Supernatural, Perhaps -- Baloney, Perhaps Not

Recommended films 10-13-10/19

2006-10-13T22:34:00.000-07:00

APOLOGIES TO THE three regular readers of this space. Yes, I'm terribly late this week. Not that it makes any difference, but I've been immersed in writing a somewhat scholarly (I actually use the word “performativity”!) paper on Argentine filmmaker Maria Luisá Bemberg's final film De eso no se habla (1993), studying for a mid-term exam, trying to nail down the details of my final thesis statement, and trying to log and transcribe three hours of footage I've done for a documentary proposal prior to handing it off to an editor (Hi, Laura!). I missed Special Agent LC's birthday celebration at The Girl Can't Help It! this past Wednesday, although I did manage to catch the movie on Tuesday—one of the more enjoyable viewing experiences I've had recently, thanks to the presence of Special Agents ES and GH, not to mention the spectral presence of the always delightful Julie London.

Let's just get right to this week's recommendations:

THE EVENT of the week is Rick Prelinger's presentation of industrial shorts, Spinning Up, Slowing Down: Industry Celebrates the Machine at the Pacific Film Archive Thursday, 10/19, 7 p.m. Prelinger is a San Franciscan who amassed a large collection of “mental hygiene” and industrial training and promotional films, creating what is now called the Prelinger Archive. The folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000 frequently tapped the archive for mid-20th century short gems like Jam Handy's Hired! (for General Motors, 1940), Kling Films' Mr. B Natural (for Conn, Ltd., 1957), and the unintentionally creepy Simmel-Meservey classroom instructional short A Date With Your Family (for Encyclopedia Britannica, 1950). These films are an unheralded treasure trove of history, providing a surprisingly frank view of how Americans of the 1940s through the 1960s viewed themselves—not as they were, but as they might be if they could shape their society to their wishes. Ken Smith assembled a monumental catalog of these films, with insightful commentary, Mental Hygiene (Blast Books, 1999).

As part of PFA's The Mechanical Age, Prelinger presents six short films about the United States' relationship with industrial machinery:

(Adapted from Prelinger's notes.) Precisely So (Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet, 1937, 2 mins, closing segment, Beta SP) is a stop-motion paean to precision.

Mechanical puppets offer a lesson in free enterprise in Round and Round (Jam Handy for GM Public Relations Staff, 1939, 6 mins, Beta SP).

Pennsylvania steel mills shut down in Valley Town (Willard Van Dyke for Educational Film Institute of NYU and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1940, 24 mins, Beta SP), leaving behind a bleak post-industrial landscape filled with human detritus.

Conquer by the Clock (Slavko Vorkapich for RKO-Pathé, 1943, 11 mins, 16mm) shows World War II production in full swing just three years later, with workers and fighters rhythmically coordinated minute-by-minute in a prefiguration of today's Internet-synchronized world.

We end with Jam Handy's industrial symphony and tour de force Master Hands (for Chevrolet, 1936, 33 mins, 35mm), a newly preserved Wagnerian epic showing the making of Chevrolets from foundry to final assembly.

This is, hands down, my top pick of this week.

WHEN TELEVISION reduced attendance at motion picture theaters during the 1950s, Hollywood responded with technology: stereo sound, different widescreen formats, and 3-D—the illusion of depth produced by viewing two similar images through polarized lenses. There was cheap 3-D, using one strip of double-exposed film and red-blue glasses, which produced headaches and rarely worked. There was expensive 3-D, using two different strips of film projected simultaneously, and transparent, polarized lenses, which produced fewer headaches, and worked more often than the cheap version. 3-D never really caught on, despite frequent attempts to revive it (last summer's fluffy popcorn confection, Superman Returns, had a 3-D sequence inserted for screenings at IMAX theaters).

A few years back, the Castro Theatre installed the equipment required to project the expensive, dual-strip 3-D process, and they're presenting some genuine and ironic classics this week:

Saturday, 10/14: The Creature From the Black Lagoon trilogy! With Creature-bait Julie Adams and the man-in-the-suit himself, Ben Chapman, in person for both the matinee and evening shows. It all starts at noon for the daytime event, and at 7 p.m. for those who like it darker outside. Unfortunately, the third picture, The Creature Walks Among Us, will be presented from a digital source, and will not be in 3-D. But the first two (which are much better films anyway) are in glorious dual-system 3-D and black-and-white!

Sunday, 10/15: One of the most fun, cheesy 3-D horror flicks of all time, Andre de Toth's House of Wax (1953), with Vincent Price at the top of his scenery-chewing form, at 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. With the lesser but still fun Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), directed by Roy Del Ruth, with Karl Malden's nose leaping from the screen into your lap, at 4:15 p.m. and 8:45 p.m.

