Pacific Film Archive

The passion of Agnes

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Director commentaries are de rigueur in the DVD age, but few filmmakers possess the élan to warrant a feature length auto-exegesis. Agnès Varda is one, and her most recent memory piece — she claims it’s her last — cheerfully dissolves the boundaries between memoir, retrospective, and installation. The film caps the Pacific Film Archive’s month-long series, "Agnès Varda: Cinécriture," and faithful attendees will be rewarded by its recollections of earlier works from La Pointe Courte (1954) to The Gleaners and I (2000). The Beaches of Agnès begins with the 80-year old Varda spryly instructing her devoted assistants. These are people willing to enter a reverie on the placement of various mirrors. "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes," she explains of her motivation for filmmaking, before setting off on an unclassifiable daisy chain of reenactment and reminiscence. The film moves at the leisurely pace of the flaneur’s walk, the better to relish Varda’s joie de vivre and sweet bawdiness. Where to begin? With her color-bending bowl cut or Chris Marker’s grinning cat cameos? With the ephemera of Varda’s innumerable home movies or her defense of the so-called "Manifesto of the 343 Bitches"? With the many things she adores — blurry foregrounds, ancient frescoes, heart-shaped potatoes, neighbors — or her W.G. Sebald-like resuscitation of photographs? "All the dead lead me back to Jacques," she says, referring to her great love, Jacques Demy. Their life together loops Beaches with enough beautiful images to warrant several viewings. A must.

THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS

Fri/10, 8:40 p.m.; Sat/11, 6 p.m., $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk

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

Pineapple express?

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood’s hitherto stereotypical or simply indifferent portrayal of Asians progressed, albeit in one-step-forward-two-steps-back fashion. (Notably horrifying was Mickey Rooney’s 1961 yellowface caricature as Holly Golightly’s "Japanese" neighbor Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.)

South Pacific (1958), Flower Drum Song (1961), The World of Suzie Wong (1960), and several Sam Fuller–directed pulp actioners (like 1959’s The Crimson Kimono) promoted tolerance and understanding, however compromised they might look now. Nor is sincerity an issue in 1963’s Diamond Head, which gets a rare revival screening at this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. This glossy Panavision soap opera, based on a pulpy novel (Peter Gilman’s Such Sweet Thunder), offers a perfect mixed-message read of Hollywood’s hesitant multiculturalist liberalism at the time.

Charlton Heston, then at the height of box-office stardom (concurrently a significant civil rights activist, before his infamous conservativism later in life) plays the politically aspirational, bullwhip-wielding macho Richard "King" Howland, ruler of a vast Hawaiian pineapple ranch. He’s got a borderline incestuous interest in preventing kid sister Sloane (Yvette Mimieux) from marrying "half-caste" Paul (teen idol James Darren in light-cocoaface). That intervention is intervened by Paul’s big brother Dr. Dean (West Side Story‘s George Chakiris, two years later, again with the dusky "ethnic" makeup). Meanwhile Heston’s "Dick" (ahem) hypocritically keeps mistress Mai Chen (a stilted Frances Nuyen, famed from South Pacific and ridiculously self-serving protests against 1993’s The Joy Luck Club when her big scene was cut). Blackmail, jealousy, arguably accidental death, and provocative Caucasian hula-dancing likewise figure into the contrived melodramatics.

Diamond Head sports the sort of juicy-coarse plotting that used to be called "claptrap." It’s not wholly camp yet. But the widescreen gloss, corny emoting, and sheer presence of über-alpha-male Heston at his Sir Smirksalot peak are getting there, fast. Buried somewhere in these vanilla histrionics are fairly sharp digs against ethnic prejudice. Mimieux even says, "Someday all bloods will be mixed and all races gone. Where’s the loss?" — a remarkably hopeful statement for 1963. Or today. Diamond Head semi-embarrasses now. Yet it also tries admirably hard to get over its inherent miscegenationalist sensationalism, which does count for something.

DIAMOND HEAD

Sun/15, noon, $11

Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF

www.asianamericanmedia.org

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Home suite home

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

How’s this for lowest common denominator? The first sentence of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wikipedia entry explains that he is a "Japanese filmmaker best known for his many contributions to the J-horror genre." With his latest film, family drama Tokyo Sonata, particularly fresh in my mind, I’d nearly forgotten he was even part of that late-1990s trend. It’s inarguable that he made one of the best of the genre — 2001’s cult nugget Pulse, a meditation on the cold, paralyzingly lonely soul of the Internet masquerading as a sublimely creepy ghost story. Pulse is the only one of Kurosawa’s films made widely available to American popcorn-munchers, albeit in the dumbed-down form of a bastardized PG-13 remake starring Kristen Bell (tagline: "You are now infected.")

Fortunately, as the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival program notes point out, you’ll soon be getting a chance to see the original Pulse on the big screen, where its sinister sparseness should freak out even those who’ve already watched it on DVD. SFIAAFF’s spotlight on Kurosawa, encompassing seven films (including the local premiere of Tokyo Sonata) and an in-person visit from the man himself, couldn’t have been easy to curate. His filmography stretches back to the 1970s, with pink films and yakuza films and pre-J-horror horror films. His breakthrough, at least to stateside art house patrons and festival attendees, was 1997’s Cure, a serial-killa-thrilla lacking anything resembling Hollywood-style story beats. As the New York Times marveled, "Kurosawa constructs an elaborate psychological maze and then strands us in the middle of it" — a favorite technique that echoes throughout his work.

Though the SFIAAFF program spotlights Kurosawa, in many ways it’s also the Sho Aikawa show, with the actor appearing in paired films The Revenge: A Visit from Fate and The Revenge: The Scar that Never Fades (both 1997), and Eyes of the Spider and Serpent’s Path (both 1998). The stone-faced Aikawa — also a Takashi Miike regular, having triggered the total destruction of Planet Earth at the end of 1999’s Dead or Alive, among other triumphs — is particularly moving in the later films, wherein he plays a same-named character caught up in mirror-image circumstances who is, nonetheless, decidedly not the same dude. A child is snatched and murdered, and vengeance is sought, but Kurosawa focuses on the mundane aspects of gangsterhood, with the crew in Eyes of the Spider, for example, discussing polar bears and fishing strategies during stretches of downtime.

But this ain’t no Tarantino-style crimes-‘n’-chuckles set of films. With Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa does away with the yakuza element, along with the overtly scary stuff, though the film is so timely it’s near-eerily prophetic. The economy is the boogeyman here, as an average Japanese family fractures when Dad is laid off (and doesn’t tell Mom) and the older son decides that joining the U.S. military seems like a pretty good career option. Dinner-table calm is soon replaced by ever-bizarre and sometimes tragic events, but the hidden talents of the younger son suggest all may not be dark in the world. The end result is Kurosawa’s most fulfilling work to date, in a career that’s already delivered quite a few winners. To borrow the title of one of those films, a bright future awaits.

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Keeping their cool

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>>Click here for our complete SFIAAFF coverage

Did Asian American hipsters arrive with the cinematic appearance of Mr. Miyagi or Gregg Araki? The moment Hipster Bingo included an "über-hot Asian hipster (female)" square? Face it, we are everywhere — bubbling up from every microniche to make zines, play in bands, draw comics, and chafe against those model-minority, math-geek stereotypes, ready to rage against the Man’s machine.

According to You Don’t Know Jack: The Jack Soo Story, it all started with the star of Flower Drum Song (1961) and late-1970s TV series Barney Miller. Oakland-raised Goro Suzuki got his start as the life of the Tanforan and Topaz internment camps, evolving into a popular crooner-comedian in the Midwest where he attempted to sidestep prejudice by shortening Suzuki to the more Chinese Soo. He hit the Hollywood big time with his scene-stealing nightclub owner Sammy Fong and his beloved Detective Sgt. Nick Yemana, a role showcasing an understated wit that seems to define Asian cool. Alas, The Slanted Screen (2006) director Jeff Adachi concentrates so hard on Soo’s hipster cred, reinforced by pals like George Takei, that the drumbeat gets a bit deafening in this valuable if flawed doc, which fails to truly reveal the man behind the parts.

That’s the flip side of cool — the more you stress on it, the more elusive it is. On the opposite side of the spectrum: the 1990s-ish iconoclastic, workaholic breed of Asian hip obsessively worked by David Choe in Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe. Exhaustively documenting the Los Angeles-born artist for eight years as he matures before our eyes, director Harry Kim charts the growth spurts: from mischievous tot to shoplifter and graf artist to porn illustrator to street-art superstar to spiritual penitent after a stint in a Tokyo jail. The filmmaker doesn’t seem to know quite when to stop, but then neither does his subject: an obviously intelligent, playful talent who specializes in compulsively analyzing himself and pushing himself to the limits of the law, his work, and his own (r)evolution as a human being. So driven in his pursuit of edge-skating experiences that he comes off as less hipster than haunted, Choe and his Bukowskian tendencies, Vice aesthetics, and "deep" thoughts rivet long after the bodily fluids and sensory overload murals congeal.

