Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Desperately seeking cinema

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Jennifer Reeves’s movies are personal wishing wells, each a repository of dreams and worries. As we see ourselves reflected in the water’s surface after tossing in a coin, so too is Reeves’s presence apparent in the handmade, fussed-over quality of her moving pictures. I use that broad designation pointedly, as her films are as varied in material and form as they are prosaic in mood and temperament. Over 15 years of independent filmmaking, the New York–based artist has created hand-painted films in the style of her mentor Stan Brakhage, freewheeling shorts, fiction fantasias, 16mm double-projections, feature narratives, and experiments in high definition. San Francisco Cinematheque hosts the formally restless filmmaker for a three-program tour.

Reeves’s early shorts channel riot-grrrl spark with scratched-up film stock. Elations in Negative (1990) is a good sample of the celluloid-mad sexual politics of these 16mm beaters, though Taste It Nine Times (1992), with its vivid pickle-biting innuendos, will be missed from the Cinematheque run. In painted films like The Girl’s Nervy (1995) and Fear of Blushing (2001), Reeves’s appropriation of Brakhage’s technique conveys playful femininity in color, pattern, and music.

Though Reeves toyed with narrative early on, most notably in 1996’s psychodrama Chronic, 2004’s The Time We Killed represented a kind of breakthrough. An unhurried 94 minutes passes through the dark mirror of an agoraphobic poet keeping to her New York apartment during the buildup to the Iraq War. "Terrorism brought me out of the house, but the war on terror drove me back in," Robyn (Lisa Jarnot) says in her peripatetic voice-over, adding later, "I’m afraid of catching the amnesia of the American people." Reeves’s magnetically immersive filmmaking is such that the political situation neatly folds into an extended experiment in subjectivity — besides being an unstinting portrait of madness (it’s everywhere in this film: in a record’s spin and neighbors’ voices echoing through the walls, in dogs’ faces, bathwater, and masturbation), The Time We Killed also serves as an understated chronicle of the collateral psychic and moral damage of our country’s manufactured warmongering.

The Time We Killed is heavier than Reeves’s other work, though it’s not without humor; she finds the ridiculous, unwieldy side of depression in Robyn’s litany of death fantasies and a painfully misguided interaction with a curious neighbor. Robyn’s locked in, but Reeves is formally unfettered, mixing conventional 16mm footage with lyrical, associative streams of inner life shot in high-contrast black-and-white. The filmmaker raids her home-movie archive for the film, in addition to using her own apartment and acting as Jarnot’s body double during the extended shooting. This air of transference makes The Time We Killed weirdly transparent, so we feel as intimately connected to Reeves’s isolated work in the editing room as we do to Robyn’s experience in the apartment.

Since The Time We Killed, Reeves has returned to more typically experimental filmmaking. Her 2006–07 Light Work variations strike an ideal balance of abstract and representational visions, in the process cataloging the changing textures of cinema. In the affecting He Walked Away (2007), Reeves dissects, refracts, and abstracts footage from her older movies to create a tri-tipped memorial piece in which the intrinsically elegiac nature of cinema is connected to the dissolution of film technology, which is then tied to the disappearing loves and friendships that shadow personal lives.

As with Guy Maddin — another filmmaker who favors overheated evocations — one has the sense that Reeves could make a hundred interesting movies from the same scraps of footage. "I want to counter the turncoats who say film’s dead," Reeves announces on her excellent new blog. "Try telling a painter that she can only use digital paint on a Mac for the rest of her life. She’d be pissed." But if she were Jennifer Reeves, she certainly wouldn’t slow down.

IMMERSIVE CINEMA: JENNIFER REEVES

Artists’ Television Access, Sat/15, 8:30 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sun/16, 7:30 p.m.;
Tues/18, 7:30 p.m.; $6–$8

See Rep Clock for venue information

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

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PREVIEW While electronics have transformed the very core of contemporary dance music, rap, and pop, so-called art music of the concert hall persuasion still centers on acoustic instruments reverberating in real time. But some of the earliest feats of sound manipulation, predating the Beatles’ trippy tape loops and even the ’60s soul tracks destined for an afterlife in eternal sampledom, were achieved by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was decidedly not a populist. In current terms, "electronic" music tends to denote the limitless reorganization of beats and breaks, but Stockhausen dispensed with regular rhythms altogether, turning his attention to the most basic components of sound itself, using now-primitive equipment to generate sine waves and splice magnetic tape. The most famous result of his experiments, aside from a nod from the Fab Four on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, may be the 40-minute tape-based work Kontakte, for piano, percussion, and electronics, premiered in 1960. Pianist Julie Steinberg, who also moonlights as a percussionist for this performance by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, emphasizes the prohibitive complexity of performing Kontakte live. "We have to know the electronics perfectly," she says of playing along with Stockhausen’s original four-channel futuristic noise collage, now a digital version realized by a sound projectionist as the performers play. Conceived in recognition of the late composer’s 80th birthday by percussionist Willie Winant, whose cutting-edge creds include work with Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Wilco, and the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, this is a rare realization of what Winant calls "a masterwork" and a "seminal piece."

SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS Mon/17, preconcert talk 7:15 p.m., concert 8 p.m.; $10–$27; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; 978-ARTS, www.sfcmp.org

Shen Wei Dance Art

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PREVIEW It might be just as well that Chinese choreographer Shen Wei didn’t start dancing until quite late — at the ripe old age of 20. But what he may have missed in early dance training, he more than made up for in other artistic endeavors. The son of Chinese opera performers in Hunan, at age 9, Wei followed the parental path and began studying opera, and by 16 he was performing with the Hunan State Opera. He also studied, and became recognized in, the demanding art of Chinese watercolor. So when Wei became a founding member of Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China’s first contemporary dance group, he brought an exceptionally well-honed visual sensibility to dance. To this day, his choreography shows a rare ability to unite the visual and the kinetic, not to mention the East and the West. He eventually moved to New York and created Shen Wei Dance Art company in 2003. Last year he won a MacArthur Fellowship, and this summer his company will perform at the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. He’s having that kind of explosive career. But then why wouldn’t mysteriously staged, musically intriguing, visually stunning dance theater lure in audiences? For its Yerba Buena appearance, the company performs Map (2005) to Steve Reich’s 1985 sprawling orchestral suite The Desert Music, and on a more intimate scale, Re-(Part 1) (2006) to Tibetan chant. (Rita Felciano)

SHEN WEI DANCE ART Thurs/6–Sat/8, 8 p.m, $26–$45. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Dining in the off-hours

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LATE LUNCHES One of the things that makes Don’t-call-it-Frisco such a fine place is the disproportionate ratio of successful slackers to office drones who live here. You know the type: they sleep in until 10, read the whole newspaper over a bagel and coffee, get some sort of exercise, and then spend the rest of the day creatively earning money. I’m one of them — hell, you’re probably one of them. Waiters, bartenders, freelance mortgage brokers, writers, graphic designers … there are all sorts of creative types doodling around the city during off hours, working after the sun goes down and eating their meals whenever they please. The only problem? When you finish breakfast at 11 a.m., you want lunch around 3 or 4 p.m. — and many power-lunch spots serving the corporate world close between 2 and 5 p.m., when the earliest cocktailer trickles in. So where do late lunchers eat? For those of you who think outside the cubicle, here are a few restaurants that’ll serve you no matter what time the lunch urge strikes.

Everything about Bar Bambino (2931 16th St.; 701-8466, www.barbambino.com) is carefully rustic. In the restaurant’s front window, a rough-hewn community table seats 10 and a soft white Italian marble bar reaches all the way back to an open section of the kitchen, displaying cheeses and charcuterie. A few scattered indoor tables give way to a quiet, heated outdoor patio. The menu shows owner Christopher Losa’s love for northern Italy, where he lived for several years: the food is simple, traditional Italian, like the polpetti, pork-and-veal meatballs in a rich tomato sauce with dark chard. There’s nothing superfluous on the plates (order some sides for that), and the dishes are affordable. "I’m all about gastronomic progression, but how many times a week can you eat peppered sardines in cilantro foam?" laughs Losa. "Sometimes you just want a plate of really good pasta." The highly polished Italian wine list offsets Bar Bambino’s simple food.

If you want to know where the really good meals are, follow the chefs. When San Francisco’s culinary heroes have slept off last night’s shift (and postshift drinks) and finished their coffee, they head to Sunflower (506 Valencia and 3111 16th St.; 626-5022) for cheap and authentic Vietnamese eats. Sunflower has two locations: a tiny (like, four tables tiny) space on Valencia and a larger dining room around the corner on 16th Street. Both locations share the same kitchen, which speedily produces hangover-curing dishes like sticky wontons (stuffed with pork, rolled in rice, and deep-fried) and all kinds of pho, with the requisite Mission vegan options available. The industrial-strength Thai iced tea or coffee is sweetened by plenty of condensed milk and will keep you buzzing long into the evening. The produce is fresh and the meat is nondubious, something of a rarity for a pho restaurant.

Absinthe (398 Hayes; 551-1590, www.absinthe.com) hasn’t gotten a lot of press in the past couple of years, but that’s not because the restaurant has slipped any. The Yelpers and the new-restaurant junkies may have gone to feed on fresh prey, but good ol’ Absinthe remains a staple of opera diners and cocktail connoisseurs. The bar’s lounge area stays open through Absinthe’s lunch rush, dinner rush, and the post-opera blitz. Sure, you’ll drop some coin on a meal at Absinthe (a decadent lunch for two plus cocktails runs about $100), but you’ll eat, and be treated, like royalty. Forget about the tired waitstaff dying to drop the checks so they can go home — the service here is as good as the Chartreuse cocktails and the fresh crab.

Restaurant Lulu (816 Folsom; 495-5775, www.restaurantlulu.com) is a total find in the restaurant wasteland that makes up this part of the SoMa corridor. It has the best salty, lemony mussels around, hands down. The industrial-chic decor is at odds with the impeccable and friendly service (read: no pretense, no attitude). Lulu’s is perfect for a hefty lunch circa 3 p.m., after a midday spin at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The kitchen at Perbacco (230 California; 955-0663, www.perbaccosf.com) will only do a bar menu between lunch and dinner, but it’s worth a trip to the heart of the Financial District for some ultra-authentic Italian snacks and drinks. The house specialty is the charcuterie plate (the sassy little meat-chef slices everything on a vintage machine right behind the bar), but everything’s good. Try their signature cocktail as a brightly acidic complement to the heavy, comforting meatiness offered on the rest of the menu.