Tuesday, 10/17: Tonight's menu features lots of sliced American cheese. Gorilla at Large (1954) features Lee J. Cobb investigating brutal murders at a circus where the gorilla is the chief suspect. It also features Raymond Burr and Lee Marvin. In eye-popping Technicolor, at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. With one of the most disturbing 1950s sci-fi flicks aimed at kids ever made: Robot Monster (1953). This one has to be seen to be disbelieved. If the bizarrely incestuous bondage sequences disturb you, just reflect on the wondrous spectacle of the 3-D bubble machine. A-wunnerful, a-wunnerful! In shamefully grainy black-and-white at 8:40 p.m.

Wednesday, 10/18: Cheesy sci-fi and horror take a backseat to the cheesecake of Ann Miller in the MGM musical Kiss Me Kate (1953). Incorporating and spinning off Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, this is a breathtaking spectacle in 3-D Ansocolor. With the Three Stooges' 3-D short, Pardon My Backfire (1953), both at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Thursday, 10/19: The 3-D series ends with a sci-fi classic, It Came From Outer Space (1953), at 7 p.m. With the sci-fi “klassic” Cat-Women of the Moon, featuring Sonny Tufts and film noir icon Marie Windsor.

MORE HALLOWEEN season cheese is available at Oakland's Parkway Theater, Thursday, 10/19, 7:30 p.m., as Will the Thrill and Monica Tiki Goddess introduce the splendidly awful Spanish-German co-production La Noche de Walpurgis (Werewolf vs. the Vampire Women, 1971) and the wonderfully wretched Filipino abomination Beast of the Yellow Night (1971). With apperances by Mister Lobo and The Devil-Ettes.

Recommended Films 10/5 - 10/12

2006-10-04T16:35:00.000-07:00

MY ROOTS AS a cinephile could be traced to a 16mm print of Casablanca (1942) shown at the University of Connecticut in 1978, a 1974 screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at Loew's College Theater in New Haven, or my earliest cinematic memory: Sean Connery and Honor Blackman in Goldfinger, seen at a drive-in with my entire family when I was seven years old. More likely, my interest in the movies began at home, on the cathode ray tube. Before I was even allowed to take the bus downtown by myself, I was a regular viewer of Creature Features on WNEW-TV, channel 5 from New York City. The pre-cable poor reception often resulted in a snowy, wavy picture, adding to the mystery as black-and-white ghosts of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains, Elsa Lanchester, and Lon Chaney, Jr. wandered through Hollywood's figment of Mitteleuropa. Unconsciously and unintentionally, I was introduced to German Expressionism, gothic literature and architecture through the work of directors Tod Browning, Edgar G. Ulmer, and James Whale, cinematographers Karl Freund and John J. Mescall, and designers Charles Hall and Jack Otterson, although it would be years before I knew their names.

In the post-video age, there are no more Creature Features. TV channels are targeted to specific genres and marketing demographics: channel surfing 10-year-olds won't stumble across Dwight Frye's delirious “Rats! Millions of rats!” speech from Dracula (1931), because the only channel likely to screen it today is Turner Classic Movies, which no self-respecting kid would be caught dead watching.

October brings with it Halloween, the most important holiday on San Francisco's calendars. And Halloween brings with it a raft of horror films to theaters. Sadly, none (that I know of—please correct me if I'm wrong) appear to be screening the classics from Universal's golden age, but there are a few delightfully fun examples from the post-atomic era on the horizon.

STRANGE AS IT seems today, Brian DePalma was once part of a “new direction” in American cinema. Along with Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, DePalma was part of the first generation of American film directors to come from film schools rather than the studio system. His early films, like Dionysus in '69, Sisters, Greetings (the first film to receive an X from the MPAA) and Sisters, were considered part of an American “new wave.” DePalma's trademark was his use of homage which reflected his cinematic influences. Chief among these was Alfred Hitchcock. Beginning with Dressed to Kill (1980), DePalma's Hitchcockian touches started to seem like ill-considered parodies. By the time he hollowly restaged the Odessa steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables (1987), it was apparent that any art that was once present in DePalma's work had been replaced by artifice. Now he shepherds the latest generation of brat packers through focus group-produced pastiches like Mission to Mars (2000) and The Black Dahlia (2006).

