Johnny Ray Huston

Casanova Lounge: Vancouver International Film Festival, Part Two

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Fueled by cinema love more than just biz deal BS, the Vancouver International Film Festival offers a chance to not only see films by upcoming directors, but also to see the directors themselves outside the movie theatre. One great example this year was a night in which Serge Bozon, director of the acclaimed La France, transformed into DJ Bozon.

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At an upstairs bar on Richards Street, Bozon spun 45s from his collection of rare ‘60s garage rock, Northern Soul and Motown vinyl. Cinemascope editor and VIFF programmer Mark Peranson told me that Bozon has paid thousands of dollars on eBay for a single coveted disc. It’s not for nothing that this director has a film (which I’d love to see) titled Mods: he was coiffed and styled like a Gallic cousin of Linton from SF’s gone but not forgotten Popscene progenitors the Aisler’s Set. In a nod to the Northwest, he played the Sonics. But what about his movie?

Cinema is Useless: Vancouver International Film Festival, Part One

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My first morning at this year’s Vancouver International Film festival brought Riri Raza’s 3 Days to Forever. Though a colleague loves Raza’s 2002 Eliana, Eliana, I’ll admit that a more basic form of curiosity drew me to his latest movie. One of its stars is Nicholas Saputra, a pop culture idol in Indonesia, who shared a very rainy boat ride with me and a few dozen other people at the Vancouver fest two years ago. On that particular gray Sunday, Saputra occasionally walked over to a director and I and would talk with us, only to quietly go off and then come back again. Back then, Saputra was at the fest because he had the title role in Gie, Raza’s follow-up to Eliana, Eliana.

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Acousticity

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The Night of the Hunter is at the top of a list of favorite films compiled by Colleen, a.k.a. Parisian musician Cécile Schott, and Iker Spazio’s lovely cover art for the new Colleen album, Les Ondes Silencieuses (Leaf), more than hints at that film’s magic and menace. In Spazio’s paper cut–influenced dark and starry nighttime vision, Colleen is viewed from the back as she plays the viola da gamba at the edge of a forest by a body of water. A bird descends to the ground, a butterfly floats by a tree, and a cat is curled up in a flower bed. The orphans of Charles Laughton’s classic might as well be floating by, so strongly does the imagery evoke The Night of the Hunter‘s famous riverside ballad sequence.

The CD art’s dark allure, mixing a sense of innocence with sinister undercurrents, is also present in the recording’s title. While a relatively literal translation might be "the still waters," the phrase les ondes silencieuses is also meant to evoke the infrasonic sounds detected only by animals before an earthquake. It’s tempting to view the album’s spare, acoustic arrangements as ballads composed for the moment just before this world’s apocalypse, a perspective that strips away any of the whimsy or preciousness that one might attach to Colleen’s use of antiquated instruments — crystal glass, spinet, and the aforementioned viola da gamba — to create and play these latest compositions.

In the past, Colleen has been associated with unique electronic recordings such as last year’s lengthy EP, Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique, which is composed of and constructed from loops of music-box melodies. On that recording, "Rock a Bye Baby" and "Pop Goes the Weasel" are contorted into new shapes, with song titles to match, but most often the enchantment isn’t so easily recognizable, and the atmosphere is haunted rather than whimsical. The minimalist symphonic effect of "What Is a Componium? — Part 2," for instance, suggests Terry Riley in a bad mood. In interviews Colleen has noted that a search for music-box melodies in movies revealed that they were often paired with scenes of rape or murder, an observation that — along with Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique‘s final track, "I’ll Read You a Story," with its oceanic, nighttime waves of classical guitar — brings us right back to the Grimms’ Fairy Tales imagery on the cover of Les Ondes Silencieuses.

Bowed like a cello but with seven strings and guitarlike frets, the viola da gamba is at the center of the disc, which finds Colleen experimenting with acousticity and a live recording style that involves minimal overdubs. This approach yields meditative rewards on "Blue Sands," on which a sea- and seesawing rhythm cuts across delicate fingerpicking. The spidery spinet melodies on "Le Labyrinthe" and forlorn duet between clarinet and acoustic guitar on "Sun Against My Eyes" are as unsettlingly beautiful. There’s a persistent sense of lightlike sound intensifying and then fading into deep empty space, especially on "Echoes and Coral," on which Colleen plays crystal glass in a manner that suggests Aphex Twin at his most ambient as much as it suggests one of her instrumental influences, Harry Partch. As one listens, it’s hard not to think about the precataclysmic aspect of the album title. In fact, while The Night of the Hunter is on the top of Colleen’s list of favorite films, the final position is occupied by Apocalypse Now.

Much like his cousin in classical guitar composition Colleen, Jose Gonzalez employs acoustic reverberation as a musical metaphor for personal or universal being. That sounds heady, but the appeal of Gonzalez’s music stems from its unadorned, understated direct address. On In Our Nature (Mute/Imperial), Gonzalez maintains his trademark tender brevity, but there’s a stronger sense of lingering discord — brought across through the increased force of his open strumming and plucked bass notes — than on his 2003 debut, Veneer (Mute), or the 2005 EP Stay in the Shade (Hidden Agenda). The tension suits a collection of disenchanted songs that apply equally to world affairs and affairs of the heart.

Gonzalez has partly made his name through transformative cover versions of electronic pop songs such as the Knife’s "Heartbeats" and Kylie Minogue’s "Hand on Your Heart," and on In Our Nature he performs similar wonders with Massive Attack’s "Teardrop," using his vulnerable tenor to make the word feathers float and the word breath breathe. Just as contemporary Devendra Banhart can err on the side of poetic whimsy, Gonzalez can tend toward overly literal earnestness.

But both possess special talents. Gonzalez’s is pensive. "Abram" uses the figure from the Torah, Bible, and Koran to chide religion, and throughout "Time to Send Someone Away" his recriminations against obesity and war lust are sung in a voice so sweet and soft it’s a surprise to realize the words are meant to sting. In Our Nature rivals or even matches the bittersweet wisdom of Caetano Veloso’s sublime first album in exile — 1971’s Caetano Veloso (a Little More Blue) (Philips) — on "Down the Line," on which the word compromising gives way to the word colonizing above frantically swaying six-string melodies and rhythms. "Don’t let the darkness eat you up," Gonzalez repeats insistently at the song’s close. There’s paradox in the hopefulness of his ever-beautiful tone, as if a darkness that eats up evil just might be fine.

COLLEEN

With Beirut

Mon/8–Tues/9, 8 p.m., $25

Herbst Theatre

War Memorial Veterans Bldg.

401 Van Ness, SF

(415) 551-2000

www.anotherplanetent.com

JOSE GONZALEZ

With Tiny Vipers

Mon/8–Tues/9, 8 p.m., $20–$22

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.musichallsf.com

“You Should Stop Editing”

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REVIEW I should stop editing? Well, an unedited issue of the Guardian has sprung to my wild or tired mind more than once, whether it be rated X or composed entirely of photocopied press releases. In the case of Ema Harris-Sintamarian’s show at Jack Fischer Gallery, the phrase "You Should Stop Editing" might function as a creative credo — one that allows the artist to range freely within works and between mediums. To put it bluntly, what the exhibit lacks in posturing, it more than makes up for in intricate intensity. These metalandscapes of ink and gouache on velum bloom from a technique that verges on digital design or ancient lithograph in its exactitude yet maintains a hand-drawn, idiosyncratic charm.

Nostalgia and science-fiction dystopia tangle and tango in idiosyncratic ways within Harris-Sintamarian’s mazes, grids, and matrices. Upside Down: The Story of Air suggests the skeleton of a spacecraft — and are those construction workers suspended above a roller coaster made of city halls? Elsewhere the cellular and the architectural entwine, sometimes in disturbing, dead-end fashion. Spaghetti, intestines, musculature, bridges, canoes, eggbeaters, machine guns, movie projectors, vaulted hallways, and decorated ceilings ricochet elastically through time and space. At times, as in Lullaby on C, the carefully open-ended result suggests a page from a sophisticated coloring book before its spaces have been completely filled. Gertrude Stein seems to peek from the background of one piece, and Eugène Delacroix is invoked in another, but for the most part the artist’s cosmology is her own. As she has hinted in statements about her work, she’s remaking Alice or trying to find her in the wicked wonderlands of a life that has spanned from Romanian Communism to Californian capitalism. Just as filmmakers such as Cristi Puiu herald a new wave of Romanian cinema, Harris-Sintamarian shows that acute dreaming can be born abroad.

YOU SHOULD STOP EDITING Through Oct. 25. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Jack Fischer Gallery, 49 Geary, SF. (415) 956-1178, www.jackfischergallery.com

Diamonds are a skull’s best friend? Skulls are in!

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Damien Hirst might have “created” the most notorious and expensive one, but he’s far from alone: skulls are on display everywhere right now, within galleries, on record covers, and spray-painted on the wall next door. Behold this onslaught of skull imagery, collected from current art shows and some recent reissued albums and labels. Dia de los Muertos beckons, yet there’s a serious sinister present-day political element to at least some of this work. Add your skullbitchery, skullduggery and skull contribution suggestions to the comments section below.

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For the Love of God by Damien Hirst. This platinum-cast skull, covered with 8601 pave-set diamonds, recently sold for $100,000,000.

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At Cheim & Read in New York, “I Am As You Will Be: The Skeleton in Art” includes pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Hirst, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Above is Alice Neel’s Self Portrait, Skull, from 1958.

A brief history of space vampires in the movies

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70MM MANIA With everyone vulnerable to psychic Taser attacks through e-mail and cell phones, you don’t have to peek over shoulders to be a space vampire today. Is there any doubt that space vampirism is running rampant?