OK, so you never want to hear the words "Asian fusion" again. I know: I don’t either. But buck up and check out Ozumo (161 Steuart; 882-1333, www.ozumo.com) on the backside of Steuart. If you just can’t bear to order anything with the word "fusion" in its name (your loss), you can still try the sushi. Ozumo is where the other servers in the area head for their post-lunch-shift drink — in case you wonder who the raucous group in the front lounge are. If you sit up there too, you can even pick up a wireless signal from next door. Hey, it’s like you really are in an office … but with cocktails. Viva la SF-slacker lifestyle! (Ella Lawrence)

Compañía Nacional de Danza

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PREVIEW When Nacho Duato, crowned with laurels from his years in England and Holland, returned to his native Spain in the 1980s, the country’s national ballet company offered him its directorship. He took one look at the ensemble’s anemic repertoire and decided he could breathe some life into it. Consequently, today Compañía Nacional de Danza is a repository of Duato’s choreography. Spain could have done worse: Duato has put contemporary Spanish ballet on the world map like no one else. Don’t expect even a shadow of bolero or flamenco in the two different programs that constitute his company’s San Francisco debut. You will get the fruits of an exceptionally broad musical imagination and dancing that is full-bodied and energized — still ballet based but moving into a lush contemporary sensibility. One of this tour’s pieces, Castrati (2002), also performed at the University of California at Davis a few years back, recalls the brutal ceremony that insured boy sopranos retained their voices beyond puberty. To the sounds of the most glorious Vivaldi, cassocks fly about the stage in a none-too-gentle representation of those initiation rituals. An older work, 1996’s Por Vos Muero, splendidly evokes the role of dance as a social occasion and is performed to 15th- and 16th-century Spanish music. The newest work, Gnawa (2007), named after Moroccan descendents of slaves, explores connections within Spanish and North African cultures. Also on the program are Gilded Goldbergs (2006), White Darkness (2001), and Rassemblement (1990).

COMPAÑÍA NACIONAL DE DANZA Program A, Wed/20–Thurs/21, 8 p.m.; Program B, Sat/23, 8 p.m., and Sun/24, 2 p.m.; $35–$55. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org, www.ybca.org

ZZ top — the return of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

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The loaded title of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait promises a rendering of the iconic and volcanic footballer and of the century in which we reside. This Friday, Gordon and Parreno’s one-of-a-kind film begins a return engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In honor of the film, and in conjunction with our recent “Video Mutants” cover package, here is a link to my extensive interview with Gordon about the film from last year, and a trailer that gives you a mere taste of Zidane‘s sensurround properties when experienced in a movie theater.

Video Mutants: Mike Kelley on chopping, screwing, and playing with Superman

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day is done dancer sml.jpg

We’re not quite done with artist Mike Kelley, profiled this week in Sonic Reducer. Easy-going, amiable, and eager to ramble at length on the phone from his base in LA, Kelley – a founding member of influential Ann Arbor, Mich., art-noise band Destroy All Monsters – will show his first feature, Day Is Done, Thursday, Jan. 31, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

SFBG: Day Is Done has been changed significantly since its installation at Gagosian Gallery?

Mike Kelley: Oh yes, it’s been radically changed, completely chopped up and intercut. When it was installed, it was on multiple screens and computer-synched, and because the space was so large, we would have it run at two points simultaneously. Nevertheless you couldn’t take it in as you would a normal film – it was spatialized and treated more as a sculpture, so you could sit and watch sections and follow it over to here and over to there. But it would be hard to follow it in a very linear way. And also you wouldn’t have this very purposeful crosscutting that you have in a single-channel version, where we take all the various scenes and treated them as if they were simultaneous action and played with that kind of filmic language.

Quixotically yours

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› johnny@sfbg.com

In a multiplex in San Francisco (whose name I do not care to recall) there is at least one movie intent on bludgeoning viewers with a bombastic soundtrack, a mechanical approach to emotion, and a conclusion that is obvious before the story has begun.

In contrast, in a smaller theater, Albert Serra’s Honor of the Knights offers one of the best windows onto a current phenomenon that might be tagged somnambulant cinema.

Amid contemporary sensory overload, it’s unsurprising that somnambulant cinema – meditative and ambient, often set outdoors and yet never fully outside society – has begun to flower. Does the darkness of a movie theater have to be a site of sonic and visual assault? A recent spate of films, perhaps led by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), has answered that question with a low-key rebuff, choosing quietude and nature instead, evoking contemplative wonder in the process. By revivifying a literary classic – Don Quixote de la Mancha – that through sheer proliferation has become a myth of modernity, Serra’s first feature announces itself as a worthy Spanish answer to Apichatpong’s Thai fables.

To be sure, what I’m calling somnambulant cinema might easily be tagged “boring art films” by detractors. Any style or subgenre contains failures and successes. But Serra’s movie succeeds – partly because of its lightness, a quality not found in the hordes of festival films that confuse slowness or idyll with turgidity. In following the progress – or lack thereof – of Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó) and Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), Honor of the Knights immerses viewers in hypnotic rhythms. Using only natural light and shooting primarily during the magic hours of dusk and dawn, Serra gives the moon one of its most gorgeous scenes since the time of Georges Méliès and constructs a symphony from the way an orchestra of insects varies in pitch depending on the time of day or night.

As embodied by Carbó, the Don Quixote of Honor of the Knights is disheveled, with the matted hair of a bear and rusty armor, and he careens convincingly from senility to spryness. One minute he’s muttering to his lumpen sidekick as if Sancho (who still has traces of disobedient boyhood on his face) were nothing more than an extension of himself; the next he’s taking a dip in a stream with renewed vigor – even swimming while wearing heavy boots. Transutf8g an almost 1,000-page work into a 90-minute film with only a few hundred words of dialogue, Serra has inspired more than one critic to claim he’s bringing Samuel Beckett to bear on Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. But while this Don Quixote doesn’t seem to know where’s he’s going or even what time it is, after parrying phantoms with a sword and retreating from the wind, he leads Honor of the Knights to moments of offhand beauty and old joy.

Those last two words are no accident: juxtaposing various degrees of a fraternal bond against a varying but uncaring landscape, Honor of the Knights is closer to Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) than it is to Gus Van Sant’s more overtly Beckett-like and aloof Gerry (2002). Comedy moves to the fore when the archaic Don Quixote urges Sancho to look up at the sky and cry, “God, you are the best,” but the character’s final musings on mortality hint that – within himself at least – he isn’t as lost as he might appear. “Chivalry is civilization,” he asserts, and with fealty the movie records his avoidance of all humanity besides Sancho. Serra’s movie ends on literal notes of melancholy, plucked and strummed on Ferrant Font’s solitary acoustic guitar.

When Don Quixote addresses the sky, Honor of the Knights takes on a simple grandeur not far from that found in Marcos Prado’s extraordinary, underseen 2004 documentary Estamira, a portrait of a sage madwoman who lives in an apocalyptic Rio de Janeiro landfill. In appearance, Carbó also somewhat resembles fellow journeyman traveler Vargas, the threatening protagonist of another recent somnambulant cinema work, Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos (2004). Much like Serra’s Apichatpong-influenced debut, the Argentine Alonso’s recent films reflect a conversation between filmmakers from different countries that is beginning to emerge from the somnambulant style. Just as Los Muertos shares traits with Apichatpong’s Blissfully Yours, Alonso’s more recent Fantasma (2006) resembles Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Goodbye, Dragon Inn more than it does any recent work of new Argentine cinema.

By moving Tsai’s and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s updates of Michelangelo Antonioni’s slackness from urban settings to mountains and jungles, Apichatpong helped establish the tone, atmosphere, and characteristics of somnambulant cinema, which treats the screen of a movie theater as a wide-open rather than narratively enclosed site for conscious and unconscious dreaming. The most literal example of the form has to be Paz Encina’s 2006 Hamaca Paraguaya, which confronts the audience with an extended shot of a rural hammock, using this sight and the voice-over banter to represent Paraguay’s place in the world.

Certainly, the very idea of somnambulant cinema brings the prospect of loud snoring two seats away or two rows down, but amid the cavalcade of cell phone rudeness in movie theaters today, that possibility is more humorous than annoying. There is a difference between a slow film and a boring film, and Honor of the Knights is lively – it doesn’t require a prescreening blast of black coffee and sugar-free Red Bull (one veteran online critic’s diet before watching Pedro Costa’s literally awesome 2005 Colossal Youth).

What is the dark good for, if not dreaming?<\!s>2

HONOR OF THE KNIGHTS
Thurs/13 and Sat/15, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/16, 2 p.m.; $6-<\d>$8
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Video Mutants: Booby call

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Who can bring together cast-off crocheted critters and KISS? Early ’70s Ann Arbor, Mich., art noise and the Whitney Biennial? Vampires toiling in cubicles and Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty (DGC)? Mike Kelley, man, can.

Ouch — the allusions get bumpy after almost three hours of mind-altering video candy. The medium may be the favored art material of the moment, but it’s only one weapon at the disposal of the cofounder of Destroy All Monsters — the Stooges’ weirder kissing cousins — and the Dirty cover artist. Kelley’s work can be found in major museum collections around the world, and he’s collaborated on video pieces with artists like Paul McCarthy in the past, but Day Is Done, which screens Jan. 31 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is his first feature, revamped as a narrative-ish stream from the installation version shown in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery in New York City.

Religious icons, ’80s modern dancers, lousy Nazi rappers, bad comedians, and spacey witches and vampires dance, sing, and hold forth throughout the video musical’s 32 chapters, augmented by a Kelley-written soundtrack that encompasses gospel and techno, light pop and monkish drone. Say I’m lost in pop idolatry, but the most wonderfully bizarre moment in this lengthy bizarre wonder arrives during a painful singles mixer furnished with irksome chair-desks as the differences among the assembled women — two African Americans, a white lost Hee Haw extra, a rocker in full KISS makeup, and a gloomy witch — are highlighted by portraits of their respective all-American idols: Kobe Bryant, R. Kelly, Garth Brooks, Gene Simmons, and Brandon Lee, all painted with clunky, thrift store–style passion. After getting an, erm, tongue lashing from the KISS girl for nattering about the largeness of some big stuffed bananas, the hick chick is forced to defend her painting of Brooks staring at a bare breast (in reality painted by Kelley). "But it ain’t even my tit — it’s my momma’s," the backwoods boob protests as the KISS fan sneers with all of Detroit Rock City’s blood-spitting wrath. "Gosh, I hope Garth don’t go for my momma and not for me!"