The early, fun DePalma is on display at the Clay this weekend, with Phantom of the Paradise (1974). This savaging of the American pop music industry fell like a thud on its initial release. Promoted as a rock 'n' roll spectacle, it failed to dazzle the target audience of 16-25 year-olds who recognized it for what it was: a slap in the face of a consumer class who bought whatever tripe Rolling Stone told them to. (Among the biggest hits of 1974: “Mockingbird” by James Taylor and Carly Simon, “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas, “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede, “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, and “You're Having My Baby” by Paul Anka.) It's since achieved cult status, buoyed by a fan base that was too young to appreciate it when it first came out. There's even a convention, Phantompalooza. DePalma's use of homage is surprisingly restrained and even funny. His send-ups of the excesses of the 1970s music scene are priceless: The story combines Faust with The Phantom of the Opera in a portrayal of a naïve and pretentious songwriter who signs a bargain with the devil after the devil has already destroyed him. Beef, the glam-rock stand-in, says at one point: “I can tell drug real from real real!”

Flesh Muppet Paul Williams, who composed all of the songs, which rain righteous ridicule on the Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, KISS, Elton John, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and the '50s nostalgia craze, will appear at the screening. He portrays the chief villain, a Satanic boy band version of Dorian Gray. William Finley, DePalma's classmate at Sarah Lawrence College's theater school, plays the Phantom. The woefully underrated Jessica Harper provides a convincing portrayal of Phoenix, the grasping and somewhat slightly dazed wannabe singer, as well as an impressive singing voice. See it in a new 35mm print at the Clay Theatre at MIDNIGHT, Friday, 10/6. Goth-techno duo Evolution Rainbow provide a pre-show mini-concert. This is a co-presentation of Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass.

THE 1980s saw a lot of horror films, continuing a trend begun by the success of DePalma's Carrie (1976), John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and others. Return of the Living Dead (1985) is one of the funniest entries in the field. Based loosely on a screenplay by John Russo, George Romero's partner on the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), this parody makes brain-eating zombies funny while not sacrificing any of the gore. Director and writer Dan O'Bannon, who wrote the screenplay for Alien (1979), delivers a delightfully implausible exploitation film that rips off punk music, cold war tensions, consumer society and medical science, that's more fun than you might think. Features the legendary line “send more cops,” and a wondrously gratuitous graveyard strip (minus the tease) by scream queen extraordinaire Linnea Quigley. It's in a new 35mm print at the Castro Theatre, 7:30 p.m. Friday 10/6, as part of Jesse Ficks' Midnites for Maniacs, along with Alex Cox's loving portrait of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, Sid and Nancy (1986) and John Carpenter's They Live (1988).

FOR YEARS NOW, I've been hearing that the obsolete and inflammable nitrate filmstock that was the base for all 35mm films up to about 1952 produced a sharper, more luminescent image on the silver screen than the acetate stock used since. The scarcity of nitrate prints, plus the even greater lack of projection booths equipped to show these potentially destructive films, means that I've had to take that statement on faith. Our chance is finally here.

The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, one of the few cinemas equipped with self-sealing, projectionist-dooming steel trap booths required for public safety while screening nitrate stock, is running several nitrate-based reels during their current series, from now through early December. Every Wednesday and Thursday, the 7:30 p.m. film will be projected from a nitrate print. Every Friday, at least one of the evening's two features will be seen in nitrate-based Technicolor. The series is dedicated overall to the films made by 20th Century Fox during Darryl Zanuck's tenure as studio chief.

Thursday, 10/4, Love is News (1937) is the nitrate feature at 7:30 p.m. Tyrone Power, Loretta Young and Don Ameche star in the screwball comedy based at a newspaper. It plays with The Magnificent Dope (1942), with Ameche and Henry Fonda.

Friday, 10/6, catch the big and brassy musicals State Fair (1945) at 7:30 p.m. and Carousel (1956) at 5:10 p.m. and 9:20 p.m., at least one of which (probably State Fair) will be in glorious nitrate Technicolor.

Wednesday, 10/11 and Thursday, 10/12, see the nitrate print of In Old Chicago (1938) at 7:30 p.m. Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Brian Donlevy and Andy Devine star in this historical spectacle about Chicago's O'Leary family—owners of Mrs. O'Leary's pyromaniac cow. Plays with Ladies in Love (1936), with Janet Gaynor, Loretta Young and Constance Bennett as three gals hunting men and an apartment in Budapest.

Next Friday, 10/13, set your calendar ahead for a nitrate print of Leave Her to Heaven (1946), a glorious deep woods Technicolor noir extravaganza (no, that is NOT a contradictory description) with the incomparable Gene Tierney as one of the most psychotic femmes fatale of all time. Plays with Niagara (1953), another fabulous Technicolor noir with Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has proven to be one of the more enduring 19th century gothic fables. Cinematic adaptations range from the sublime (Victor Fleming's 1941 version with Spencer Tracy) to the strange (Roy Ward Baker's Hammer 1971 extravaganza Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, with Bond girl Martine Beswick as the shapely beast) to the stupid (Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical featuring David Hasselhoff, from 2001). Among the best adaptations is the 1920 silent film from Famous Players-Lasky, featuring John Barrymore in the title roles. Barrymore gives a tour-de-force performance here, using minimal makeup tricks, embodying the monster through his own natural talents. See it at the Balboa Theater, Thursday, 10/12, with a new score by Massachussetts' Devil Music Ensemble.