The answer, my friends and fellow Criswell worshippers, is no. This makes the sheer lack of space vampire movies downright shocking. Leave it to Midnites for Maniacs programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks to confront the problem by reviving one of the greatest space vampire movies ever, Tobe Hooper’s 1985 Lifeforce. Now you can ponder space vampirism in its full, bodacious 70mm splendor, as primarily embodied by naked alien Mathilda May, who brought anarchic madness to London almost 20 years before 28 Days Later.

Lifeforce was coproduced by the Cannon Group, a name that — along with fellow producer Golan-Globus — is an absolute guarantee of mind-boggling visions. In addition to the ever-naked (except when wearing a trash bag) May, Lifeforce features Halley’s Comet, a space vampire nun, a screaming Steve Railsback (is there any other kind?), and an overblown score by Henry Mancini, who has wandered a long way from "Moon River." It also includes copious homoeroticism, especially when Patrick Stewart, chrome domed even back then, is possessed by May’s wily feminine spirit. Could Lifeforce have been crazier? It seems impossible. And yet: Klaus Kinski was originally supposed to play one of the film’s mad scientists. (It goes without saying that the scientist is mad.)

Within the It! The Terror from beyond Space–derived upper echelon of the space vampire canon, Lifeforce rivals Curtis Harrington’s 1966 Queen of Blood. In place of a naked May, Harrington’s movie offers a green-skinned alien vampire (the amazing Florence Marly) wrapped in an extratight bodysuit and sporting a hairdo that has been described as a "testy beehive" and a "turnip" by online reviewers and compared to Mister Softee ice cream by me. (Mario Bava’s 1965 Planet of the Vampires is more of an antecedent to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien.) As for Lifeforce’s futurist twist on body snatching, it does live on in at least one 21st-century movie, 2001’s Kairo (a.k.a. Pulse), by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a director who also qualifies as probably the biggest fan on the planet of Hooper’s 1990 Spontaneous Combustion.

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS IN 70MM

Fri/21, 7 p.m. (Ghostbusters) and 9 p.m. (Lifeforce); double feature, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.thecastrotheatre.com

How soon is now?

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW Sixteen minutes with Lars Laumann? Well, I didn’t say no, and discovered that his video Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana is as uncanny as its title is ludicrous. This present-day conspiratorial artifact makes a Smiths devotee feel like Jim Garrison during a virgin viewing of the Zapruder film. Laumann weds a looped melody from the Smiths’ instrumental "Oscillate Wildly" to TV news footage, music-video clips, and visions from the ’60s kitchen sink cinema that have inspired (and provided) Morrissey lyrics, using all of the above as a backdrop to a voice-over lecture that links the 1986 album The Queen Is Dead to the Aug. 31, 1997, death of Princess Diana. Even if you have no interest in (or an aversion toward) the title’s pair of late 20th-century British cult figures, the result casts a comic yet eerie spell.

At this point, it’s fair to say that Smiths-inspired art has become a subgenre, a phenomenon flourishing to the degree that it deserves a book-length essay — ironic, since most of the video and visual art projects responding to Morrissey and company are far superior to the shelf of books that have been written off of his name.

Laumann’s video doesn’t pack the emotional wallop of the Istanbul-set karaoke in Phil Collins’s installation dünya dinlemiyor (The world won’t listen), which did time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last fall. But the Oslo, Norway, artist is exploring something different than is Collins, whose update of Andy Warhol’s screen tests allows for compassionate views and expressions of fandom. Drawing heavily from David Alice’s site www.dianamystery.com, Laumann’s short work reaches for the extraterrestrial stars in presenting the organic quality of conspiracy theory during the Internet era. As in Lutz Dammbeck’s Unabomber documentary The Net, the final conclusion (if there is such a thing) matters less than the numerous revelatory or ludicrous destinations that are part of the narrative’s crazy maze.

Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana helps kick off a staggered series of videos showcased over the next two months in "There Is Always a Machine Between Us," at SF Camerawork. Curated by Kate Fowle, Karla Milosevich, Chuck Mobley, and Chuck Orendorff, the overall exhibition toys with Skype, mouse-triggered wall projections, and an orange-hued approximation of living-room DVD viewing. Some viewers might find it inherently problematic for lo-res video to receive bigger-screen treatment. Regardless, the varied combos of form and context here aren’t as provocative as the material gleaned by the select group of Web trolls whose research is on display.

Web trolling as gallery fodder — is this just one more ploy to destruct ye olde sacred art space so it can be mistaken for YouTube or an amusement park? If so, I’m happy that the likes of Cliff Hengst, Matthew Hughes Boyko, and Matt Wolf are doing the handiwork. More than one contributor to the exhibition’s DVD library includes the YouTube mainstay CPDRC Inmates Practice Thriller, yet Hengst’s, Boyko’s, and Wolf’s compilation DVDs also showcase distinctively deranged aesthetics. Hengst gives us Anna Nicole Smith outtakes, Barbra Streisand swearing at a heckler, and an industrial clip he aptly titles Clowns vs. Old People: The Final Battle. Beginning with another YouTube hit, Cobra vs. Baby, Boyko’s DVD moves on to revealing moments when onlookers seize control of imagery from stars, such as an unedited version of Tom Cruise getting sprayed in the face at a War of the Worlds premiere and the aftermath of Tara Reid inadvertently flashing a post-op nipple during her zillionth red carpet stroll.

Wolf’s DVD, featuring moments such as Kerri Strug Olympic Vault (singled out for its revealing masochism) and a clip of Ryan Phillippe playing the first gay teen in daytime soap history, offers only a taste of the imitations of Imitation of Life found on his site, mattwolf.info. More than the research DVDs provided by some of the show’s other videomakers, it adds to the richness of his work on display. In Smalltown Boy, Wolf — who is currently working on a documentary about the late musician Arthur Russell — picks up the baton left by Todd Haynes sometime at the cusp of the ’90s, combining TV-documentary motifs such as voice-over and interview to tease out a link between the late David Wojnarowicz and a teenage girl obsessed with My So-Called Life. The conspiratorial thread that runs through "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" resides within Smalltown Boy as well, in a manner that is all the more effective for being muted.

Fifteen minutes with Markus Linnenbrink? Well, I didn’t say no — and didn’t regret spending that amount of time and a bit more with his wall painting, epoxy resin paintings, and sculpture at Patricia Sweetow Gallery. Though slick on the surface, with a lively sense of color that exposes the rote and drab quality of some Bay Area work, on closer examination the German Linnenbrink’s paintings possess candy cane sickliness. The queasy factor is only magnified by the suspended drops of paint that hang from the bottom of some works, or, in the case of ALLESWIRDWEITERGEHNINEEINPAARSEKUNDEN, by hundreds of pockmarks. (Twisting things inside out once again, these pocks are gorgeous on closer examination, resembling the interiors of porcelain saucers or cups.) The muscularity of Linnenbrink’s process — Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock would approve — is counterbalanced by his fondness for bits of glitter and his droll flair. Though he’s understated in comparison with Douglas Gordon when it comes to temporal commentary, his titles sometimes question whether it is the paintings or their viewers who are loitering.

THERE IS ALWAYS A MACHINE BETWEEN US

Through Nov. 17

Tues.–Sat., noon–5 p.m., free

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, second floor, SF

(415) 512-2020

www.sfcamerawork.org

FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH YOU

Through Oct. 20

Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m., free

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

77 Geary, mezzanine, SF

(415) 788-5126

www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!

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I knew there had to be a silver lining to the predictable cavalcade of hate for B_____y S____a’ VMA performance: it’s providing Chris Crocker with his biggest crossover to date.

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He brings it, too, seizing the moment to let us all know what the title “Gimme More” is about and to show why Perez Hilton is worse than Paris Hilton. What in tarnation has the 21st century answer to Jonathan Caouette’s boy-self wrought? Video diaries beyond his wildest dreams.

This may make you laugh, but remember, he’s crying for us all.

Hot like Cole: Oakland girl makes great

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Did you see her perform over the weekend? She killed it!

No, I’m not talking about B_____y S____s killing her career (as if) with a fascinatingly amateurish lip-sync of a song that didn’t sound that bad. That performance may have had current popular girl or pop tart du jour Rihanna looking for an umbrella to hide her giggles under (time is cruel), but the wreck factor was predictable amid today’s mania for celebrity ambulance-chasing.

I’m talking about Keyshia Cole, whose show at Mezzanine on Friday served up the kind of thrill you get when seeing someone really talented starting to peak in a way that makes you — and probably her — wonder just how great she can make this thing. After Hurricane Chris and the “One More Chance” remix (and Michael Jackson, Prince, Bell Biv Devoe — and Luther) heated up the club, Keyshia set it on fire with two half-hour sets during which she brazenly covered songs that Mary J. Blige covered early in her career, and — working a blond pageboy — brought an earlier Bay Area soul singer, the legendary Etta James, to mind. Decked out in white, with a pair of tough backup singers and a young band (her guitarist looked straight outta high school, with enthusiasm to match), Keyshia was like a sports-fit young Etta.

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Who’s cruising who: William Friedkin speaks

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Did Cruising director William Friedkin cruise the gay community without taking responsibility for the consequences? Was he cruising for a bruising, or careless about his film’s impact on gay men’s safety? (Is it a double standard when sexualized slasher-movie killings of gay men draw protests, but the same acts done to women on screen are treated as par for the course?) Friedkin the man may have been ignored while filming a scene from the movie at a bar’s jockstrap night, but Friedkin the director’s 1980 look through — or is it at? — a sexual underground hasn’t gotten the blind-eye from gay men, then or now. In this week’s Guardian and on this blog, you’ll find critical writing and specific history on the subject, some of it scathing.