The rejoinder "That bitch is nuts!" might be a punch line to a half-cocked sitcom, but it’s also the perfect response to the old biddy dressing down a would-be school pageant Madonna for her posture or the blood-drenched hawker of a putf8um MasterCard that supports the "educational complex" — or any other denizen of Kelley’s jet-black-humored, bleakly antic fun house.

Looking back at the video now, however, Kelley can still picture changes to Day Is Done — each chapter a live-action re-creation of an extracurricular activity photo culled from a high school yearbook. For instance, the many students and office workers dressed as depressed vampires and gleeful witches seem a bit too trendy today, even for a man with a taste for monsters. "If I thought about it more, I would have done something less … au courant, I guess," Kelley drawls over the phone from his Los Angeles home. Does he still glimpse kids in full goth regalia? A heavy sigh, then, "Yeah. Also, it’s kind of gone into the art world. A lot of gothy art is being made."

A self-described "maximalist" who has made noise for years as part of Destroy All Monsters — a forerunner of experimentalists here and abroad — and later on his own, the man once pegged as a major proponent of installation-oriented "clusterfuck aesthetics" is clearly driven to strike out in fresh directions all the time. Day Is Done, for example, emerged from his work with repressed memories and his Educational Complex sculpture, a model of every school the Detroit native ever attended, with, he says, "all the parts I couldn’t remember left blank." The original idea for the video — shot over a few weeks in 2005 at an LA park, Kelley’s studio, and his alma mater, California Institute of the Arts — was to "fill in the blanks with screen memory."

"Also because this show was in New York, I thought doing something with a Broadway overtone would be funny because that’s something cultured New Yorkers are embarrassed about!" Kelley says, laughing.

Kelley is obviously still eager to venture into unexamined office parks of discomfort, provoking his viewers by pushing them into the dead spaces that fill the back lots of corporate break rooms and school yards. The artist’s well-known stuffed-animal works similarly evolved from an unspoken exchange with his audience. "When I first starting using that stuff, I was only working with things that were handmade, and it didn’t matter to me what they were — I was more interested in the idea of love and labor," Kelley explains. "But people were really, really fixated on the dolls, and I realized there’s a great kind of empathy for them, and also I realized that much of that empathy had to do with this kind of rise and fixation on child abuse and that whole victim culture that was coming up in the ’80s."

Shortly after one of those discarded dolls popped up on the cover of Dirty, Kelley, bandmate Cary Loren, SY’s Thurston Moore, and critic Byron Coley put together the 1994 three-CD retrospective Destroy All Monsters: 1974–1976 for Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label to document the original lineup’s work before the arrival of the Stooges’ Ron Asheton and the MC5’s Michael Davis in the band. The founding group re-formed, while Kelley has continued to work sound components into his artwork and make and release music on his Compound Annex imprint.

Has music video ever been part of Kelley’s Wagnerian compendium of interests? "I’ve never been asked!" he says. "I don’t think I would do one for myself — who would show it? It’ll just be another thing that sits in a box in storage, like all my records." Still, his freshly edited feature might work. "It generated a tremendous amount of music," the artist muses. "In a sense, Day Is Done is one giant music video." *

DAY IS DONE

Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m., $6–<\d>$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.mikekelley.com

Video Mutants: The man with the video camera

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The unmistakable riff from AC/DC’s "Back in Black" blares from the dark room in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that houses Douglas Gordon’s exhibition Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from About 1992 until Now. It’s coming from Gordon’s cell phone, in the pocket of his trench coat, which he’s wearing over a leather jacket.

Gordon is a man of many layers, though as its title plainly states, Pretty Much collects his visions to date, a number of them appropriated, into a single room. There one can spend a minute or a day pondering light and dark manifestations of selfhood, taking the long view, in which the TVs buzz like sinister leftovers at an abandoned appliance store (or lights in the eye sockets of a huge skull), or opting for an extreme close-up on a piece such as 1999’s through a looking glass, in which Travis Bickle’s famous dialogue with his mirror image in Taxi Driver is endlessly fractured and reunited.

After we’ve stepped outside the exhibition, Gordon chooses to focus on the relationship between 1998’s Blue (which brings new meaning to the phrase finger-fucking) and the stretch of his famous 24 Hour Psycho in which Norman Bates notices a fly on his hand. He’d just noticed it while leaving Pretty Much‘s "moving encyclopedia" of his works and decides it’s time to "fabricate a relationship" between the two images. I show my recently scarred left hand to Gordon to trigger some image association, since disembodied hands star in a number of his video works, as well as in Feature Film, his 1999 portrait of James Conlon conducting Bernard Hermann’s score for Vertigo. Ordering Red Hook at noon, he shares a story about a bone-splintering skateboard wipeout.

Other visual triggers shed a few more sparks. I pull out an old hardcover copy of Otto Preminger’s autobiography Preminger (Doubleday, 1977) because Gordon’s 1999 piece Left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right is built from Whirlpool, Preminger’s 1949 echo of 1944’s classic Laura. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so), the book and its superb Saul Bass cover design trigger Gordon to talk, in a roundabout way, about directors other than Preminger.

"When I got off the plane, I got a message that Gus Van Sant has been trying to reach me," he says. "I met [Van Sant] once before. He’d just released [his 1998 remake of] Psycho and I had just finished editing Left is right, so I’d been stuck in a strobe environment for two weeks. The last day I’d finished editing it, I took my girlfriend to see Psycho. Because I’d just been bombarded by thousands of strobed images, I couldn’t handle it. I fainted at least three times. When I met him, he asked what I thought, and I said, ‘I really enjoyed it.’ I was lying through my teeth! So I have a confession to make to him."

I pull out one last visual trigger, an old snapshot a friend took of My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda J. Butcher. "That’s the same guitar as mine — I just bought a Fender Mustang!" Gordon enthuses, noting that the group is re-forming. My Bloody Valentine’s re-formation arrives a few years after the group’s Kevin Shields worked as the noise consultant for Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s masterful portrait of the soccer legend. Zidane‘s upcoming one-week run at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will allow people to see just how crucial Shields’s contribution — which makes crowd noise into something truly hallucinatory — is to a masterpiece of modern cinema.

"Our generation experienced film in bed, mediated through TV," Gordon says. "That’s a huge difference from deconstructing it mechanically in a film academy or art school. For us the deconstruction was social.

"The first time I came to San Francisco, in 1994 or 1995, I was searching for stag movies that had been transferred onto tape," Gordon continues. "Now it’s all online. I don’t want to be too nostalgic about it, but there was something special about making a physical pilgrimage to get [images]. The dissemination of ideas today is not necessarily media based. For my generation and for younger people it’s a tsunami — you cannot beat it back."

DOUGLAS GORDON: PRETTY MUCH EVERY FILM AND VIDEO WORK FROM ABOUT 1992 UNTIL NOW

Through Feb, 24, 2008, $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT

Feb. 1–7, $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Twelve for the road

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The past year’s many exhilarations are here condensed into a month-by-month format. Let a veil of silence fall over the frustrations, and remember the yin and yang in everything, dance included.

January: Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, Marin Civic Center Auditorium, San Rafael. "Hungarian Concerto: Hommage à Béla Bartók," a brilliant presentation of traditional folk material, was choreographed within a sophisticated, contemporary setting that highlighted how the future and the past can coexist perfectly with each other.

February: Forsythe Company, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. Making a stunning debut with Three Atmospheric Studies, a piece that is as politically astute as it is formally challenging, William Forsythe’s new independent company confirmed his status as one of the most original contemporary thinkers about the role of dance in society.

March: Jess Curtis/Gravity, CounterPULSE, San Francisco. Under the Radar, Jess Curtis’s life-affirming cabaret, was probably the year’s single most inspired show, as poetic as it was inventive. The performers were as diverse as they come, and every one was top-notch. Radar did what good art always does: change our perceptions about who we are.

April: San Francisco Ballet, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. A rich month from the SFB, with the now-departed Gonzalo Garcia glorious in a slight work, Elemental Brubeck, and two of my SFB favorites, Kristin Long and Gennadi Nedvigin, in a problematic piece, Concordia. Julia Adam’s Night also returned. Adam’s choreographic voice is idiosyncratic and spunkily irreverent. Watch for her take on Sleeping Beauty this April.

May: Pick Up Performance Company, ODC Theater, San Francisco. David Gordon, who has been creating art for more than 30 years, is a master craftsman who works brilliantly with language and movement. In Dancing Henry Five he interwove formalized and pedestrian dance with Shakespeare’s language to stunning effect.

June: Joe Goode Performance Group, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. We may know what Goode thinks of the frailties of the human heart, but we continue to watch because he keeps exploring ways to express his loves and concerns. Humansville was a fine example of dance as installation.

July: West Wave Dance Festival, Project Artaud Theater, San Francisco. The best West Wave in years — focused and straightforward — was also the last under Joan Lazarus’s stewardship. Let’s hope that showcasing quality artists (think Amy Seiwert and Kate Weare) will be utmost in the minds of future organizers.

August: Zaccho Dance Theatre, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Beckett, Mass. Watching Joanna Haigood’s haunting Invisible Wings performed in a place that served as an Underground Railroad station was both chilling and inspiring.

September: Nora Chipaumire, ODC Theater, San Francisco. Always a stunning dancer, the regal Chipaumire returned to the Bay Area with equally impressive choreography, including Chimurenga, inspired by her life in Zimbabwe.

October: Oakland Ballet Company, Paramount Theatre, Oakland. Whether this company’s tale will become a rags-to-riches story remains to be seen, but watching the hundreds in the audience give the fledgling new troupe their rousing support was not be missed.

November: San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest, Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Treading a fine line between the community groups that form her primary base and the main-stage artists that are pushing the genre ahead, producer Micaya again put on a smart, well-paced, and highly enjoyable weekend of hip-hop dance.

December: Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Project Artaud Theatre, San Francisco. Other Suns is the first piece in a trilogy that Jenkins is crafting with China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company. If the remaining parts push as fiercely at the edges of the physically possible, they will be something to look forward to in 2009.

Staying power

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Looking back at the Bay Area art scene in 2007 affirms our perennial difficulty in holding on to ambitious players. It’s an oft-repeated story. Given San Francisco’s commitment to nonprofit and alternative models over commercial ones and the high cost of living, artists find it easier to start off than to build their careers here. Since the art world in general has been buoyed by brisk sales, art fairs, and biennials, the Bay Area’s condition applies as much to high-profile curators, dealers, and administrators as to artists.