YOU DON’T KNOW JACK: THE JACK SOO STORY

Sun/15, 2:30 p.m., and March 18, 7 p.m., Kabuki

DIRTY HANDS: THE ART AND CRIMES OF DAVID CHOE

Sat/14, 9:30 p.m., Castro

Tues/17, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki
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THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Indie notes

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A D.I.Y. movie musical made for all of $15,000, indie popster-turned-scenarist/actor H.P. Mendoza and local cinematographer-turned-feature-director Richard Wong’s Colma: The Musical proved to be the little movie that could after its 2006 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival debut. It won a limited theatrical release and critical praise, including a flattering New York Times review. After collaborating on last year’s unclassifiable (IMDB lists it as "action/drama/musical/thriller") SFIAAFF premiere Option 3, they’re back with Fruit Fly, which isn’t quite a Colma sequel but feels like one. It brings back that film’s Maribel (L.A. Renigen), this time starring as a straight newcomer wading into SF’s theater and gay-nightlife scenes while dealing with some unresolved identity issues. With 19 numbers (including "Fag Hag"), it is once again not your grandma’s (or even ABBA’s) kind of musical.

This time around Mendoza (who also plays a supporting part) is in the director-editor’s chair. But Wong’s brightly colored widescreen HD photography is once again an outstanding element. He spoke with the Guardian before Fruit Fly‘s bow as this year’s SFIAAFF Centerpiece presentation.

SFBG H.P. Mendoza directed this time, but it seems like the two of you are collaborative in most aspects of the movies you’ve made together.

RICHARD WONG I was certainly very involved in a lot of different ways. This is definitely H.P.’s movie, though. We were originally going to do something called On Sundays. Where Colma was kind of H.P.’s story, I wanted to do a movie about my family dynamic, this big, grand musical. But the economy really screwed that. We decided to use our CAAN (Center for Asian American Media) grant just to jump in and do something, [resulting in] both Option 3 and Fruit Fly.

SFBG You must have been really surprised by the exposure Colma got.

RW So much has happened since then, it’s really changed my life. I can attempt to be an actual, serious filmmaker. When we were making it, it was hard to see that as even a possibility. It was so remote. Of course all the timing was wrong with the writer’s strike and the recession, but nonetheless, I honestly still can’t quite believe it.

FRUIT FLY

Sun/15, 6:15 p.m., Castro

March 20, 6:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

March 22, 7 p.m., Camera 12

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Alone and ahead

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Amid a persistent backlash against feminism stateside — see: He’s Just Not That Into You — at least two SFIAAFF docs offer compelling reminders that women’s struggle for equality in education, work, property ownership, and their very lives continues to be very relevant: Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority and The Forgotten Woman (both 2008).

Now best known for her coauthorship of Title IX — the 1972 legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in schools that now bears the name the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act and is still being fought by athletic departments — the late Mink was a force of nature in national as well as Hawaiian politics. Growing up in Honolulu, I knew her as the fearsome liberal rabble-rouser who stormed the islands’ oft-complacent consciousness with such fire that she rated a daily newspaper comic strip. Kimberlee Bassford’s documentary reminded me of Mink’s achievements, her battles, and the incontrovertible fact that the Japanese American Maui native, once denied entrance into medical school because of her gender, became the first woman of color to serve in the U.S. Congress in 1965.

Dilip Mehta — a National Geographic photojournalist and the production designer of older sister Deepa’s Water (2005) — turns an equally empathetic lens toward the real-life subjects of his sibling’s feature: the tragically marginalized widows of India. In The Forgotten Woman, they gravitate to the holy city of Vrindavan to live on the streets after being abandoned by families who have claimed their land and property. Mehta doesn’t shy away from questioning the ashrams that dispense some charity but benefit financially from the donations; the men who claim that women are forbidden to remarry; and the upscale city dwellers — so far from the glam exotica purveyed by Slumdog Millionaire (2008) — who pay their alms and then banish the women from their minds. His images of the women themselves — surrendering their stories as monkeys scamper about, their glasses held together by string as he shoots them with the utmost grace, respect, and heartbreaking beauty — genuinely sing.

PATSY MINK: AHEAD OF THE MAJORITY

Sun/15, noon, and March 18, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

March 21, 12:45 p.m., Camera 12

THE FORGOTTEN WOMAN

Mon/16, 6:45 p.m., and March 18, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki

March 19, 6:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Lupino Noir

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REVIEW A Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts-trained Londoner born to Brit vaudeville parents, Ida Lupino improbably wound up one of hardboiled studio Warner Bros.’ favorite tough all-American dames in the 1940s. Albeit not quite favored enough: WB already had Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan, and then acquired Joan Crawford, so Lupino didn’t get the pick of parts despite some stellar work. When they let her go in 1947, she continued to act but proved her mettle by becoming something extremely rare: a director, writer, and occasional producer. She was, in fact, the only woman occupying a Hollywood director’s chair at the time. Lupino directed features just between 1949 and 1953 (then innumerable TV episodes for another 15 years), but they’re all admirably taut little black-and-white "B’s" with a penchant for taking on sensational themes in a no-nonsense manner.

This Film on Film Foundation double bill revives two. The Bigamist (1953) stars Edmond O’Brien as a businessman explaining to a shocked adoption agency investigator (Edmund Gwenn, Miracle on 34th Street‘s Santa) how he came — with the best intentions, really — to be married to both elegant San Franciscan Joan Fontaine and working-class Los Angeleno Lupino. The latter character is striking for being the kind of unapologetically self-reliant single woman portrait Hollywood generally wouldn’t get around to until much later in films like 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

The real find here, however, is 1950’s Outrage, a surprisingly frank (even if the word "rape" is never uttered) study of a young woman’s psychological deterioration as a consequence of sexual assault. Attacked after a long, Expressionistically atmospheric stalking through a late-night warehouse district, young Ann (Mala Powers) has to endure the subsequent whispers and stares of neighbors and coworkers. (Her name was printed in the newspaper crime report — something not uncommon then.) Unable to cope, she flees town, ending up incognito as an orange-farm worker. But her lingering trauma can’t simply be run away from. Outrage has its flaws. Yet there’s still considerable force in the way Lupino stylistically conveys Ann’s panic attacks, and the screenplay’s unusual, sympathetic focus on aftereffects rather than the crime itself.

"LUPINO NOIR" double feature, Sun/8, 7:30 p.m., $7. Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. www.filmonfilm.org

Rights way

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Ask any filmmaker: facts and figures may horrify, but images are what leave the most lasting impression. With raw and shocking footage of worldwide atrocities, the movies featured in this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival speak multitudes — even when their narrators are silent. Rather than attempt to encapsulate the entirety of the injustices committed, these films focus on the human side of things. And so we get glimpses: a mother weeping over the daughter taken from her, a student cradling her bloody head as she leads a protest.

Two particularly effective films restrict their focus to the women involved in these struggles—as perpetrators and as victims. Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling (2007) avoids such labels and focuses on female Israeli soldiers as individuals. Some might criticize the film for its apolitical tone. While many of the women lament war crimes, they have little to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. But the story that emerges from these interviews is a unique one, and a valuable addition to the ongoing debates. To See If I’m Smiling doesn’t seek to justify the actions of the Israeli Army, but rather to give its subjects space to reflect — both on their rights and on the rights they served to protect.

The scope of Julie Bridgham’s The Sari Soldiers (2008) is considerably wider. Her female subjects are the civilians of Nepal, the Maoist rebels, the Royal Nepal Army soldiers. Some are loyal to the king, while others march in protest. Bridgham wisely avoids coming down on one side or the other, allowing us to see that these women are united not by ideologies, but by their shared belief in a better Nepal.

One film can’t sum up a human rights quandary — and it surely can’t solve it either. At the very least, though, this festival gives a voice to people in dire need of speaking, whether through pictures or words.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/27–Fri/27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

March 5–26, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

www.hrw.org/iff

To a pulp

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Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the death of author Cornell Woolrich, darkest of the noir genre’s lost souls. Like so many of the milquetoast protagonists who populated his novels, Woolrich died an anonymous and ignoble death in a New York City hotel room. Years of alcohol abuse and a gangrenous leg amputation had left him an amorphous wad of a man. Though often credited with establishing the American roman noir ("black book") and indirectly developing its cinematic correlate, film noir, his literary legacy has largely been siphoned by hard-boiled mavericks like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Inspired by Dostoyevsky and Victorian poets like F.W. Bourdillon, whose 1878 ode "Light" provided the title to one of Woolrich’s most popular novels (The night has a thousand eyes, / And the day but one). Woolrich’s occasionally hackneyed poetics of the dark became his literary obsession. Besides 1945’s The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, there was 1959’s Death Is My Dancing Partner, 1948’s I Married a Dead Man, and a 1939 short story, "Through a Dead Man’s Eye." Few American writers so accurately portrayed the crushing boredom and fantasies of violence that existed in the postwar American metropole during the very years when suburbanization and media-driven consumption lavished the middle-class with giddy excesses. Biographer Francis Nevins perspicaciously sums up Woolrich’s life and career with one of the late author’s most nihilistic offerings: "First you dream, then you die."