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William Friedkin circa 1970s

Cruising is not a perfect movie, or Friedkin’s best movie. It has ridiculous moments. The faux-Freudian explanation at the end parrots Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as routinely as any Brian DePalma imitation of Hitch. But I’ve been fascinated by it since an era when it was reviled and hard to find on VHS tape. And I like it. I like Cruising‘s ambivalence and its ambiguity, which could be viewed as prophetic in a societal sense and influential in a stylistic sense. (In comparison, a lot of New Queer Cinema still seems rather, um, safe.) I like the movie’s gorgeous but scary shots of Central Park at night. I like its soundtrack. I think it’s interesting that the “killer”‘s disembodied voice — a quality that takes on new meaning the more you consider the story — might very well be the influence behind the killer’s voice in gay screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s Scream series. Today, Cruising seems most interesting to me as a movie that critiques (hyper)masculinity, straight and gay, as the boundaries between them blur.

I had a 20-minute block of time to talk with Friedkin when he came through town recently in conjunction with Cruising‘s upcoming run at the Castro Theatre and DVD release. Here’s what he had to say about Cruising — and about Mercedes McCambridge being tied to a chair, knocking back hard liquor and swallowing raw eggs for The Exorcist. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Guardian: The Roxie Cinema here in San Francisco has had a role in the changing reputation of Cruising, so I want to ask you about your relationship with them.
William Friedkin: I don’t know if Elliot [Lavine] and Bill [Banning] are still running [the Roxie], but they always ran films that I made, and I came up [from L.A.] whenever I could to answer questions from the audience. I loved what they were doing.
Now it seems the DVD is the true cinematheque.

Why Cruising Still Sucks

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By Bus Station John

As a DJ who’s created a number of clubs celebrating the music, aesthetic and sexual freedom of the period during which Cruising was released, I’ve noticed that a significant number of the gay men in attendance — the twenty- and thirtysomethings in particular — seem excited and intrigued by the film’s reissue on DVD. And why shouldn’t they be?

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The film offers today’s youth much more than just a fleeting glimpse of the now long-gone gay NYC sexual underground enjoyed by their elders. In fact, Cruising works best as a travelogue of pre-Disneyfied gay Manhattan, a celluloid tour of the city’s most notorious bars, back rooms and bushes, refreshingly populated by non-tweezery, pedicure-free, steroid-deficient and un-cyber-tainted denizens of the night. As the camera pans various tableaux of lusty men-on-the-make, the viewer finds himself literally cruising the screen…everybody’s lookin’ good!

Stormy leather

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Cruising for a Bruising By Jason Shamai

FILM William Friedkin, like it or not, has contributed so much to mainstream queer cinema that it’s remarkable his name primarily calls up images of projectile vomiting and Gene Hackman running a lot. The Boys in the Band (1970) and the more high-profile Cruising (1980) are bookends to a decade of comparatively unencumbered gay sex that is legendary to gay men of my generation (I was alive for a gloriously unencumbered two months of it), yet there was almost no mainstream representation of gay men in pop culture between the two films that didn’t involve guest spots on Match Game or The Hollywood Squares.

Last year’s excellent Friedkin offering, Bug, spent its first 15 minutes or so, gratuitously but innocuously, within a lesbian community. And let’s not forget Father Dyer’s gayer-than-gay proclamation in The Exorcist (1973) that “My idea of heaven is a solid white nightclub with me as a headliner for all eternity, and they love me.” Friedkin’s representations of queer people are hardly consistent in their degrees of sophistication, but the venom he’s inspired in so many activists is certainly excessive and arguably not worth the energy. If he can be accused of exploitation, what he’s exploiting is of no mere passing fascination to him. For some reason the man, whether or not he’s welcome, has clearly thrown in his lot with the queers.

Cruising — let’s just get it out of the way — is a pretty terrible movie in most of the major categories: dialogue, acting, and plot all add up to a big fat blecch, and the restored version playing at the Castro Theatre beginning Sept. 7 in anticipation of the DVD release does nothing to remedy the narrative inertia. The murder mystery it purports to be — regarding an undercover cop’s pursuit of a serial killer in the West Village’s leather-clad S-M scene — is a murky and parenthetical excuse for a series of Boschian tableaux of boot licking, fist fucking, and ass ramming. But beyond a frustrating mess of implications about the scene’s negative influence on Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), Friedkin isn’t guilty of much beyond overexuberance.

The initial vitriolic reaction to Cruising, it seems, had more to do with its depiction, embellished a touch, of a significant chunk of the gay world with its legs up in the air. The flatteringly concentrated sexual activity in the bar scenes may be less of an issue nowadays because of the growing number of politically engaged queer people, unconcerned with assimilation and happy to sign off on anything that makes jittery straight people uncomfortable. But does this say enough about the movie’s sexual proclivities? There isn’t much talk about Cruising as a pageant of eroticized violence or as a film eager in its bloodiness for the titillated approval of its viewers. Were Friedkin’s murder scenes — overt visual associations of anal and violent penetration, blood sprayed across the screen in a porn booth — intended as an extension of his conception of S-M play? Would it be wrong for him to do so, or for the audience to be duly turned on?

I’ve always taken for granted that Cruising‘s two major scenes of police harassment were your garden-variety (though highly effective) critiques of injustice, a risk-minimizing way of approaching an unfamiliar culture. But now I’m wondering if these scenes were intended as an indictment of the police at all (was the unnecessarily long, squirm-inducing raid on an all-black bar in The French Connection intended as an indictment?) or if they were simply elaborate fetish scenarios, artistic expansions of the imagery and dynamics already well integrated into the S-M scene? Mr. Friedkin, are you trying to get us off? ——————- ——————-

Stormy Leather by Matt Sussman

When Cruising (1980) finally arrived in Bay Area theaters Feb. 15, 1980, San Francisco’s gay community had long been up in arms. The 1978 murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone were still fresh in many people’s minds. Gay bashing was still a regular occurrence. Word had spread through the gay press about efforts to disrupt the movie’s filming in New York, and the verdict was clear: Hollywood was profiting from gay murder.

In a December 1979 Oakland Tribune article, Konstantin Berlandt, a member of the group Stop the Movie Cruising and perhaps the film’s most vociferous adversary in local gay rags, called Cruising “a genocidal attack on gay people.” Two months later, the STMC helped organize a demonstration at the Transamerica Pyramid, protesting one of Transamerica’s subsidiaries — the film’s distributor, United Artists. On opening day hundreds of protesters picketed the St. Francis Theatre.

“I don’t remember what I thought of the whole thing other than it was kind of stupid and annoying,” recalls Marc Huestis, one of the cofounders of the city’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now the SF International LGBT Film Festival). “As long as I’ve been here, there has always been the battle between the respectable gays and the fringe gays,” Huestis continues. “The respectable gays — many of whom I will say probably went to the leather bars to cruise after their protests — were all into showing a positive face.”

The issue of positive representation — and whether or not Cruising‘s problematic yoking of gay sadomasochism and serial murder warranted merely protest or outright censorship — was at the core of much of the debate. One reader wrote to San Francisco’s Sentinel, “It is ironic that we who have long been victims of prejudice and censorship should attempt to use these weapons of oppression against the movie.” In a February 1980 cover story, “The Men of Cruising,” in Mandate (the gay “international magazine of entertainment and Eros”), Rod Morgan, one of the gay extras in the film’s bar scenes, commented, “If the protesters want progay propaganda, let them get the money together and make their own movie.”

“The stakes of gay representation were very different at the time,” reflects Michael Lumpkin, artistic director of LGBT media nonprofit Frameline. “They were much higher because it was, like, ‘Hollywood hasn’t given us anything, and then they give us this?’ ” However, critic Scottie Ferguson, writing in the Advocate in April 1980, found a thrilling frisson in Cruising‘s portrayal of gay men and asked readers, “What Hollywood film has made the sexual electricity of the gay male seem so vibrant and visceral and unnerving?”

By 1995, when the Roxie Film Center revived Cruising, Ferguson’s observations had been somewhat vindicated. Mainstream LGBT film was taking off, and thanks to the risky work of directors like Gregg Araki and Tom Kalin, new queer cinema had confronted audiences with visceral and unnerving representations of violence-prone gay men.

In contrast to the largely positive reevaluations in the local press, David Ehrenstein implied in the Bay Area Reporter that the Roxie’s revival was tantamount to screening the notorious anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew (1940). Representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation showed up to hand out protest literature. “It was hilarious,” former Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine recalls. “There was a line around the block, and 90 percent of those waiting were in the leather crowd, and these GLAAD folks are trying to persuade them not to see the movie.”

Cruising has, to some extent, been defanged by the passage of time, its campier moments and macho signifiers embraced by a younger generation of queers. Clearly, though, the film still touches nerves: flame wars are being ignited as fast as they are being put out on Craigslist.com. And even for this gay fan of slasher movies, the film’s murder scenes are incomparably unsettling.

After a recent local media screening of the restored movie’s DVD release — at which director William Friedkin was present — DJ Bus Station John, whose clubs Tubesteak Connection and the Rod evoke the milieu of gay nightlife at the time Cruising was made, commented in an e-mail that “Friedkin’s present claim that contemporary audiences are more ‘sophisticated’ and therefore more receptive to Cruising, if not more friendly [to the film], doesn’t mitigate the damage done to our community at the time [of its release].”