Curatorial flux is particularly apparent. Madeleine Grynsztejn, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture since 2000, recently announced her new position as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. René de Guzman left his post as director of visual arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to become senior curator at the Oakland Museum of California. Daniell Cornell, currently the director of contemporary art projects and curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will become the deputy director for art and senior curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum, while the Berkeley Art Museum — which is embarking on a capital campaign for a new building — saw senior curator Constance Lewallen and director Kevin Consey leave for various reasons. This means there are a number of key positions that, when filled, will change the directions of these important venues. Or will they? Such turnovers have happened before, and frankly, institutions rarely undergo radical makeovers.

In 2007 new curators began or continued their programs. In May, Liz Thomas, the Matrix curator at BAM, began her first slate of shows with Allison Smith’s participatory, craftsperson-based Notion Nanny project, Rosalind Nashashibi’s film installation, and Tomás Saraceno’s current "suspended environment" (through Feb. 17), revealing a solid and diverse range of emerging international practices. This curator’s strategy is to build slowly rather than open with a bang.

The program moves at a faster and flashier clip at California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute, where in fall 2007 curator Jens Hoffman began his first season of programming with a sporty graphic identity and high-concept group shows. These include "Pioneers," a nod to Bay Area mavericks from gold rush groundbreakers to conceptualists; "Passengers," a long-term, rotating round-robin show; and "Apocalypse Now" (through Jan. 26), a political "attack" he curated with international biennial-favorite artist duo Allora and Calzadilla. The pair’s works were also highlighted as the main fall exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries, which are programmed by curator Hou Hanru. Hou’s exhibits started in fall 2006, and in 2007 they included "World Factory," a two-part group show that boisterously explored conditions of global capitalism in various media while serving as a test ground for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, which he also organized. Hoffman and Hou are key figures in an international circuit of curators that also includes SFAI dean Okwui Enwezor, and the three simultaneously work on projects here and abroad. (Full disclosure: I teach at both of the aforementioned schools.)

It’s been difficult, though, to gauge these projects’ impact on the doggedly localized Bay Area art scene — or how their curators will take to the regional climate. Such curatorial presence has provided an opportunity for a larger number of artists and other curators to pass through the region, and it’s offered platforms for provocative group shows that are rarely staged in museums around here. The bottom line, though, is that in the present model of international art, change is driven by the marketplace, and these institutional spaces exist outside the commercial gallery arena that makes certain cities more visible art hubs than others.

There was, however, movement in the local commercial realm. Catherine Clark broke from 49 Geary to open a Chelsea-style space in the shadow of SFMOMA. Ratio 3 unveiled a surprisingly large and cannily designed new space near 14th and Valencia streets, not far from Jack Hanley Gallery’s two spots on Valencia (another recently debuted in New York) and Southern Exposure’s just-opened second temporary site. Combined with other galleries nearby — Intersection for the Arts, Needles and Pens, Adobe Books, etc. — the neighborhood could be turning into a destination alternative to the exhibition spaces on the first block of Geary. The Dogpatch neighborhood shows promise of becoming another art zone with the ambitious Silverman, Ping Pong, and Ampersand galleries, which have all been staging interesting shows, though the area is still a bit under the radar.

All said, we’re at a transitional moment, and forward thinking seems in order. The year ahead offers huge potential for new faces, directions, and already scheduled programs at many of the aforementioned venues. I’m anticipating the Gilbert and George show at the de Young Museum, Lee Friedlander at SFMOMA, and a Paul McCarthy project at the Wattis, as well as the 2008 openings of the California Academy of Sciences and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. All provide plenty reason to stick around. *

GLEN HELFAND’S TOP 10


The following exhibitions, events, and films enthralled me with their winning combinations of joy, originality, and serious subtext.

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal’s Ten Chi, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley

The Book of Shadows," Fraenkel Gallery

Liz Larner’s lecture, San Francisco Art Institute

"© Murakami," Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Mitzi Pederson’s "Unlet Me Go," Ratio 3

Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird

"A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s," Berkeley Art Museum

“Rudolf Stingel” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Weeds

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Unknown Forces installation, REDCAT, Los Angeles, and his film Syndromes and a Century

Year in Film: Cinema 2007

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COVER STAR RICHARD WONG’S VIEW OF 2007


I feel like I’ve only seen about 10 films this year, so my list would basically be No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There, and Beowulf (two of those movies were painful, they were so aesthetically pleasing — guess which ones). But I’m going to say Paranoid Park was a huge influence on me this year. The risks it took and its loose narrative and utter disregard for convention were extremely inspiring. I saw it in Toronto at a press screening, among all the jabbering sales agents and distribution reps, and it still managed to drop my jaw — despite the guy next to me answering his phone midway through, telling the guy on the other line how "half baked" the movie was. Afterward I talked to a fellow aspiring filmmaker about the film, and he told me how much he disliked it because he thought it was a "mess." Exactly. It feels like a rough cut, only not — a work in progress, but that’s the point. Perhaps that’s why I identified with it so much. Besides, maybe a little messiness is not such a bad thing to embrace right now.

Richard Wong is the director and producer of Colma: The Musical.

JEM COHEN’S FAVORITE MOVIE MOMENT


James Benning’s Ten Skies at New York’s invaluable Anthology Film Archives: with a description like a parody of avant-garde impenetrability ("Ten shots of the sky — feature length"), it sounds daunting. Instead, it was an experience of mysterious joy that brought me back to why movies are entertaining and why seeing them can be so communal. After a few restless, fidgety minutes, both audience and film hit a groove so sublime that I kept laughing with pleasure. Each sky has its revelations and dramas, each viewer "makes" their own film, but in a shared hallucination that filmmakers and venues rarely allow, much less encourage. Sure, we’ve all seen the sky before, but when’s the last time you fell in so deeply and for so long, undistracted yet free to drift, stunned by both the thing itself and the amazing mirror of moving pictures? And I love that Benning says it’s a political film, "the opposite of war."

Jem Cohen (www.jemcohenfilms.com) is the director of Instrument, Benjamin Smoke, Chain, Building a Broken Mousetrap, and other films.

VAGINAL DAVIS’S FLESH FOR LULU: A LETTER FROM TEUTONIA


So glad I live in Berlin as an expat, far away from icky, tired Los Ang, that sad, pathetic film industry towne. When I worked for the Sundance Film Festival in programming I watched what seemed like a zillion of the same kinds of films. This year I created (with the art kollective Cheap) the Cheap Gossip Studio installation as part of the Berlin Film Festival. It was housed in the atrium of the Kino Arsenal. Film historian Marc Siegel brought Callie Angel out to show some rare, seldom-screened Andy Warhol films, as well as Jerry Tartaglia, who restored Jack Smith’s noted oeuvre. I even got to meet my sexy feminist heroine, Jackie Reynal of the Zanzibar movement, and Phillip Garrel, who brought his delicious young thrombone of a son, the actor Louis Garrel.

During the year, I started a new monthly performative series at Kino Arsenal called "Rising Stars, Falling Stars." It featured experimental silent classics from filmmakers like Louis Delluc, Man Ray, and the grandmama of the avant-garde, Germaine Deluc.

A lot of filmmakers send me rough cuts of their new films hoping I will write something on my blog, which gets a million readers a day. I just saw Bruce La Bruce’s allegorical zombie flick Otto; or Up with Dead People, and it’s beyond brilliant, and I am not saying that just because I have starred in Bruce’s other films Super 8 1/2 and Hustler White or because he directed my latest performance piece, Cheap Blacky. I am harsh on my filmmaker friends. I told Bruce that he shouldn’t act in his own movies anymore, just like Woody Allen and Spike Lee shouldn’t act in theirs. I even scolded Todd Haynes that Far From Heaven was overrated, but I adored Velvet Goldmine and his latest, I’m Not There. (Though I can’t stand Cate Blanchett; after seeing her as Queen Elizabeth yet again all I could say was, "Glenda Jackson, Glenda Jackson.")

I watched Superbad twice with the 14-year-old twins of my Cheap Blacky costar Susanne Sachsee, and I even got off on the ‘roid rage of Gerard Butler in the epic 300. No one does brittle white lady like my Tales of the City costar Laura Linney in The Savages. Tony Leung is so elegant and sensuous in Lust, Caution that everyone will want a Chinese boyfriend as the hot new fashion accessory this year. And if Sweeney Todd doesn’t bring back the musical genre, nothing will.

Vaginal Davis (www.vaginaldavis.com), who now lives in exile in Berlin, will be in the Bay Area on March 29, 2008, for the opening of her installation Present Penicative at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; it will also feature her performances "Bilitis — A Lesbian Separatist Feminist State" and "Colonize Me."

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL DOCUMENTARY TOP 10

1. Absolute Wilson (Katharina Otto-Bernstein, US/Germany)

2. All in This Tea (Les Blank, US)

3. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

4. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

5. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

6. My Kid Could Paint That (Ami Bar-Lev, US)

7. No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson, US)

8. Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US)

9. Romántico (Mark Becker, US)

10. Zoo (Robinson Devor, US)

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALARMING PORN TITLES, 2007 EDITION


All thanks to the Internet Movie Database, without which we would remain in blessed ignorance.

Brad McGuire’s 20 Hole Weekend

5 Guy Cream Pie 29

Abominable Black Man 8

Ahh Shit! White Mama 4

Anal Chic

Apple Bottom Snow Bunnies

Be Here Now

Blondes have More Squirt!

Bore My Asshole 3

Bring’um Young 23

Campus Pizza

Catch Her in the Eye

Even More Bang for Your Buck

Go Fuck Yourself

I Scored a Soccer Mom 3

Old Geezers, Young Teasers

Seduced by a Cougar 4

Swallow My Children

Thanks for the Mammaries

Trantasm

You’ve Got a Mother Thing Coming

Dennis Harvey is a Guardian contributor.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’S PICKS


1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania). This debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two young women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime.

2. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US). Uncovering the layers of human identity has been a career-long, disturbing theme of Cronenberg’s. But with his most recent films he’s figured out how to deconstruct our psychotic and schizophrenic patriarchal society in a minimal, confrontational manner.