The Pacific Film Archive’s "One-Two Punch: Pulp Writers on Film" retrospective celebrates the onscreen contributions made by Woolrich and his brethren in pulp — Fredric Brown, Jim Thompson, and Charles Willeford — from the halcyon mysteries of the ’40s to the bloody climaxes of the ’80s and ’90s. While many noir authors established reputations primarily on the page and others failed to make the transition to Hollywood, these four writers have had a particularly enduring relationship with cinema, as their stylized and iconic prose lent itself to arch visual expression.

Along with the über-popular James M. Cain, Woolrich and Thompson were responsible for much of the genre’s early vogue and were able to cash in on the development of the mass paperback (the primary medium for roman noir) precisely because their onscreen popularity had made the format financially viable. Woolrich’s publications-turned-films like The Phantom Lady (1944) and The Black Angel (1946), along with Thompson’s The Kill-Off (1989), signified the breadth of noir’s settings and styles by effectively trading the former’s claustrophobic Gothams for the latter’s dusty, open roads and seaside towns.

Discovered in Europe in the ’60s and ’70s, Woolrich and Thompson were critically acclaimed by French nouvelle vague writers and directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Alain Corneau’s Série noire (1979), written by Oulipo poet Georges Perec and based on the 1954 Thompson novel A Hell of a Woman, is a conscientiously Francophone retelling of a most American narrative.

Fredric Brown, an eccentric innovator of the noir/sci-fi short story, had as much influence on the works of Philip K. Dick as those of Elmore Leonard. His 1949 novel, Screaming Mimi (Gerd Oswald’s film version, 1958), remains his most infamous contribution to the screen. Starring newcomer Anita Ekberg — later of La Dolce Vita (1960) fame — Mimi‘s lewd, serial killer-meets-stripper plot is a thinly veiled exercise in dime novel titillation.

Willeford, the most contemporary of the quartet, comes closest to representing the silver age of the genre, often referred to as neo-noir. Similar in style to Thompson, Willeford forgoes the moribund poetics of Woolrich and the whimsical perversities of Brown for more straightforward prose replete with crisp plotlines, raunchy interludes, and sociopathic villains. Willeford’s most popular novel turned film, 1984’s Miami Blues (George Armitage’s film version, 1990), demonstrated the crossover potential of crime fiction onto the screen at the beginning of the ’90s, anticipating the mega-popularity of Leonard and Quentin Tarantino.

"ONE-TWO PUNCH: PULP WRITERS ON FILM"

Feb. 13–28, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2757 Bancroft, Berk.

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

“Who Got the Chickens” and “Love Can Build a Bridge”

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REVIEW/PREVIEW Although No. 43 has finally flown the coop back to Crawford, Texas, our country would do well to remember Faulkner’s famous words from 1951’s Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." The psychic damage from the Bush years runs deep, and will no doubt keep resurfacing. Maybe it’s the Texan atmospherics — the soundtrack of chirping crickets, the smell of sawdust, the strange manqués and photos of tumbleweeds — or the loose "one that got away" narrative that whistles through Stephan Pascher’s installation "Who Got the Chickens" that made me think of Bush.

The exhibit’s true empty center, though, is Donald Judd. Judd’s ghost is most present in Pascher’s sculptural centerpiece — an empty chicken coop, a few feathers the only trace left of its former occupant, that faces two gray wooden boxes in a Y-formation. The boxes nod to the concrete sculptures that dot Judd’s sprawling Marfa, Texas art ranch like unearthed giant sarcophagi, but Pascher’s mixed media assemblage is not as concerned with purity of form as Judd, the anti-minimalist minimalist who once opined that, "Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all." Pascher’s show practically calls Judd out on his prissiness — an accompanying short story finds Judd (here named James Dean) throwing hissy fits about bird shit on his sculptures — but it leaves the titular semi-question open and sidesteps anything as concrete as recrimination.

Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich are perhaps less gracious toward Judd in their 2002 Poets’ Theater play Love Can Build a Bridge, which coincidentally is being restaged this weekend as part of BAM’s "Bending the Word/Matrix 226" exhibit. In Love, Judd (played brilliantly by the inimitable George Kuchar) is a Lear-like patriarch whose video will has left his extended clan — including country singers Naomi and Wynona, B-lister Ashley, and "illegitimate son" Judd Nelson — in disarray. I asked Killian over the phone if his characterization of Judd had any specific inspiration, and he recalled visiting curator David Whitney, whose Big Sur house had lots of furniture made by Judd. Looking at one such chair, Whitney said: "I can’t even stand to look at it or sit in it because he was the most hateful man I’d ever known." It looks like Bush isn’t the only wellspring of psychic damage deep in the heart of Texas.

WHO GOT THE CHICKENS Through Feb. 7. Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

LOVE CAN BUILD A BRIDGE Sat/31, 7 p.m., free. Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Welles well

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Many years before the word got sullied on the campaign trail, Orson Welles took up the maverick badge during his acceptance speech for the 1975 AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. Welles used the platform to show clips from The Other Side of the Wind, his comic portrait of an old-time director (played by John Huston) making the rounds in the "New Hollywood" of the 1960s and ’70s. Auteur-worship, Hemingway machismo, and Pauline Kael all come under fire in Wind, a radical film deceptively clothed in shaky handheld camera. The project was in chronic need of funding, and Welles surely hoped that some dues-paying member of the American film society that had recouped Citizen Kane (1941) as a Hollywood classic might step forward to support his new work. They did not, and the film remains unreleased.

For all the fantastic myths that still circulate about Welles, his annotated filmography is the single most intriguing evocation of his career. To be sure, there has been progress since Charles Hingham’s willfully reductive 1985 biography, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. Touch of Evil (1958) and The Lady from Shanghai (1948) are widely admired today despite existing in compromised cuts, and the tragic story of RKO’s knee-jerk butchering of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) has passed through generations of cinephiles.

And yet, a full appreciation of Welles’ career continues to be hampered by the notion that it ended with Touch of Evil. Criterion’s stellar edition of F for Fake (1974) helps correct this view, but with even a masterwork like Chimes at Midnight (1965) still unavailable in America, Welles’ late period remains mired in obscurity. Every time a critical appraisal trots out the tired tropes of Rosebuds and wunderkinds, we lose sight of the indefatigable productivity of Welles’ wilderness, etched in the fragmented traces of The Dreamers, Don Quixote, and The Deep, the forays into television and video, the unproduced scripts (The Big Brass Ring) and monologue performances (Moby Dick).

Munich Filmmuseum director Stefan Drössler’s traveling program "Unknown Orson Welles" offers a rare chance to glimpse this material, much of it locked up in legal contestation. It’s an especially invaluable assemblage for a new generation of Welles scholars, a group who will not feel obliged to reconcile Welles’ degraded performance of his personality (the wine commercials and bit parts that financed his work) with his tremendous record of creative freedom. Following the breadcrumb trails of his genius, we find a wellspring of possibility — and little use for regret.

"UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES." Sat/17, 5 p.m.; Sun/18, 2 p.m. $5.50–$9.50. Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berkley. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Picks, pans, and a top 10

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CHUCK MOBLEY, CURATOR AT SF CAMERAWORK


Pan: SF Art Institute’s furlough

A humble proposal to those laid off for a month: exchange your individual voice for a collective one and begin intervening by employing the crafty tools of activism as an artful device of communication in order to effect positive change for your institution. As culture workers you are bound to succeed.
Pick: The Size Queens, Magic Dollar Shoppe (Bitter Stag)

A lineup of Bay Area all-stars have produced a multi-layered disc of anti-globalization, anti-pop culture anthems filled with pathos and wit. By turns literary, cheeky, melancholic, and celebratory, this music is the perfect accompaniment to a protest or a Naomi Klein lecture.

XYLOR JANE, ARTIST


Pick: P&H 2 (Behemoth), 2007, oil on canvas, 84" x 92", from "Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular,"

at Tang Museum, Saratoga, NY

This painting stares you down and sizes you up. I lock a gaze. I’m a little scared. I can hear and smell every single thing near me. IT makes you bristle, puff, straighten and square the challenge, feet planted for a tussle. The hot center smokes and glows blood fire, breathes through clamped jaws, "What the fuck are you?". Turns a thick neck and swings an armored tail. THWACK. Hit, jolted, burnt? Part of me melts away, Oh, just my outers, clothes and skin. Hair.

LAWRENCE RINDER, DIRECTOR OF BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE


1. Odetta at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival
2. Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s documentary film October Country
3. Conspiracy of Venus at Adobe Books
4. "Ajit Chahuan: Milky Way of Breeding Stallions That Roll, Ejacuutf8g By Themselves," at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
5. "Paul Schiek: the thing about you is that you will end up like me," at Stephen Wirtz Gallery
6. Leah Marks’ senior show at California College of the Arts
7. Jennifer Blowdryer
8. Andy Goldsworthy’s The Spire in the Presidio
9. Brontez at Dog Eared Books
10. Frederic Rzewsky, solo piano at Mills College

WILLIAM E. JONES, FILMMAKER


Pick: Odires Mlászho

At São Paulo’s Galeria Vermelho this fall, I saw the sexy and cerebral, disciplined and dissipated work of Mlászho for the first time. He juxtaposes ordinary mortal faces and Roman portrait sculptures with geometric rigor in his collage series "A Fossil Dig Full of Hooks." He cunningly cements pages of reference books together in his sculpture Enciclopédia Britânica. His most powerful works (from a series called "Butchers and Master Apprentices") involve elaborate collage rearrangements of male nudes that manage to look at once disemboweled and bloodless. Diaphanous yet strong, a body becomes a deconstruction of a flesh-colored Herman Miller lamp.

