Max Goldberg

Weekend warrior

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Phil Spector may or may not have been the first to use layers of overdubs to convey the widescreen-aspect ratio of teenage emotion. Nonetheless, he certainly carved a niche. Adolescent euphoria be thy name: Brian Wilson, "Baba O’Riley," Bradford Cox, and now Anthony Gonzalez on his new M83 album, Saturdays=Youth (Mute).

"I have such good memories of my teenage years," Gonzalez confesses over the phone from his native Antibes, France. Saturdays=Youth wraps wasted youth in nostalgia for 1980s pop, and it’s a dangerously fun tonic. "John Hughes was my main influence on this album," Gonzalez said, and the proof’s in the overheated lyrics, the sun-struck portraits, and the quick changes between subgenres, which resemble so many high school cliques. Saturdays=Youth is no less ambient than Brian Eno’s chilliest scores, but instead of Music for Airports, it’s Gonzalez’s "Music for a Molly Ringwald Movie."

When Gonzalez first emerged with his massive, bright synth rainbows on earlier M83 albums like M83 (Mute, 2001) and Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts (Mute, 2003), he came off as a post-shoegaze Enya. The crucial change on Saturdays=Youth is first apparent after the marching chorus opening "Kim and Jessie" drops out, leaving space for Gonzalez’s verse. Instead of coasting on an endless climax-loop, the song makes effective use of a traditional pop structure — choruses, bridge, and masterfully diffused outro — to convey the simple exuberance of two teenage girls sneaking liquor in a patch of woods. Gonzalez downplays revisionist favorites like My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain here in favor of shinier surfaces descending from groups like Simple Minds and Tears for Fears.

M83’s dips into catchy new wave ("Graveyard Girl"), Hot Topic goth ("Skin of the Night") and electro-gospel ("We Own the Sky") are smoothed by the album’s high definition gloss. After only working with sound engineers in the past, Gonzalez opted to collaborate with two different producers on Saturdays=Youth. Ken Thomas’ long résumé makes the album one degree removed from Gonzalez favorites Cocteau Twins, while Ewan Pearson is known for his sleek dance tracks. "The combination of these two producers brings something interesting," Gonzalez muses, and the songs do seem to sway between velvet reverie and intense ear candy.

"My older brother used to lend me his VHS, so I used to watch with my friends," Gonzalez said. "A lot of horror movies and a lot of the teen movies. When I was watching the John Hughes movies, I was 13 or 14. I felt really close to the characters." At its best, Saturdays=Youth slows these generational markings into a ritualized ghost dance. The album is certainly a simpler, less troubled nostalgia piece than something like Donnie Darko (2001). What of the fact that this heavily marketed teenage paradise was borne of American conservatism? Gonzalez doesn’t have the answers, but his transporting music makes you feel silly for asking too many questions.

M83

With Berg Sans Nipple

Wed/21, 9 p.m., $16

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

Follow that “Balloon”

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After years of Tarantino twists and shot-for-shot shams, homage has gotten a bad name. Let’s call Flight of the Red Balloon something else: a transportation device in which Paris, Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 slice of magical realism The Red Balloon, and a patchwork family float in and out of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s inscriptive view. At 61, the former Taiwanese new wave pacesetter is on a travel kick. After moving to Tokyo to film 2003’s Café Lumière, his tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, the filmmaker next went to Paris, thanks to a commission by the Musée d’Orsay. Flight of the Red Balloon‘s reception at Cannes was lukewarm, but away from that hothouse it’s plainly a masterwork. Mysterious without being opaque, it is as delightful in its particulars as in its overall musical intelligence.

It starts simply, with a boy and a balloon. The red orb reappears periodically in Hou’s film, like a refrain, but this prologue provides the fullest convergence with Lamorisse’s original. A sleepy-eyed child calls out to the air before descending the Metro steps; the camera pans up, catches a first glimpse of the talisman as it lingers behind wind-brushed trees, and then follows it across the rooftops of an overcast Paris.

The balloon retreats, but Hou’s camera stays alight. We soon find the boy, Simon, living in a jumbled apartment with his mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a blustery creative type who voices puppet shows. She has engaged a young Chinese filmmaker as Simon’s nanny: Song Fang (playing herself) is first seen entering Suzanne’s puppet theatre, her oval visage shrouded in the richly-toned shades of black typical of Hou’s collaborations with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin.

The conflicts within this autumnal story world pass at a remove. Hou wryly observes aspects of Parisian life (a downstairs neighbor unable to ask a simple kitchen favor without detailing his mutton stew, for example), but doesn’t tether his film to such observations. Instead he emphasizes resonant textures: the musical interplay between the relaxed camerawork and Binoche’s breathy, bleached-blond performance; the lyrical enfolding of a child’s half-comprehending, absorbed perspective with that of a foreigner’s; and too many paired scenes and visual echoes to count, including a couple of lovely pirouettes up and down a spiral staircase. Throughout, Hou’s inclusive model of filmmaking draws from painting, music, and puppetry. Whenever he ventures into the mother and child’s apartment, currents of light and color are pitched between minimalism and reverie.

Much like some of this season’s other film highlights (In the City of Sylvia, Alexandra, Paranoid Park), Hou’s latest foregoes plot restrictions for acute ambience and sustained portraiture. I didn’t respond to Flight of the Red Balloon as quickly as I did to the others, but it’s the one I most want to revisit. Diffuse yet deep, Hou’s vision erases the boundaries between his film and the worlds that surround it.

The red balloon of The Red Balloon beckons, but Hou’s film also bears a surprising resemblance to Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) in its skipping ellipticism, its depiction of a detached Asian woman swimming amid unkempt Parisians, its utterly free way of withholding story information and averting linearity, and its double-exposed invocation of a past French film classic. Assayas is no stranger to Hou’s work, having made a documentary about the Taiwanese director in 1997 (HHH), but their unique sensibilities impart common materials with entirely different moods. Where Irma Vep radiates frenetic energy, Hou’s profoundly subdued film lingers in the drowsy quiet of afternoon. In this respect, Flight of the Red Balloon also reminds me of another French film about childhood, stasis, and puppet shows: François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). One new wave shores up another, and an old man’s meditation reflects a precocious debut like so many carefully angled mirrors.

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

Opens Fri/16 at Bay Area theaters
www.ifcfilms.com

CC Riders

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

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

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

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

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

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

SFIFF: Critic’s choice

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SFIFF J. Hoberman — trenchant weekly critic, book author, programmer, teacher — is celebrating his 30th year at the Village Voice, an unheard-of stretch for a film writer. (Pauline Kael’s famous tenure at the New Yorker lasted 23 years.) Freshly garlanded with a three-week program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and an Anthology Film Archive screening of his early forays in experimental filmmaking, Hoberman continues his prize tour with this year’s Mel Novikoff Award.

The recent programs at BAM and Anthology highlight attributes that made Hoberman an essential buttress against the sycophantic rivalries flowing from Kael’s 1960s showdowns with Andrew Sarris. Over the phone from his New York office, Hoberman told me about his early days at the Voice: "I created a beat of things the other critics weren’t particularly interested in, and that took in a lot of stuff. Originally they had brought me on to write about avant-garde and experimental film, but pretty soon I was writing about documentary, animation, revival series, foreign films that weren’t from France … all kinds of things."

Hoberman’s BAM program was accordingly unwieldy, covering Andrei Rublev (1969) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Ernie Gehr and Martin Scorsese. Cinephilia Hoberman-style seems to be everywhere at once, encompassing Looney Tunes, No Wave New York, Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Yiddish cinema. It’s eclecticism with a program, matched by a willingness to chase the rabbit down its hole — but never at the expense of analytical rigor.

Although Hoberman is a professed admirer of the puzzling jazz in Manny Farber’s criticism, his prose is solidly explicatory and instructive. He knows how to open a discussion: "In its tireless attempts to mean everything to everyone and empirical willingness to try anything once, the American culture industry intermittently generates its own precursors, parallels, and analogues to local or European avant-gardism." He’s an apt profiler: "Pain and Fear — and the convulsive desire for public recognition — are Scorsese’s meat." And he’s not afraid to take a stand, as with a recent rave for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007): "From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run."

He’s also an accomplished facilitator of Jean-Luc Godard’s idea that the history of cinema is synchronous with the history of the 20th century. We can count on Hoberman to connect Terror’s Advocate (2007) with La Chinoise (1967), to draw a line from a prescient film like A Face in the Crowd (1957) to Watergate and Nashville (1975). When his interests come together — as with an appreciation of Southland Tales‘ (2007) avant-gardism, midnight movie appeal, and socio-political currency — sparks still fly. Talking about an upcoming "prequel" he’s penning to his 2005 decoupage of ’60s cinema, The Dream Life (New Press), Hoberman muses, "I think that now, or at least since [Ronald] Reagan, it’s sort of customary to see movies as political scenarios." To the extent that this is true, Hoberman is due significant credit — his meditations on that movie-land president, for one, are as adroit as that of any policy wonk.

Historical markers notwithstanding, Hoberman’s film selection for his special night is likely the most unabashedly sensuous movie not starring Asia Argento to play this year’s festival. Spanish director José Luis Guerín described In the City of Sylvia (2007) as a "simple" film at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, and it certainly does offer a distilled vision of cinematic paradise: gazing and grazing faces, old Strasbourg, and a slow stitch of sound and image.

Our inlet to Sylvia is a whiskered young man, haunting the city at a dreamy remove. He sits in an outdoor café with his notebook, sketching the faces of radiant women while Guerín orchestrates fractal cutting, multilevel staging of faces, and intricately gradated sound design into a sun-dappled symphony. After changing seats, the dreamer recognizes a woman sitting behind a pane of glass. She leaves and he follows, locked in an ambiguous reverie inscribed with resonant detail and sweet ambiguity.

