most ambitious and certainly timely project is the current five-part "How We Fight" series. Evoking Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series of World War II-era propaganda films for the United States, "How We Fight" presents international works that investigate the various ground truths of those doing the fighting. "We wanted to show films that looked at war, but not from some specific ideological or moral perspective," Leimbacher explains. "Instead [they] actually explore and visually convey the experience of what it means, in the short and long run, to be a soldier." From Joseph Strick’s historic interviews with My Lai veterans, to recent footage shot by soldiers and mercenaries on the frontlines of Iraq, to Stefano Savona’s controversial, diaristic portrait of Kurdish terrorists, the films in "How We Fight" demand an honest emotional as well as critical response.

A forum for this sort of critical engagement with aesthetics, in fact, is exactly what kino21 creates. "There’s an aspect of art where we use it to better our lives. But there’s another aspect where we use it to investigate our lives," Steiner says. "We try to do the latter."

www.kino21.org

Shift happens

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trouble with hairy

-
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON

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

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

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

Speed Reading

-
0

WOLFGANG VOIGT — GAS

By Wolfgang Voigt

Raster-Noton

128 pages with CD

$46.49

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

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

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

THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR

By Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley

Harper Paperbacks

432 pages

$14.95

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

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

XXX-tant love

-
0

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

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

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

“Halloweird”

-
0

PREVIEW The short films showcased at Independent Exposure’s "Halloweird 2008" are mostly more bizarre than they are spooky, but that doesn’t mean they’re not holiday appropriate. There’s something deeply unsettling about many of the offerings, which offer a more lingering impression than your standard scares. Loka "Tabernacle 1" is haunting precisely because we’re given so little of the overall picture. As the camera glides gracefully alongside gorgeous violins, we find a glowing, floating man, with no explanation. By the Kiss is similarly devoid of context: a woman pressed against a wall greets a sequence of suitors who — quite literally — smother her with kisses. It’s hypnotizing but wholly unpleasant. Of course, with 17 films on the agenda, there are bound to be some clunkers: Mama, which features a ghoulish woman crying "mama" for two-and-a-half minutes, might be disturbing if it weren’t so annoying. Kaltes Klares Wasser is also overlong. But hey, "overlong" is a relative term here, and it’s worth zoning out for a few minutes to make it to the best films. Here, the real standouts are firmly planted in the comedy genre: Transrexia, a short but sweet stop-motion animation about a T-Rex’s love for a pterodactyl, and Fantaisie in Bubblewrap, in which individual Bubble Wrap bubbles are alive and rather chatty. That is, until they’re popped.

"Halloweird 2008"

Wed/29, 8 p.m., $6

Bollyhood Café, 3372 19th St., SF

www.bollyhoodcafe.com

Ritual de lo non-habitual

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Since rituals necessitate a community of believers, presenting one for an audience in a theater runs the risk of becoming a mere item of cultural consumption. Yet, on Oct. 16, master drummer-vocalist-dancer Dohee Lee went beyond expectations. Her oddly named Flux succeeded best in its most ritualistic elements — the moments when it called up soul-wrenching memory, pain, and reconciliation.

The title refers to the ever-changing aspects of all creation. That’s a cliché and doesn’t tell us much about the nature of this, at times, powerful work of dance theater created by the Korean-born Lee and a slew of excellent collaborators. Foremost among them are the musicians of Asian Improv Arts: Francis Wong; Tatsu Aoki, who also created one of Flux‘s films; Jason Lewis; and Jonathan Chen. They are master performers. And as a result of their efforts — along with Lee’s — Flux‘s seamless unity of dance and music made for an exceedingly rare experience. The only other dancer besides Lee was the very capable Sherwood Chen. Relegated for the most part to subsidiary roles, he was, however, underused.

Using the I-Ching as a shaping device and philosophical tool, Lee divided the evocative Flux into nine sections, helpfully explained in the program insert. The work started on a dreamy note and moved through historical sequences to the climactic dramatization focusing on the memory of Lee’s grandmother. The piece wound down to a peaceful, even joyously embracing close with the traditional passing of the Banyayoungsun, the ship that connects the living with ancestors.