AVA JANCAR, CO-OWNER OF JANCAR JONES GALLERY


Pick: The current Berkeley Art Museum

A few months ago I found a pamphlet-like publication at an antique shop in Alameda, its cover austere, reading simply University Arts Center. Detailed within were the elevation plans of the elegantly modern yet utilitarian Mario Ciampi design for the Berkeley Art Museum’s current site. Opened in 1970 and constructed in a brutalist manner, with fanning interior cantilevers around an airy core, the concrete building is to be replaced soon with a design by international architect Toyo Ito. My past year of visits to the museum has been colored by this knowledge, and I’ve begun to mourn its impending loss. In spite of the current structure’s seismic instability, it remains baffling to me that a community is so quick to dispose of this local icon, not yet 50 years old. "The richness of this building will arise from the sculptural beauty of its rugged major forms," an awards jury wrote in 1966 regarding Ciampi’s plan. "We believe [it] can become one of the outstanding contributions to museum design in our time."

HENRY URBACH, CURATOR OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN AT SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART


Pick: "Lautrec in Leather: Chuck Arnett and the Birth of the San Francisco Scene," at the GLBT Historical Society

If you missed the show, you can still see Arnett’s rendition of Michelangelo’s David in full leather gear (on view in the Historical Society’s exhibition on 18th and Castro), or you can make an appointment to visit the organization’s extensive queer archive.

Pick: The Federal Office Building by Morphosis, Renzo Piano’s Academy of Sciences Building, and Toyo Ito’s design for the Berkeley Art Museum

These buildings point the way to a new civic architecture.

Pick: The Hunky Jesus contest in Dolores Park on Easter Sunday

Street theater at its finest.

Pick: Nice Collective’s "Voix de Ville" Collection

How fortunate we are to have these brilliant designers among us.

Pan: Proposition 8

MATT FURIE, ARTIST


Pick: "One-Thousand Twenty-Six Eyes," at Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter

One thousand twenty-six eyes is a lot of eyes and it’s also the name of an awesome group show I saw this year at Hamburger Eyes. I like eyes. The show featured a ton of cool photos from the kids at Space 1026 in Philly. The best thing there was a large glowing geodesic dome with tie-dyed pillows all around it. I sat on a pillow and discovered a little peephole with a tiny photo inside. Turned out this structure was lined with tons of little viewfinders and each hole had a different pic! They also had a great merch booth in the back with a bunch of handmade prints, zines, t-shirts and stuff. I bought an awesome hamburger-with-eyes t-shirt there by artist Chris Kline. He rules.

DARIN KLEIN, PROGRAMS COORDINATOR AT THE HAMMER MUSEUM AND CURATOR


Pick: Fag School #3

Naked men (Jewish Jason, Bob the Handyman, and My Best Friend’s Weiner), hilarious cruising reviews, mortifying blackout reviews, advice columns by Telfar and Allison Wolfe, interviews with New Bloods and Billy Cheer. All of this and more, created with scissors, markers, glue, and a manual typewriter. Nothing fancy, experimental or tricky about this project. Just rants, raves, and snapshots, served up hottt by San Francisco’s very own Brontez in glorious black and white photocopy. The price is right at just $3.50. Warning: Playing the weird Lovewarz DVD that comes with this zine could ruin a preppy gay birthday party!

Take the red pill

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PREVIEW/REVIEW After a foray into the spirit-swindling zines and quilts of Olivia Plender that provide the other highlight of Berkeley Art Museum’s latest installment in the MATRIX series, it’s best to venture into the exhibition’s darkened back room, sink into a beanbag chair, and soak up the kinetic collage animation of Martha Colburn. Those beanbags, so different from the hard, backless blocks that art spaces and artists usually offer as places to sit, are an invitation to watch Colburn’s looping short film Myth Labs over and over — a worthwhile endeavor, since you could notice new things on your 20th dance with its blitz of religious, historical, commercial, and (oh yeah, before I forget) human imagery.

Rain clouds rain yet more rain clouds within just a single second-long burst of Myth Labs, which charts a tempestuous world where cops continually threaten to shoot whomever they encounter — cute kitties or Christ-like black men — in the face. Gunfire isn’t the only shooting going on, since the title of Colburn’s movie puns off of meth labs. The pairing of that literally explosive material with her animation is an apt one: as ever, her images erupt across the screen in rightward pans that no live action camera could capture. Beginning with battles between pilgrims and justifiably outraged and confused Indians, Colburn’s eight-minute version of American history is cinema as convulsive as its subject matter.

In an extension of the Berkeley Art Museum show, Pacific Film Archive is presenting a night with the artist and filmmaker. Though Colburn is most associated with Baltimore these days, it’s a homecoming of sorts, since she did time in the Bay Area in the 1990s, forging ties with fellow filmmakers at Other Cinema and collaborating since with Deerhoof. Spanning from 1995 to 2008, the hour-long program should be a decent representative look at the work of one of the best collage artists and animators in a post-Harry Smith world.

BENDING THE WORD/MATRIX 226 Through Feb. 8, 2009, free–$12. Wed.-Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

MARTHA COLBURN’S COLLAGE ANIMATIONS Tues/2, 7:30 p.m; $5.50–$9.50. Pacific Film Archive, 2575, Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Boot up

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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

The trouble with hairy

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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

Cinemania

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Mock Up on Mu Craig Baldwin’s latest opus, on rocket science and Scientology in California, with the director in person.

Sept. 2. Pacific Film Archive

Obscene A new documentary about Evergreen Review and Grove Press publisher Barney Russet and his many battles on behalf of free speech and real art.

Sept. 5–11. Roxie Film Center

Lost Indulgence and In Love We Trust A pair of films by up-and-coming Chinese directors Zhang Yibai and Wang Xiaoshuai.

Sept. 6–20. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wattis Theater, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

"History Stutters: Found Footage Films" Bruce Conner’s John F. Kennedy–assassination film Report (1965) and Ken Jacobs’ Malcolm X. assassination response Perfect Film (1984) is on the same bill; program also includes a movie with Ed Henderson.

Sept. 9. Pacific Film Archive

Leave Her to Heaven The 1947 Technicolor noir — and ultimate swimmer’s nightmare — returns with a demonstration of film restoration.

Sept. 12. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org

"MilkBar International Live Film Festival" Three days of experimental cinema, including more than 20 local short works.

Sept. 12–14. Noodle Factory Performing Arts Center, 1255 26th St. #207, Oakl. (510) 289-5188, www.milkbar.org

"Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke" At last, China’s vanguard contemporary filmmaker gets an extensive Bay Area retrospective.

Sept. 12–Oct. 17. Pacific Film Archive

"The People Behind the Screen" Local programmers contribute to "Bay Area Now": Jesse Hawthorne Ficks presents girl rock; Stephen Parr of Oddball Films shares a giddy taste of his mega-montage project Euphoria; and kino21 puts together performance cinema; Peaches Christ, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, and DocFest also have nights.

Sept. 13–Oct. 18. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Shatfest Thrillville’s tributes to the one and only William Shatner continue with his 1968 spaghetti western White Comanche.

Sept. 18. El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo, El Cerrito. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

"Taylor Mead: A Clown Underground" The legendary wit Mead visit for screenings that showcase his best starring roles (1960’s The Flower Thief and 1967–68’s Lonesome Cowboys).

Sept. 18–21. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Forbidden Lies The Roxie is distributing this look at con artist Norma Khouri, which gets a theatrical run after a successful trip through the festival circuit.

Sept. 19. Roxie Film Center

MadCat Women’s International Film Festival Ariella Ben-Dov’s fest turns 12 with eight archival greats (including one by Samara Halperin) and silent films with live rock scores.

Sept. 19 and 23. Various venues. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org

"Psychotic and Erotic: Rare Films by Tinto Brass" Ass-fixated erotica that includes talking animals and naked cannibals.

Sept. 24. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"How We Fight: Iraqi Short Films" Kino21 kicks off a series with Argentine director Mauro Andrizzi’s feature-length compilation of short videos shot by US or British soldiers, Iraqi militia members, and corporate workers.

Sept. 25. Artists’ Television Access

"James Dean Memorial Weekend" Come back to the five and dime, or failing that, the Castro, and be sure to wear your red windbreaker.

Sept. 26–28. Castro Theatre

Film in the Fog Gene Kelley is singing in the rain — and the Presidio fog.

Sept. 27. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org

The World’s Largest Shopping Mall The debut or preview of a film by Sam Green and Carrie Lozano is at the heart of a program devoted to psychogeography.

Sept. 27. Other Cinema

Deathbowl to Downtown Coan Nichols’ and Rick Charnoski’s look at the history of NYC street skateboard culture, narrated by Chloë Sevigny.

Sept. 29. Castro Theatre

"Bette Davis Centennial" She’ll tease you, she’ll unease you — all the better just to please you.

Sept.–Oct. Castro Theatre

Dead Channels You can never get enough weird horror and fantasy.

Oct. 2–5. Roxie Film Center

Mill Valley Film Festival The major fall Bay Area festival turns 31.