3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, US/UK). This minimasterpiece follows the downward spiral of two nice, middle-class brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), both of whom loosen their moral codes just to better their lifestyles. Striking camera work (by Vilmos Zsigmond) encloses the characters in an unrelenting nightmare.

4. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US). Forever you’ll be able to bust out the statement "What did you think of the end of The Sopranos?" and people will get all lit up.

5. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US). Thanks to audacious writing and powerful acting (especially by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bittersweet sincerity is pitch-perfect.

6. Californication, season 1 (various directors, US). David Duchovny is alive and hilarious. Creator Tom Kapinos cuts right through our progressive relationship era, devilishly developing each character over 12 episodes. This is heavy-duty stuff mixed with dirty, dirty sex.

7. Year of the Dog (Mike White, US). White brings heartfelt storytelling to his directorial debut.

8. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

9. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US). This Wes Craven–produced Iraq war allegory deserves more attention than Brian De Palma’s patronizing Redacted.

10. Hostel 2 (Eli Roth, US). Baddie Roth again makes social commentary on America’s xenophobic world colonization by torturing the pathetic children of the apathetic parents who make our lovely world go round.

11. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany). Reygadas updates the transcendental religious overtones of Carl Theodor Dreyer by way of a Mennonite community.

12. At Long Last Love (Peter Bogdanovich, US). Never released on VHS or DVD, this throwback to the musicals of Ernst Lubitsch — featuring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan — was dismissed and despised on its only theatrical release in 1975. All of the Cole Porter musical numbers were filmed live, with the actors using their own voices. Not only are these numbers brilliantly executed (inspiring realistic musicals like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark), but the film also attains the rapid-fire interaction and casual kookiness of late ’30s screwball comedies. Did critics really overlook the fact that this is clever cheekiness? It’s a true treasure that serves as a ’70s time capsule and should inspire future filmmakers to take their chances all the way. It may have taken 32 years, but your time has come, Mr. Bogdanovich. Thank you.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches film history at the Academy of Art University and curates Midnites for Maniacs (www.midnitesformaniacs.com) at the Castro Theatre.

JAMES T. HONG’S TOP 11, STARTING FROM 0


0. The 70th anniversary memorial of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, China, and especially survivor Xia Shuqin’s reaction to her re-created wartime house, where most of her family was raped and killed by Japanese soldiers.

1. The passing of House Resolution 121 (the "Comfort Women" resolution) on C-Span, July 30.

2. Yasukuni (Li Ying, China/Japan). The power of the shrine isn’t fully captured, but this is the closest an outsider has come to doing so that I’ve seen. All captured on a Japanese mini-DV video camera, in American NTSC.

3. Nanking (Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, US). AOL + Iris Chang = Woody Harrelson and the Nanjing Massacre.

4. A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (various, US). The alpha and omega of Asian America. For those with the required assets and skills, Playboy and the Internet can make you, regardless of race, a bisexual American celebrity — the end and a new beginning for all the so-called angry Asian Americans.

5. Summer Special Olympics in Shanghai, China. Globalization was transformed into music by Kenny G during the opening ceremony.

6. Pride: The Moment of Destiny, or Puraido: Unmei no Toki (Shunya Ito, Japan). Finally found a good DVD copy of this, in Canada of all places. This could also be called Tojo: The Hero.

7. Inside the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic (various, US). Pride and Prejudice for the heavyset, on the Learning Channel.

8. Major League Eating’s Thanksgiving Chowdown (various, US). The purest American professional sport and the fall of Japan’s greatest hero, Takeru Kobayashi, on Spike TV.

9. Mock Up on Mu, in progress (Craig Baldwin, US)

10. Blockade (Sergey Loznitsa, Russia)

The works of San Francisco filmmaker James T. Hong (www.zukunftsmusik.com) include Behold the Asian: How One Becomes What One Is, The Form of the Good, Taipei 101: A Travelogue of Symptoms, 731: Two Versions of Hell, and This Shall Be a Sign.

JONATHAN L. KNAPP’S TOP 10


1. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

2. Brand upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, Canada/US)

3. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

4. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Malaysia/China/Taiwan/France/Austria)

5. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

6. In Between Days (So Yong Kim, South Korea/US/Canada)

7. Makeshift 2007 grindhouse double feature: The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US) and Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, US)

8. The Wire, season four (various, US)

9. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

10. Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

Jonathan L. Knapp is a Guardian contributor.

MARIA KOMODORE’S 10 WORST


In addition to bringing some very good movies to the screen, 2007 was also a really good year for bad films. But among them all, these are the ones I feel had lack of intelligence, conservatism, and conventionality on a whole different level:

1. Hitman (Xavier Gens, France/US)

2. Good Luck Chuck (Mark Helfrich, US/Canada)

3. License to Wed (Ken Kwapis, US)

4. The Brothers Solomon (Bob Odenkirk, US)

5. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, US)

6. P.S. I Love You (Richard LaGravenese, US)

7. The Final Season (David M. Evans, US)

8. The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Jay Russell, UK/US)

9. The Perfect Holiday (Lance Rivera, US)

10. P2 (Franck Khalfoun, US)

Maria Komodore is a Guardian contributor.

CHRIS METZLER AND JEFF SPRINGER’S TOP 10 DOCS


With a very special mention and heavy props for the fantastic TV doc series Nimrod Nation.

1. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Jason Kohn, Brazil/US)

2. Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, US)

3. Summercamp (Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price, US)

4. This Filthy World (Jeff Garlin, US)

5. A Man Named Pearl (Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson, US)

6. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

7. An Audience of One (Mike Jacobs, US)

8. Crazy Love (Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens, US)

9. Big Rig (Doug Pray, US)

10. Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa (Jeremy Stulberg and Randy Stulberg, US)

San Francisco filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer codirected the award-winning documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (www.saltonseadocumentary.com).

SYLVIA MILES’S TALES OF GO GO TALES


Go Go Tales was filmed at Cinecittà, so I had a location like I did in the ’60s. Cinecittà was thrilling. When the film premiered in Cannes, you would have thought I was the lead from the reviews. What’s her name in the New York Times gave it a wonderful review that got picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

Abel [Ferrara] got mad at Burt Young, who played my husband, and cut him out of the film. Be that as it may, we still managed to keep that story together The irony is that the rap that I do [at the end of the movie] was ad-libbed at 10 o’clock on the last night of filming. I give my all and know that something good will happen.

From what I hear, [Bernardo] Bertolucci is the one who chooses the film from Italy that gets into the New York Film Festival. Because they were renovating Alice Tully Hall, Go Go Tales had one of its screenings at the Jazz Center. It was exciting to look out my apartment window and see the lines of people outside [Frederick P.] Rose Hall waiting to see the movie. People even came to the 4 p.m. Sunday screening. At 4 p.m. on a Sunday they should have been out to tea instead of at that film!

Two-time Academy Award nominee Sylvia Miles has starred in Midnight Cowboy, Andy Warhol’s Heat, Evil Under the Sun, She-Devil, and Abel Ferrara’s soon to be released Go Go Tales.

JACQUES NOLOT’S TOP 10


1. The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akim, Germany/Turkey)

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)

3. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany)

4. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

5. Le Dernier des Fous (Laurent Achard, France)

6. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)

7. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/US)

8. Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, France)

9. La Graine et le Mulet (Abdel Kechiche, France)

10. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France)

Actor-director Jacques Nolot’s latest film, Before I Forget — John Waters’s second-favorite film of 2007 — will be released theatrically in 2008.

DAMON PACKARD’S TOP 10


I have no shortage of rants about the sad state of cinema. Of the 25,000-plus films released each year, it’s impossible to keep track or be aware of anything above the overrated Oscar contenders or mindless mainstream crap that floods the market. Anything slightly worthwhile not on this list would be a smaller independent (foreign or documentary) film, such as Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter or The Life of Reilly.

1. Paris, Je T’Aime (various, France/Liechtenstein)

2. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

3. Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, UK)

4. Sicko (Michael Moore, US)

5. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, US)

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

7. Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman, US/Spain)

8. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, US)

9. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

10. Death Proof, driving sequences only! (Quentin Tarantino, US)

Damon Packard (www.myspace.com/choogo) is the director of SpaceDisco One, Reflections of Evil, and other films.

JOEL SHEPARD’S TOP 11


1. Bug (William Friedkin, US)

2. The Kingdom trailer (Peter Berg, US; editors Colby Parker Jr. and Kevin Stitt)

3. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China)

4. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

5. Into the Wild (Sean Penn, US)

6. An Engineer’s Assistant (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Japan)

7. Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, US)

8. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US)

9. The Pastor and the Hobo (Phil Chambliss, US)

10. You and I, Horizontal (Anthony McCall, UK)

11. Kara Tai in the Front and the Back (Bangbros.com, US)

Joel Shepard is the film and video curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 5


1. Following Sean (Ralph Arlyck, US). Thirty years after making a legendary short film about Sean, the lawless four-year-old son of Haight-Ashbury hippies, filmmaker Arlyck reconnects with his subjects. The result is the most complicated study of baby boomers and their kin ever made.

2. Artist Statement (Daniel Barrow, Canada). Winnipeg artist Barrow uses an old-school overhead projector and layers of transparent drawings to create manual animations with music and live narration. His second US performance brought to life his imaginative, queer, literary, and delicate personal manifesto.

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria). Apichatpong’s latest radical narrative film focuses on a rural Thai hospital and its inhabitants. Among its meditative episodes is an unresolved love story between a female physician and an orchid farmer.

4. Real Housewives of Orange Country (various directors, US). Bravo’s reality television program about a contrived community of rich middle-aged women living in Coto de Caza is unexpectedly compelling. Because their lives are so boring, there’s nothing left to explore in this show except their complex emotions.

5. Zodiac (David Fincher, US). Crushworthy Jake Gyllenhaal, genius cinematography from legend-to-be Harris Savides, and incredible reconstructions of a beautiful and scary San Francisco in the 1970s.

Matt Wolf (www.mattwolf.info ) is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (premiering at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival) and Smalltown Boys.

Heaven knows

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› johnny@sfbg.com

In the virtuoso first and last shots of Silent Light, director Carlos Reygadas has the audience seeing stars. At first it’s difficult to tell that you’re staring at the nighttime sky: those glimmering lights could be electric. But once the camera completes its initial 180-degree acrobat maneuver and begins to creep over a rural landscape, it’s apparent that Reygadas’s vision is stratospheric. A time-lapse tracking shot matched with a magnified, morphing soundtrack of insect and animal noises, this opening sequence (echoed at the end) eclipses the mechanical spectacle of Koyaanisquatsi-style ethnographic docs and the intimate splendor of nature films. Even if Reygadas is simply being a show-off, there’s something uncanny about his merging of the cinematic and the choreographic — the spectrum of light, darkness, and color inspires wonder.