THE MECHANICAL AGE series at the Pacific Film Archive continues Sunday, 10/8, with The Steel Beast at 3:30 p.m. and La Bête Humaine at 5:30 p.m. German photographer Willy Otto Zielke was commissioned by Hitler's government to make a film commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Nuremberg-Fürth railroad. The Steel Beast, the Surrealist, avant garde movie he submitted was a beautiful examination of the greatest machine of the 19th Century—the train—and a masterstroke worthy of Kino-Eye founder Dziga Vertov. It was also highly subversive in the eyes of the Nazis, who banned it as decadent. It plays with Shirley Clarke's Bridges Go Round (1958) and Joris Ivens' De Brug (The Bridge) (1928). La Bête Humaine (1938) is Jean Renoir's adaptation of Emil Zola's novel about a tortured railroad engineer. It established Jean Gabin as a star.

ANOTHER OF MY guilty pleasures is The Girl Can't Help It (1956), 20th Century Fox's big budget, Technicolor Cinemascope entry into the then-scandalous arena of rock 'n' roll movies. Directed by former Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin, the story revolves around woebegone music promoter Tom Miller (Tom Ewell) who tries to make a singing star of tone deaf but pneumatic Jerri Jordon (Jayne Mansfield) at the insistence of mob boss Marty Murdock (Edmond O'Brien), all while pining for his lost love, torch singer Julie London (Julie London—a master stroke of casting). That's all great fun (and it really, really is), but the real reason for this film is to see some of the early rock 'n' roll stars in widescreen and Technicolor. Little Richard, The Platters, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino and Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps all give amazing performances. The Castro Theatre presents a glorious new 35mm anamorphic print of this widescreen extravaganza Tuesday, 10/10 at 7 p.m. and 9:05 p.m., and Wednesday, 10/11 at 2:30 p.m., 4:45 p.m., 7 p.m., and 9:05 p.m. Don't be square, Daddy-O.

Text copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Recommended Films 9/28-10/5

2006-09-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

DAVID LYNCH'S new film, INLAND EMPIRE, makes its U.S. debut at the New York Film Festival on October 7. The film is ready for regular release throughout Europe and Japan, but there has still been no formal announcement of an agreement with a North American distributor. ComingSoon.net suggests that Magnolia Pictures will pick up the film, but no one knows for certain what will happen. Astonishing, given the success of his last release, Mulholland Drive (2001), which was all but abandoned by its U.S. distributor, Universal. Of course, U.S. viewers have been treated to Jackass Number 2, Beerfest and Talladega Nights. They can also look forward to another Harry Potter rehash, Flags of Our Fathers, another Batman, another Spider-Man, another X-Men. . . and probably another bit of pseudo-historical fluff based on a Jane Austen novel to satisfy that occasional date that demands something other than explosions.

Well, there's only four months left before the next Noir City festival. >Sigh.<

THE ABSOLUTE coolest film series in the Bay Area right now is The Mechanical Age at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. These examinations of the romance of machinery as seen through the brilliant device of cinema offer a rare look at the greatest obsessions of the 20th century. Thursday, 9/28 brings David Francis, curator of the British National Film Archive for 16 years, and head of the Library of Congress' Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound division, until 2001, and Joss Marsh, Indiana University professor of Victorian Studies, with a collection of serial chapters from the silent era, starting at 7:30 p.m. The episodic film began long before TV came along. Movie-goers from the 'teens into the 1950s were accustomed to seeing weekly installments of adventure serials. Each chapter ended with the hero or heroine in mortal danger, and the next began with a miraculous rescue. Machinery, from automobiles to Zeppelins to giant robots, were frequently featured in these films, and Francis presents several of these chapters in archival 35mm prints, including The Perils of Pauline with Pearl White, The Exploits of Elaine, and Nick Carter, Detective. Judith Rosenberg plays the piano, thrillingly.

FRANCIS AND MARSH return to the PFA on Saturday, 9/30 at 7 p.m. for an exploration of ur-cinema: the Magic Lantern. Before pictures moved, Victorian viewers were dazzled by images projected in sequence, accompanying storytellers recounting travels to exotic lands, stories of literature, fairy tales, and other narratives. This evening offers a very rare opportunity to see this progenitor of cinema. This one's a must, folks. Note that it occurs in the Berkeley Art Museum's Theater Gallery at 2621 Durant Avenue, not the usual PFA screening room.