Oct. 2–12. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org

Rosemary’s Baby and The Devils Double the demonic hysteria!

Oct. 3. Castro Theatre

"No Wave: The Cinema of Jean Eustache" The series includes 1965’s Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, his 215-minute masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973), his hog-slaughtering documentary — shades of Georges Franju? — The Pig (1970), and a 1997 doc portrait of him.

Oct. 4–22. Pacific Film Archive

"Rediscovering the Fourth Generation" The post-Mao cinema that laid groundwork for directors such as Jia Zhangke gets a SF showcase.

Oct. 4–30. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wattis Theater, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Vertigo The greatest San Francisco movie ever — maybe greatest movie ever — gets the outdoor screening treatment from Film Night in the Park.

Oct. 4. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org

"Spirit of ’68" and "Know Your Enemy" A pair of programs compiled by Jack Stevenson

Oct. 5. Oddball Films, 275 Capp, SF. (415) 558-8117, www.oddballfilm.com

Manhattan and Muppets Take Manhattan Mariel Hemingway, meet Miss Piggy.

Oct. 7–9. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994. www.redvicmoviehouse.com

"French Cinema Now" A new minifestival from the San Francisco Film Society.

Oct. 8–12. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

"Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of SF Amateur Sex Cinema from the ’60s" Stevenson looks at that time in SF when everyone would take off their clothes for a camera — with film in it.

Oct. 9–11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Midnites for Maniacs: Back to School … in the ’90s" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1991), Romeo and Juliet (1995), and Starship Troopers (1997).

Oct. 10. Castro Theatre

"Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking" The expansive 16-film program extends across eight decades.

Oct. 10–30. Pacific Film Archive

"Protest-sploitation" A lecture-demo by Christian Divine looking at six "youth" films made in 1970, along with a screening of that year’s The People Next Door.

Oct. 11. Other Cinema

RR James Benning’s train film finally reaches a Bay Area destination.

Oct. 14. Pacific Film Archive

Arab Film Festival The festival turns 12 this year.

Oct. 16–Nov. 4. Various venues. (415) 564-1100. www.aff.org

DocFest IndieFest’s doc extension turns seven this year with a slate of at least 60 films.

Oct. 17–Nov.6. Roxie Film Center and Shattuck Cinema, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. (415) 820-3907, www.sfindie.com

Leslie Thornton A three-program SF Cinematheque series devoted to the director behind Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985–present) and other experimental works, with Thornton in-person.

Oct. 19–26. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

United Nations Association Film Festival Environmentalism is the focus of the festival’s 11th year.

Oct. 19–26. Various venues. (650) 724-5544, www.unaff.org

"I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying" Ning and her acclaimed Beijing trilogy — which spans from the Peking Opera to dogs, cops, and taxi drivers — visit the Bay, capping things a screening of her 2005 "Chinese Sex and the City" feature Perpetual Motion.

Oct. 23–27. Pacific Film Archive

The Werewolf of Washington The president’s speechwriter is a lycanthrope in this Nixon-era flick.

Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive

"The New Talkies: Bollywood Night" Kino21 presents six works of live narration to Bollywood film scenes.

Nov. 1. Artists’ Television Access

"Occult on Camera" Erik Davis charts out the Aleister Crowley–Kenneth Anger–Led Zeppelin triumvirate-of-evil — what does Jimmy Page’s appearance in the closing ceremony of the Olympics mean?

Nov. 1. Other Cinema

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine The SF premiere of a new documentary devoted to the sculptor.

Nov. 2–3. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Ghosts Nick Broomfield’s excellent first non-documentary feature, about the abuse of Chinese immigrants in the United Kingdom.

Nov. 7–13. Roxie Film Center

San Francisco International Animation Festival The burgeoning fest and showcase turns three with a program that includes the Cannes favorite Waltz with Bashir.

Nov. 13–16. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

Luther Price New works by one of the more scathing and harrowing filmmakers on the planet, presented by SF Cinematheque.

Mid-November. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

New Italian Cinema Will it include Matteo Garrone’s Cannes critic’s fave Gomorra?

Nov. 16–23. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

"Films by Martha Colburn" A night of kinetic works by the collage creator, presented in conjunction with a show at Berkeley Art Museum.

Dec. 2. Pacific Film Archive

Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy Thrillville stuffs your stocking with a gem from 1957.

Dec. 11. El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo, El Cerrito. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

James Hong A sneak peek at the local director’s expose on Japan’s rewriting of history, Lessons in the Blood.

Dec. 13. Other Cinema

"At Sea" Peter Hutton’s At Sea (2004-7), about the life and death of a colossal container ship, is the centerpiece of an oceanic SF Cinematheque program.

Dec. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS/OTHER CINEMA

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

CASTRO THEATRE

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

ROXIE FILM CENTER

3317 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Blondells have more fun?

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At the start of his 2007 biography Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 300 pages, $30), film historian Matthew Kennedy introduces the story of one of Hollywood’s forgotten actresses by posing a phenomenological question: what does it mean to always be gazed upon?

In describing Jack Warner’s golden girl of the 1930s, Kennedy looks to the lineaments of her face and body as the first sign of her success. "The architecture of [Blondell’s] mouth, simultaneously sharp and soft, suggested Cupid," he writes. "She had a radiant smile, straight white teeth, pillowy lips, and easy curls in her gamboge blonde hair…. Her figure was voluptuous, at one time measuring 37–21 1/2– 36." As for Blondell’s eyes, "they were spellbinding on screen, and apparently more so in person."

Kennedy’s paean to Blondell is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’ poetic 1957 short essay, "The Face of Garbo." But whereas Garbo’s face represents for Barthes an eternal, unforgettable synecdoche of Hollywood, Blondell’s mystique lies mostly in her erasure. What became of this celluloid icon whose image once defined an era but has since been lost in the canister?

"Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda," playing at the Pacific Film Archive, collects some of the actress’ most memorable performances from a 50-year career. A vaudeville performer turned Warner Brothers ingenue lauded by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS) as the most promising performer of her time, Blondell was part of the first generation of talkie actors who blossomed against the moribund backdrop of the Great Depression. After a childhood spent at the mercy of a peripatetic acting family, her endurance and versatility were soon exploited by the Hollywood meat-grinder. Unencumbered by unions, censors, or truculent auteurs, moguls like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer managed Hollywood like an industrial assembly line, churning out most films in four weeks. By the end of the 1930s, Blondell had completed more than 50 films.

Alongside contemporaries such as Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Judy Garland, Blondell was the face of the Hollywood studio system as it began its ascent to the so-called Golden Age. From the art nouveau musicals of Busby Berkeley (Gold Diggers of 1933) and pre-Code cheap thrills (1931’s Night Nurse and 1932’s Three on a Match) of the Depression to the classic melodramas (1945’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and noirs (1947’s Nightmare Alley) of the postwar era, Blondell’s putf8um performances regularly stole the spotlight. Her greatest onscreen collaboration came after a serendipitous meeting with promising stage performer Jimmy Cagney at a Broadway audition for playwright George Kelly. They would go on to star together in nearly a dozen Warner films, including The Public Enemy (1931), Blonde Crazy (1931), and Footlight Parade (1933).

Despite her constant, almost Puritan dedication to craft, Blondell’s equal devotion to a home life away from the screen might have contributed to her disappearance from the Hollywood A-list. She reportedly hated the spotlight and refused the preening lifestyle of industry players. Three disastrous marriages — to cinematographer George Barnes, actor Dick Powell, and producer Mike Todd — as well as work exhaustion and a predilection for domestic seclusion largely devalued her star status by the 1950s. It would not lessen the impact of her performances, however — 1951’s The Blue Veil, 1957’s Lizzie, and John Cassavetes’ 1978 dramedy Opening Night confirmed that maturity had not diminished her gift.

Blondell represented "the three-dimensional face on a two-dimensional screen," according to Kennedy, who describes her as "full of surprises, one moment as tough as Joan Crawford, the next as fragile as Margaret Sullivan, the next as saucy as Mae West." Her screen image represents a peak moment of Hollywood radiance. But that same radiant image contained a delicate talent yearning for the darkness of obscurity.

JOAN BLONDELL: THE FIZZ ON THE SODA

Fri/13 through June 29, $9.50 ($13.50 for double bills)

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Slamdance elegance

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"Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?" Rock critic Simon Reynolds opens his recent survey Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin, 432 pages, $16) with that famous piece of invective, courtesy of Johnny Rotten from the stage of San Francisco’s Winterland. Rotten sneered those words during a Sex Pistols show. Tellingly, they arrived at the end of an American tour that contained both a zeitgeist and its own annihilation — or so it seems from Lech Kowalski’s documentary D.O.A. (1980), one of four features comprising the Pacific Film Archive’s "Louder, Faster: Punk in Performance" series.

Even before the blowup, Rotten’s question had already been answered — first by the art school oddballs and city poets who pre-dated then capitalized on punk’s groundswell, and later by the younger acolytes who reclaimed the false prophets’ call for "louder, faster" with their authenticity-obsessed rebel yells. Punk was made to be photographed — Sex Pistols guru Malcolm McLaren ensured that much — but the spirit of the frame depended on who was doing the shooting. The same three-chord assaults could make for social documents (1978-’88’s Target Video) or hipster scrawls (1976’s Blank Generation). They might inspire science experiments (Bruce Conner’s 1978 Mongoloid; Graeme Whifler’s 1978 Hello Skinny), or lyrical love streams (1979’s Deaf/Punk).