Sylvia fulfills the cinephile’s dream of disembodiment. "It’s a narrative that comes organically from the fact of making the movie rather than dramatizing a story situation," Hoberman opines. "There’s a real love of cinema, the process of it." Each of the film’s handful of extended passages is distinct in its precise design, but this blissful lucidity Hoberman describes is Sylvia‘s central melody and romance.

Late in Guerín’s film, after a yearning bar scene set to Blondie’s "Heart of Glass," the young man sits at a tram stop, considering the waiting women and rushing window reflections for some clue as to his own loss. In a virtuosic eliding glimpse of a passing bus, Guerín dissolves the sounds and images of shots already superimposed by the panes of glass. A quick succession of several more multi-tiered, unexpectedly conversant portraits of women ("Elles," the dreamer notes in his book) finally lands on a mesmerizing rear-angle of a woman’s hair blowing wildly in the wind. The young man can’t put pencil to paper. He’s as enamored as we are with this siren song from what the director calls "the continent of cinema," a place J. Hoberman knows all too well.

AN EVENING WITH J. HOBERMAN (includes screening of In the City of Sylvia), Sun/27, 6 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA Tues/29, 4 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 9 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

Mothers of invention

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In spite of music culture’s constant craving for new waves and next-big-things, there are always those bands that do not hew to any marketable bubble, the ones that skew the trends and equations of rock chronologies with their sui generis melds. After several albums of high-flying concepts, sheet music-necessitating technique, and stylistic miscegenation, Dave Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors have firmly established themselves as such a group.

First conceived in New Haven, Conn., Longstreth’s namesake went through many permutations before settling in Brooklyn as an elemental two guitars-bass-drums quartet. The current grouping plays the leader’s chamber-rock compositions with fire and finesse. Bassist Angel Deradoorian and guitarist Amber Coffman’s double-helix backup vocals leave Longstreth free to float his quivering voice and slash at his thin, West African–kissed guitar lines as if they were exclamations. Hypertuned and aerobic, a Dirty Projectors concert is a bold tonic of intellectualism and adrenaline.

I try to say as much to Longstreth when I catch him on the phone in Brooklyn, and he muses, "I kind of like feeling that that’s a component of the feeling of the music … [that] tension of the relatedness, or unrelatedness, of what our mouths are doing and what our fingers are doing." All of Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors records are accordingly stretchy, though last year’s Rise Above (Dead Oceans) is probably the most cohesive formulation of the project’s intrinsic push-pull. The back story, well trod by now, is that Longstreth recovered a cassette case for Black Flag’s hardcore LP, Damaged (SST, 1984), without the actual tape, and in a flight of Borgesian invention, set out on writing songs refracted by his memory of the original album.

Longstreth has indulged similarly sly threads before — 2005’s The Getty Address (Western Vinyl) had something to do with Don Henley — though hardcore pieties meant Rise Above received more scrutiny than usual. "We got some really amazing hate mail on our MySpace page," Longstreth says, laughing. Hardly a straightforward tribute, Rise Above references the essential "no" of Black Flag’s attack in both music and lyric, but inscribes the songs with double-consciousness and complexity rather than Greg Ginn’s brute strength.

Syrupy strings introduce a snaky, sweet guitar line and a dirty disco bottom. Thundering female and male choruses overhang Longstreth’s echoing verse before launching off for an oasis of backwards guitars and cymbals. This all happens a couple of minutes into "No More." Longstreth may think in fragments, but the resulting sound is one of passion, not math. His hot-blooded appreciation of pop and R&B — he mentions T-Pain and Chris Brown as two current interests — doesn’t come with a smirk. Though these elements are mostly cloaked in convolution on Dirty Projectors recordings, Longstreth occasionally offers a more unobstructed view of his visionary soul music. The title track of Rise Above sounds almost newborn in its plaintive wail, and the same can be said for older tracks like "Not Having Found" from The Getty Address and "Unmoved" from Slaves’ Graves and Ballads (Western Vinyl, 2004).

With all the rehashing of post-punk over the last several years, it’s hard to imagine a more eloquent last word on the subject than Rise Above. When Longstreth looked back on an earlier era, it wasn’t to revive something: it was to let it go, and then keep right on pushing ahead. When I ask Longstreth what he’s been up to, he tells me he’s been busy working through new material with the band for their upcoming tour. "The music’s written with [them] in mind," he explains. "It’s the first stuff I’ve done that’s been like that."

DIRTY PROJECTORS

With No Kids and Rafter

Fri/11, 9 p.m., $13

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1422

www.theindependentsf.com

Bigger than life

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How would you define an improbable Tilt-A-Whirl Technicolor or Vistavision or Cinemascope view of American virtue and vice? Jean-Luc Godard’s term for it was Tashlinesque. Watching the feverish films in the Pacific Film Archive’s short Frank Tashlin retrospective, we see an artist pushing the outermost limits of cinematic realism, gorging 1950s America on its desire for bigger, better, and faster.

The Tashlinesque land of excess encompasses Jayne Mansfield’s breasts, Kool Aid-red convertibles, and bubblegum teenagers. If there is a milk bottle in a Tashlin film, it will cream when a pin-up walks by. Ten-gallon hats spontaneously ejaculate oil. "The room temperature is changing, if you catch my cruder meaning," Mansfield coos in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and we do, over and over again. Tashlin’s America is a nation of alcoholics and dupes, softheaded nincompoops and sexpot cynics. France had Jacques Tati, and we had — and have — Tashlin.

Just as it did with other stateside pulp visionaries, it took the French to recognize Tashlin’s genius. "There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust [1956] and It Happened One Night [1934]… but a difference of kind," Godard wrote in a 1957 assessment for Cahiers du Cinéma. There’s a touch of cruelty (and a trace of the director’s cartoon roots) in Tashlin’s preference for physically excessive actors like Mansfield and Jerry Lewis, though the way he uses these figures to channel the distorting nature of American gluttony and naïveté is brutally effective.

It’s not just the bodies that are inflated. The frame itself seems to be stretched over the course of these films, with camera angles and props used to accentuate the horizontality of the widescreen image. Just as Preston Sturges outdid his era of talky screwballs with dialogue-mad farces, Tashlin amplified ’50s Hollywood’s taste for grandiosity and crudeness to a pointedly unmanageable extreme. His self-aware movies give a sharp sense of the studio system in its death throes.

As satire, Tashlin’s send-ups of ad men and agents are as prescient as they are unsparing. A typical Tashlin alarm is sounded when Dean Martin’s character in Artists & Models (1955) announces at the outset that he moved to New York to make money in order to study art. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Tony Randall’s title character turns on the television to hear what the starlet Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) is saying to reporters on his front lawn — an apt commentary on the way technologies abstract reality and invade our privacy. The spin cycles continue to gain speed: the ’90s were an especially prime slice of the Tashlinesque, what with a booming economy, celebrity sex tapes, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Cinematically speaking, Richard Kelly just tried his hand at Tashlinesque with Southland Tales (2006), though I can’t help thinking the originator would have done better with the musical numbers.

Tashlin’s burlesque is dexterous, but it doesn’t hatch from any stable logic. Television is clearly the enemy, but the movies aren’t much better. With every bathing beauty and each overripe burst of Technicolor, the director indulges and implicates our most blithering desires. (One feels like a child reaching out for a lollipop while watching Tashlin’s films: when Godard famously quipped that there was no blood in his own 1965 Pierrot le fou but only red, he might have been quoting his American forebear.) If the plots nominally resolve themselves, the tone and visual style remain pitched between splendor and disgust.

"By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically," Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker. It was Tashlin who taught us to see this way. If there were any justice to art history, he would be in the pantheon of Pop Art, not just for his content, but also for his bold use of color and scale. But he of all people would have known that artistic success is on the same shaky ground as achievement in politics, entertainment, and business — same as it ever was.

FRANK TASHLIN: AMERICAN NONSENSE

Fri/11 through April 18

PFA Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Deja vu, times two

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TAKE ONE With his short film Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais introduced the world to his idiosyncratic and esoteric filmmaking, while offering an initial glance at his obsessions with memory, time, and space. He would further elaborate on this trio of fixations in his extraordinary debut feature, Hiroshima mon Amour (1959). But his second feature, Last Year in Marienbad (1961), is where Resnais truly allowed himself to grapple with these issues, as well as with cinematic form.

Because of its enigmatic plot, mysterious characters, and various peculiarities, Marienbad has inspired a wide variety of discussions about the nature of time and memory, and about the divisions and links between reality and fantasy. Although such explorations are totally valid, the most striking — and perhaps somewhat neglected — of Marienbad‘s many wonderfully bizarre features is its treatment of space.

Resnais’ choice and use of locations is very imposing. Marienbad‘s two protagonists — including Delphine Seyrig in only her second feature role — encounter each other at a hotel, and try to figure out whether they had met and fallen in love at that same place a year ago. The hotel is actually composed from the interiors and exteriors of various grandiose chateaux in Germany. Impressive scales, strictly geometric gardens, and an exhaustive array of rooms immediately give the impression of a sumptuous maze in which one can get trapped and become lost.

Employing repetitive long pans and dolly shots throughout most of the film, Resnais painstakingly observes the hotel’s interiors, emphasizing their excessive ornamentation. Endless corridors give way to doorways that yield yet more hallways and living rooms. All of them are decorated to perfection; all of them feel terribly empty, cold, still, and asphyxiating. These images are juxtaposed with shots that similarly observe the hotel’s occupants. Clad in their flamboyant Coco Chanel dresses, members of the bourgeoisie are shown aimlessly wondering around the hotel, engaging in commonplace activities and conversations.