CRUISING

Sept. 7–13, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

For Johnny Ray Huston’s interview with Cruising director William Friedkin, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

 

Bedsit cinema of ’60s England

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The early ’60s French new wave gets imitations and retrospectives and books galore, but in terms of homage, the British new wave of roughly the same era hasn’t been gifted with much more than a number of Smiths 7- and 12-inch singles covers and some Morrissey lyrics. Such tributes are nothing to sniff at, but an orange Shelagh Delaney on the cover of Louder Than Bombs or a picture of a pouty Rita Tushingham on the packaging of Sandie Shaw’s version of "Hand in Glove" don’t amount to the unanimous praise and canonical status given to, say, Jean-Luc Godard.

The subject of the new Pacific Film Archive series "Look Back at England: The British New Wave," "bedsit" or "kitchen-sink" British film drama of the early ’60s has often been a target for critics. Pauline Kael sneered at its emotions. The films of Tony Richardson and the acting of Tushingham have met no greater naysayer than Manny Farber, who devoted an entire essay, titled "Pish-Tush," to attacking Tushingham as the foremost example of a "megalomaniac star who can make the simplest action have as many syllables as her name." No doubt about it, Tushingham is mannered. But more than 40 years on from Farber’s essay, many and much worse offenses have been committed to celluloid and video, and it’s easy to see the merits of a movie such as 1962’s A Taste if Honey, written and directed by Delaney, whose dialogue and lead-colored riverside scenario provided Morrissey with an entire song ("This Night Has Opened My Eyes," far more doleful than A Taste of Honey) as well as a number of lines to steal for other lyrics.

"Look Back at England," which looks at nearly a decade of filmmaking, kicks off this week with Richard Burton abusing a Claire Bloom much wimpier than his future real-lire and onscreen wife in Richardson’s 1958 adaptation of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and ends with the Stanley Kubrick–tinged Malcolm McDowell antics of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 If… In between, you’ll find Tom Courtenay, madcap in 1963’s Billy Liar (sampled on Saint Etienne’s album So Tough) and haunted in 1962’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; and Albert Finney, loutish in 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Michael Caine posh loutish in 1966’s Alfie. Prototypical angry young men? Yes. But women had major roles as well — the period introduced us to the divine Julie Christie (in Billy Liar, her appeal later inspiring a song by Yo La Tengo, and in 1965’s Darling) as well as Tushingham, who meets her everything-and-the-kitchen-sink directorial match in Richard Lester in The Knack … and How to Get It, a 1965 film as narratively wild as Godard’s work of the era, if not wilder.

Yo La Tengo, Saint Etienne, the Smiths: funny how the seeming dreariness of British bedsit movies inspired maybe even more great pop acts than did the French new wave visions of and for the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. You can also find the seeds of the lurid extravaganzas of Derek Jarman in some of these pictures, if not the phallic frenzies (to borrow the title of Joseph Lanza’s new book) of Ken Russell and the hallucinations of Nicholas Roeg. The hyperextravagant Joseph Losey could find a home within the modest British new wave (his 1963 The Servant is a touchstone, thanks to Dirk Bogarde’s career peak performance). And while a contemporary director such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa loves his French new wave, he’s no stranger to the British corollary either. His Séance (2000) is based on Bryan Forbes’s 1964 Séance on a Wet Afternoon.

Speaking of Forbes, his excellent The L-Shaped Room (1962), starring a low-key Leslie Caron in a Tushingham-style unwed mother role, is one of the few links missing from "Look Back at England." But you can seek it out on video — and discover the source behind the opening moments of The Queen Is Dead. (Johnny Ray Huston)

LOOK BACK AT ENGLAND: THE BRITISH NEW WAVE

Sun/2 through Oct. 26

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.org

Class of 2007: The Passionistas

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SUPERLATIVE Most Likely to Succeed

QUOTE "We want the fashion line and the fragrance."

"We’d like to be pro — in the sense that we’d like to not work and have lots of money," Aaron Sunshine says of the Passionistas. Based on the group’s Kelley Stoltz–produced debut, God’s Boat (New and Used Records), Sunshine, fellow songwriter Myles Cooper, and bandmate Andrew Lux have earned the right to think big. Yeah, it’s hard to draw blood from a stone, but it’s even tougher to mine new blood from old rock music. Yet that’s exactly what the Passionistas do. If you’re a 21st-century modern lover, ready for post-Y2K "12XU" anthems, and you know you can’t hide your love forever, your dream soundtrack is ready. The Passionistas are so new and so classic they could revirginize an ancient whore.

They’ve got the punk smarts to cover Yoko Ono’s conflicted "No No No," to know fucking is a hot word not used often enough in rock lyrics, and to realize that it’s impossible for a song named "Teenage Jesus" to be lame. But make no mistake: the Passionistas have huge pop potential. They love Lil’ Wayne (Cooper: "He really frees himself of history to say what he feels"), they think Beyoncé’s aggressive shrillness is a sign of the times (Sunshine: "B-Day is like a hardcore album"), and they worship Aaliyah (Sunshine: "She and R. Kelly and Timbaland had this crazy alternative vision that is what we now think of as R&B"). Tom Sneddon is their antichrist. "We supported Michael Jackson through his entire trial," says Sunshine, a young man with a mission born and raised in the Mission. "We have a drum that has ‘Free the King of Pop’ painted on it."

The agnostic-to-atheist Cooper and Sunshine met in a math class at City College of San Francisco. They took the title God’s Boat from a speech by a contestant on Missy Elliott’s reality show The Road to Stardom. If their road to stardom is flooded, they’re ready to go the Noah’s ark route, or perhaps catch a ride on the American whales — seal-bullying orcas sporting stars and stripes — that are part of the Bay Area vista on their album’s Photoshopped back cover. Never descending into what Cooper disdainfully calls a "brofest," the Passionistas’ studio recording with longtime fan Stoltz is ready for the canon. "One Foot on a Banana Peel" is the best grandma-dis track ever, "Fucking Cold" is a boy-raised-on-riot-grrrl tantrum that makes the absolute most of leaping an octave, and if Lou Reed hadn’t turned into such a bore, he’d undoubtedly wish that he’d written "Going Gay." There’s nothing else to motherfucking say. (Johnny Ray Huston)

THE PASSIONISTAS With the Happy Hollows and the Dont’s. Thurs/30, 9 p.m., $7. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. (415) 647-2888, www.makeoutroom.com

Step in and look around: A talk with ArtSpan’s Therese Martin

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In the Visual Art section of this week’s Fall Arts Preview, San Francisco Open Studios gets a shout out. I recently talked with Therese Martin, Executive Director of ArtSpan, about Open Studios, and about ArtSpan’s role in helping Bay Area artists. We also discussed art by ‘hood, and people who visit 75 artist studios in one weekend.

Guardian: How do you feel Open Studios is different from many art events in the Bay Area? I’d guess that while it’s larger, it’s can sometimes be more direct in terms of a chance to meet with artists.
Therese Martin: It’s definitely different because of the number of artists involved in so many different neighborhoods. It’s something you can participate in and not move beyond the 2 or 3 neighborhoods you normally go to.
The personal connection is unique. You really have the opportunity to shake the hand of a creative person. Even if you’re in a studio that’s not the living pace of an artist, it’s still a very personal space.

Fall Arts: Sing or swim

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

 

AUG. 28

Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Def Jux) We’ll see if ‘Sop has lost his edge livin’ in ol’ Frisky. Blockhead and Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle take a pass on the nervy rhymes.

Akon, Konvicted (Konvict/Upfront/SRC/Universal Motown) Konvinced? Or just plain a-korny?

Evelyn Champagne King, Open Book (RNB/Jaggo/Fontana) The disco queen who was discovered while cleaning the offices of Philly International brings “Shame” into the 21st century.

Ledisi, Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) The local singer’s debut for the true diva cathedral of all jazz labels has been three years in the making.

Liars, Liars (Mute) Work that skirt.

Noreaga, Noreality (Babygrande) Wake me up when Noreality TV has finished its broadcast day. Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Jadakiss, Three 6 Mafia, David Banner, and a cast of thousands trade off on enabling duty.

Scorpions, Humanity — Hour 1 (New Door/UME) Oh, the inhumanity; Billy Corgan scorps out new turf.

Yung Joc, Hustlenomics (Block/Bad Boy South) Joc’ed up on java with the first single, “Coffee Shop,” off this Neptunes-, Fixxers-, and Gorilla Zoe–produced disc.

 

SEPT. 4

Calvin Harris, I Created Disco (Almost Gold) The brazen Scot is irreverent enough to lay claim to inventing the big D, the buzzword of this year and the year before.

 

SEPT. 11

Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino) Helmed by frequent Sun City Girls producer Scott Colburn, their eighth album’s nine songs include one dedicated to Al Green.

B5, Don’t Talk, Just Listen (Bad Boy) Diddy’s answer to the Backstreet Boys unknowingly use the favorite phone phrase of the Weepy-Voiced Killer as the title for their album.

Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans) Another punk machismo-reclamation project? Queerific art rockers team with Grizzly Bear playas to rewrite Black Flag’s Damaged — from memory and with a hearty helping of cracked experifolk whimsy.

50 Cent, Curtis (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope) The artist also known as a form of VitaminWater that tastes like grape Kool-Aid continues his marketing onslaught.

Go! Team, Proof of Youth (Sub Pop) Will their first single, “Grip Like a Vice,” hook till it hurts?

Jenny Hoyston, Isle Of (Southern) The Erase Errata guitarist finds paradise far from the dashboard blight.