THE MECHANICAL AGE continues at the PFA on Sunday, 10/1, at 2:30 p.m., with Adam Curtis' Pandora's Box, Episode One: The Engineer's Plot (1992). Curtis's series examines the 20th century's technophilia; this chapter examines the Soviet Union's fabled Five Year economic plans as an effort to mechanize systems of human interaction. It obviously offers lessons for today's “science” of “inevitable” globalization. It's followed at 4 p.m. by Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line (1929), the saga of a Soviet woman's efforts to create a collective farm, featuring a glorious montage poem to a cream separator. It's preceded by Ralph Steiner's and Jay Leyda's 1930 short Mechanical Principles (Gears in Motion and Design), a U.S.-produced prayer to the almighty machine.

ANOTHER GREAT series, Arrr, Mateys: Pirates and Piracy, continues at the PFA Wednesday, 10/4, 7:30 p.m., with A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), Alexander Mackendrick's saga of a buccaneer (Anthony Quinn) who finds himself the father figure of a shipful of lost children. The “piracy” half of the bill features Jim Gladman's and Negativland's No Business (2006), a mash-up of Ethel Merman and dog-only-knows-what-else. Viva fair use!

FRATRICIDE (2005) looks like an interesting film from Germany. Director Yilmaz Arslan focuses on an odd couple: a Kurdish teenager who takes a Turkish waif under his wing. As they try to eke out a living amid Germany's EU guest worker community, they find that their friendship may not be enough to transcend the expectations of Kurdish-Turkish antagonism. It plays at the Roxie Cinema, through Wednesday, 10/4.

MAYA DEREN'S films transgressed on at least two levels: they were avant garde, often surreal, and they were made by a woman working in a form and style dominated by men. Her first, and best-known, is Meshes in the Afternoon, in which lovers become killers. Her second film, At Land (1944), explores presence, invisibility, and significance. Both screen at Artists Television Access Friday, 9/29, 8 p.m., with the premiere of new scores by Reel Change, who will also perform for experimental films by David Michalak.

MARTINA KUDLÁCEK gained attention with In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002), a documentary about the avant garde filmmaker. She's set her editing scissors to a new film about another woman experimental director in Notes on Marie Menken (2006), presented by the San Francisco Cinematheque at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sunday, 10/, 7:30 p.m. Menken was a denizen of Andy Warhol's Factory, where she appeared in a number of the films made there, as well as making her own, such as Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961) and Watts With Eggs (1967).

ROBERT GREENWALD continues his series of digital video guerilla documentaries [Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005)] with Iraq for Sale (2006), a hard-hitting exposé of the corporations getting very fat off of that ongoing abomination against all that is good and right. Like Greenwald always does, he's avoiding the regular theater circuit, and showing it in benefit screenings at various locations. It plays in San Francisco 10/8 at a screening sponsored by Box Dog Bikes, and 10/8 at CellSpace. Contact the hosts through their respective websites. There are other screenings coming up, check out the Iraq for Sale screenings website for details.

LONG BEFORE Terry Gilliam was preparing cut-out animations for Monty Python, Czech animator Karel Zeman put together an epic film of The Fabulous Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1961), based on the same fables and legends that Gilliam would mount in 1988. Combining live actors and sets with stop motion, puppetry and other cinematic tricks, Zeman crafted an unusual interpretation. See it at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Wednesday, 10/4, 7:30 p.m.

OPENING SOMEWHERE in the Bay Area this week is The U.S. vs. John Lennon. See what I've already said about this film here. Heaven help us all if it roosts at the new Century abomination at what used to be the Emporium.

SET YOUR CALENDARS ahead for the 1920 film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with John Barrymore in the title roles, featuring a new score by Boston's Devil Music Ensemble. At the Balboa Theater, Thursday, 10/12.

Text copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

You Gotta Give 'em Hope

2006-09-21T23:37:00.000-07:00

HARVEY MILK, the first openly gay man elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, made this famous declaration:

You gotta give 'em hope.

Milk was assassinated on November 27, 1978—11 months after taking office—for his political views and his homosexuality. A small-minded and frustrated little man, threatened by inclusiveness and progressive thought, shot Milk and Mayor George Moscone.

The city erupted. Protests, both peaceful and violent, continued for months. The gay community, which had flocked to San Francisco's bohemian, laissez-faire nature, were not going to return to the closets they had escaped because a wretch with a gun thought he could gain power by killing.

Today, no one seems to bat an eye about gays in public office in San Francisco. In fact, it appears that heterosexuality is a liability for candidates running in Districts 5 and 8. Milk's death almost tore apart the city by the bay. Milk's life kept the city together. He gave people hope.