By complimenting this visual pattern with eerie organ music, Resnais achieves a striking effect. As film professor and writer Laura Rascaroli puts it: “The [film recalls] one of the main features of baroque architecture, the use of a superabundance of details and decorative elements as a means of filling up the void and repressing the fear of nothingness, of oblivion, of death.”

Few filmmakers manage to treat space as more than mere background. Michelangelo Antonioni is one obvious example. In Marienbad, Resnais moves beyond an exploration of the creative possibilities that a film’s space has to offer. He goes so far as to use space to actually produce meaning. That idea, perhaps more than anything else, is what this ageless masterpiece is all about. (Maria Komodore)

TAKE TWO To begin, a word for Sylvette Baudrot, “script girl” for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s arch postmodernist plaything, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Film critics are often guilty of underplaying contributions by screenwriters and cinematographers, but script girls? You’d better believe it with a film as rigorously mathematical as Marienbad. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s creation defies continuity, but it rests heavily on bridges and echoes, its staging directions endowed with interlocking, psychic value — all impossible, one assumes, without Baudrot’s attentive supervision. Resnais goofily nods to his obsessive predecessor Alfred Hitchcock when he places a cardboard cutout of the master of suspense in an early shot. But Baudrot provides the direct link: she was the script supervisor on Hitchcock’s 1955 Riviera dalliance, To Catch a Thief.

Credentials aside, Last Year at Marienbad is an elegant whirlpool, all the more notable for being made amid the fuck-all bluster of the early French new wave. At a sodden grand hotel, “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi) implores “A” (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year and agreed to reconvene away from the watchful eye of A’s husband “M” (Sacha Pitoëff). Some of the aspects surrounding these characters seem hopelessly musty, encrusted by decades of swollen undergraduate debate. There is the flattening score, and the famous strategy game that M always wins. Try not to giggle at those scenes in which a character’s bulging eyes conjure so many Universal B-movies — indeed, Pitoëff seems to have been cast for his gaunt shape, evocative as it is of Karloffs and Lugosis past.

And yet, Marienbad‘s distancing front-line of attack remains a radical proposition: erotic obsession defanged of the eros, and further soused in sounds and images that seem, if not deceitful, then at least unverifiable. At the center of this opaque sphere is Seyrig who, as A, has the unenviable task of making something of being more than a marionette. The film is most symphonic — and terrifying — in those moments when Resnais’ camera movements collude with Albertazzi’s direct address, simultaneously conjecturing and ensnaring the imagined A.

Marienbad‘s chilly core endures despite the extent to which its formalist shock tactics have been assimilated into mainstream productions. In stretching cinematic space-time like so much chewing gum, the film provides a direct link between Louis Feuillade’s shape-shifting serials (1913’s Fantômas, 1915’s Les Vampires), Stanley Kubrick’s gliding horror (1980’s The Shining, in particular) and latter-day brainteasers like Memento (2000), Being John Malkovich and The Matrix (both 1999). If this is Resnais’ unexpected lineage, Seyrig’s A keeps a different company. She’s still lost in Marienbad‘s hall-of-mirrors (the last line, like a curse: “Losing your way in the still night, alone with me”). But while there, she might catch a reflection of some kindred spirits: Kim Novak, of course, but also Rita Hayworth, Laura Dern, and least suspecting of them all, Rose in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936). (Max Goldberg)

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

Through March 27

Opens Fri/21; $7–$9.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

 

Desperately seeking cinema

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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

Reveille in reverb

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The first thing fans will notice about Beach House’s second album, Devotion (Carpark), is that it hews to the same gauzy sonic architecture of their 2006 eponymous debut. An elegant combination of keyboard beats, organ drones, apparitional electric slide guitar, and Victoria Legrand’s molasses vocals gave Beach House a golden glow that sent music scribes running to their thesaurus for "autumnal" synonyms. These elements sound thicker on Devotion, though a few spins down the line it becomes apparent that the difference lies more in the compositions themselves than in any studio trickery.

This isn’t a small distinction, given our tendency to fetishize certain sounds. Phil Spector productions, Dusty Springfield laments, and Lee Hazelwood bonanzas all have brilliant surfaces, but they also have the depth of classical songwriting, complete with bridges, vamps, and theatrical flourishes. Legrand, the niece of French film composer Michel Legrand, grew up in a musical atmosphere. The two of us have a phone date, but work and a sick dog interfere, leaving her to e-mail me from her Baltimore home about her glam-rocking father ("My papa wore tight purple satin pants, with hair down to ‘there’<0x2009>") and her studies at Paris’s International Theatre School Jacques Lecoq ("I was trained classically, and I know Alex [Scally, her Beach House bandmate] also has an affinity towards the classical, old-fashioned world, so I think it’s a given we’d be into the Zombies and . . . watered-down show-tune buildups").

And so we get a folded gem like Devotion‘s "Heart of Chambers," in which Legrand breathily asks, "Would you be my longtime baby?" On "Holy Dances," a drowsy, shaker-spurred verse flowers into the sunburst of Scally’s arpeggios. The centerpiece chorus of "All the Years" echoes with the same kind of distant regret running through the best of old girl-group records. Still, the purest pleasure on Devotion might be its sole cover, a version of Daniel Johnston’s "Some Things Last a Long Time": Beach House distills the song to a plucked melody, lolling drum beat — it’s like listening to a "Be My Baby" single at 33 rpm — and Legrand’s barely there inflection. "We felt compelled by the fragile essence of the song and merely wanted to capture it, if only for a brief moment," she writes.

Across Devotion, Legrand’s phrasing emerges as a major shaping force. She knows how to pause — inserting the breath before the chorus in "Turtle Island" and a delicious lingering note over at the end of "You Came to Me." And her sometimes slumberous drawl gives the 1960s pop orchestrations a European edge — Nico comes to mind — and from that same era Legrand also seems to have picked up the special knowledge that spelling a word out, as with "D.A.R.L.I.N.G.," always makes it sexier.

"We don’t have full rock band power, but that can also be detrimental to songwriting," Legrand writes. "Being a duo enables us to start simply and build from there." It also allows the twosome to maintain a key measure of intimacy. Though their preproduced effects emulate yesteryear’s studio magic, listeners never lose sight of the modest means of this music. Devotion‘s cover image strikes a similar balance, signaling formality — Legrand and Scally sit at a candlelit table — while admitting a homegrown touch: the album’s title is spelled out in a cake’s icing, and Legrand’s casual bare foot peeks out at the bottom of the frame.

If Beach House established the group’s palette, Devotion sees the duo working more confidently with the brush. When I describe some of the new disc’s brightest passages as "Technicolor moments" to Legrand, she replies: "I personally heard Technicolor in ‘Turtle Island’ during the bridge because all of a sudden the voices burst out, and it feels literally like paint and light are bursting through . . . a soft burst like a bubble in slow motion." That beats "autumnal" any day.

BEACH HOUSE

With Anaura and Best Wishes

Sat/15, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

Beautiful losers

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Great movies stay with you in the oddest ways. In the days after I first saw Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, I was preternaturally attuned to the sound of skateboards dragging the street outside my bedroom window—the slow tug of concrete, the bumping waves of wheels. This ambient strain surrounds Paranoid Park‘s cherubic point of focus: Alex (Gabe Nevins), a sleepy-eyed skater waiting out his parents’ divorce in a Portland, Ore., suburb. He occupies most of the film’s exquisitely composed frames, though he’s more a figure etched in light than a proper protagonist.

Figure-eight narrations and slow-moving Steadicam tracks have underpinned Van Sant’s last couple of films (2003’s Elephant, 2005’s Last Days), though they’re more artfully embedded in Paranoid Park‘s fragrant sprawl, not least because of the visual equivalencies provided by the film’s skateboarding footage. Blake Nelson’s airless young-adult novel presents Alex’s story as an extended confessional letter. Van Sant dissembles chronology and inflects the narration with associative freedom.

Most immediately, Van Sant folds Nelson’s plot to delay the central trauma, which first enters our vision peripherally through a detective’s investigation and a local news report. With that said, narrowing the effect of this organizing principle is a little like trying to get a fix on Phil Spector’s reverb or Gerhard Richter’s gray — Van Sant’s placid puzzling is a textural aesthetic before it’s a device. Where Nelson’s moral tale is a streamlined account, Van Sant’s adaptation aims for something more transparent and sublime. His Alex is at once layered and laid bare.

This channeling begins with a slow-creeping tracking shot as Alex is interviewed by a detective. What begins as a conversation eventually lands as a full-frame portrait of the adolescent, the detective’s words ("What’s your parental situation?") left hanging in the air, irrelevant. As Nevins garbles his lines, the boundary between the nonprofessional actor and his character becomes palpably blurred. Does Van Sant’s MySpace casting call automatically qualify as tawdriness? Not when Paranoid Park maintains its enigmatic distance. Indeed, Van Sant renders the film’s MacBook surfaces — the subdued luminescence, boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and soundtrack shuffle from Elliot Smith to the Juliet of the Spirits score all evoke a MacBook — as something unique and refined.