Modeselektor, Happy Birthday! (BPitch Control) Genre-hopping Berlin duo go the celebrity cameo route, enlisting the vox of Thom Yorke and others.

Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs (Touch and Go) Will this top Pinback’s last album, Summer in Abbadon, which sold more than 80,000 copies? Indie music sellers wanna know!

Qui, Love’s Miracle (Ipecac) Jesus Lizard David Yow’s quid pro quo — with covers of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” and Frank Zappa’s “Willie the Pimp.”

Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release (Interscope) I got my pulverizing bass in your acid keyboard scrunchies!

Kanye West, Graduation (Roc-A-Fella) West’s mom has been caught saying that this is his best album ever. Making or breaking the case: West has said that Lil’ Wayne will rap over a song titled “Barry Bonds.”

 

SEPT. 18

Babyface, Playlist (Mercury) The onetime close, personal friend of Bill just wants do covers, like “Fire and Rain,” “Time in a Bottle,” and — hoo boy — “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

James Blunt, All the Lost Souls (Custard/Atlantic) U-g-l-y, this ain’t got no alibi.

Chamillionaire, Ultimate Victory (Chamillitary/Universal Motown) The H-town star’s long-delayed sophomore effort has a mammoth supporting cast even by commercial-rap standards; it kicks off with a single featuring Slick Rick.

The Donnas, Bitchin’ (Purple Feather/Redeye) Named after the fluffy puppies overrunning their studio?

Eve, Here I Am (Aftermath/Interscope) Had anyone been looking? Listening in are producers Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, and Pharrell Williams.

Rogue Wave, Asleep at Heaven’s Gate (Brushfire/Universal) Just don’t drift off around Marshall Applewhite while wearing black-and-white Nikes. A new bass player — Patrick Abernathy — and a new label for the locals.

Angie Stone, The Art of Love and War (Stax/Concord) The road back from VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club may yet be one to salvation, since it’s passing through the holy land of Stax.

 

SEPT. 25

Devendra Banhart, Smokey Rolls down Thunder Canyon (XL) Gael García Bernal sings on one track, and Vashti Bunyan sings on two; Noah Georgeson produces a collection that is supposed to flit from Gilberto Gil breezes to Jackson 5–style pop.

The Cave Singers, Invitation Songs (Matador) Pretty Girls Make Graves–Murder City Devils, Hint Hint, and Cobra High grads calcify in intriguing country-folk shapes.

Keyshia Cole, Just like You (A&M/Interscope) Two years on, it’s clear that Oakland girl Cole’s The Way It Is was the best R&B debut since What’s the 411? Through the sheer intense focus of her singing, she rescues overexposed Missy and Lil’ Kim on the first single here.

José González, In Our Nature (Mute) Yes way, José. The long wait for the follow-up to Veneer is over. González recorded this in his hometown over a three-week period after obsessing about today’s religion and (lack of) ethics.

PJ Harvey, White Chalk (Island) Peej draws in longtime collaborator Eric Drew Feldman and Jim White of the Dirty Three.

Iron and Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop) Here’s hoping three’s the charm for Sam Beam.

Jagged Edge, Baby Makin’ Project (So So Def/Island) Yet another case for population control.

Mick Jagger, The Very Best of Mick Jagger (Rhino UK) It’s semiofficial: the best of Mick Jagger is worse than the worst of the Rolling Stones.

Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (Anti-) A singer who can bring out the black-and-blue tone of that title, especially because the scene of the crime is Muscle Shoals, Ala., where she returned to record this album. She’s backed by Drive-by Truckers.

Matt Pond PA, Last Light (Altitude) Neko Case and Kelly Hogan hold a candle.

Múm, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, Let Your Crooked Hands Be Holy (Fat Cat) Mum’s the word?

Meshell Ndegeocello, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Decca) Connecting her MySpace page to the gender-bending edges of her cover of Bill Withers’s “Who Is He (and What Is He to You?),” you might say the man of her dreams is Miles Davis.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder) Why does my mouth fill with sand when I think about this project?

Queen Latifah, Trav’lin’ Light (Verve) Latifah steps to a song that will always be owned by Billie Holiday — and sings some other songs as well — on her debut album for one of Lady Day’s main labels today.

Scott Walker, And Who Shall Go to the Ball? (4AD UK) The enigma returns more quickly than usual, albeit with a four-movement instrumental mini-LP composed for a dance piece.

Will.i.am, Songs about Girls (Interscope) The Black Eyed Pea with the lamest name loves the ladies, egged on by Snoop Dogg.

 

OCT. 2

Cassidy, B.A.R.S. (Full Surface/J) The Philly battle rapper rebounds from injury and lockup and leans on Bone Thugs, John Legend, and others for faith.

Annie Lennox, Songs of Mass Destruction (Arista) No doubt about it, “Why?” can be very irritating. But this title suggests she’s really amped up the damage inflicted by her tunes.

 

OCT. 9

Band of Horses, Cease to Begin (Sub Pop) Ben Bridwell expresses his love for YouTube video directors on this Phil Eks–produced second LP.

Dengue Fever, Untitled (M80 Music/NAIL/Allegro) On recordings, they’re sometimes glorious, sometimes not — will the third time be a charm for the group led by Chhom Nimol’s dynamic voice?

The Fiery Furnaces, Widow City (Thrill Jockey) The prolific sibs thrust forth their sixth full-length, emboldened by engineer John McEntire of Tortoise.

The Hives, The Black and White Album (Interscope) The ebullient Swedes will be donning black after a dozen or so shows opening for Maroon 5.

Jennifer Lopez, Brave (Epic) Are listeners courageous or is she?

Robert Pollard, Coast to Coast Carpet of Love and Standard Gargoyle Decisions (Merge) Two releases in one day — guided by bipolar voices?

She Wants Revenge, This Is Forever (Geffen) Let’s hope not.

Amy Winehouse, Frank (Island) Pre–US juggernaut album by the singer in rehab, for anyone who doesn’t think she’s overexposed or wouldn’t rather look at Ronnie Spector and listen to Ruth Brown.

 

OCT. 16

Nicole Scherzinger, Her Name Is Nicole …(Interscope) …and she’s the Pussycat Doll whom you can tell apart from the other Pussycat Dolls — I think. She falls in seconds-long love at first sight with prospective members of her group during auditions, if the trashiest TV show in recent memory is to be believed.

 

OCT. 23

Ashanti, The Declaration (The Inc.) I’ll flabbergast many by saying that Ashanti has served up more quality hit singles than the other R&B diva releasing an album this week.

Alicia Keys, As I Am (J) She can sing, she can play, she can sell Proactiv Solution like few others. But will she ever truly let that voice loose?

 

OCT. 30

Backstreet Boys, Unbreakable (Jive) Do we really want it that way again? Can they give it to us that way? One thing’s for sure — this should give Chelsea Handler months of comedy material.

Chris Brown, Exclusive (Jive) Yeah, he’s cuter than kitten posters. But his appearance in a tribute to the Godfather of Soul at last year’s Grammy Awards verged on sacrilege.

 

NOV. 13

Wu-Tang Clan, The 8 Diagrams (Street Recordings) Their first album in six years — thus their first post-ODB recording — takes its title from the Shaw brothers’ film Eight Diagram Pole Fighter; in tune with the George Harrison revival, it includes a cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

 

NOV. 20

Six Organs of Admittance, Shelter from the Ash (Drag City) The Redwood Curtain’s guitar-wielding heir to John Fahey breaks out a new LP, said to be smokin’.<\!s>*

 

Fall Arts: I screen, you screen

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"Switching Schools Sucks" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up a triple dose of teen alienation: Pump Up the Volume, Footloose, and the Andrew Stevens–starring, Heathers-influenced Massacre at Central High.

Aug. 31. Castro Theatre (info below)

"Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany" Perhaps the most expansive retrospective of East German film in the United States, spanning from the early 1960s to 1990.

Sept. 1–Oct. 27. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

"Look Back at England: The British New Wave" Does kitchen-sink cinema deserve classic status? It would be great to witness Manny Farber (who wrote scathingly about Rita Tushingham and Tony Richardson) duke it out with Morrissey on the subject.

Sept. 2–Oct. 26. Pacific Film Archive (info below)

"Devotional Cinema: Films by Dorsky and Ozu" Nathaniel Dorsky shows two of his films and also talks about Late Spring, one of the Yasujiro Ozu films discussed in his insightful book that shares this program’s title.

Sept. 4. Pacific Film Archive

"Send Granny Back to Russia" The 1929 film My Grandmother is screened with Beth Custer’s score to raise funds for an upcoming trip on which Custer’s ensemble will perform the score in Russia and elsewhere.

Sept. 4. Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, Berk. Also Sept. 5. Dolby Laboratories, 100 Potrero, SF. www.bethcuster.com

William Friedkin Series Someone I know who knows all the great actresses calls Ashley Judd’s performance in Bug a "tour de force." That film and others set the stage for more Friedkin freak-outs.

Sept. 4–6. Castro Theatre

"Helmut Käutner: Film Retrospective Part 2" The series continues with the post–World War II period of Käutner’s career, including a 1947 feature shot in Germany’s ruins and a 1954 film featuring a young Klaus Kinski (yes, he was young once).

Sept. 4–Oct. 9. Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF. (415) 263-8760, www.goethe-sf.org

"Fearless Females: Three Films by Shyam Benegal" The director appears at screenings that highlight the feminist currents of his contributions to the Indian new wave of the ’70s.

Sept. 5–7. Pacific Film Archive

Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana Lars Laumann’s 16-minute video screens in a loop as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" exhibition.

Sept. 6–22. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Darwin Awards A new comedy by Finn Taylor focuses on death by stupidity.