Blank Generation is the earliest punk film essay, a given since its New York milieu was already codified and oozing latent celebrity before punk moved to the provinces. Directed by Patti Smith bassist Ivan Kral and future No Wave saint Amos Poe, the film’s chapbook portraiture is heightened via a Hollis Frampton-like use of non-synched sound. Grainy black-and-white 8mm footage floats over the skips and starts of the soundtrack’s mix, creating a jilted effect perfectly suited to the push-pull of Television and the Talking Heads, as well as the tense erotics of Smith and Blondie.

Crappy audio and video smears aside, Joe Rees’s Target Video compilation reveals Bay Area post-punk in full bloom as it moves between Black Flag’s pummeling hardcore and Flipper’s art-damaged sludge to Devo’s proto-Teletubbies weirdness. The austere, one-camera setups anticipate a billion YouTube transmissions. I’ve driven by San Quentin Prison dozens of times wondering how Johnny Cash scored his famous gig there, but that was before I saw Rees’ footage of Crime at the same site — thrashing away in mock police uniforms under the harsh glare of the afternoon sun.

Before it is art or communion, punk is permission. For a zenith-like picture of this freedom flight, one should look no further than John Gaikowski’s modest short Deaf/Punk. Gaikowski’s film uncorks a long-forgotten performance at San Francisco’s Deaf Club, using slow motion to revel in punk’s limitless potential energy. This music wasn’t designed to be elegant, but I can think of no better word for Gaikowski’s shocked vision of a singer standing in repose among a small crowd of daydreaming slamdancers.

"LOUDER, FASTER: PUNK IN PERFORMANCE"

Thurs/5 through June 26

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

Bullet time

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

An utterly complete retrospective of Johnnie To’s films would be too much to ask, really. To’s résumé to date involves nearly 50 features, with at least one release nearly every year since 1986. His work also spans such a gobsmacking array of genres that even an audience of dedicated fans might experience exploding-head syndrome. And genre is the key word here; the man’s a master at it, a trait that has earned him admiration if not fame stateside — probably a good thing, given the cautionary tale of the Hollywoodized John Woo. Though even his most bizarre Chinese New Year farces occasionally pop up at the 4-Star Theatre (and probably nowhere else in the Bay), To’s most internationally acclaimed entries are his action flicks, filled with blazing guns, taciturn antiheroes, and, inevitably, at least one scene in which several characters pause their killin’ to enjoy a hearty meal.

So, sorry, completists — To’s exercises in romance (including 2001’s gloriously offensive Love on a Diet, which makes Eddie Murphy’s fat-suit adventures look subtle), his 1993 supernatural tough-chick classic The Heroic Trio, and his goofy comedies (like 2003’s young-doctor yukfest Help!!!) are not repped in the Pacific Film Archive’s "Hong Kong Nocturne: The Films of Johnnie To." Even the PFA admits, in their notes on the series, this is a "small sampling" of To’s output. But if I had to pick nine To films — culled, as the PFA’s are, from To’s output under his own Milkyway Image banner, created in 1997 — my sampling would likely resemble what’s on tap through June.

The essential To screens first: 1999’s The Mission, as close to perfection as he’s ever come. Spare, gritty, and obsessed with the business of male bonding (a To leitmotif), The Mission is about five gunslingers (all character types: a hairdresser, a barkeep, a pimp, etc.) who come together to protect a mob boss, then close ranks when they’re ordered to off one of their own. To regular Anthony Wong plays the hairdresser — a guy so grim he’s known as "The Ice" — so you know this shit is serious.

The theme of loyalty among assassins who’ve become friends despite themselves is echoed in 2006’s Exiled, which brings back much of the Mission cast. In this modern-day spaghetti western, the gang is charged with killing a former comrade who’s left the organization and settled down with wife and baby. A straightforward execution is discarded in favor of an endlessly complicated scheme that involves a gold heist, double-crossing mob heavies, seedy operating rooms, and more; naturally, slow-motion bullet ballets punctuate every act with gory grace. Wong, as a sad-faced killer caught between doing the right thing for his boss and the right thing for his conscience, is typically top notch.

The more overtly linked Election (2005) and Triad Election (2006) also address the gangster code, taking a darkly realistic look at how Hong Kong gangsters select their leadership — honor takes a back seat to power, and money, of course, means everything. Breaking News (2004) adds eager TV crews to To’s usual cops-‘n’-robbers stew. There’s a lesson learned about not turning police business into a media circus, and yes, it’s a lesson tattooed into Hong Kong streets with many, many bullets.

"Hong Kong Nocturne" may be the PFA’s program title, but not every selection is a dark tale. Throw Down (2004) is a judo comedy. The amusing if overlong Fulltime Killer (2001, codirected with frequent collaborator Wai Ka-fai) follows dueling hired guns O (Takashi Sorimachi, stone-faced but Snoopy-obsessed) and Tok (a particularly smirky Andy Lau). To’s meta-intentions are signaled at the start, when Tok voiceovers, "I like watching movies, especially action movies." My general feeling on Fulltime Killer, from a later Tok observation: "Not the best movie, but I like the style." For an even more bizarre Lau performance, 2003’s Running on Karma is recommended; the star plays a psychic bodybuilder turned stripper. A muscle suit that eclipses even Love on a Diet‘s stunt-costume gimmickry is prominently featured.

The series’ local premiere, 2007’s Mad Detective, is unfortunately non-noteworthy. The rubber-faced Lau Ching-wan, a To favorite, stars as the titular detective. He hears voices! The voices are embodied by actors who follow him around! The conceit gets old fast. For a better Lau-To pairing, pick up 1999’s Running Out of Time — not part of "Hong Kong Nocturne" but worthy enough to be. *


"HONG KONG NOCTURNE: THE FILMS OF JOHNNIE TO"

May 29–June 27, check Web site for schedule, $9.50– $13.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, UC Berkeley, Berk

(510) 642-1412, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Black, white, and color

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Clip this article. Put it on your refrigerator to remind yourself, your roommates, your friends and family to see Medicine For Melancholy.

The story seems simple. In the aftermath of a party, two 20-something San Franciscans wake up in bed together with no recollection of how they got there. They exchange names at a Noe Valley coffee shop and share a cab in cold silence with no attempt to reconnect. She leaves her wallet behind. He hunts her down online to return it. From there, they begin a convincing dance of seduction infused with excitement, disclosure, and tenderness. Micah (Wyatt Cinach) is immature, self-effacing, and strong, while Jo (Tracey Heggins) is confident, grown-up, and intense. What they learn about each other — and what the film reveals — is on par with any postmodern romance. Writer-director Barry Jenkins has created complex characters trying to negotiate simple feelings in a difficult world.

It’s always enriching to see talented artists at work. In mixing black and white with color to explore the relationship between setting and dialogue, director of photography James Laxton captures the sublime and gritty sides of San Francisco. The city he sees is the city we know. From the grassy lands of Noe Valley to the quiet hush of the Tenderloin at dawn, Laxton’s eye makes the nearly deserted SF that the two main characters inhabit lush, promising, and sinister.

Medicine for Melancholy is important because it spotlights the most overlooked aspect of SF’s changing face: black people, and the lack thereof. Micah and Jo are black and their race plays into the affair in surprising and subtle ways.

Jenkins has said that Medicine for Melancholy is "a simple, straightforward film that illuminates the modern complexities of living as a declining minority in America’s major cities." At the time Medicine for Melancholy was filmed, SF’s black population was 7 percent and dropping. As one of the remaining black people in SF, I know that black flight is a reality here. The self-evident gentrification and anti-black sentiment of the city play heavily into the dynamic of this movie’s couple: Micah doesn’t do SFMOMA; Jo hadn’t known that MoAD existed. Micah sees himself as black first and a man second. Jo refuses to define herself.

At Micah’s apartment, a poster with a 1962 quote from the Redevelopment Agency sparks a conversation. Jo wants to let go of the past. Micah, the native, sees the poster as relevant to Mission Bay.

"Why is everything that is ‘indie’ mean ‘not black?’" Micah asks at one point. Conversations like these have been going on among my dwindling number in San Francisco for too long. Until now, only we have heard them.

Tell people about Medicine for Melancholy. In the face of an impending cultural extinction and the potential loss of SF’s soul, this excellent movie is part of a necessary discussion.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY

Wed/30, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/4, 8:15 p.m., PFA; May 7, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

Area 51

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I agree with my cohort Dennis Harvey — it is always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. There’s something so special about the bodiless head trapped under a glass jar in that movie. As Jan Compton, a.k.a. "Jan in the Pan," actress Virginia Leith seethes and cackles, bringing across pure existential pain more forcefully than any French philosopher with a perma-creased brow. The fact that The Brain That Wouldn’t Die figures in local mad magician Craig Baldwin’s new antic investigation Mock Up on Mu is just one of at least 51 reasons why I’m excited to see it premiere at the 51st SF International Film Festival.