Like so many high school boys, Alex is essentially passive (see the film’s hilarious sex scene, with talky girlfriend Jennifer’s blond wisps dissolving Alex’s face like something from Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon). Van Sant captures this state via formal permeability, rigorously designing Paranoid Park‘s memory machine as a head trip. Strips of slow motion, a narrow-depth-of-field, ping-ponging sound, a mumbled voice-over — all these elements serve to cover the largely amateur cast but also to project Alex’s environmental interiority. This tendency reaches a swollen apex during a posttraumatic shower. The camera again draws in, and Christopher Doyle’s typically luscious lensing isolates every droplet; the lighting darkens, and the blistering sheets of water-noise are overlaid with thick forest sounds as Alex drops his head, revealing the bathroom wallpaper’s bird motif.

There’s no buried logic to Paranoid Park, and even though it’s shaped as much like a jigsaw as Donnie Darko (2001) and Rian Johnson’s underappreciated Brick (2005), it doesn’t invite solutions. Whether or not Alex’s withholding aura is read as a symbolic closeting, Van Sant’s direction is some kind of sorcery, especially in those B-roll streams of easy riders through which the film’s story expands to encompass all breathless teenage riots. Paranoid Park ends with these images after cutting from Alex asleep in biology class, dreaming of flying. He never touches the ground, always hovering between idyll and responsibility, the dream and his place in it. (Max Goldberg)

PARANOID PARK

Opens March 21 at Bay Area theaters
www.myspace.com/gusvansant

“My Name is Albert Ayler”

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REVIEW My Name Is Albert Ayler offers a close reading of the titular musician, a saxophone colossus who pushed the emotional limits of free jazz, but it also tells a broader story about the strange currents of American avant-garde music. Interviews with Ayler’s churchgoing Ohio family, New York City compatriots, and Scandinavian admirers trace a particular, though by no means atypical, passage. The tenor saxophonist first achieved renown in Stockholm, Sweden, where he began to experiment with the wailing, explosive runs that would some years later turn even John Coltrane’s head. ‘Trane specifically asked for Ayler to play at his funeral, and the photographs and live sound from the memorial service included in the film are searing enough to make even the staunchest defender of melody reconsider. Rather than employing warts-and-all tactics, first-time Swedish director Kasper Collin keeps a respectful distance from Ayler’s mysteries, nowhere more hauntingly than in a few late sequences regarding the musician’s purported tendency to stare into the sun. There is so much we will never know about Ayler, Collin seems to tell us, but watching former collaborators listen to his music through cracked expressions of pain and amazement is revealing enough.

MY NAME IS ALBERT AYLER runs Sun/9–Tues/11 at the Red Vic Movie House. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

World of echo

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It’s been 20 years since My Bloody Valentine released their breakthrough album, Isn’t Anything (Creation) — long enough for it to be wound up in a younger generation’s musical DNA. For how frequently the band is referenced by both musicians and critics, the rich double-sidedness of MBV’s peculiar attack often gets simplified as "swooning" and "ethereal." Erstwhile Deerhunter vocalist Bradford Cox is one of the few shoegaze suitors who seems clued in to the searing — and often distressing — tensions that distinguish My Bloody Valentine from followers like Slowdive and Ride. In Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (Kranky), his first official release as Atlas Sound, Cox has worked out an exquisite combination of shoegaze and laptop pop, a fucked-up beauty waiting to be adored.

A self-described "queer art punk," the young Atlantan first turned heads for his Internet indiscretions and outré performances with Deerhunter. The words Cox used to describe author Dennis Cooper in ANP Quarterly may as well be his own propulsive mantra: "The only thing he does to infuriate so many people is to write honestly, expressing things that most people would prefer to stay far under the surface."

While Cox’s transgressions have previously edged up to mawkishness, Let the Blind channels his confessional tendencies into a newly retrospective shape. Atlas Sound’s source material, aesthetic means, and subject are inextricable from one another in the same manner as Jonathan Caouette’s first-person film, Tarnation (2003). Much glitchier than Deerhunter’s Cryptograms (Kranky, 2007), the Atlas Sound home recordings are almost exclusively about the soul-baring, delicious isolation of being alone in your adolescence. Cox has described "Quarantined" as being about children with AIDS, though the main refrain, "I am waiting to be changed," resonates with Morrissey-like wistfulness.

The music on Let the Blind drifts uneasily between bliss and terror, the heavily doctored mélange of glockenspiels and guitars conjuring a narcoleptic glow. Drone pieces like "Small Horror" and "On Guard" concentrate on specific intense emotions, while fuller arrangements like "River Card" and "Bite Marks" entangle youthful romantic obsession in soft-hewn bass melodies and howling vocals. The shoegaze textures may be Cox’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, but it’s in the treated, divested vocal tracking that Let the Blind achieves its deepest immersions.

On "Winter Vacation," the chords seem to be pulling each other apart, reaching for different resolutions — so too with the rest of the album’s balancing act of sensuousness and numbness — though never so far apart as we think. Cox has written extensively about aiming for catharsis on his heavily trafficked blog, but Let the Blind comes off more as a prismatic refracting of past intensity and indolence. It’s teenage confusion done in Technicolor, and that ought to be enough to change more than a few kids’ lives.

ATLAS SOUND

With White Rainbow and Valet

Sat/8, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com, deerhuntertheband.blogspot.com

“From San Francisco to Silicon Valley”

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REVIEW The camera loves San Francisco. Weather, light, hills, and landmarks all make it primary fodder for photographers, too many of whom hew to the postcard views. Known for his architectural documentation of the industrial outer rings of Europe’s cities, Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico came to the Bay Area to capture its transitional developments: Silicon Valley and the San Francisco of strange buildings and telephone wires. No Victorians or trolley cars here, which means that many viewers may recognize the city as they know it: construction, do-not-enter road signs, and a distant skyline; sunbathers in Dolores Park rather than the Golden Gate’s majesty; Verizon Wireless billboards; and the 76 gas station globe. A conventional picture of the Marin Headlands drifting in fog is interrupted by the foregrounding of high-rise apartments. A stunning landscape photo taken from Twin Peaks revels in the incongruities of our still-beautiful city, with grassy California hills overlaying the low-slung Sunset and Castro, and Market Street forming a V with a long afternoon shadow.

"From San Francisco to Silicon Valley" also includes a plethora of freeway shots, which makes sense, given the show’s title. Basilico shoots both the silent underpasses and the blurred velocity of downtown-bound cars. As we transition to the valley, the highways provide the visual link. Instead of giving way to a rising crowd of buildings, the roads beget alien corporate campuses and manicured exurbia. Basilico the architect gleefully frames the garish structures and sprawling sameness that define much of the Silicon Valley landscape, though his best portraits include counterpoint evocations of California nature. On the same floor of the museum, in "Picturing Modernity," Carleton E. Watkins’s photograph The Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill (circa 1868) presents San Francisco as a hungry upstart. More than 100 years later, Basilico’s shot of roughshod development in the hills outside San Jose tells a similar story.

FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO SILICON VALLEY Through June 15. Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Elastic band

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After struggling to settle into a listening routine with Dig That Treasure (Asthmatic Kitty), the sprightly debut from Bay Area trio Cryptacize, I decided to take the recording for a walk. Buoyed by the sudden spring weather, I floated down Harrison to the candy-striped fuzz of "Heaven Is Human," and before long, found certain street noises complementarily weaving their way into the track. "Bells are ringing / Gates are singing," Nedelle Torrisi coos on "Cosmic Sing-A-Long," before bandmate Chris Cohen joins to harmonize on the gentle rallying cry, "Every note is an unfinished song."

Cryptacize’s numbers are arranged as twisty medleys, their frequent stops and starts redolent of the impressionistic fragrance of melody. Torrisi and Cohen previously explored similarly horizontal song structures together in the Curtains, but the addition of percussionist Michael Carreira — who plays drums as if he were painting — and proper duets lend Cryptacize a markedly easygoing, domestic air. Sharp melodic inversions and time changes are softened by Torrisi’s and Cohen’s disarmingly sweet voices and a general balancing of tunefulness with cacophony.

As with Cohen’s earlier band Deerhoof, Cryptacize strives for the development of a private musical language rather than the typical filtering of influences. "We never really jam," Cohen e-mails from his Oakland home, "but some songs are sections designated as free tempo so we [just have to] follow each other’s movements out of the corners of our eyes. There are also parts where we improvise on a specific theme or riff, but these moments are built into a song." This kind of programmed free association is especially evident on more mosaic pieces like "Heaven Is Human," but instead of resulting in free-jazz confusion or Deerhoof density, Cryptacize’s wide-eyed stitch often seems like the score to an imaginary musical.

Part of this stems from the album’s isoutf8g production, in which the multiplicity of the compositional elements plays against a sparing sound. The overdubs are few and far between, and the silences many. "Hearing parts separately was important to us for this album. We wanted the listener to have lots of empty space," writes Cohen. Even on thicker-sounding productions like "We’ll Never Dream Again," the two guitar tracks are panned to either side, emphasizing the song’s moving parts on headphones.

One can be forgiven for picturing a stage while listening to these wide expanses. It’s there in the plaintive opening of "The Shape Above," the pitched mood swings on "How Did the Actor Laugh?," contemplative confessionals like "Water Witching Wishes," and the outstretched verses of "Stop Watch." When I ask Cohen about it, he fills me in on his and Torrisi’s youthful exposure to musical theater and sings the praises of Leonard Bernstein. "Mike actually isn’t a big fan of show tunes, although we did turn him on to our favorite, West Side Story, when we were on tour in October," Cohen e-mails, before explaining the theatrical roots of the disc’s inviting title: his father, an aspiring collegiate composer, cowrote a musical review of the same name. He lent the title to Cryptacize "cautiously," Cohen continues, "warning us that his cowriters might sue us!"