Sept. 7. Roxie Film Center (info below)

"TILT" The Film Arts Foundation presents an evening of films from its media-education program, which works with schools.

Sept. 7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (info below)

Cruising The digital restoration of William Friedkin’s most controversial film finally hits the Castro Theatre, years after being revived from infamy at the Roxie Film Center.

Sept. 7–13. Castro Theatre

Imp of Satan Local queer horror midnight movie screens along with a live comedy drag show.

Sept. 8. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.synchromiumfims.com

"Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master" An extensive series devoted to the undersung Japanese director, whose movies spanned five decades and even more genres, including comedies, samurai films, theatrical adaptations, and police flicks.

Sept. 8–29. Pacific Film Archive

9/11 Truth Film Festival Two days of films and discussions.

Sept. 10–11. Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand, Oakl. (510) 452-3556, www.renaissancerialto.com

Madcat Women’s International Film Festival Turning 11 this year, Ariella Ben-Dov’s festival includes a tribute to the life and work of Helen Hill and culls 98 films — 76 of them premieres — into 11 programs.

Sept. 11–26. Various venues, SF. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Super Sleazy ’70s Go-go Grindhouse Show Will "the Thrill" Viharo brings together Pam Grier in Black Mama, White Mama and live dancing by the Twilight Vixen Revue.

Sept. 13. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Honor of the Knights Along with recent works by José Luis Guerín, this idiosyncratic take on Don Quixote by Albert Serra is being heralded as a new highlight of Spanish cinema.

Sept. 13–16. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Role Reversal" Midnites for Maniacs strikes again, with The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Yentl, and a film that can never be screened enough, The Legend of Billie Jean.

Sept. 14. Castro Theatre

The Warriors Walter Hill’s gang classic comes out to play.

Sept. 14–15. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Film Night in the Park: Rebel Without a Cause Sal Mineo makes eyes at James Dean, and Natalie Wood weeps about her dad rubbing off her lips.

Sept. 15. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org

Xperimental Eros PornOrchestra accompanies stag movies in a celebration for OCD’s latest DVD release.

Sept. 15. Other Cinema (info below)

Eros and Massacre Film on Film Foundation presents Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1970 film about anarchist Sakae Osugi.

Sept. 16. Pacific Film Archive

"It’s a Funny, Mad, Sad World: The Movies of George Kuchar" The man appears in person for a screening of five Kuchar classics spanning 15 years, selected by Edith Kramer.

Sept. 18. Pacific Film Archive

Orphans of Delirium What is paratheatre? Antero Alli and a 2004 video provide the answer.

Sept. 18. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org

Midnites for Maniacs in 70mm All hail Jesse Hawthorne Ficks for bringing Tobe Hooper’s bodacious nude space vampire classic Lifeforce — one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s favorite movies — back to the big screen. Even Planet of Blood‘s Florence Marly may have nothing on Mathilda May.

Sept. 21. Castro Theatre

Strange Culture The story of Steve Kurtz is discussed and reenacted in San Francisco filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s latest feature.

Sept. 21. Roxie Film Center

"Girls Will Be Boys" This series, curated by Kathy Geritz, includes Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich trouser classics, as well as Katherine Hepburn under the eye of Dorothy Arzner in Sylvia Scarlett.

Sept. 21–30. Pacific Film Archive

Amando a Maradona Soccer icon Diego Maradona gets the feature treatment.

Sept. 26. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. (510)849-2568. www.utf8ofilmfestival.org

In Search of Mozart Phil Grabsky’s digiportrait of the composer works to counter the distortions of Amadeus and the elitism that sometimes hovers around Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s legacy.

Sept. 28–30. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Legendary Composer: Jerry Goldsmith" The salt and pepper to John Williams’s Hollywood sucrose gets a cinematic tribute, with screenings of classics such as Seconds, Poltergeist, and the film with perhaps his best scoring work, Chinatown.

Sept. 28–Oct. 4. Castro Theatre

DocFest It turns five this year, offering more than 20 films and videos, including the Nick Drake profile A Skin Too Few.

Sept. 28–Oct. 10. Roxie Film Center

Film Night in the Fog The increasingly popular Creature from the Black Lagoon makes an appearance, this time at the Presidio.

Sept. 29. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org

"Red State Cinema" Joel Shepard curates a series devoted to rural visionaries, including Phil Chambliss and his folk-art videos set at a gravel pit and Spencer Williams and his 1941 Southern Baptist feature The Blood of Jesus.

October. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Olivier Assayas in Residence: Cahiers du Cinema Week" The Pacific Film Archive has screened early Assayas movies that didn’t get distribution, such as the Virginie Ledoyen showcase Cold Water. Now the director visits to show Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (think of Assayas’s Irma Vep, also screening) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (think of his Demonlover), along with Assayas’s latest movie, Boarding Gate.

Oct. 4–11, Pacific Film Archive

Mill Valley Film Festival The biggest Bay Area film fest of the fall turns 30 this year, presenting more than 200 movies from more than 50 countries.

Oct. 4–14. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org

Helvetica The typeface gets its very own movie.

Oct. 5–7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Shock It to Me: Classic Horror Film Festival" Joe Dante will appear at this fest, which promises a dozen pre-Halloween shockers.

Oct. 5–7, Castro Theatre

"Zombie-rama" Thrillville unleashes Creature with the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau.

Oct. 11. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400. www.thrillville.net

"Joseph Cornell: Films" Without a doubt, this multiprogram series — in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Cornell exhibition — is one of the most important Bay Area film events of the year.

Oct. 12–Dec. 14. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Wattis Theater, 151 Third St, SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

"Expanded Cinema" Craig Baldwin, Kerry Laitala, Katherin McInnis, Stephen Parr, and Melinda Stone blast retinas with double-projector performance pieces.

Oct. 13. Other Cinema

"Celebrating Canyon: New Films" Under the SF Cimematheque rubric, Canyon Cinema’s Michelle Silva and Dominic Angerame put together a program of recent additions to the Canyon catalogue.

Oct. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Films by Bruce Conner" The long-awaited new Soul Stirrers short His Eye Is on the Sparrow kicks off an hour of Conner magic.

Oct. 16. Pacific Film Archive

Arab Film Festival The festival’s 11th year will bring 11 days and nights of movies, including a Tunisian doc about the making of Tarzan of the Arabs.

Oct. 18–28. Various venues, SF. (415) 564-1100, www.aff.org

"I Am Not a War Photographer" Brooklyn-based Lynn Sachs presents a night of short movies and spoken word.

Oct. 20. Other Cinema

"Experiments in High Definition" Voom HD works, including one by Jennifer Reeves, get an SF Cinematheque program.

Oct. 21. SF Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

"Walls of Sound: Projector Performances by Bruce McClure" Brooklyn artist McClure explores projection as performance in this kickoff event in SF Cinematheque’s "Live Cinema" series.

Oct. 24–25. Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

Smalltown Boys Arthur Russell documentarian Matt Wolf’s semifictive historical look at David Wojnarowicz loops as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" series.

Oct. 30–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Last Man on Earth Vincent Price fights zombies in this oft-pillaged 1964 US-Italian horror classic, soon to be re-created with Will Smith.

Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive

"Día de los Muertos: Honorar las Almas de Cineastas de Avant-Garde Vanguarda" Canyon Cinema and SF Cinematheque founder Bruce Baillie shares some favorites from the Canyon vaults.

Nov. 1. Roxie Film Center. Also Nov. 2. Ninth Street Independent Film Center, 145 Ninth St., SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

International Latino Film Festival One of three fests to turn 11 this fall.

Nov. 2–18. Various venues, SF. (415) 513-5308, www.utf8ofilmfestival.org.

"Science Is Fiction" Nope, not Jean Painléve — the histories of the Tesla coil, the blimp, and other phenomena hit the screen, thanks to cinematographer Lance Acord and others.

Nov. 3. Other Cinema

Shatfest Get your mind out of the toilet — it’s another Thrillville tribute to William Shatner, including a screening of Incubus.

Nov. 8. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Strain Andromeda The and Cinepolis, the Film Capitol Anne McGuire’s reedit of The Andromeda Strain isn’t exactly backward, but — thanks to Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde" series for SF Cinematheque — it is back. The series continues to beam as Ximena Cuevas’s metamontage attack on Hollywood shares a bill with Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99.

Nov. 8. Roxie Film Center

San Francisco International Animation Showcase A big premiere, some music vids, and a link to the famed Annecy animation fest are possibilities as the SF Film Society event turns two.

Nov. 8–11. Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center (promenade), SF. (415) 561-5500. www.sffs.org

"Celebrating Canyon: Pioneers of Bay Area Filmmaking" Bruce Baillie unpacks some Bay Area experimental cinema treasures from the ’40s and ’50s.

Nov. 11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

My Favorite Things At last! Negativland premiere their first CD-DVD release.

Dec. 1. Other Cinema

"James Fotopoulos/Leah Gilliam" and "Victor Faccinto/James June Schneider" Fotopoulos has had some Bay Area attention before, but Gilliam’s Apeshit — a look at racial politics in Planet of the Apes — might be the highlight in this last evening of Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays" series.

Dec. 13. Roxie Film Center *

CASTRO THEATRE

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

OTHER CINEMA

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

ROXIE FILM CENTER

3317 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Boom, dream, flow: A look at Independent Exposure’s animation

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By Maria Komodore

The exact moment when I decided to study cinema is very clearly imprinted in my memory. It occurred three years ago while I was watching Man Ray films.