When Reygadas breaks free from human subject matter, Silent Light takes on a mystical air. But those moments bookend a tale of adultery set amid a Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico, and the people in that story move — not for the first time in a Reygadas film — like dolls at the mercy of a drowsy child-god. Try as he might, Reygadas can never quite tell a straight story when he fixes his gaze on human subjects. He leaves the corpulent realm of 2005’s Battle in Heaven for the blond hair, extreme tan lines, and reptilian beads of sweat of a farmer and his family. But he never mocks the beliefs of his human subjects, even if his latest film’s eternally smiling grandfather figure seems like a creature out of Beatrix Potter. Shades of blue and white, Ford T-shirts and 4×4 pickup trucks, a sweaty Jacques Brel glimpsed in pixel-pointillist close-up, the untamed aspects (and bizarre elderly features) of children, sun drops — refracted jewels from beams of solar light that hang like stained-glass mobiles amid the daytime landscape — and, when indoors, reflections in the golden pendulum of a tick-tocking clock: these ingredients are all as important as the narrative and its mystical outcome.

If he or she exists, God works in mysterious ways, allowing Silent Light to rediscover Denmark in rural Mexico and letting Reygadas try on the robes of Carl Theodor Dreyer — the film’s connections to Dreyer’s 1955 Ordet (also invoked reverently in João Pedro Rodrigues’s cockeyed, blasphemously faithful 2005 Odete, a.k.a. Two Drifters) are many and varied. Reygadas’s point of view ceaselessly circles the action, sometimes crawling toward (or past) dark thresholds. But only at the beginning and the end of Silent Light does his direction — with an emphasis on that word’s searching as much as literal cinematic terminology — reach a sublime realm. This isn’t a miracle — he’s already demonstrated a flair for elaborate beginnings and finales: his overrated 2002 debut Japón closed with a marathon tracking-shot trek over a train crash. Silent Light lacks the bracing pairings of the sacred and profane that characterize Battle in Heaven, but its starry-eyed beginning and end prove that that Reygadas’s scrutiny of the ineffable is far from complacent. If cinema is a corpse, his kiss just might bring it back to life.

SILENT LIGHT

Thurs/13 (with Carlos Reygadas in person) and Sun/16, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Cinema critiques sinophilia

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Just as the serious-minded traveler to a foreign land sacrifices certainty and ease of understanding to derive fresh insight, viewers of Ellen Zweig’s video works must jettison their expectation of narrative in order to embrace Zweig’s fragmentation — its disorientation and truthfulness. Her interwoven snippets of interview, performance, and language are decontextualized in a way that is apropos of her thematic consideration of how Westerners construct, imagine, and experience China and Chinese-ness from a distance. Her HEAP series is akin to being parachuted into profundity — your peripheral vision has to adapt hastily.

Language is essential to Zweig’s form and content. It is both an alienating force and a means of bonding. In (The Chinese Room) John Searle, after absorbing calligraphy and vacilutf8g between being "embarrassed" and "ecstatic" while in China, she concedes, "I cannot speak Chinese." The repeating, graphic Chinese text of (Unsolved) Robert van Gulik feigns a connection with the English that is being spoken, but actually tells its own story. On the other hand, language is shared amicably between the artist and Chinese strangers in (Flick Flight Flimsy) Ernest Fenollosa.

Zweig is a fascinating guide because she is a semi-insider; she navigates the much-mythologized land of her heritage with a privilege and a passion the non-Chinese necessarily lack, but she must arrive at knowledge through translation and inquiry. Language and privilege are cleverly wielded when, in A Surplus of Landscape, she interrogates fellow filmmaker Leslie Thornton about choosing to shoot a film about China, with no prior experience of the land, in a Japanese garden. Zweig’s videos juxtapose Western Sinophile "experts" with Chinese common folk and customs in a manner that continually questions cultural (mis)understanding.

ELLEN ZWEIG’S CHINA TAPES

Sun/9, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

Fuck the holidays

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› culture@sfbg.com

Despite the cheery tinkling of those silver bells, Christmastime in the city isn’t always something that makes us want to meet smile after smile. Indeed, San Francisco has a reputation for being one of the loneliest cities in the world, with an average household occupancy of 1.3 people (you and the cat?) and all-too-common stories of people lying dead in their apartments until they’re discovered by the landlord two weeks after the rent’s due.

So what do you do if you’re not satisfied with Christmas on KOIT, Old Crow, and a glazed and crosshatched loaf of Spam for you and Ms. Katrina Marmalade Pussycat? Check out our ideas for making the holiday seem less bleak — or at least less boring.

CELEBRATE IT


What’s more San Francisco than spending the holiday with former mayoral hopeful (and possible candidate for supervisor) Chicken John Rinaldi? The artist and showman has been putting on a game show gift exchange (Dec. 24, 10 p.m.; 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF; 415-970-9777, www.chickenjohn.com) every Christmas Eve for two decades.

If you’re more of a traditionalist, visit Glide Memorial United Methodist Church (Dec. 24, 11 a.m.–2 p.m.; 330 Ellis, SF; 415-674-6000, www.glide.org). This beacon for the city’s disenfranchised and left behind hosts a prime rib luncheon every Christmas Eve. Sure, you can volunteer (they always need more help), but if what you need is a warm meal and some company, you can just show up and eat.

A glass of Christmas on the rocks doesn’t have to be an exercise in despair. In fact, neighborhood watering holes like the Gold Dust Lounge (247 Powell, SF; 415-397-1695), the Lexington Club (3464 19th St., SF; 415-863-2052), the Mix (4086 18th St., SF; 415-431-8616), and Sam Jordan’s (4004 Third St., SF; 415-824-0155) will not only be open Christmas Eve and Christmas Day but also feature drink specials.

IGNORE IT


For some people, it’s personal contact, not religious expression, that’s really being sought at the holidays. Why not go straight to the source? Whether you like the Power Exchange (74 Otis, SF; 415-487-9944, www.powerexchange.com), Eros (2051 Market, SF; 415-864-3767, www.erossf.com) or Steamworks (2107 Fourth St., Berk.; 510-845-8992, www.steamworksonline.com), a visit to one of these clubs pretty much guarantees a satisfying alternative to mistletoe modesty.

If you want to try a new spin on the classic Chosen People’s Chinese food–and–movie routine, visit the Jewish Museum’s Free Family Day (Dec. 25, 11 a.m.–3 p.m., free; RayKo Photo Center, 428 Third St., SF; www.jmsf.org) for music, stories, interactive exhibits, and tours, then Lisa Gedulig’s 15th annual evening of Kung Pao Kosher Comedy (Dec. 22 and 24, 6 and 9:30 p.m.; Dec. 23 and 25, 5 and 8:30 p.m., $40–$60; New Asia Restaurant, 772 Pacific, SF; 415-522-3737, www.koshercomedy.com/kungpao) for Jewish-themed stand-up.

For something a bit more pagan, head across the bridge to the Berkeley Partners for Parks’ Winter Solstice Celebration (Dec. 22, 5 p.m.; Cesar Chavez Memorial Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park, 11 Spinnaker Way, Berk.).

FUCK IT


Think Clara’s an obnoxious Goody Two-shoes? See the rats’ side of the story at the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band’s Dance-Along Nutcracker: Ratified! (opening gala Dec. 8, 7 p.m., $50; Dec. 8 and 11, 2:30 p.m.; Dec. 9, 11 and 3 p.m.; $16–$24; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; 415-978-2797, www.sflgfb.org/dancealong.html).

Another option is the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco’s Christmas Crap-Array, (Dec. 20–22, 8 p.m., $10–$20; Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; 1-800-838-3006, lgcsf.org), a collection of songs and skits that’s the hilarious answer to Christmas clichés.

But best of all is Santacon (Dec. 15, 11 a.m.; location TBA; santarchy.com). Don a cheap Santa suit and join hundreds of other disgruntled St. Nicks for everyone’s favorite culture jam. Expect street theater, pranksterism, public drunkenness, and choruses of "Frosty the Cokehead" and "Deck My Balls."

And to hit the final nail in the coffin of Christmas 2007, visit Danger Ranger’s Post-Yule Pyre (visit www.laughingsquid.com for details) to watch the incineration of Monterey pines, spruces, and Douglas and noble firs. As the fog is cast in hues of orange, breathe deep the evergreen aroma and whisper, "Finally, this fucking holiday is over." *

The reel world

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Among the coverage of the horrific San Francisco Bay oil slick, I saw a short video of a fowl gliding through sea glimmering with petroleum. The bird maintained grace in this toxic environment, navigating marbled, paperlike swirls in the blackened water. That image had an indelibly uncomfortable beauty, the sort that occurs in Takeshi Murata’s videos, in which cinema — transferred to digital media — begins to transmogrify into something that slithers like mercury and soaks into our psyches.

His current show at the recently relocated and vastly expanded Ratio 3 gallery is centered on a new six-minute work, Escape Spirit VideoSlime, though the addition of another piece, Untitled (Pink Dot) (2006) creates a satisfying double bill. Both works feature buzzing electronic soundtracks by Robert Beatty, vivid acid-trip color schemes, and not-so-veiled references to environmentalism. Escape, the more narrative of the pair, was created with generic nature footage of chimps in the forest, while Pink Dot appropriates scenes from Rambo: First Blood. In both, Murata deconstructs the imagery. Pixels reveal their capacity to act like paint, then reconfigure into fleeting photographic images of animals, explosions, and consuming, liquefied landscapes. They evoke a morass, an underworld similar to Barbarella’s Matmos, befitting the term VideoSlime and its promise of creaming the virtual.

The pieces are screened in separate stalls, yet if you stand between them they can be viewed simultaneously. Their ominous soundtracks, however, constantly blend together into somewhat overdetermined eeriness. Both are nightmarishly memorable, though the graphic quality and the recognizable but surprisingly earnest use of Stallone make Pink a somewhat stronger work. In totality, Murata’s project fits a contemporary moment in which the digital and the analog are merging in ever more complex and perhaps confusing ways. His work can be seen in context with groups such as PaperRad and a number of young artists who create neopsychedelia from Saturday-morning cartoon detritus and the comforting, rudimentary digital nature of Pac-Man. Murata has mined this territory in earlier works such as Monster Movie (2005), but what set his recent projects apart are the sophistication and complexity of the visions.