Legal proceedings notwithstanding, Cryptacize has all the qualifications to reinvent the rock opera. In the meantime, the band is readying Dig That Treasure‘s prismatic pop for the road, angling for bewitchment. "Since we don’t exactly bombard the audience with volume," writes Cohen, "Nedelle has developed a set of hand movements to hypnotize them."

CRYPTACIZE

With Why? and Dose One

March 6, 9 p.m., $13

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

Noise Pop: Joy Rides and Darby Crash test dummies

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In the current glut of music biopics and documentaries, it seems any band or scene worth its salt in influence and innovation is fair game for the big screen. Chalk it up to corporate tie-ins or affordable filmmaking equipment, Behind the Music or DIY videozines, but chances are your favorite group will someday make it to a theater near you. Eschewing polished product for its annual film program, the Noise Pop festival spotlights several ragtag productions focused on left-of-the-dial music legends.

To begin with the cream of the crop, Chris Bagley and Kim Shively’s Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides balances a measured introduction with an intimate appreciation of the titular hero. The film will inevitably be compared to In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006) for its profile of an outsider artist and its clever animations of Willis’s colorful cityscapes, but Willis was simply too one of a kind for Joy Rides to be anything but. Willis’s music and art flowed directly from the outsize personality of the hulking Chicagoan, who was raised in the projects. Bagley and Shively evidently spent a lot of time filming Willis in the years before his 2003 death, and their movie is much the better for Willis’s constant jiving, affable head butts, and offhand bouts of inspired wordplay.

Not that all of Joy Rides goes down so easy. It’s wincingly uncomfortable to watch Willis, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, knock himself upside the head while trying to "get the demons out," and some of the film’s talking heads veer dangerously close to "magical black man" territory. But there’s a discernible difference between transparency and exploitation, and Joy Rides decidedly sways toward the former. Bagley and Shively had Willis create the documentary’s credits sequences, which seems emblematic of a broader mutual appreciation. Given Willis’s prolificacy, it’s no surprise he would want a hand in the film: the next time I encounter creative restlessness, I’ll be sure to think of Willis’s maxim "The joyride keeps my ass busy."

Darby Crash was similarly driven during his brief life, but the punk vocalist’s ferocity is blunted by biopic clichés in the weirdly saccharine What We Do Is Secret. Rodger Grossman’s film follows the course of Crash’s five-year plan, which took him from high school dropout to rock ‘n’ roll suicide. The director catches some of the excitement of the Germs’ hopelessly abbreviated sets and lucks out in a nice performance by Bijou Phillips as bassist Lorna Doom, but his tendency toward sitcomish lighting and confessional monologues sinks the band’s fire in a morass of conventionality. The original Germs recently tapped Crash impersonator Shane West for a cash-in tour, proving that some legacies are never safe.

A pair of low-key documentaries cast a wider net in their hard-rock forays, with varying results. Such Hawks, Such Hounds profiles a few of the most vibrant interpreters of heavy music (Comets on Fire, Dead Meadow, Om) but without much purpose. Filmmaker John Srebalus floats between interviews with divergent bands without offering any of the categorizing insights or personal passion that made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2006) such a hit.

Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman’s documentary You Weren’t There, on the other hand, is a thrillingly exhaustive survey of early Chicago punk. Viewers may not be familiar with outfits like Strike Under and Silver Abuse, but the documentary’s detailed time line and great stock of interviews and primary documents thoroughly pinpoint that most elusive beast of rock music: the scene. Whether parsing overlapping band lineups, defunct venues, or long-out-of-print zines and records, You Weren’t There strays from the master narrative of punk, recovering a local history no less vibrant for staying below the radar.

The Jamie Kennedy vehicle Heckler chooses the route of takedown rather than appreciation, serving up a feature-length revenge act on critics — the title fudges the film’s true target. As strangely compelling as it is to watch the likes of Jewel and Henry Winkler spill their guts, Heckler is too indulgent of its interviewees’ bipolar bursts of insecurity and bullying to shape much of an, er, critique. This just in: bloggers take cheap shots at celebrities! Then again, no one likes a … you know how it goes.

>>Back to Noise Pop page

James Blackshaw

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PREVIEW Those seeking musical majesty need to acquaint themselves with the 12-string acoustic guitar playing of James Blackshaw, a Londoner and, at 25, one of an ever-expanding set of John Fahey acolytes. Fahey expanded the purview of folk-blues structures in his 1960s and ’70s prime to accommodate a roving interest in sundry classical forms. The journeying compositions stood apart from the contemporaneous folk revival but immediately attracted disciples, notably Fahey’s Takoma labelmates Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho, and Mark Fosson.

Of the current crop of acoustic shamans, Blackshaw is perhaps the most fluid player and the most frankly transcendental in his musical themes. His song titles are indicative of this mood: "Transient Life in Twilight," "Spiraling Skeleton Memorial," "Stained Glass Windows," and so on. He’s already the owner of a longish discography — three out-of-print early releases are soon to be reissued by Tompkins Square — and his spiral jetty compositions flurry forth with transposed phrases and delicately twisting tempos. The recordings have a pantheistic quality in their detailed sensuousness, a glistening shimmer that begs comparison as much to Terry Riley and My Bloody Valentine as to Fahey and Peter Walker.

Blackshaw has pursued Eastern-tinged, droning passages with increasing frequency over his past two albums, O True Believers (Important, 2006) and The Cloud of Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2007), and if these segments are less immediately successful than his Gregorian guitar mode, it’s still gratifying to hear the young talent pushing his limits. The Cloud of Unknowing caps its culminating steel-string swirl with a protracted bout of nail-biting strings, not unlike the effect that closes the Beatles’ "A Day in the Life." It sounds like a promise of things to come, a sonogram of the great depths underlying Blackshaw’s placid surfaces. Catch the guitarist in the flesh in a rare stateside appearance, in support of guitar guru Sean Smith’s Eternal (Gnome Life) record release.

JAMES BLACKSHAW With Sean Smith and the Present Moment, Spencer Owen, and Colossal Yes. Wed/6, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

“Enter the Center”

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REVIEW Full disclosure would take up the full piece, so I’ll just say that in spite of knowing both David Wilson and Frank Lyon well as friends, I’m hardly alone in counting them as two of the Bay Area’s most celebratory and engaging young creators. They’ve largely steered their efforts away from the typical venues that comprise San Francisco’s music-art coordinates thus far, especially in their periodic outdoor music gatherings. A eucalyptus grove in Berkeley, old military tunnels overlooking the Pacific, a comfy crater — all have been transformed into communicative commons under the purview of Ribbons Productions, Wilson and Lyon’s encapsuutf8g entity for performances, small-press books, a blog par excellence, and now their premier SF exhibition, "Enter the Center."

The show — comfortably and spaciously laid out in the Eleanor Harwood Gallery — is a new turn for Ribbons in its expansion beyond direct collaborations, although both artists’ solo contributions echo Ribbons’ overarching ethos involving landscape, temporality, and process. Wilson’s billowy pencil drawings of Contra Costa hills and decorative collections of seeds, fruits, and other fibrous materials possess a persistent attentiveness and loose-limbed appreciation: his gigantic HEAL landscape unfolds over several record-sleeve panels, gently nudging viewers toward an equation of space and time. Lyon’s entrancing collages pose as hats, capes, and tree stumps. Beyond these preoccupying surfaces, the pieces function as windows onto emotional reckoning and magnificent obsession. The exhibit also showcases a new book, which arrives with a DVD including a generous helping of Ship songs — Wilson and Lyon’s music duo, one of the Guardian‘s picks for its class of 2007 — performed in treetops. Finally, it wouldn’t be Ribbons without communion: the second of two special concerts is scheduled at the gallery for Feb. 9 and highlights recent Guardian cover model Arp, a new Brendan Fowler (BARR) project, and Pocahaunted.

ENTER THE CENTER Through Sat/9. Thurs.–Sat., 1–5 p.m. Eleanor Harwood Gallery, 1295 Alabama, SF. (415) 867-7770, www.eleanorharwood.com

Bye bye beautiful

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There’s a wonderful moment during the performance of "Bye Bye Blackbird" that opens the 1964 Chet Baker set preserved on a recent Jazz Icons DVD (Chet Baker Live in ’64 and ’79 [Reelin in the Years]). In the midst of the squarish piano player’s solo, the star trumpeter shuffles into the medium close-up frame, shucking a cigarette from his accompanist’s pack. Chiseled even when sporting a stuffy sweater, Baker takes a long drag and glides back to his place on the stage. The pianist plays on, but the camera operator tracks Baker, plainly in the clutch of a lonely lothario.

The cigarette break is more revealing of Baker’s largesse — his ineffable cool and the desire it produced — than any of his softly sustaining trumpet solos for the television program are. It also sheds some light on the side-winding portraiture that marks Bruce Weber’s adoring documentary Let’s Get Lost, filmed during the last months of Baker’s life in 1987 and now playing in a restored print at the Castro Theatre.

The first interview in Let’s Get Lost is with photographer William Claxton, an early admirer of Baker’s who waxes poetic about the revelation of shooting such a naturally photogenic subject. Weber, known for innumerable sleek Calvin Klein and Abercrombie and Fitch spreads, riffles through these striking stills in contact-sheet form, a neat solution to the persistent documentary problem of how to make archival photographs move. Twenty minutes pass before we begin to explore Baker’s music, and there are another 20 minutes after that before we meet his Oklahoma mother, our first whiff of personal history. Backward, it might seem, except for Baker’s being a cipher of his own iconography.