What impressed me most about films such as Return to Reason, Ballet Mécanique, and Emak Bakia was the potential they seemed to add to the film medium. Strange, almost indistinguishable forms and shapes danced around on the screen to generate equally mysterious inner associations. Though at times this colorful and playful montage of images didn’t make sense, at least not in the conventional way that films are supposed to make sense, they had deep impact on my perception.

Independent Exposure‘s Animation Edition 2007 —a series of short animations series that Microcinema Inc. has compiled on DVD and will also be showing all around the world—made me relive that moment. All fifteen shorts are exceptional not only for their subjects and the imaginative manner in which they’re treated, but also simply for their aesthetic value.

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Strange powers: Notes on Stalker

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By Maria Komodore

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There aren’t many things that haven’t been written about Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Of course the film’s mysterious subject and Tarkovsky’s even more mysterious direction do open the film up to all kinds of discussions. The story, if one can say that there is such a thing, revolves around an enigmatic Zone whose creation conditions never become quite clear. The suggestion is that it was the product of a meteorite fall—but that doesn’t really matter anyhow. Within the obscure Zone there is the equally abstruse Room which is supposed to be capable of granting men’s innermost wishes. Writer and Scientist are the film’s two protagonists, who want to access the Zone and get to the Room, although doing so is prohibited to everyone. And this is where the Stalker, the film’s third main character, comes in. Writer and Scientist use him to reach the Room. The Stalker has managed to find his way in the forbidden area and navigate it safely.

Might makes wrong

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A couple of years ago, filmmaker Thom Anderson remarked to me that all films about war, even those that aim to show its injustice, are prowar.

War Made Easy might be the first film I’ve seen since hearing Anderson’s assertion that effectively counters such a claim. Admittedly, Anderson was likely referring only to dramatic movies, especially those produced by Hollywood. Yet even a contemporary doc such as Fahrenheit 9/11 not only takes the honor of military force for granted but spins it into a cause for voice-over dramatics. In contrast, War Made Easy codirectors Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp’s documentary uses Norman Solomon’s recent book to perform an autopsy on the now-zombified propaganda surrounding post-1940s US war.

Alper and Earp’s doc skips smart-ass sarcasm and the usual air of incredulity in order to make complex points clear, and it does so skillfully and quickly. It still has moments when horror and humor commingle, such as when various embedded TV reporters cream their business slacks or loaned camouflage gear during assertions of love for aircraft such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the A-10 Wart Hog.

George Santayana’s famous statement that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it is proven without a doubt throughout War Made Easy. A parade of presidents mouths variations of the same theme, which goes something along the lines of “We love democracy and peace so much that we have to murder others to maintain it.”

With the passing of time, the words and phrases used to justify US military action have become increasingly debased and the puppets mouthing them more craven, until today, when we have George W. Bush repeating the word evil more often than an old metal album skipping on a turntable. Yet if evil exists, he and his cronies are exact embodiments of what they decry. Witness a moment in this movie when Bush describes Saddam Hussein as “a homicidal dictator addicted to weapons of mass destruction.” (Johnny Ray Huston)

Americans no longer like the war in Iraq. They know it is not going well. Still, most don’t really want to know how things got so bad. Ergo, there’s probably not much hope No End in Sight will join the ranks of those rare recent must-see documentaries involving penguins, Global Warming 101, or Michael Moore. That’s too bad, because Charles Ferguson’s film has no preaching-to-the-converted tone or snarky on-camera filmmaker.

Ferguson, a sometime lecturer at UC Berkeley, draws on heavyweight connections to show how the administration continually matched arrogant, ignorant policy with new staff, people who — not unlike Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — lacked experience in combat and postwar infrastructure rebuilding, let alone knowledge of Middle Eastern history, culture, and relations.

“I don’t do quagmires!” Rumsfeld quips in one of several gag-inducing moments of news conference levity. It’s repeatedly noted that Bush didn’t read even the one-page summaries crafted for his wee attention span.

No End in Sight includes input from US and Iraqi scholars as well as former Pentagon, CIA, and White House staff, sorely disillusioned American military leaders, and grunts badly wounded by inept policy. This movie should be required viewing for all US citizens currently obsessed with gas prices, the wacky misadventures of Lindsay Lohan, and their navels. The DVD version is going to make a great Christmas present. (Dennis Harvey)

NO END IN SIGHT

Opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.noendinsightmovie.com

WAR MADE EASY

Thurs/9, 7 p.m., $12

Grand Lake Theater

3200 Grand Lake, Oakl.

(510) 251-1332, ext. 102

www.warmadeeasythemovie.org

 

Two great cult movies

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Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (John Newland, US, 1973). As Grindhouse viewers or true grindhouse aficionados know, starting a title with Don’t was once a popular way to strike fear in sleazoids. The fact that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark was made for TV would suggest it’s tame — that is, if the Don’t era didn’t coincide with the glory, rather than gory, days of frightening TV movies. In fact, this little number is at least as great as Dan Curtis’s 1975 Trilogy of Terror, with which it shares some knee-high shocks while being much less campy. Don’t Open the Fireplace might be a more accurate if less catchy title, especially since the dark — not to mention a soundtrack that layers sinister, gnomish voices into a chorus — is definitely something to be afraid of here. As lead character Sally, Kim Darby realizes this only after her incessant urge to remodel a mansion has taken on Pandora’s box connotations. In every dream home lies a heartache, and in every possessed old mansion lurks the doom of a nuclear family (as in Curtis’s 1976 Burnt Offerings) — or in this case, a frigid, childless couple. This movie is at least as creepy as any manifestation of Takeshi Shimizu’s Ju-on (Grudge) series, which updates its conceit. For an extra kick, imagine a remake with Martha Stewart in the lead role! (Johnny Ray Huston)

Fri/10, 11:30 p.m., Roxie Film Center. See Rep Clock

Welcome Home Brother Charles (Jamaa Fanaka, US, 1975). I once thought Jamaa Fanaka’s most outrageous movie was 1987’s Penitentiary 3. What could be wilder than Leon Isaac Kennedy’s character Too Sweet and übercutie Steve Antin as a sax-playing John Coltrane disciple in a prison overseen by Tony Geary, his receding mullet frazzled by peroxide, with drag queens and a crack-smoking, back-breaking sex dwarf named the Midnight Thud at his beck and call? Well, Penitentiary 3‘s psycho-racial-sexual parade marked only the baroque era of a one-of-a-kind directorial career that began with efforts such as this flick, a.k.a. Soul Vengeance, which has attained notoriety because it features a certain part of the male anatomy gone extra large and homicidal. There’s something crazily brilliant about the way Fanaka literally takes racist stereotypes to their illogical and logical ends. Though his material has been pure pulp, his career deserves to be viewed close to, if not alongside, those of UCLA peers such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima, none of whom has courted or been understood by white Hollywood. Look past the trouser snake, and you’ll see a moodily lit credit sequence with a score not dissimilar to Mick Jagger’s for Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother and a politicized, funny, angry, and loving use of the color red. Admittedly, most people won’t be seeking out this movie for a performance by an actress in a supporting role, but it must be said that Reatha Grey is a natural. (Huston)

Fri/10, 7 p.m., Roxie; Sat/11, 2:30 p.m., Roxie

Lee Hazlewood: July 9, 1929- August 4, 2007

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In honor of the late Lee Hazlewood, here is Edward E. Crouse’s unfiltered conversation with the great singer-songwriter, from the Guardian in 1998:

Love Lee
A duet over the phone with Mr. Hazlewood.

By Edward E. Crouse

LEE HAZLEWOOD writes, produces, and sings ambrosial pop songs. Ambrosial in both senses: the Greek (what the gods ingest) and the American (that picnic mystery made of canned fruits in heavy syrup and whipped cream). Hazlewood claims never to have met Serge Gainsbourg — a Gallic strategist with a similar dark, drunken heart and thick basso profundo–bizarro pipes who shares his knack for perverse idioms and knocking out hits with boy-girl, Beauty-Beast arrangements. Hazlewood is by no means as fashion-ready as Gainsbourg, which means that clubs won’t charge a premium for lacquered and booted neo-modistes to frug on his birthday, and the prospect of cats aping Hazlewood’s trademark stealth fighter–shaped mustache is doubtful.

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The Eclipse: One Day, Two Giants of Art Cinema Gone

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By Max Goldberg

It’s enough to make you wonder. Not twenty-four hours after headlines announcing Ingmar Bergman’s death at 89 news arrived of Michelangelo Antonioni’s end at 94. Both died this past Monday. They seemed on parallel tracks throughout their careers—producing strings of self-consciously intellectual films bent on existential meaning—making their alignment in death all too temptingly neat of a frame for the heavy eulogizing to come. Still, maybe they would have appreciated the coincidence: a flash of suggested meaning, the intimation of magical thinking.

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Black and white and color

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One of the most exciting aspects of being a newspaper editor is recognizing a wave of activity that isn’t connected to government mind control or onslaughts of corporate-sponsored and mass-marketed art. This kind of spontaneous mass energy is happening via photography in San Francisco right now. August is known as a slow month, but the city’s galleries are alive with contemporary photos. Bill Daniel’s latest look at the US landscape is opening at RayKo Photo Center, the Daniel-influenced vagabond spirit Polaroid Kidd has his first Bay Area show at Needles and Pens, Greg Halpern’s moody views of Buffalo and Kelli Connell’s double-minted prints are up at SF Camerawork, and at City Hall — through the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery — the work of 32 local photographers is on view.