Israel started firing missiles into Lebanon on July 12 this past summer. They were responding to rockets fired by Hezbollah terrorists into Israel, as well as the seizure by Hezbollah of two Israeli soldiers (who may have been illegally in Lebanese territory). The rain of warheads into Lebanon continued for a month. Some 1,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed. More than 3,000 were wounded. A million or more lost their homes. Israeli casualties numbered 162, mostly soldiers, dead.

In the rubble of Beirut, a seven-year-old film festival refuses to surrender. Ayam Beirut Al Cinema'iya is underway with a reduced program of 40 films instead of the planned 100. Artistic director Eliane Rehab and festival director Hania Mroue have managed to get filmmakers into the shattered nation, and screenings will continue through Sunday, 9/24.

In an interview with the BBC, Mroue talked about housing refugees in Beirut's only art house cinema, and the importance of presenting films as a defense against fear.

“People continued coming to the cinema the next day, even though war had started," [Mroue] says. “They came. I don't understand how and why they came even though Beirut was being bombed, but they came. And even the third day they kept coming.”—BBC News.

The festival includes features, documentaries, and shorts from around the world. Appropriately enough, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) is included. The only film from the United States is James Longley's Iraq in Fragments (2006).

An earthquake on May 7, 1976, killed nearly 600, injured 1,000 and displaced 800,000 in Italy's northern Friuli region. Without electricity, with food and water in short supply, people were shocked to see a couple of youngsters carrying a portable movie projector and several cans of 35mm film. Piera Patat and Livia Jacob had rescued their personal archives of silent film treasures. Recognizing the power of film to bring a community together in the face of crisis, they set up their projector at night, powered by car batteries or other generators, and showed classic films on the remaining walls. This became a ritual that continued after recovery began. It's now the Giornate del Cinema Muto, the largest and most important festival of silent films in the world.

Films give people hope. The courage of Rehab, Mroue and everyone associated with Ayam Beirut Al Cinema'iya should inspire us all.

They've prepared a moving video letter to the world about their situation, and why they are continuing with not just the festival, but their lives as citizens of Beirut, a historically significant cultural capital. Folks with a broadband connection can link here. Dial-up users should use this link.

My hat is doffed to extra-super-special ginchy agent extaordinaire ES for the tip on this item.

From Beirut With Love directed by Wael Noureddine (Lebanon/France, 2005, 16mm).

Text copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Recommended Films: 9/21-9/27

2006-09-21T00:38:00.000-07:00

THE THREE greatest comedians of the silent film era are quite distinct from each other:

Charlie Chaplin was a brilliant stage performer whose artistry blossomed within the boundaries of the silver screen.

Harold Lloyd's sheepish onscreen persona gave more power to the extreme physicality of his performance. His “aw-shucks” style also concealed the heart of a ruthless businessman.

Buster Keaton, like Chaplin, was a veteran of the vaudeville stage. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton was a a consummate tinkerer fascinated by locomotives and mechanical processes. He began his movie career by dismantling a camera to see how it worked.

Keaton's understanding of filmmaking as a mechanical process is on display this Sunday, 9/24, in Sherlock, Jr. (1924) at the Pacific Film Archive. One of the greatest reflexive exercises in cinematic history, Sherlock, Jr. features Keaton as a small-town movie projectionist whose fascination with detective fiction, combines with his spurned affection for the local beauty (Kathryn McGuire) to create a fantasy in which Keaton enters the action he projects onscreen. The film contains many of the gags used in the Keaton family vaudeville act, and is both a technical and humorous marvel. It's part of The Mechanical Age series at the PFA, and it's in 35mm, starting at 4 p.m. An added treat is Broken Down Film (1985), an animated short by Osamu Tezuka—creator of Kimba the White Lion and Tetsuwan Atom, better known in the U.S. as Astro Boy.

Screening right after Sherlock, Jr. is another astonishingly reflexive film of the silent era, The Man With a Movie Camera (1929). Director Dziga Vertov was the champion of Kino-Eye, a Soviet filmmaking philosophy that decried narrative structure and emphasized montage. The Man With a Movie Camera is Vertov's best-remembered work, and it's a breathtaking example of what cinema, unfettered by theatrical or literary expectations, can achieve. This is one of my Film 101 essential movies. It starts at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, 9/24, in 35mm from the PFA Collection. Judith Rosenberg accompanies the films on piano.