The Guardian‘s deluxe coverage of SFIFF 51 kicks off with a portrait of Baldwin. Elsewhere, Cheryl Eddy discusses blood ties with the sickest father-daughter team around, Dario and Asia Argento. Our stories this week also scope out a pair of life-and-death documentaries; a mod, mod, mod war movie; some new Mexican filmic journeys; the merits of festival awardees; and, last but not least, the eternally fatal allure of the late Gene Tierney. So, before you drown in the dark, before hours of unmapped SFIFF excursions have you feeling like the son or daughter of the brain that wouldn’t die, read all about it here. In the words of José-Luis Guerín, director of In the City of Sylvia, "we should see cinema as a separate continent" — and we should be cheered by what we see. (Johnny Ray Huston)

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

>>For more reviews, previews, news, and daily coverage of SFIFF 51, check out SFBG’s Pixel Vision blog.

>>Highway 51
A road map to SFIFF 51 — films to ride with (and some speed bumps)

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>>Explosive stuff!
Craig Baldwin turns space junk into magickal treasure with Mock Up on Mu
By Dennis Harvey

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>>Blood ties
Asia and Dario Argento go go for a SFIFF trifecta
By Cheryl Eddy

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>>Ashes to ashes
A dance between Dust and Profit motive and the whispering wind
By Matt Sussman

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>>On tour
Mod auteur Serge Bozon makes the war go pop in La France
By Kimberly Chun

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>>Critic’s choice
In praise of J. Hoberman and In the City of Sylvia
By Max Goldberg

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>>Apolitical animal
Mexico’s SFIFF thrillers aren’t thrilling, but Cochochi turns loss into victory
By Jason Shamai

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>>Fierce perm
Robert Towne still knows how to give an award-winning Shampoo
By Maria Komodore

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>>Color her deadly
Leave Her to Heaven‘s strange allure will pull you under
By Johnny Ray Huston

CC Riders

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

LIT When filmmaker Bruce Baillie founded Canyon Cinema in the early 1960s, it was a backyard bohemia to show artisanal films and drink wine with neighbors. But it quickly took root as a cooperative serving the needs of a movement of underground filmmakers. In scholar Scott MacDonald’s lovingly detailed history, Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (University of California Press, 480 pages, $29.95), Baillie’s early shambling is halcyon past, a sweet moment of spontaneous invention that then, rather surprisingly, begot a sustainable model for communal eclecticism.

Canyon wasn’t the only game in town — indeed, MacDonald describes the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which preceded Canyon, as "a single instance of an idea whose time had come." But the organization’s underlying West Coast flavor, open channels of communication, and relatively clean distribution record put it at the center of an unwieldy film culture.

Drawing from a wealth of primary materials, MacDonald has woven a compelling narrative of American avant-garde cinema. One hardly needs to be aware of obscure corners of the underground to appreciate the book’s lively mix of voices. MacDonald doles out generous segments of Cinemanews, Canyon’s in-house clearinghouse for letters, critiques, advice, poems, recipes, and — in later years — extended interviews with the anointed giants of the avant-garde.

Among Canyon Cinema‘s five historical "portfolios," we get a full panorama of Canyon’s burning personalities: Baillie’s Zen road correspondences (describing pies that contain grapes and flowers); John Lennon’s zonked fan letter to Bruce Conner; Conner’s fierce riposte to Jonas Mekas’ NY Cinematheque; Saul Landau’s exposé of police pressure on a local Jean Genet screening; a photograph of the board of directors forming a naked pyramid; Stan Brakhage holding forth on etymologies; Robert Pike’s thoughtful report on how programming avant-garde cinema in peep houses could be a profitable venture; a tender letter from Will Hindle worrying over teaching filmmaking in art institutes; George Kuchar comics; and last, a precious line from Commodore Sloat: "Maybe more bits of film history next letter: Hollis Frampton and my junior high astronomy book (which he won’t admit he has and has refused to return)."

Canyon Cinema is wonderful in its particulars. It’s a pleasure to explore the depths of an organization that was emblematic of the counterculture without being beholden to it. Of course, being located in San Francisco and Sausalito, it had a pretty good view. Canyon keeper and former Pacific Film Archive programmer Edith Kramer recalls of the 1967-69 heyday that "The East Coast people were coming out; everybody wanted to come out — for the right reasons and the wrong reasons." Already in 1968, Robert Nelson writes of "the ever-growing dirge of psychedelica that in three years has gone from far-out to ad nauseam." Things dry up a bit with the intellectualization of the ’70s, though there are passionate, nothing-for-granted debates over the currents of the co-op’s milieu.

One suspects this overarching prudence is because, as filmmakers and co-op members, these people were intimately familiar with the economics of personal expression. Canyon is a romantic, idealistic group, but also a utilitarian one. Despite frequent brushes with insolvency, the amazing fact remains: "During the past 40 years, Canyon has evolved into the most dependable distributor of alternative cinema in the United States, and it has done so without betraying the fundamental principles on which it was founded."

SFIFF: Highway 51

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THURS/24

• The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations — 2006’s Anatomy of Hell — to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, Mick Jagger–lipped Ryno de Maginy (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decades-long affair with the magnetic mistress — telling the tale to his fiancée’s grandmother, who is rapt. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years — not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)

7 p.m., Castro.

FRI/25

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra‘s 70-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven, but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role, opera veteran Vishnevskaya doesn’t need to sing to etch a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

• Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a parable, set on the eve of World War II, about the use of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)

8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Brick Lane is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair alone. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki.

• The Golem with Black Francis (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Codirected by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history, and political commentary. (Harvey)

9:30 p.m., Castro.

• Just Like Home (Lone Scherfig, Denmark, 2007) Dogme95 filmmaker Scherfig hones her flair for bittersweet comedy with this goofily enjoyable ensemble piece about a misfit small town that falls into chaos. Much of the film’s story is seen through the eyes of a newcomer who has escaped from a bizarre religious cult; in accordance, Scherfig records the earnest bumbling of town folk through a unique lens, sometimes smeared with streaks of overexposed or double-exposed shapes and colors. The result is only as deep as a standard-issue Hollywood romantic comedy, but it’s deftly handled and slyly endearing. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

6:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/26, 1 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/27, 4 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

• Lady Jane (Robert Guédiguian, France, 2007) Lean and mean as a killer B-movie, Lady Jane shows that the French noir still possesses a powerful measure of chilly fire. Its namesake, played by the 50-ish, formidable, and fierce Ariane Ascaride, perfectly embodies the genre. Roused from bourgeois slumber when her son is suddenly snatched, Lady Jane reconnects with two old partners in crime to raise a ransom. Director Guédiguian is overly fond of his flashbacks but redeems himself with the care he puts into imagery that avoids Bogart-by-way-of-Belmondo clichés. (Chun)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/ 27, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

• You, the Living (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway, 2007) There is one thing wrong with Swede Roy Andersson’s movies: there aren’t enough of them. His fourth feature in 30 years is another almost indescribable gizmo that strings together absurdist tableaux to increasingly hilarious and elaborate effect. From an incongruous Louisiana brass band to unhappy barflies forever facing last call, the characters here are comic Scandinavian-miserabilist pawns in a cosmic joke told largely through music — and painted a fugly shade of lime green. Bizarre and delightful. (Harvey)

6:15 p.m., Castro. Also Sun/27, 8:30 p.m., PFA; Tues/29, 7 p.m., Kabuki

SAT/26

Fados (Carlos Saura, Portugal/Spain, 2007) Attempting to do for the Portuguese torch song what he once did for Spain’s gypsy blues with Flamenco (1995), Saura soars and stumbles with Fados, presenting wonderful performances and a few unfortunately dated modern-dance treatments. Chico Buarque, Mariza, Lila Downs, and Césaria Évora lend their varied styles and impassioned voices to the form. But one wishes Saura would have stepped aside further for the effervescent, soulful lilt of Caetano Veloso; the plush, liquid tones of Lura; the arch, curled-lip warble of Ana Sofia Varela; and old world narrative grace of Carlos do Carmo. (Chun)

2:45 p.m., Castro. Also Mon/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

Ice People (Anne Aghion, USA/France, 2007) The movies have long made the Antarctic the terrain of terrifying monsters and cute creatures, but the beings discovered by Anne Aghion in this documentary bare fatigue, not fangs, and they are far more prickly than cuddly. Aghion’s portrait of the inhabitants of the McMurdow Research Station spends most of its time with a satellite group of four geologists looking for 20-million-year-old leaf fossils. There’s more depth in the fantastic landscapes, which Aghion lenses far more flatteringly than she does her human subjects. (Sussman)

6:45 p.m., Kabuki. Mon/28, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki

Mataharis (Icíar Bollaín, Spain, 2007) Charlie’s Angels this ain’t: these investigators and would-be Mata Haris of an all-female Madrid detective agency have the unwashed hair, sensible shoes, and bad marriages of everyday wage slaves. Actress-director Bollaín’s skillful, empathetic knack for capturing the grubby, low-light details of working women’s lives glimmers through the pale haze of this promising film. But she falters with the application of narrative-flattening sentiment, predictably reassuring story arcs, and the occasional cheesy slo-mo effect. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 7:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 1:15 p.m., Clay