Baptized in arguments regarding its viability as an art form, photography remains as contentious as it is expansive. Witness a veteran such as Duane Michals sharpening his claws on the megapopular likes of Cindy Sherman in last year’s rant-monograph Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank (Thames and Hudson). We live in an era when the ready availability of portraiture seems to have made its definition even more reductive; via MySpace and more explicit sites, people use cameras to readily package themselves as products. Yet when black-and-white and color and digital and film collide with unpredictable results, photo portraiture can be as varied and lively as the work you’ll find on these pages.

Thanks to fellow Guardian arts editor Kimberly Chun for suggesting, late in the selection process, a focus on portraiture. This decision necessarily narrowed the Bay Area photographers to choose from; there’s a wave of garden- and eco-driven work being done by Bill Basquin and others, while Dusty Lombardo, R.A. McBride, and Jackson Patterson are discovering tremendous depth in interiors. Thanks also to Basquin, Daniel, Glen Helfand, Chuck Mobley, Katie Kurtz, and Dave and Ray Potes for their suggestions.

Twelve years ago I interviewed therapist and author Walt Odets because he was bringing much-needed humanity to discussions of the AIDS crisis; to find out that he’s also a superb photographer whose subjects have included Jean Renoir and his wife, Dido, is a revelation. In distinctive ways, Vic Blue, Robert Gumpert, and Amanda Herman reveal what journalism usually ignores or renders shallow. The intimacy of Vala Cliffton’s photos makes one ponder her presence within the scenes she depicts. Matthias Geiger shows a city you might not have noticed even when it’s been in front of your face. Stan Banos has an eye for the many shades of gray within the multihued and the cuckoo. Job Piston is that rare Bay Area photographer whose work brandishes a sexual edge that isn’t obvious or predictable. Jim Goldberg’s urban work has been canonically influential since the publication of Rich and Poor (Random House, 1985) and Raised by Wolves (Scalo, 1995). Photography is just one aspect of Désirée Arlette Holman’s hand-fashioned fantasy world, a place that looks like a wicked satire of our own.

If you’d like to see more about some of these artists, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision. (Johnny Ray Huston)

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Stan Banos

NAME Stan Banos

TITLE The Marine

THE STORY "This photo was taken in San Francisco during Fleet Week in ’04."

INSPIRATION "I’ve always had a vague obsession with time and place, and the camera is the best-suited instrument to record such transient moments (particularly when you can’t draw). I generally try to incorporate whatever signs of irony life can offer within a rectangle."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS "I have more favorite photographers as an adult than I had favorite ballplayers as a kid: Bruce Davidson, Josef Koudelka, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Carl de Keyzer, James Nachtwey, Cheryl Richards, Henry Wessel, Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr, Lee Friedlander … the list is endless."

SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commission Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21.

WEB SITE www.reciprocity-failure.com

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Victor J. Blue

NAME Victor J. Blue

TITLE Honduran immigrants, Detention Center Tapachula Mexico

THE STORY "I went to the Guatemala-Mexico border to photograph immigration there. These guys had been caught trying to ride the freight train to the United States. We only had a few minutes to take pictures inside. They were on a bus back to Tegucigalpa within a day, probably just to try again."

FAVORITE MONOGRAPHS The Mennonites by Larry Towell (Phaidon, 2000), Exploding into Life by Eugene Richards and Dorothy Lynch (Aperture, 1986), Kosovo 1999–2000: Flight of Reason by Paolo Pellegrin and Tim Judah (Trolley, 2002), Under a Grudging Sun: Photographs from Haiti Libere 1986–1988 by Alex Webb (Thames and Hudson, 1989).

WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? "The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the people of San Joaquin County."

WEB SITES www.victorjblue.com, online.recordnet.com/projects/iraq/Jose/index.html

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Vala Cliffton

NAME Vala Cliffton

TITLE Unicorn

THE STORY "Unicorn is a portrait of my niece and my brother after their trip to Hawaii. My niece is in love with Hawaii and could not seem to detach herself from her scuba gear that afternoon. My brother was trying to catch a nap before dinner. The combination of elements in this unposed portrait captures an essential and intriguing aspect of their father-daughter relationship."

INSPIRATIONS "The Family of Man [Harry N. Abrams] was the first photography book I can remember picking up and being interested in. Photography was always a part of our family life. One of my projects while at the San Francisco Art Institute was to print the black-and-white snapshots taken of the family over the years."

WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? "I have spent the past couple or years working as a filmmaker and producing music videos, some of which I have put up on YouTube at youtube.com/alavala11."

SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commision Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21.

WEB SITE alavala.com

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Matthias Geiger

NAME Matthias Geiger

TITLE Train

THE STORY Train is taken from Geiger’s "Tide" series, which he describes as "an examination of human presence" in "places of transit and momentary rest…. The technique of layering still images allows past, present, and future moments to appear simultaneously, reflecting the notion that each moment in time is a construct of our memories, our presence, and our projections."

INSPIRATIONS "Direct physical experience such as being outdoors, dance, and meditation, as well as readings on metaphysics."

WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? A series on utopian subcultures.

SHOW "Matthias Geiger: Tide." Sept. 6–Oct. 20. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

WEB SITE www.matthiasgeiger.com

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Robert Gumpert

NAME Robert Gumpert

TITLE Untitled

THE STORY "For the past 13 years I’ve been doing an off-and-on documentary project called ‘Lost Promise: The Criminal Justice System.’ This image was done in August 2006 while I was documenting the closing of San Francisco County Jail No. 3. Built in 1934 and beset by a number of serious issues and several lawsuits ordering its closure, the jail was finally closed in August 2006, when inmates were moved to County Jail No. 5, built on land adjacent to the old jail."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Don McCullin, Lewis Hine, August Sander, Leonard Freed, Gilles Peres, and Philip Jones Griffith.

WEB SITE www.robertgumpert.com

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Amanda Herman

NAME Amanda Herman

TITLE Untitled

THE STORY The image is taken from Herman’s most recent work, the short film Lost Island, which looks at the impact of Hurricane Katrina on one large family two years after the storm forced them from their home in Chalmette, La. Herman met the Morris family in Oakland while doing free family portraits for survivors at a relief day in October 2005, one month after Katrina drove them from their homes, and, she writes, "over time, I became interested in exploring the intricacies of one family’s experience with the disaster." Donations and income from the sale of the Lost Island DVD will go into a family fund to assist the Morrises as they rebuild their lives in Oakland.

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Seydou Keita, Allen Sekula, Susan Meiselas, Jeff Wall, Wing Young Huie, Wendy Ewald, Jessica Ingram, Eric Gottesman, and others.

SHOW "Inchoate," through Aug. 11. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary, mezzanine, SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

WEB SITE www.amandaherman.com

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Désirée Arlette Holman

NAME Désirée Arlette Holman

TITLE Something Ain’t Right

THE STORY "This image is from a larger series of video and photo work depicting actors wearing crude, handmade (by me) chimp costumes. Something Ain’t Right was inspired by smoking chimps in zoos in South Africa and China. One zookeeper claimed that the chimps were smoking because they are frustrated. Could captivity make a chimp neurotic and lead it to smoke? Others claimed that the chimps were imitating tourists, recalling the cliché ‘Monkey see, monkey do.’ "

INSPIRATION "I am inspired by psychology, popular culture, figurative sculptures (including toys), art, and various types of fantasy and fiction making. I capitalize on the potential to create fantasy from realistic imagery through the use of the camera."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Currently include Tracey Moffatt, Liza May Post, and Suzy Poling.

SHOWS "CCA: 100 Years in the Making," at the Oakland Museum of Art, and a solo show at San Francisco’s Silverman Gallery. Both open in October.

WEB SITE www.desireeholman.com

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Job Piston

NAME Job Piston

TITLE A Year Later

THE STORY "I was making portraits of young Hollywood and became interested in deconstructing glamour. This is a good friend of mine who was sent away to a facility for a long while. I took this picture the first time I visited him. Today popular figures openly go to rehab; it too has become glamorous."

INSPIRATION "Complicated personalities, intimacy in public spaces, secrets, the figure, and the fountain of youth."

SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commission Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21; "Evidence of Things Unseen," Peninsula Museum of Art in Belmont, through Oct. 21; solo show at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco in October.

WEB SITES www.jobpiston.com, book-of-job.blogspot.com

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Walt Odets

NAME Walt Odets

TITLE Greg Hoffspiegel, Palo Alto, California, 2007

THE STORY "Because it is so instantaneous, there is much chance in photography. This photograph seems to me about the gaze and emotion of the three figures, some combination of attention, reflection, loss, and pathos, as well as the visual organization."

INSPIRATION "I have taken pictures since I was 16. If I can use the camera in a way that forces deconstruction of what we normally see but do not observe, then I feel I have accomplished something."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS "Henri Cartier-Bresson, of course, and Ed Ruscha and Lee Friedlander, for their elegance and form, intellect, and relentless literal rendering, respectively."

SHOW An October 2007 three-person show at SF Camerawork, devoted to winners of the James D. Phelan Award for photography.

WEB SITE www.waltodets.com/photo

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Jim Goldberg

NAME Jim Goldberg

TITLE Untitled

PHOTO COURTESY OF STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

THE STORY The image is drawn from "The New Europeans," a project Goldberg started around the time of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. The series focuses on the journeys of refugees and immigrants from war-torn or economically devastated homelands in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere to settle in Europe, specifically Greece and Ukraine. In June, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris presented Goldberg with the HCB Award so he could travel to his subjects’ countries of origin and tell the complete stories of their migration.

SHOW "Jim Goldberg: New Work." Oct. 3–Nov. 10. Reception Oct. 4, 5:30–7:30 p.m. Stephen Wirtz Gallery, 49 Geary, third floor, SF. (415) 433-6879, wirtzgallery.com

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