Deann Borshay Liem’s excellent appropriations of historic Korean films included sepia-colored portraits of ordinary men and women in addition to haunting sequences of refugees, corpses, and iconic symbols. Combined with Aoki’s more abstract images — water, fire, wind, a ravine — which set the context for the individual sections, Flux captured the experiences of a specific people while placing them in a universal context of human experience. Less effectively, the program notes to the "Fire=Trade" sequence seemed a little naïve in the way it commemorated only the unequal trade treaties "between the US and Korea from 1850 to the present." It’s not as if Asian nations and European powers were entirely innocent when it came to Korea’s woes.

As a performer, Lee is a wonder of versatility and strength. In "Water," she commenced the refugee’s journey by stepping gingerly into the sea, her feet floating and blindly attempting to find firmer ground — her only guide a fan-shaped wooden rattle. In "Thunder," she played a battery of Korean drums with an increasingly furious intensity as we stared at those all-too-familiar images of terrorized faces and rows of bodies, victims of war. In the somewhat prolonged finale, a bouncy, almost jazz-like freedom propelled Lee into a rollicking celebration of hope.

Lee’s duets and the choreography for Chen, in contrast, looked uncertain. They spoke of what may be inexperience choreographing for other dancers. Yet as a soloist, Lee is outstanding. The "Mountain" section was an astounding tour de force that started on a rather low-key interchange between a child and her grandmother, then swelled into something approaching the demonic. The program notes explained that the old woman was recalling her experience during the Korean War, and that the style evokes Korean opera.

The moment was as dramatically powerful as anything in Puccini — and those vocalists don’t dance. Though performed in Korean and therefore verbally unintelligible to many in the audience, the trajectory of this tale of pain and fury was crystal clear. Bent over and dragging a drum behind her, Lee gradually straightened and then whipped herself into shamanistic ecstasy. In the end, standing on her drum, she returned to her guise as a fragile human being. It was the closest thing to a ritual that you are likely to see onstage. *

The land of the screen

-
0

>johnny@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land of the free, home of the brave

-
0

By Cheryl Eddy


> cheryl@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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


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

Doc workers

-
0

More DocFest:

>>A cockeyed view of a kooky country

>>Musical outsider may be genius, werewolf

>>DocFest Web site

> cheryl@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

“SF Open Studios: Weekend 3”

-
0

STUDY 3, 2003 BY DAVID KING

PREVIEW The third weekend of Open Studios focuses on spaces in Bernal Heights, Duboce Triangle, Glen Park, Eureka Valley, Noe Valley, and the Castro and Mission districts. Here’s a lucky-seven list of artists worth seeking out.

Matt Sarconi Spatial clarity is a major aspect of Sarconi’s photography; his use of frames within frames elevates images that might be pretty as a greeting card into something more contemplative. His settings span from the Bay Area to Spain and Croatia.

A.J. Oishi There’s at least a bit of the late Sol Lewitt in Oishi’s low-key commercial acrylic-on-canvas paintings. She patterns circles within circles (or conversely uses smaller circles to form larger ones) while experimenting with muted versions of appetizing colors such as chocolate, orange, and cherry.

David King The gallery owner Jack Fischer first showed me some of King’s collages, which commingle camp and metaphysical imagery in a manner that never neglects visual pleasure. King’s most recent work veers away from blue-hued dreamland into darker, microscopic images. His sharp-eyed use of found material means an upcoming residency at the San Francisco Dump holds promise.

Lauren Kohne A mixed-media piece that mines musicality from the grids, strips, and numbers on Muni bus transfers demonstrates Kohne’s interest in foregrounding societal habit and patterns.

Victor Cartagena Artist and teacher Cartagena had a stark solo exhibition at Galeria de la Raza earlier this year — a visit to his busy studio is bound to reveal different facets of (and relationships between) his mixed media works, painting, and printmaking.

Bill Basquin This is a busy time for Basquin: you can find his collected films for sale at Needles and Pens, see at least one of them projected by kino21 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this week, and check out photos from his urban garden series "SOILED" at Mission Pie. He’ll show photos and installation work at Open Studios.

Robert H. Garrett Garrett’s photo in the Open Studios guide suggests a color version of Henry Wessel’s droll, laconic, crisp images of the suburban landscape.