Walt & El Grupo (Theodore Thomas, USA, 2007) In 1941, Walt Disney and a band of animators, writers, and other artists — which came to be known as El Grupo — journeyed to South America on a goodwill tour. This documentary, codirected by the son of one voyager, gathers wonderful photos, home movies, and a dazzling collection of drawings and cartoon clips to re-create the trip. The trouble is that there’s no real drama. The cumulative view is as sharply Eurocentric as Disney’s was when he went on to make cartoons such as 1942’s Saludos Amigos. (Anderson)
1:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 6 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki

SUN/27

• Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowksi, Australia, 2007) Norma Khouri made headlines and toured the talk show and lecture circuit as a crusading heroine when her 2003 international bestseller Forbidden Love highlighted the phenomenon of honor killings in pockets of the Muslim world. Trouble was, her heartrending story turned out to be a fabrication. As filmmaker Anna Broinowski grows increasingly exasperated with her subject’s fibbing and evasiveness, this documentary develops from an exposé into a portrait of a serial con artist one would be quite happy to see writing her next book from behind bars. (Harvey)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also April 30, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 6:30 p.m., Clay; May 4, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

• Picking Up the Pieces (various, 2007) The most intriguing piece in this shorts program about things lost and found is Death Valley Superstar, Michael Yaroshevsky’s half-hour documentary focusing on Marc Frechette, who was picked off the street to star in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point. Taking his role as a student revolutionary into real life, he subsequently tried robbing a bank, was arrested, and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Also excellent is Radu Jude’s 25-minute Romanian drama Alexandra and John Magary’s The Second Line, a narrative revolving around a FEMA worker in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Harvey)

11:45 a.m., Kabuki. Also April 30, noon, Kabuki.

A Stray Girlfriend (Ana Katz, Argentina, 2007) Writer-director-actress Katz maps out post-breakup transience with a wandering handheld camera and oblique dialog. As her titular character explores a rural township on Argentina’s coast, each scene teeters between bewilderment and menace. Lynne Ramsay covered similar terrain in her minor masterpiece Morvern Callar (2002), though with a dream-inducing soundtrack and enigmatic ellipticism far beyond Katz’s more vanilla approach. (Goldberg)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 1, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 6:15 p.m., PFA

MON/28

• Cachao: Uno Más (Dikayl Rimmasch, USA, 2008) Actor, would-be bongo player, and Cuban music fanatic Andy Garcia does right by his idol, the late Cuban musical great Israel "Cachao" Lopez, in this passionate tribute sprinkled with SF sights and centered around a Bimbo’s 365 Club concert. The show was apparently a hot one — it also showcased Bay Area Latin music scholar John Santos, timbalero Orestes Vilato, and vocalist Lazaro Galarraga — and director Rimmasch does it justice by using the performance as a narrative framework for a history that parallels that of contemporary Cuban music. (Chun)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki.

TUES/29

Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA, 2008) After profiling Robert McNamara in 2003’s The Fog of War, Morris jumps down the chain-of-command to summon US soldiers punished for the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. Ever the showman, he cuts from burnished interviews and photos to reenactments and slow-motion rumbles — we "see" Saddam’s egg frying, giant prison ants, and an exploding helicopter. Such obsessive visualizations seem misplaced and morally confused. The Abu Ghraib story is, among other things, about the unstable, delicate nature of photographic representation. Yet Morris can’t resist auteur-stamped fireworks — how else to explain the typically nutty (and utterly incongruous) Danny Elfman score? (Goldberg)

Part of "Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award: An Evening With Errol Morris," 7:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Explosive stuff!

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SFIFF The pop detritus of today is the archaeological evidence of tomorrow, to be pieced together by future generations — should there be any — who will no doubt want to know what the hell we were thinking. Their conclusions may be bizarre. But will their conjecture be any stranger than our present-tense realities?

Inventing tomorrow’s conspiracy theories today is Mock Up on Mu, the latest pseudodocumentary, sci-fi historical dig, Situationist prank, and thinly veiled fight-the-power rant by San Francisco’s collage king, Craig Baldwin. In the mode of his prior cult faves Tribulation 99 (1992), O No Coronado! (1992) and Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) — albeit with a higher percentage of new staged sequences mixed into the ingeniously assembled archival errata — it again grinds fact and fiction into a tasty genre-defying pulp. For many, Mu‘s world premiere is the most eagerly awaited event in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival’s goody-laden schedule.

It’s 2019 AD on the Empire of Mu — the Moon — where L. Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard) is building theme parks, selling crater-naming rights, and beaming corporate logos back to "that prison planet called Earth." Having been banished from our planet, he must dispatch "Agent C," a.k.a. Marjorie Cameron (Michelle Silva), back to the blue ball to engage in some espionage involving the seductions of both Ra-worshiping rocket scientist Jack Parsons (Kal Spelletich) and sleazy defense contractor Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke). Realizing "Commodore" Hubbard’s purposes may be more nefarious than professed, she finds the truth is out there … way out there. It’s naked and shameless, in fact. Those hippies were right: free love will save us all.

As ever, there is a certain investigative method behind the Oakland-born Baldwin’s jigsaw madness. The real Parsons was the founder of the pre-NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an avid occultist. He started a private boat dealership with none other than Hubbard, before Hubbard absconded with some money and Parsons’ girlfriend (whom he married). Soon thereafter, Hubbard wrote the original Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, which in turn led to that gift to mankind we call Scientology. As for Parsons, he went on to marry painter, author, and psychic Cameron, who, like him (as well as Hubbard) was an early American devotee of Aleister Crowley and a participant in sex magick rituals.

Thus you don’t need six degrees, let alone Kevin Bacon, to connect Wernher von Braun, Kenneth Anger, and Tom Cruise. History is fun! As is Mu, with its antic use of everything from old propagandistic footage to clips spanning eras of cinematic sci-fi: Georges Melies’ 1902 Trip to the Moon, the original Flash Gordon serial and 1936’s H.G. Wells–based Things to Come, drive-in trash (it’s always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), and Star Trek. The resulting fair-use frolic nonetheless reveals a serious side or three while exploring the dense and slightly demented history of military and aerospace business in sunny California.

Baldwin recently took a break from his numerous other roles — programmer at Other Cinema; teacher at SF Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and Artists Television Access — to sound off on Mu.

SFBG I hate to ask such a blunt question, but what is this movie about?

CRAIG BALDWIN My "Mu-vie" is about how utopian visions of technology and space exploration became compromised by the military in the late 20th century. And [about] how the lives of [technological and space travel] pioneers afford a rich trace of California regional history after World War II: the complex crossing of alternative tech research, personal belief systems, lifestyles, artistic practices, newly organized and newly imported religions, and spiritual institutions. Plus that era brought an explosion of the formerly marginalized sci-fi genre, of which Mu is of course the very latest iteration!

Mu is also about the cult of film, especially experimental film. I’m trying to work though a new model of historiography or storytelling that I am calling collage-narrative. It’s a humble stab at opening up a new space in film practice that is not only of interest to historians but also to aesthetes. And, my dear, I don’t have to tell you that these groups are certainly not mutually exclusive!

SFBG Your father worked for a rocket manufacturer. Has that made you more interested in Cold War and military-industrial complex themes?

CB Yes, my dad worked for Aerojet. He was born the same year as Parsons! And I was born the year Parsons died. I am his reincarnation. But the point is something like 30 percent of Californians were involved in the aerospace biz at its height.

SFBG How much real Scientology material is in Mu?

CB [The film] remains at the level of Swiftian allegory or satire, spinning off of their Genesis story and [acting as] a meta-gloss on Hubbard’s own autobiography.

SFBG I wish Unarius had become the growth religious cult of our time. They’ve certainly made better movies. But regarding yours, the real life connections between Parsons, Hubbard, Crowley, "Mother of the New Age movement" Cameron, occultism, and scientific and military work are stranger than fiction.

CB Everyone has been very influenced by the New Age, uh, belief systems. But more than anything, I identify with postwar bohemians, beats, and hippies. Those days when rocket scientists and sci-fi pulpmeisters and occult conjurers and proto-Wicca ritual carnal orgiastic pagans intermingled may be long gone — though Kenneth Anger is still around.

SFBG Mu uses a lot of excerpts from mainstream and low budget entertainment. But where does the less familiar material — educational, promotional, and so forth — come from? You must spend infinite hours looking for the perfect clip.

CB It comes from my usual source: My basement archive of 2,500 industrial films. I do spend time in there, but could hardly claim to find the perfect clip. Au contraire. I call it "availabilism" — making what I do have work for me, through editing and audio techniques, overwriting it all into an associational stew hopefully akin to the half-memory, half-fantasy, sublinguistic colloid of thought itself.

SFBG What reaction does your work get from students? They presumably grok the pop culture stuff, but do they get the political undercurrents?

CB People can be responsive to the pop-cult clips, or the regional history, or the antiwar sentiments. But methinks [Mock Up on Mu] will be a touchstone for legions of occult or subcult partisans ravenous for these almost mythic tales of the roots of alternative religions.

SFBG Sir, your Thetan level must be off the charts.

MOCK UP ON MU Mon/28, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 8:55 p.m., Pacific Film Archive


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

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