His 2006 piece Untitled (Silver) — seen in Murata’s first show at Ratio 3 and in "Cosmic Wonder" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — is a knockout, with its metallic gray footage of horror-film star Barbara Steele floating through a well-appointed goth interior that undergoes Murata’s process of liquefaction. Silver may still be the artist’s benchmark, but these new works reveal he’s got plenty of fuel left in the continually tenuous worlds, both actual and media, that we inhabit.

TAKESHI MURATA: ESCAPE SPIRIT VIDEOSLIME

Through Nov. 30

Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; and by appointment; free

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

True grace

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By Rita Felciano

Bay Area Odissi dancer Asako Takami died on November 3, 2007 in San Francisco after a four-year battle with ovarian cancer. She was 47 seven years old. Founder and artistic director of the East Bay-based Pallavi Dance Group, Takami was an exquisite dancer and much-revered teacher of who had lived in the Bay Area for fifteen years. As a sign of their love and affection for this remarkable woman and artist, the Bay Area dance community honored her in a benefit at the Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco on October 27, 2007.

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Born in Nigata, Japan, Takami became interested in Odissi, the Indian classical dance style from the state of Orissa, at the age of 20. In 2000, in an interview with Hinduism Today she explained her fascination with the art. “I’d never seen women who were really beautiful and really powerful. That energy I’d never felt in anything — that was my first impression. I could not forget it.” For the next 15 years she studied with Smt. Kumkum Lal and Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra in India and Japan. She gained international attention through her participation in Ralph Lemon’s Tree, part two of “The Geography Trilogy.” The work was performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October 2000.

Mythili Kumar, Artistic Director of Abhinaya Dance Company in San Jose, remembers Takami for her “exquisite grace and perfect technique.” Her death, she said, “is a tremendous loss to the dance world but I feel so fortunate that we got to know such a wonderful, humble and sweet person. We will miss her so much.” Takami is survived by friends and her partner Ralph Lemon. A memorial service will take place Sun/18 at 2 p.m. in the Bolinas Community Center, 14 Wharf Road, Bolinas.

Goldie winner — Dance: Shinichi Iova-Koga

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Shinichi Iova-Koga’s work is grotesque, beautiful, and funny. As a dancer he is never less than mesmerizing — ephemeral like smoke, limpid like a vernal pool. And yet he is an accidental dancer. The son of two painters, he was initially drawn to photography; at age 12 his bathroom doubled as a darkroom. Then, at San Francisco State University, he became a film major. "All the while," he says, "I was involved in theater, but I thought my main line was behind the camera."

The Oakland-born Iova-Koga also trained in Tadashi Suzuki’s method for actors, through which he was introduced to Butoh. Another influence was the investigative method of Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater. His most formative teacher, however, was Butoh dancer Hiroko Tamano: "While we were making rice balls one day, [Tamano] asked me if I wanted to join Harupin-Ha [Butoh Dance Theater]." After a while, like many of Tamano’s pupils, Iova-Koga needed to strike out on his own. He traveled to Japan and Germany to study and work with other Butoh masters and, not incidentally, learn to adapt the genre to his expressive needs.

Thanks to these shifts in focus, he has developed a personal form of mixed-media dance theater that integrates contradictory impulses — the ancient and the technological, the chaotic and the formal, nature and nurture. He might be called a dancer at the edge. To Iova-Koga, this may well be a compliment; he has said that "only a dance at the edge reveals the honest life." His process blurs the distinctions between categories of thinking, being, disciplines, and performing. He likes to dig into both humorous and horrible subjects. The resulting works have taken him around the world.

One of his early works, 1996’s Desert Body, showed dramatic flair but not much personal voice. Ironically, he says, "I first started with Butoh so that I could be a better director. Now by chance I am a dancer." He is very precise about what this means to him. Dancing, he has said, means "focusing on the body being danced. To mentally construct a choreography that ignores this is to create a false dance."

Iova-Koga is an avid solo performer as well as a collaborator; he is often inspired by the people around him. His harrowing Tasting an Ocean — influenced by his father’s having lived through the atomic bombing of Nagasaki at the age of five — kept a 2003 audience at the tiny Noh Space on the edge of their seats. His most recent, highly acclaimed solo, Milk Traces, which he has performed in Europe and Japan, was prompted by the birth of his daughter. He calls her his main teacher now: "I follow her without questions."

In ensemble pieces such as Heaven’s Radio, an adaptation of a Samuel Beckett radio drama, and this summer’s Our Breath Is as Thin as a Hummingbird’s Spine (cocreated with Nanos Operetta), Iova-Koga has worked with other Bay Area theater artists (Nils Frykdahl, Ken Rudstrom, and Allen Willner) and Butoh dancers Tanya Calamoneri and Leigh Evans. The duet Ame to Ame, featuring Yuko Kaseki, another Germany-based frequent collaborator, finds the two playing out a riotous male-female relationship in terms of both meanings of the word ame, Japanese for "candy" and "rain." The absurdist Cockroach casts Kaseki as the ghostly wife to Iova-Koga’s husband; she dances through his tea-slurping last moments. His newest enterprise is C(h)ord, which he’s collaborating on with Seattle’s Degenerate Ensemble. It premieres at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on April 24, 2008.

www.inkboat.com

Fellini in Arkansas

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"Ahm tired uh yer uppity, citified ways!" leering slob Odis (Gene Ross) tells houseguest Helen (Norma Moore) in S.F. Brownrigg’s Poor White Trash II, a 1974 movie also known by the equally savory title Scum of the Earth. The late Brownrigg’s gasp-producing moonshine swaller of incest-cum-insanity is one of several delights in the new program of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ film curator Joel Shepard, "Red State Cinema: Rural Auteurs," which spans from Harry Revier’s 1938 Child Bride (which was aimed at traveling tent cinemas) to Joe Pickett and Nick Preuher’s new documentary Dirty Country (a profile of factory worker and raunchy composer-performer Larry Pierce). Jennifer Baichal’s terrific 2002 The True Meaning of Pictures looks at the controversy surrounding Shelby Lee Adams, whose memorable photographs of dirt-poor Appalachia residents were accused of artificially heightening hillbilly squalor for a fascinated upscale audience. Then there’s Arkansas auteur Phil Chambliss, who makes films of varying length starring friends, family, and gravel-pit coworkers. Chambliss’s aren’t home movies but eccentric narratives as bizarre, humorous, and strangely familiar as the weirdest relative in your family.

RED-STATE CINEMA: RURAL AUTEURS

Nov. 1–16, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

King of the dance

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Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet celebrates its 25th anniversary this weekend, but King’s influence on Bay Area dance goes back further than that. Veteran dancers remember his ballet classes for the musical combinations that he gave his students in the ’70s. One of them was Joanna Haigood, artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre, who said, "Alonzo was a spirit master who happened to be a dancer." While she loved the challenge of the technique, she was really in his class because "he taught us to live the dance."

Not only local performers knew about King’s poetic approach to ballet. Big stars like Fernando Bujones and Natalia Makarova never missed an opportunity to work with him when they were in town. But eventually, King needed to have his own company. These days, in addition to periodic guest artist Muriel Maffre, Lines Ballet performs with nine dancers. This year it toured from France to Poland, from Austria to Greece, in addition to performing in stateside engagements and two home seasons.

King also founded the SF Dance Center, initially to support his company financially; the now-independent center offers classes for adults in a variety of styles. He then created Lines Ballet School, which teaches according to his principles. Last year, in conjunction with Dominican University, King established a BA program that allows dancers to simultaneously pursue professional and academic studies. In other words, in addition to choreographing 74 works, King has created an institution. "I know now that we have grown so much it will be more difficult to balance humanity and creativity with effective business practices," he said in a recent phone interview. "But if I have my choice, I will go with the humanity."

Aside from his choreography, King’s greatest contribution might turn out to be his challenging of preconceptions about dance, specifically ballet. To question the status quo is perhaps the birthright of this son and grandson of prominent civil rights leaders in Albany, Ga. King grew up participating in civil rights marches. His mother introduced him to dance, while his father, a follower of 19th-century sage Ramakrishna, taught him about meditation.

For King, dance is the appropriate medium for exploring a universe that he perceives to be in flux, where opposites don’t stand against but hold one another in balance. Ballet for him is not a style but a language — one that, he says, would have to be invented if it didn’t exist already. Ballet is abstraction; ballet is science; ballet is geometry. After all, a pirouette is a perfect circle, a tendu (stretched foot) a line that reaches into infinity. To King, ballet is a tool to investigate creativity, which, he insists, is everyone’s birthright. Does he think everyone can become an artist?

"No, that’s not what I mean," he explained. "But just like we all have a brain, we all have creativity. We either tap into it or we don’t. For most people, when they are educated as children it is stripped away from them because they are trained to give the answer which the teacher wants, when there are multifarious choices that could be selected. The government doesn’t really encourage it, because if you give people the ability to ascertain thought, to really deconstruct ideas, that’s dangerous because no longer can they be sheep, but at that point they are discerning lions. And when you have 300 million discerning lions, [you’ve] got a problem."

King’s ballets are nonhierarchical — no predetermined gender roles, no fixed vocabulary — and what looks like balletic distortion is simply an emphasis on a constantly shifting center of gravity instead of a stable focus on the body’s vertical axis. Women can be strong, men tender. Early in his career he paired a tall woman with a much shorter man. It looked odd. Why, King asked, do we always see male-female duets in terms of gender relationships? Couldn’t a dance be about a mother and a child or a sky and a landscape?

He does follow one convention — putting women on pointe — though he noted that this doesn’t have to be a female prerogative. "If you look at most cultures, you see an appreciation of the idea of being elevated, of being above the earth. In Africa dancers use stilts. In Balkan countries men do dance on their toes." He often took barre on pointe, and during his training at Harkness House men took pointe class once a week. If enough training becomes available, one of these days King just might put men into pointe shoes.