SF OPEN STUDIOS: WEEKEND 3 Various neighborhoods, SF. (415) 861-9838. www.artspan.org

Dirty deeds

-
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

Razor-blade snickers

-
0

Earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, I ran into Dead Channels Film Festival director Bruce Fletcher more than once — not surprising, considering we were both haunting the same Midnight Madness screenings. This is, after all, the local programmer who brought 1975’s Welcome Home Brother Charles — with director Jamaa Fanaka in tow — to the 2007 Dead Channels fest. He’s also the mastermind behind White Hot ‘N’ Warped Wednesdays, a weekly summer series hosting such should-be cult classics as Pakistan’s first (and only?) gore film, Hell’s Ground (2007).

Fletcher’s 2008 main event unspools Oct. 2, with more than a week of films not suitable for the faint-hearted. Making its US theatrical premiere is Puffball, the latest from Nicolas Roeg, known for 1973’s Don’t Look Now and 1971’s Walkabout. Fay Weldon’s son, Dan Weldon, adapted the script from Mom’s 1980 novel — appropriately enough, since the story deals with motherhood in its more terrifying forms. A young architect (Kelly Reilly, prissy enough to have played Caroline Bingley in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice) decides to renovate an Irish country cottage, not knowing the neighbors are baby-obsessed and black magically–inclined. High production values and the participation of Miranda Richardson and Don’t Look Now star Donald Sutherland (in a glorified cameo) lend Puffball a gloss that Dead Channels’ lower-budget selections don’t have. But the story — which treads semi-close to a mix of The Wicker Man and Rosemary’s Baby — never quite came together for me, in a way that was unsatisfying rather than acceptably ambiguous.

Still planning that Irish vacation? The horrors of the Emerald Isle are further explored in David Gregory’s Plague Town, yet another film that exists to remind city folk to NEVER GET OFF THE MAIN ROAD. Seriously. Because you know if you do, you’ll wind up stranded within evil-cackle earshot of the locals, most of whom happen to be hostile mutants.

Better cancel that road trip and hang out at the Roxie instead — Dead Channel’s opening-night flick, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, is highbrow enough to be playing the current Mill Valley Film Festival. It involves vampires (totes hip) and picked up a big award at the TriBeCa Film Festival this year; see it now and brag to your friends that you caught the Swedish original when the just-announced remake by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves is eventually released.

Other Dead Channels trick-or-treats include Frank "Basket Case" Henenlotter’s freaky-deaky latest, Bad Biology, which opens with the line, "I was born with seven clits — seven that I know of," and gets more satire-tastic from there. When a seven-clitted girl meets a boy with a "drug-addicted dick with a mind of its own," what do you get? Maybe the first horror film to ever feature a vagina’s-eye-view shot, for one. Also on tap at the fest: Justin Paul Ritter’s A Gothic Tale, whose distinction of being narrated by Rowdy Roddy Piper is enough to intrigue me; San Francisco–spawned nugget o’ zombie weirdness Retardead; and a late-night program of woman-made shorts hosted by Viscera Film Festival director Shannon Lark, herself a filmmaker and Fangoria magazine’s first-ever "spooksmodel." Dead Channel’s other shorts program is comprised of international thrills and chills, including Oliver Beguin’s Swiss import Dead Bones. The setting is the old West; the cast boasts Ken Foree and Ruggero Deodato (that squealing sound you hear is the horror geek next to you, who no doubt worships both). The gory tale — bad taste? Or tastes like chicken? You decide.

DEAD CHANNELS FILM FESTIVAL

Oct. 2–10, $5–$10

See film listings for venues and schedule

www.deadchannels.com

ATP NY Day Two: Les Savy Fav, Shellac, Fuck Buttons, Harmonia, Om, and – what? – more

-
0

Shellac.jpg
Prickly, angular goodness: Shellac at ATP NY. All photos by Jessica Reeves.

By Todd Lavoie

Ah, the weekend was in need of a good easing-in period – nothing too strenuous, see, considering the epic scale of the Saturday night to come. So, on Sept. 20, we settled into our day by catching a couple of films at the Criterion Screening Room: Albert and David Maysles’ Gimme Shelter and David Markey’s 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The former – a chronicle of how it all went wrong at the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway, was absolutely riveting – while the latter was a bit more hit-or-miss, thanks to a nerve-grating focus on Thurston Moore as the documentary’s free-styling, wisecracking prankster. Having thoroughly relished the considerably mellower, less chatty Moore of the night before, I couldn’t cotton to the younger, ever-vibrating version I was witnessing onscreen. Still, the Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr. performances in the film made it all worthwhile.