"He was trouble and he was beautiful," an interviewee muses early in Let’s Get Lost, and it might as well be the film’s byline. He was beautiful, possessing a ravaged, introspective glamour attractive to both men and women: writing about Baker’s underfed croon in his excellent liner notes for The Best of Chet Baker Sings (Blue Note, 1953), Will Friedwald notes, "His moony voice twangs like an Oakie [sic]-cum-valley person at times, but more often he achieves geographic — not to mention sexual — ambivalence." Though less remembered today than James Dean or Jack Kerouac, Baker had a comparable rogue appeal, his missing front tooth suggestive of wounded sensitivity, his shoulders bent under the unknowable weight of being himself.

Weber’s velvety black-and-white cinematography has never met a silhouette it didn’t like, and indeed, his documentary is first and foremost a tribute to Baker’s arch stylishness. Insofar as Josef von Sternberg, Leni Riefenstahl, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s idolatrous visions are often said to anticipate modern fashion imagery, Weber must rightly be considered their direct descendent: a fashion photographer turned filmmaker unapologetically devoted to surfaces. He is equally attentive to the silvery bleach of Santa Monica, the inky black swallowing various stage spotlights, and the shadows of heroin abuse running across Baker’s unbearably gaunt 57-year-old face — all shot in an amorous chiaroscuro evocative of the trumpeter’s West Coast cool musical phrasings, his constant drug nod, and the late-night languidness of his smoking and speech.

But, of course, Baker was trouble too, and this is where Let’s Get Lost can feel strained. Though clearly a labor of love, the film shrugs off conclusiveness as casually as one of Baker’s shopworn melodies might. For one thing, Weber isn’t much of an interviewer, asking the musician’s mother, "Did he disappoint you as a son?" and directing one of Baker’s ex-wives to "tell me something romantic." Still, with the recent documentary explosion prizing kinetic revelations at all costs, Weber’s patient accumulation is a virtue in itself. We hear several versions of a story about Baker getting his teeth knocked out, and although none of them paints a convincingly specific picture, we do get the overarching thrust of a sad decline.

Originally released the same year as Gus Van Sant’s similarly loving debut, Mala Noche, Let’s Get Lost gives the lie to the notion that every gaze is created equal. Weber may wrap the disillusionment of Baker’s life in the romanticism of the latter’s demeanor, but the director also gives the spiraling musician space for self-expression (including a couple of lovely, understated full performances) and, in an empathetic final scene, offers to buy him a methadone fix. The film is as recklessly lyrical as Baker was himself, and it’s in this way that — in spite of its shortcomings as biography — Let’s Get Lost has the spiritual heft of an ample epigraph. The ragged icon mumbles about the film’s production being "a dream," and the inevitable fade to black and memorial that follows seem exactly the type of void he’d like to walk into. *

LET’S GET LOST

Opens Fri/18, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

The stranger

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Where to begin with Jandek? First, a definition: Jandek is a phenomenon, as plainly uncanny as a lightning storm. Then on to the facts of the case: initially emerging in 1978 with the Ready for the House album (Corwood), Jandek has since released a steady stream of haunting LPs: 51 at last count, each talismanic of a cumulative mystery. The records originate from Corwood Industries, PO Box 15375, in Houston, a company that seems to exist solely to disseminate Jandek music. The discs contain no supplemental information, and the whole enterprise propagates with pseudocorporate anonymity — the performer is usually invoked as the "Representative from Corwood."

These inputs are nothing in and of themselves, but like a Rubik’s Cube, they have become a source of tantalizing fascination for a few. The music, which ranges from the inscrutable to the harrowing, comes on like icebergs in the night. The first full-lengths (especially 1981’s Six and Six) lay out the basic Jandek sound: immersive death-letter blues, unstudied and intense. Misshapen chords crumble in his clanking tunings and obtrusive picking patterns. Songs end with the dull thud of a stopped tape recorder.

There have been additions and subtractions since this first period: a thudding racket of drums on a string of releases in the mid-’80s, cryptic collaborations ("Nancy Sings"), a wonderfully severe "breakup" album (1987’s Blue Corpse), and a short phase of unlistenable a cappella (2000’s Put My Dream on This Planet, 2001’s This Narrow Road, and 2004’s Worthless Recluse). Evaluative criteria have been junked, lyrics and titles scrambled, and explications left unanswered. Even something as basic as Jandek’s chronology is up in the air: many of his closest listeners do not believe the albums are released in the same order in which they were recorded.

The covers further channel these constantly shifting parameters, as well as the intensely desolate nature of the Jandek persona. Like the recordings, they are pointedly unprofessional, evoking the titular hero without pinning him down. When the figure does appear, he is inevitably alone and dour. Like the lyrics, multiple album covers are drawn from a single photo session, if not from one single photograph (2006’s What Else Does the Time Mean and The Ruins of Adventure).

Jandek has carved a tremendous field of negative space and achieved a collusion with his devotees as remarkable, in its way, as the one associated with the Grateful Dead. As far as dedicated fandom goes, Seth Tisue’s annotated Web site (tisue.net/jandek) is simply amazing. While looking over Tisue’s notes, it’s easy to appreciate how much the Representative from Corwood rocked the boat when he announced his first live performances in 2004. Thirty shows later, he is making his first scheduled West Coast appearance at the appropriately chaste Swedish American Hall.

Unprecedented perhaps, though not necessarily as shocking as it might first appear. A proper recluse doesn’t want any kind of attention, whereas Jandek simply seems to want to tightly regulate the flow of information. There’s an unexpectedly illuminating moment in a 1985 phone interview highlighted in the Jandek on Corwood documentary (2003) when Jandek confesses he only decided to go on with his project after Ready for the House received a good notice from now defunct OP magazine. Is it such a stretch, then, to connect Jandek’s decision to begin performing live to the increased attention following the film?

Regardless, any fears that Jandek would be sacrificing his essence have been allayed by the fiery quality of the concerts. He pens a new set of lyrics for each, performing the compositions with an unfamiliar nest of collaborators plucked from the local experimental music community. San Francisco is especially rich in this regard, and two of the area’s best will fall into Jandek’s orbit Jan. 12: Ches Smith (Xiu Xiu, Good for Cows) is marked down for drums and Tom Carter (Charlambides, Badgerlore) for bass.

Carter wrote to me about a previous experience playing with the Representative from Corwood, "It was one of the heaviest playing situations of my life. He didn’t demand much specifically from the other musicians, but there was definitely a sense that there was something he wanted, and that if you didn’t figure it out yourself, it was on your head if the performance fell flat."

The shows may last longer than the records, but this seems less of an issue when you acknowledge the elastic, architectural quality of the music. The recordings, in any event, are an apt preparation for the appearances, as they too seem to unfold in stuttering real time. After we listen, our throats are dried out, our blinking irregular, and it seems the preceding minutes have passed through a dark star. We do not ask for music to move us like this, but once it does it is hard to imagine anything else.

Some fans think the performances and recent spike in releases indicate that the Representative from Corwood has retired from his day job. Regardless of whether he has, he’s certainly earned the right to embrace his artist self. Whether we choose to visit his terrain or keep away is inconsequential next to the fact that Jandek is undeniably there. Insofar as this body of work represents the buzzing strangeness lurking just behind the flecked curtains of everyday Americana, the Representative from Corwood is on a track similar to that of Thomas Pynchon or David Lynch. Ever inscrutable and increasingly undeniable, the Jandek discography has somehow wormed its way onto the map. 2

JANDEK

Sat/12, 7:30 p.m., $25

Swedish American Hall

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Angels with dirty faces

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The Bay Area boasts some of the most forward-thinking film programmers in the country, but even here there’s often no getting around the circuitous, arbitrary workings of foreign film distribution. No matter how big a hit in its festival travels, the foreign film must dutifully wait untold months until it is dressed up by Sony Pictures Classics or released to no fanfare by a small distributor like Film Movement. That particular company is backing the belated American opening of Francisco Vargas’s The Violin, a plainly appealing sleeper that picked up major festival awards from Cannes to San Francisco as well as major props from star director Guillermo del Toro (quoted as saying, "In The Violin lies the future of Mexican cinema").

I mention all of this here only to emphasize that it’s something of a coincidence that The Violin is opening in the shadow of several American movies obsessed with death in the open West, a landscape in which violence congeals as fast as the pop of an air gun or the rush of an oil geyser. A coincidence perhaps, but a bracing one for the way it compounds the eerie calm of Vargas’s debut feature, which, completely contrary to the excellent No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood (let alone Redacted), works to profess the fullness of the soul locked in dubious battle.

As with many overtly lyrical westerns, The Violin‘s coordinates — mountains and village, the bar and the barracks, guerrillas and soldiers — aren’t specific. Whichever war is being fought, it has already spiraled into abstraction; the opening credits roll over a ravishingly composed torture sequence in which military men maim peasants for no reason other than their being indistinguishable from the guerrillas. The sequence establishes the tone through its look, with soft black-and-white cinematography suffusing the villagers’ tragedy with an ennobling grace reminiscent of Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men portraiture.

This prologue is unnerving for being a composition before it is an action — even as that action is so despairingly brutal. As Vargas slips into the main of The Violin, though, this predilection for romantic chiaroscuro inscribes his fable with the dangerous delicacy of a daydream. The plot, such as it is, gets under way when an old man and his adult son go busking with their violin and guitar, the youngest member of this patrilineal trio, Lucio, collecting the change. Later the adult son, Genaro, slips into the back room of a bar (another space painted in shadow and smoke) to procure weapons for his village’s guerrillas. It’s to no avail, since by the time he returns to the town with his child and his violinist father, the magisterial Don Plutarco (the Cannes-awarded Ángel Tavira), the Army has already done its cruel work, taking over the village and its hidden cache. Flashing modesty and feigned foolishness as another person might their teeth, Plutarco wins the favor of the presiding captain, serenading with his creaky violin ballads while surreptitiously smuggling out supplies with every adios.