For his anniversary premieres, King has choreographed two works, one to a new score by tabla master Zakir Hussein, the other to selections from baroque composers. The connection? Both types of music, to be performed live, allow for improvisation. According to the enthusiastic King, "That’s when the artists can go deep inside themselves and become fully who they are." *

ALONZO KING’S LINES BALLET

Fri/2, 9 p.m.; Sat/3 and Nov. 7–10, 8 p.m.; Sun/4, 7 p.m.; Nov. 11, 3 p.m.; $25–$65

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Urinal kinds of trouble

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

William E. Jones’s documentary triptych Massillon came out in 1991 — a landmark year for queer film — yet it didn’t receive near the popular attention given to Poison, another narrative three-way that is the arguable flagship of the new queer cinema. It’s no real surprise, since Todd Haynes’s impish and emotional experiment — as well as most other queer films associated with the early ’90s — has a drama, not to mention a generous degree of hanky panky, that Massillon eschews.

In an article by Jenni Olson included on Jones’s Web site, Jones likens his approach to that of new German cinema’s Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in Too Early, Too Late, pointing to that 1982 film’s materialist renunciation of "seduction or false spectacle." Even when detailing an abrupt advancement in his sexual education, courtesy of a public restroom, Jones speaks in a near-comical, and surely defiant, soporific tone as his camera lingers on the restroom’s exterior. If not for the frank narration and the conspicuous level of attention evident in Jones’s static townscapes, it would be hard to distinguish Massillon (though kitsch is nowhere in sight) from an old high school slide show of some prosaic industry. The film has nothing so attention grabbing as the theatricality of Derek Jarman’s Edward II or Tom Kalin’s Swoon, the literate romanticism of Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times, or the cuddly nihilism of Gregg Araki’s The Living End. In fact, even though it’s a balls-out investigation of sex in the margins, its distinguishing audaciousness lies in its presentational chastity.

Working its way from the personal to the legal to the historical, the film is divided into a trio of corresponding sections. The "Ohio" section overlays images of quiet roads and the architectural husks of the once-thriving industrial town of Massillon, where Jones grew up, with a narrative mapping his sexual development; "The Law" is a brief and perhaps overly dry summary of American sodomy laws, tied to obvious but compelling shots of various legislative buildings; and "California" attempts a genealogy of queer marginalization — making it a filmic cousin of Mike Davis’s chapters on early Los Angeles boosterism in City of Quartz (Verso, 1990) — that examines the ways that nonnative values, traditions, and other guidelines for self-identification are bred into the framework of planned Southern California communities.

Much of Jones’s work has an air of intended distance — it can range in effect from the warm, generous irony of 1997’s Finished to the sensual parsimony of 2004’s too-tentative Is It Really So Strange? — but his new film, also screening this week, is so detached that he didn’t even make it. (His Web site bills the project as "a document presented by William E. Jones.")

In his research for a planned documentary about the 1962 convictions under state sodomy laws of men engaged in public sex in a Mansfield, Ohio, restroom, Jones came into possession of 16mm surveillance footage captured from behind a two-way mirror. This footage is being presented with minimal editing as Tearoom. What is on offer here is a fascinating and important historical document of societal and particularly sexual repression and the stone-faced, eyes-on-the-door gay subculture it created. The film is at once much less viewer friendly than Massillon (the best-kept secret about cruising is the dullness factor) and much more in step with contemporaneous American media consciousness, thanks to the recently exposed indiscretions of so many throbbing pillars of moral authority.

Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, and Larry Craig, all subjected to the philosophically corresponding charges of both the right and the left, have provided an unbeatably complex backdrop for the viewing of Tearoom. The dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed is now shakier than ever, and to watch the film is to be torn between angered solidarity with the subjects and feverish speculation about the varying levels of hypocrisy on view. There’s a queasiness too in further exposing men — the younger of whom are still alive — who didn’t ask to be surveilled then and may very well not want to be celebrated now. The film’s moral ambiguity puts it on board with the new queer cinema’s ambivalence. *

TEAROOM AND MASSILLON: THREE NIGHTS WITH WILLIAM E. JONES

Tearoom Fri/26–Sat/27, 7:30 p.m.; Massillon Sun/28, 7:30 p.m.; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Take it sleazy

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CULT FILM Erstwhile cofounder of San Francisco’s late, lamented Werepad — a "beatnik space lounge" (among other things) — Jacques Boyreau, also a filmmaker (Candy Von Dewd), lives in Portland, Ore., these days. But he’s dropping into town again with a characteristic surprise package in the form of the Supertrash Peepshow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We’re promised a slide show and lecture revealing the "secret schools of design" in vintage exploitation movie posters and other pop ephemera, as showcased in Boyreau’s new coffee-table tome, Supertrash, a sequel to 2002’s eye-popping volume Trash. Then, to dive more deeply into the cinematic sleaze of yore, he’ll present a true rarity: the fragrantly named Fleshpot on 42nd Street, the final sexploitation epic of notorious grade-Z Staten Island auteur Andy Milligan. It was one of his few real hits — if only on the 1973 downtown grindhouse circuit — but has since become one of the least-remembered titles in an already obscure oeuvre (The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!, The Ghastly Ones), since only a single print survives.

Fleshpot juggles Milligan’s usual hysteria, misanthropy, crude technique, and ripe dialogue with more restrained, realistic aspects in line with mainstream counterculture downers of the period like The Panic in Needle Park and Go Ask Alice. Heroine Dusty (Laura Cannon, a.k.a. Diane Lewis) is a morally lax looker who splits when her latest sugar daddy asks her to, like, pick up after herself. She thus goes from "playing house with some guy in Queens" to playing house with a real queen: blond-fright-wigged Cherry (Neil Flanagan), a tranny hooker pal who says, "Why don’t we join forces? We could both turn quite a few each night if we play our cards right!"

Swapping abusive, money-pinching tricks, these two indelicate souls are well matched: she’s a petty thief who hates sex but would rather trick than work a regular job, and he’s an even crasser soul who sobs, "I’m no prize package: a cocksucker — not even a good one. Too weird to be called a man, too old to try and look like one!" It’s a shock when Dusty meets a guy who’s nice, employed, and genuinely likes her — Bob, played by no less than Deep Throat porn legend Harry Reems. Of course, in the Milligan universe this rare glimpse of happiness (let alone good, consensual intercourse) is doomed to end tragically. Lurid, lively, and cheap as a back-alley BJ, Fleshpot embodies a particular brand of movie entertainment that you can’t get anymore in a public space. When it’s over, you’ll want to be hosed off.

SUPERTRASH PEEPSHOW

Thurs/4, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

The curtain calls

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Theater is where you find it this fall. For instance, at a warehouse party where assembled guests — artists, authors, bons vivants, goatees, and rockers of all stripes — get so carried away that a play suddenly breaks out among them (it can happen). Or in the offices and cubbyholes where a group of Dutch actors retreat midperformance to mine universal truths about the minutiae of mundane alienation. Or hovering just above the stage, where astrocosmonautical new best friends, stranded like circus performers, orbit together after a space shuttle disaster. Or on a kitschy converted kid shuttler known as the Mexican Bus, which a trio of disembodied Chicanos use to cruise the Mission. Theater, in short, is going to be a ubiquitous presence, maybe even the stranger eyeing your canapé, so watch out.

Sweeney Todd Kicking off its national tour in San Francisco, John Doyle’s pared-down, blood-bespattered hit Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller also begins the American Conservatory Theater’s new season on a guaranteed high note.

Aug. 30–Sept. 30. Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2ACT, www.act-sfbay.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival It’s the 16th annual array of 50-minute feats, under-an-hour undertakings, and terse tirades. Perennially fast, cheap, and out of control.

Sept. 5–16. Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF. www.sffringe.org

Expedition 6 San Francisco hosts the world premiere of playwright-director (and well-known actor) Bill Pullman’s theatrically stylized, documentary-based take on the real-life encounter between Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts stranded in space after the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster. Think of it as Apollo 13 with a trapeze.

Sept. 8–Oct. 7. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org

The MagiCCal Mission Tour Albeit now in Los Angeles, the performers of Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza) are forever local theater champs with deep roots in the Mission District. In a unique take on the guided tour, they climb (virtually) aboard the rolling fiesta known as the Mexican Bus to act as your (prerecorded) guides through their own private Mexico (del Norte).

Sept. 10–16. www.mexicanbus.com

Kommer This Yerba Buena Center for the Arts engagement marks the Bay Area debut for Kassys, the acclaimed Amsterdam-based Dutch theater company. A physically exact multimedia work, Kommer (Dutch for "sorrow") begins as a comical and poignant play about a group of friends gathered in mourning, then shifts gears to follow the individual actors out of the theater as each returns to a separate little workaday world, shedding light on "private and public moments of human frailty."

Sept. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

Lies You Can Dance To Flyaway Productions — known for athletic, risk-taking, society-critiquing, and female-empowered dance performances in venues from rooftops to industrial cranes — previews a work in progress at the Marsh: Lies You Can Dance To, an investigation of "how the human body responds to lies told over and over at the level of national policy," by artistic director and Bay Area dancer-choreographer Jo Kreiter, with music by Bay Area composer-musician Beth Custer.

Sept. 14–16. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org

Continuous City This work in progress exploring postmodern interconnectivity and our changing sense of place in a global context is a tech-savvy performance piece that attempts to extend the reach of theater by, among other things, uploading video contributions from a social networking site. It’s a collaboration between Bay Area actors, UC Berkeley students, and New York’s the Builders Association (responsible for the visually stunning Super Vision at the YBCA in August 2006).

Oct. 5–14. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk. (510) 642-9988, theater.berkeley.edu

After the Quake As part of its 40th season, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre hosts the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of a new play by renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), helmed by Tony Award–winning director Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime). Adapted from Murakami’s 2000 collection of short stories, After the Quake is an intimate tale about a shy storyteller and registers the tremors of an unstable world while confronting the challenge of living with fear.

Oct. 12–Nov. 25. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk. 1-888-4BRTTIX, www.berkeleyrep.org

Des Moines Campo Santo premieres Denis Johnson’s fast-paced, darkly poetic, hilarious, and fascinating multicharacter stream of confession and moral conflict. The brilliant author turned playwright’s past collaborations with the company include Psychos Never Dream and Soul of a Whore. In what Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo are calling their take on dinner theater, the play will unfold amid a hip cocktail mixer in a warehouse not far from the company’s usual digs on Valencia.

Oct. 19–20. www.theintersection.org

Slouching Towards Disneyland Inimitable radio and stage personality Ian Shoales (a.k.a. Merle Kessler) and quick-fingered, ever-versatile musician-composer Joshua Raoul Brody team up for this wry, cranky song and rant, purportedly "a wild ride in words and music through world history from Genesis to George W."

Nov. 8–Dec. 1. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org

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