Next it was rush, rush, rush to the main stage: Fuck Buttons were about to bring the noise! We arrived just in time, and the Bristol, England, duo had just finished sound-check. Focusing largely on their March-released slab of epic gorgeousness, Street Horrrsing (ATP), the set was flush with all of the touchstones of the Fuck Buttons sound: steady electro-drone, pulsating sheets-of-static majesty, and floor-thumping noise-house.

A glistening sheen seemed to have been applied to the entire proceedings, thanks to scatters of night sky-seeking synth sparkles. Dance, drone out, raise arms to the heavens – the choice was ours, and the crowd was evenly split between the three activities.

Tim Harrington Prisoner Outfit.jpg
Go directly to jail: Les Savy Fav vocalist Tim Harrington in prisoner getup.

Speak, memory

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

(1) War demands chronicling as few human endeavors do, with representations spanning from cave drawings to cell phone photographs. German experimental filmmaker Hito Steyerl considers the volatility particular to the filmic war document in her elegant short November (2004), playing in Kino21’s series "How We Fight: Conscripts, Mercenaries, Terrorists, and Peacekeepers" (kicking off Sept. 25 and continuing through October, with the last program screening Nov. 23). Steyerl’s essay-film turns on her reexamination of some spunky "feminist martial arts" footage she shot of her friend Andrea Wolf in light of the woman’s later martyrdom as a Kurdish freedom fighter. Competing renditions of Wolf commingle, each containing elements of documentary and fiction, with the only real truth being Wolf’s sublimation as a "traveling image."

(2) The YouTube hell of the footage captured in Iraq and Afghanistan — as dramatized in Brian de Palma’s angry Redacted (2007) and the damaged fictions of Michael Haneke — was perhaps foreseen by Walter Benjamin in 1936: "The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ." So it is that the crudeness of the digital loops shot by coalition forces and insurgents alike countervails the US military’s computerized advancements. "How We Fight" opens with a compilation of this undigested material: footage from both sides synthesizing an implacable wave of mutilation. Insofar as any war can be said to have a film aesthetic, Iraq’s is that of the surveillance shot — the natural complement of the conflict’s signature weapon, the IED. As if we were watching some perverted version of the Bazinian long take, we observe, in a real time blighted by dirty pixelation and distorting zooms, as a convoy approaches an explosion.

(3) In an expanding field of unprocessed moving images, the documentary increasingly sees its own role shift to that of an interpreter of visual information already at hand. How else to explain all the recent documentaries dedicated to contextualizing id-like streams of footage from the battlefield and newsroom? It remains to be seen which of these works will deliver as lasting an indictment as Winter Soldier (1971), a collectively directed project that counterposes soldiers’ colored 8mm footage from Vietnam with the mauve black-and-white of their testimonies. For "How We Fight," Kino21 screens the rarely seen Interviews with My Lai Veterans (1970), a short film that cuts to the same bone.

(4) The issue of how these films garner testimony is of paramount importance, as evidenced by Errol Morris’ problematic probe of Abu Ghraib’s "bad apples" in Standard Operating Procedure. Exemplary in this regard is Heddy Honigmann’s Crazy (1999). The Dutch filmmaker is a master interviewer who treats her subjects as autonomous beings — Honigmann isn’t afraid to prod, but she’s not after dramatic effect. In Crazy, she stitches together interviews with Dutch veterans of United Nations peacekeeping missions by asking them to share songs they associate with their deployments. The music, which ranges from Cambodian pop to Guns N’ Roses’ take on "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door," opens the channels of memory in unexpected ways and midwifes the guarded soldiers toward reflection and emotion. The passages in which Honigmann holds close-ups of the veterans listening to their songs possess a plaintive mystery unavailable to Morris’s occupied camera.

(5) In the singular, combat films of all kinds often extol the false premises and ideals endemic to war. But taken as a collective enterprise, war documentaries pull back the curtain on the state-sponsored stagecraft and reveal the threads connecting disparate battles. We’re ever reminded that "only the dead have seen the end of war." But if we take Hito Steyerl’s spin through one particular labyrinth of war-scarred images at face value, even they may not be safe.

"HOW WE FIGHT PROGRAM ONE: IRAQI SHORT FILMS"

Thurs/25, 8 p.m., $6

Through Nov. 23

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.atasite.org, www.kino21.org

1...697071...87Page 70 of 87

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org