PFA CONTINUES its examination of pirates and piracy with Craig Baldwin's Sonic Outlaws (1995), Wednesday, 9/27, 7:30 p.m. Opening with Negativland's defeat in a copyright infringement case brought by liberal-outside-my-backyard-band U2, Baldwin traces the early history of musical mash-ups as a series of battles for maintaining creators' rights to fair use. It's shown in 16mm, from Baldwin himself. It screens with Uso Justo (2004), Coleman Miller's transformation of a 1950s Mexican soap opera into an experiment in experimental filmmaking. In Beta SP, from Miller's collection.

MUDDY WATERS was unquestionably, one of the greatest, perhaps THE greatest, blues guitarists of all time. As part of the San Francisco Blues Festival, the Roxie Cinema presents Muddy Waters Can't Be Satisfied, a documentary from 2005 by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. It took six years to complete the movie, which concentrates on telling Water's story through his music and interviews with performers he inspired, including Keith Richards and Bonnie Raitt.

On the same bill is Always for Pleasure, Les Blank's 1978 documentary of New Orleans. Blank is one of the most exciting documentary makers of all time (his 1982 Burden of Dreams remains my favorite film about making a film), and seeing his 28-year-old take on the Big Easy should be especially poignant today. For more on this film, check out the sensational entry from 2005 at Hell on Frisco Bay, one of the best blogs about films in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Both films play for one week at the Roxie Cinema starting Friday, 9/22, with matinees Saturday, 9/23, and Sunday, 9/24.

PETER WHITEHEAD gained fame turning his camera on England's rock 'n' roll scene during the 1960s. He turned heads in 1965 when he directed a documentary of Peter Brooks' The Benefit of the Doubt, a then-controversial play that obliquely criticized Great Britain's support of the United States' military adventure in Vietnam, using then-new experimental and agit-prop theater techniques. Whitehead put much of the original Royal Shakespeare Company production on film in color, interspersed with interviews of the cast and crew in black-and-white. It plays with The Fall, Whitehead's 1969 meditation on violence and society, featuring Robert Kennedy, Tom Hayden, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Arthur Miller and other bookmarks of the 1960s. Neither of these films get screened often, and they aren't available on DVD or VHS. See them at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Wednesday, 9/27, at 7:30 p.m.

THE MADCAT International Women's Festival shifts into high gear for the final screenings of its tenth season. First up is Maquilapolis: City of Factories (2006), “a documentary about (and by) workers in Tijuana's assembly factories, the maquiladoras,” according to the film's website. Coordinated by filmmaker Vicky Funari, artist Sergio De La Torre and Grupo Factor X, a Mexican women's rights organization, the film has its subjects turn the cameras on themselves, allowing the underpaid women who assemble the cheap consumer goods that North America's consumer lifestyle revolves around to tell their own stories. Among the stories:

Carmen, a single mother and one of the more than one million Mexicans employed at the maquiladoras, works making television components six nights a week for six dollars a day. She comes home to a shack she built out of recycled garage doors, in a neighborhood with no sewage lines or electricity. At 29, she already suffers from kidney damage and lead poisoning from her years of exposure to toxic chemicals.

The film is still being shot, even as it's being screened at various festivals throughout the U.S. and Mexico. It looks like an exciting opportunity to see the real results of the North American Free Trade Agreement. It screens with South of Ten (2006), Liza Johnson's ten-minute presentation of ten vignettes about New Orleans after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 9/21, at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. It's also shown at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, 9/24, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

MADCAT CONTINUES with Charming Augustine (2005), a 3-D surrealistic exercise based on photos and other records from a Parisian insane asylum of the 1880s. Filmmaker Zoe Beloff examines a case study of a Augustine, a 15-year-old suffering “hysterical paralysis,” drawing parallels between the illness and attempts to document it using the then-experimental techniques of moving pictures. It screens with Case History of a Multiple Personality (1923), a silent clinical film capturing the various personae of a patient attended by Dr. Cornelius C. Wholey, who made the film. See it Saturday, 9/23, 7:30 p.m., at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Tuesday, 9/26 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

AND DON'T FORGET to cast your vote for the Roxie Cinema in the National Trust for Historic Preservation's version of American Idol: The Architectural Face-off.

Text copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Preserve the Roxie Cinema! Vote Now! Vote Often!

2006-09-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

The Roxie Cinema San Francisco's slightly tarnished little jewel of a theater is competing for preservation funding from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and it needs your help to succeed.

As part of a strange reality-TV-inspired exercise, 25 structures throughout the Bay Area have been chosen as finalists in a vote-off to see which will get funding from the National Trust. It's Survivor: Historic Landmarks. I promise to return for a rant about the arrogant cupidity of such an exercise at another time. Right now, I want to ask you to support the Roxie Cinema.

For years, the Roxie Cinema has been THE place for the under-loved and under-appreciated movies and film-goers. It pretty much singlehandedly made successes of films like Rivers and Tides (2001) and Red Rock West (1992). It's currently operated in concert with the New College of California, and as such is probably the most progressive movie theater in the country.