Instead of drumming up dramatic impact with the story’s inherently suspenseful elements, Vargas’s film floats by with its head in the clouds, tragedies and trivialities enfolded in caressing close-ups and violin whistles. This dreamlike ambiance paradoxically seems to dovetail with Vargas’s laudable neorealist technique, especially in his work with a nonprofessional cast and his easy command of direct sound. So many films overplay their hand here; drunk on Terrence Malick movies, the nature score is often magnified to absurd sharpness, crickets chirping in your ear, blades of grass aflame in song. Vargas’s sound is comparatively obscure, but besides being pleasurably spacious, it’s true to his vision of a humble poetry of the everyday. The music too is appreciably authentic, as Vargas (who spent five years producing radio shows featuring traditional Mexican melodies) uses Tavira’s wobbly pitch to seam together his loose narrative.

All of this lyricism can have a flattening effect, as scenes of torture and vignettes of tacos hold the same smoky finesse. Innumerable close-ups of Tavira’s cracked hands aside, there is nothing gritty about the film, which is a problem insofar as it can give The Violin‘s realism a bitter aftertaste of simplistic moralism. And yet, in the film’s refined emotional palette (the final shot seals it), Vargos achieves something that the recent tongue-tied American pictures don’t. Wordless in long stretches, The Violin demonstrates a visual command of faces and editing on par with those of D.W. Griffith’s expert melodramas — minor masterpieces that recognize cinema’s strange ability to summon reality without being beholden to it.

THE VIOLIN

Opens Fri/11

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

http://www.roxie.com

www.filmmovement.com
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Bold as love

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The only thing that prevented Entrance’s resplendent Prayer of Death (Tee Pee) from being one of my top picks for 2007 was that it came out in 2006. Lately, when I want music to overwhelm me I reach for Prayer of Death. Alas, it wasn’t always so with Entrance, the nom de plume of Baltimore-born Guy Blakeslee. I first saw him perform in a dingy college basement sometime after the release of his 2003 debut, The Kingdom of Heaven Must Be Taken by Storm (Tiger Style). He played with a drummer, and while the two summoned an impressive racket, Entrance’s blown-out blues felt too much in the shadow of the ascendant White Stripes.

Four years later, the White Stripes are a parody, while Entrance has moved on to Los Angeles and sounds more and more visionary. He’s hardly the first to try to harness the invocatory power of early death-letter blues — associated with the likes of Charley Patton, Son House, and Skip James — with a Dionysian surge of electricity, but rarely has abandon felt so reposeful as on Prayer of Death. Arrangements for slide guitar ("Grim Reaper Blues"), violin ("Silence on a Crowded Train"), and sitar ("Requiem for Sandy Bull") roll and tumble, but Prayer of Death‘s power finally rests with Blakeslee’s fearless vocals, which tirelessly weave sandpaper scratch, banshee wail, and larynx-bursting vibrato. The lyrics read as so many death wishes until you realize Blakeslee has composed a suite about the revelatory power of song, specifically its ability to wrest life from a void. The boldness of the endeavor is further revealed in the fact that this is the first Entrance album without a cover song — though the title track’s skeletal gospel will have you double-checking the track listing of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways, 1952) to be sure.

Watching Entrance unleash his killer power trio at the otherwise lackluster Source Family show at the Cafe du Nord a couple of months ago, I couldn’t help wondering why his project hasn’t received more plaudits. Perhaps it’s simply the result of East Coast critics all too eager to pull the retro trigger. Entrance isn’t the only one at this special Great American performance who deserves better than the implicitly denigrative "freak folk" tag. Kyle Field finally checks back in from the endless summer for a slow stroll through his Little Wings songbook, and Nevada City’s Mariee Sioux can’t lose with her majestic verses. Throw in Vetiver’s Andy Cabic on DJ duties, and you’ve got a bill that’s some kind of dream team.

THE ENTRANCE BAND

With Mariee Sioux, Little Wings, Lee Bob Watson, and DJ Andy Cabic

Jan. 10, 8 p.m., $16

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

Year in Film: The other side of the mirror

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Is defining I’m Not There the same thing as defending it? Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic antibiography of, to quote the tagline, "the music and many lives of Bob Dylan" has inspired all sorts of platitudes since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, so many that it’s hard not to feel late for the party only a few months after. Still, the fact remains: from listening to Biograph cassettes in the backseat of my mom’s car to reading Greil Marcus’s visionary accounts of The Basement Tapes and "Like a Rolling Stone," I’ve had Dylan on my mind, always prepared to apprehend another side of him.

It’s hard not to feel privileged watching I’m Not There as both a Dylan enthusiast and a cinephile. You can read it between the lines of an erudite review like J. Hoberman’s — didja catch the references to Suze Rotolo and Masculine Feminine? So then, a solipsistic designation for a solipsistic movie: I’m Not There is a catalog and a critique, a hall of mirrors, multivalent and prismatic, like Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) turned inside out. It is epigrammatic rather than evocative, and made to be written about.

It is also a twisted kind of biopic, something worth noting with everyone from Ray Charles to Scott Walker getting the treatment. The fad for music biopics and documentaries isn’t unrelated to the tendency toward remakes and tie-ins now apparent everywhere in the entertainment business. Only a couple of years after Walk the Line and Ray, some biopic conventions are already brittle enough to encourage both a throwaway parody like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and a hardcore dissertation like I’m Not There (the films have more in common than you might think). Haynes takes the biopic’s tendency toward flashback-reliant storytelling, for instance, and transforms it into a looping, fractured portrait. Name-dropping is the biopic’s natural territory, but Haynes’s esoteric (Moondog in the opening credits) and cryptic (it’s alright, Ma, it’s only Ritchie Havens) references only add to his film’s foggy rendition.

This is as it should be with Dylan, the singer who at the tender age of 22 began a protest song with the lyric "Oh my name it is nothing, my age it means less." The feedback loops produced by the film’s strategy of quotation and fragmentation work to elucidate Dylan’s critical velocity, the way his different eras seem both terminal (the electric Dylan played by Cate Blanchett is shown in a morgue, and there are intimations that other versions of him are dead too) and porous. Where other music biopics seek to ground a singer’s aura in terms of biography and motif, Haynes runs in the opposite direction, prioritizing an abstract organizing principle like that of D.W. Griffith’s innovative 1916 foray into multiplanar cinematic storytelling, Intolerance.

It should be noted that Weinstein’s ad campaign pointedly undercuts Haynes’s game. Dylan only materializes twice — in text during the opening credits and in person for the movie’s final, mesmerizing close-up — but the I’m Not There poster lists the main cast with the misleading line "All are Bob Dylan."

Blatant Oscar pandering? Perhaps. But what does it say that some of my favorite sequences in I’m Not There are the most conventional? Haynes accesses the "romantic" Dylan of Blonde on Blonde–New Morning–Blood on the Tracks with an interesting Russian-doll trick — Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark is introduced as an actor portraying Jack Rollins (The Times They Are A-Changin’ Dylan, played by Christian Bale) in a biopic within the biopic titled Grain of Sand. With the exception of an Arthur Rimbaud insert, Robbie is the only Dylan facsimile who never plays a guitar, and this makes sense since the Dylan of "I Want You," "Shelter from the Storm," and "Idiot Wind" always seemed more man than musician. Meanwhile, Robbie’s thorny relationship with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) provides I’m Not There with some desperately needed warmth. A François Truffaut–ish meeting in a diner, a montage of bohemian New York, and a divorce in the late-day light of the Richard Nixon era: they’re all strands of a singular story, which is exactly what I’m Not There is not.

I felt fully prepared to dig Haynes’s panoply, and after seeing the movie three times I’m pretty sure I do. In its constant double-edged critiques and heady invocations of the nonexistent, I’m convinced the film represents one of the most energetic (and perhaps cathartic) directing performances of the year. And yet something’s lost in I’m Not There‘s reshuffling of the biopic deck. Dylan has indeed spent much of his career putting us on, but this is only one part of his impact, with the other more elemental component encompassing the sound of his voice, the exciting bite of his phrasing, and the lightning crack that opens "Like a Rolling Stone."

These sparks of electricity are, after all, the kind of thing rock biopics were made for. The brute power of cinema is such that with a Dolby soundtrack, heavy close-ups, and a gliding camera, even the hammiest dramatization can achieve moments of rock ‘n’ roll bliss. Insofar as Anton Corbijn’s portrait of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (Control) prizes re-creation over fragmentation, it might fairly be seen as the polar opposite of Haynes’s broken mirror. Corbijn takes the biopic conceit of mimicry to dizzying, self-aware heights thanks to location shooting, a performer (Sam Riley) who learned to match Curtis’s every twitch, and brilliant cinematography evocative of Corbijn’s own iconic photographs of the band.

Control is very good, with excellent acting and convincing performance scenes (two things that go a long way toward making a satisfying rock biopic), though it fails where biopics typically do. Indeed, it’s always a bad sign when a voice-over is introduced more than an hour into a movie. As Curtis shuts down, Corbijn flails to unpack the singer’s psychology, and the voice-over contrivance only fudges the moment of Curtis’s maximum anguish. Still, there is at least one unforgettable scene here — when Curtis stalks the street toward his day job, the soundtrack raw with punk, a graceful camera turn revealing the back of his jacket, emblazoned in chalky white with the word "HATE" — that offers the euphoric, sexy blast that is so often lost in I’m Not There‘s complex din.

There are other forms of music biopic, including the kind that’s genuinely happy to take liberties (see: 8 Mile, Almost Famous). Kurt Cobain about a Son sounded like an interesting experiment on paper, with a soundtrack culled from Michael Azerrad’s late-night interviews with Cobain jutting up against lyrical images from the Pacific Northwest. But the film is ultimately soured by its unresolved discrepancies (it’s hard to make out what such self-consciously pretty images are doing running under Cobain’s gravely, often vitriolic voice-over) and its discussion-ending lack of original Nirvana music. Cobain relates his thrill at hearing "Love Buzz" on college radio for the first time, and we listen to … Iggy Pop?

What does it say about Cobain’s legacy that both cinematic attempts at his life (the other being Gus Van Sant’s evocative 2005 Last Days) have been narrated from such a remove? For one thing, that the slightest morsel of Kurt is good enough to buy distribution. The parade continues, leading one to compile a wish list of future biopic subjects. Arthur Russell, maybe, or perhaps Nina Simone? Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, is certainly building toward a good one with all of those onstage breakdowns behind her, and I’d like nothing better than for Haynes to take an honest crack at Karen Dalton or Judee Sill. What of Big Star, John Fahey, Tropicália’s icons, Elizabeth Cotten, Galaxie 500 (directed by Andrew Bujalski), or the Mamas and the Papas? And won’t someone think of poor Donovan, patiently waiting his turn ever since being put down by you know who in Don’t Look Back? *

MAX GOLDBERG’S BAKER’S DOZEN

ON BEAUTY


•<\!s>Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, US/France)

•<\!s>Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

•<\!s>En la Ciudad de Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain)

•<\!s>Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, France)

•<\!s>In Between Days (Kim So-yong, US/Canada/South Korea)

REMNANTS OF THE REAL


•<\!s>Useless (Jia Zhangke, China)

•<\!s>My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)

•<\!s>V.O. (William E. Jones, US)

•<\!s>The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US)

NERVOUS NIGHTMARES


•<\!s>Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

•<\!s>Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

•<\!s>Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

•<\!s>No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

Year in Music: Grievous angel

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An archival recording can assume many forms, contexts, meanings. This year saw the reissue of an album unappreciated in its time (Jim Ford’s The Sounds of Our Time [Bear Family]), the compilation of genre-bound obscurities (Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul series), the live performance (Gram Parsons Archive, Vol. 1 [Amoeba]), the stripped acoustic set (Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971 [Reprise]), the radio sessions (Judee Sill’s Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973 [Water]), the reconstructed unfinished work (John Phillips’s Jack of Diamonds [Varese Sarabande]), the singles collection (Vashti Bunyan’s Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind: Singles and Demos 1964–1967 [FatCat/Dicristina]), and, perhaps closest to the bone, the fabled home recording.

Of course, some vocalists bend these categories by the nature of their performance style. This is certainly the case with Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore), a double CD documenting a lovely set by Karen Dalton at a Colorado coffeehouse in 1962. It might as well be a home recording for the intimacy of the performance space — owner Joe Loop explains in the liner notes that his club held only 50 — and the entrancing, private nature of Dalton’s folk arrangements. Such a record is notable for a performer as studio-phobic as Dalton: she only recorded two albums in her lifetime (1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best [Koch] and 1971’s In My Own Time [Light in the Attic]), and rumor has it the takes for her debut were captured on the sly, when she didn’t know the tape was rolling.

All of this would be mere intrigue if it weren’t for the fact that Dalton was one of the major talents of the first folk revival, though mostly unappreciated in her own time. She died in 1993 after a bitter struggle with drugs and alcohol. Cotton Eyed Joe is educational in contextualizing this mystery voice in terms of the coffeehouse circuit, but any such historiography quickly fades when faced with her strange, time-stopping interpretations of traditionals and tunes by the likes of Ray Charles, Woody Guthrie, and Fred Neil. The voice shakes with unresolve, surrounding you and then disappearing before you can pin it down, buckling with some unknowable duress, slipping into untold dimensions.

It only takes a few bars of Dalton’s possession of Charles’s "It’s Alright" to cast the spell. Her minimal 12-string guitar work drags on the tune, her voice searching the depths of the verse for a smoldering, emotional core. Elsewhere Dalton runs through the songs she would record for her studio albums, and it’s bracing to think how long she lived with these ballads. Forty-five years later, we hear a unique act of disembodiment, a self-eulogizing worthy of critic Greil Marcus’s illustrious "Invisible Republic."

Each glimpse deepens the appeal of so many other performers from that era, and it’s tempting to see these collections as filling a specific niche in today’s music market: a hunger for mystery, substance, and story in the face of a downloader’s paradise. As more music is rendered instantly accessible, many of us wish to burrow further into the secret histories of rock, folk, and soul. We sift for treasure, perhaps wondering if the Internet isn’t inherently anathematic to the idea of discovering forgotten greatness. Such recoveries can and will proliferate online, but ground must first be broken elsewhere — in a magazine or a basement, among audio tapes or old notebooks. Performers and promoters are becoming increasingly canny in using the Web to deliver icons and bylines, but it takes a set like Cotton Eyed Joe to make the singer a saint. *

TOP 10


•Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks), and Animal Collective at the Fillmore on Sept. 17

•Jim Ford, The Sounds of Our Time (Bear Family)

•Jana Hunter, There’s No Home (Gnomonsong)

•Karen Dalton, Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore), and Judee Sill, Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973 (Water)

•Entrance at the Ben Lomand Indian Summer Music Festival on Sept. 1 and at the Cafe du Nord on Nov. 18

•The Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans)

•Lightning Bolt at LoBot Gallery on April 9

•Michael Hurley at the Cafe du Nord on April 18

•Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise)

•Little Wings, Soft Pow’r (Rad)

Talk talk

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"I don’t like things that are about what they are."

The title character of Hannah Takes the Stairs says this to a coworker. The quip, though, constitutes something of a wink from the film’s director, Joe Swanberg, a leading light of a group of loose-knit DIY filmmakers regrettably known by the mumblecore moniker. That label is regrettable because it’s the kind of arch categorization that begets overbroad criticisms, chief among them the charge of navel-gazing, though in this film’s case the protagonist beats the critics to the punch.

Such flashes of self-awareness are essential for Hannah Takes the Stairs, a film that, it must be said, spends an awful lot of time attending characters who don’t have much to say. Chicago’s Swanberg is one of the most productive (with three features to his credit at age 26) and formally restless of the mumblecore set, and while Hannah isn’t quite so wracking as his other movies (LOL, Kissing on the Mouth), it seems more encompassing than its ilk. Fellow mumblecore directors Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha-Ha, Mutual Appreciation) and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) costar, and the screenplay is credited to all of the involved parties, with improvisation and riffing being de rigueur for Swanberg’s sticky dialogue.

The participants confirm what is abundantly obvious from the substance of the film. Hannah incorporates all of the trademarks of this pseudomovement, including characterization (diffident postcollegiate bumblers), theme (shrugging through love and work), style (what critic J. Hoberman aptly — if harshly — described as the intersection of The Real World, Seinfeld, and The Blair Witch Project), pacing (constant streams of smoke-screen talk), and tone (not funny ha-ha). And yet the film reminds me in some ways of those Woody Allen made in the late ’70s (Manhattan especially), the ones that walk and talk like the New York nebbish comedies you expect but that in later viewings are heavier and more downbeat than you remember.

So perhaps when Hannah refers to her "chronic dissatisfaction," she betrays something about the roiling sensibilities at work here. The character, played by the sharp-eyed Greta Gerwig, moves through three hopelessly underrealized relationships during the course of the film: the first with Mike (Duplass), an unemployed scruffster, the next with Paul (Bujalski), an unnerving coworker, and the last with Matt (Kent Osborne), her other coworker. She floats through these relationships errantly, unreliable in love and crumpled without it. The narrative’s tumble makes the breakups indistinguishable from the romances — surely part of the point of Swanberg’s compressed (85 minutes) triptych.

The film does not offer a detailed interior portrait of its heroine, but it draws a clear enough map of her face and her fate to make for some well-pitched situational comedy. The humor is in the ingenious physical framings of the various love triangles (Jules and Jim is a frequent reference point for these films), the way characters interact with certain basic props for counterpoint (Hannah crunches on ice cubes through the first breakup), and the steady stitch of repeated scenes, deployed to underscore something like exhaustion.

The episodic narration will rankle some, as will certain schoolboy poses. Swanberg has already received flak for certain smug touches in Hannah, such as a childlike papier-mâché credits sequence. I’m as allergic to indie earnestness as the next, but I think Swanberg, while of that school, is too critical to give it a free pass. During their courtship, Hannah and Paul have a heartfelt conversation through a Slinky: typical cutesiness, except that in context it signals the characters’ real inability to communicate.

And then there are the bodies. It’s hard to accuse Swanberg of sentimentality when he casts his actors’ forms in such harsh light. Coming of age is more often conveyed with exuberance than pale flesh, yet in this the director is resolute (and the nudity is refreshingly egalitarian). I was taken with Bujalski’s soulful rendering of threadbare living quarters in Mutual Appreciation, but Swanberg’s unsparing lens cuts closer to the bone.

Needless to say, then, that Hannah Takes the Stairs isn’t eager to indulge its characters, and it certainly doesn’t present them with convenient outs. Swanberg’s warts-and-all approach may not be for everyone, but it’s an important redress of Knocked Up‘s mismatched fantasy. These kids are all right, even when they’re not. *

HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS

Thurs/29–Mon/3

See Rep Clock for showtimes

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

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