Unfortunately, for years the Roxie Cinema has also been beset by money woes. Maintenance has frequently been deferred, and the building could stand some serious architectural love. Funds from the National Trust would go a long way to helping the building match the quality of the films and the top-notch presentation provided by the hard-working Roxie staff.

Voting often is encouraged in this plebiscite—you're allowed one vote per day, right up to October 31, when the contest ends. Registration is required, but that's a small price to pay to help ensure the future of one of the last truly independent movie houses left. The Roxie is up against some tough (and also deserving) competition, making it even more important for the Bay Area film community to stuff the ballot box!

Go to www.partnersinpreservation.com , register, and vote. Then get all of your friends to vote. Then get all of your friends to get their friends to vote for the Roxie. Rinse and repeat. And vote every day through Halloween. You'll feel better. Really.

Recommended Films 9/13-9/21

2006-09-14T00:47:00.000-07:00

Hollywood's Production Code had been moribund for a decade, dead for at least a year, when the film industry established the letter-based rating system in 1968. Intended to allow filmmakers greater freedom in representing adult subject matter while allowing parents to shield children from undesirable content, the system was implemented by former Lyndon Johnson sycophant Jack Valenti, who became president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in 1966.

Films approved for release by the MPAA are assigned a letter rating, advising theater operators and parents which movies were appropriate for different age groups. Valenti himself explains the system in this clip from the fondly remembered Amblin-Warner Brothers cartoon show Freakazoid.

Originally, the “adults-only” designation was given the letter “X.” Films like Midnight Cowboy (winner of the 1970 best picture Oscar) and A Clockwork Orange received “X” ratings. Producers of pornographic films—which exploded in popularity during the 1970s —rarely submitted their films to the MPAA, but adopted the “X” designation as a marketing tool, trebling its impact by inventing the “XXX” rating. The moral backlash that began in the 1980s made it difficult for studios to book the rare legitimate “X”-rated films into theaters. Brian DePalma re-edited Scarface (1983) twice, hoping to get the MPAA to reduce its rating to R. After Abel Ferrara's King of New York (1990) was rated “X,” pressure groups convinced the MPAA to surrender the “X” rating to the pornographers. The new “scarlet letter” was the “NC-17” designation, which proved to be just as damning as the original “X.” Film directors are often bound by a studio contract that demands they deliver a film that receives a rating no higher than “R.” David Lynch made extensive cuts to Wild at Heart to get an “R” rating. (Europeans saw the film as the filmmaker intended it—you can see it that way at the Clay October 20 and 21 at midnight). After Stanley Kubrick's death, Warner Brothers used digital manipulation to obscure elements of an orgy scene in his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, to keep from getting an “NC-17” mark. (Again, Europeans saw the original film.)

The rules the MPAA use for determining these ratings are obscure. The individuals who make these calls are also hidden from view. Hence this week's top film recommendation: an in-their-face documentary called This Film is Not Yet Rated. Director Kirby Dick borrows heavily from Michael Moore's playbook, chasing the anonymous members of the MPAA's rating board through Los Angeles, but the Illuminati-like secrecy of the MPAA all but demands this confrontational approach. Dick hired a private investigator to uncover the identities of the nation's censors, and the trailer shows that Dick spoke with at least two of them, and interviewed one on camera.

This Film is Not Yet Rated plays for one week at the Lumiere Theatre, starting Friday, 9/15.

The gorgeous Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto provides a double dose of Howard Hawks films starring Cary Grant this weekend. The screwball classic Bringing Up Baby (RKO, 1938) features Grant and Katharine Hepburn playing against type; he as a dotty paleontologist, she as a scatter-brained heiress. “Baby” is a pet leopard, on the loose in Connecticut. Only Angels Have Wings (Columbia, 1939) is a South American adventure film, with Grant as a daredevil mail pilot, Jean Arthur as a New York showgirl far from her concrete jungle, and a 21-year-old Rita Hayworth as Grant's ex-girlfriend. Bringing Up Baby plays at 5:35 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. Friday, 9/15, through Monday, 9/18. Only Angels Have Wings plays at 7:30 p.m. Friday, 9/15, through Monday, 9/18, plus 3:15 p.m. Saturday, 9/16, and Sunday, 9/17.

Midnight Mass may be dormant, awaiting its annual resurrection, but Peaches Christ still walks the earth, and she's been helping the Clay Theatre program their series of midnight movies. This week, Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez star in one of best of the the midnight films produced during the 1980s—the last and possibly the best decade of the midnight movie era—Repo Man (Edge City/Universal, 1984). Estevez plays a punk kid whose larcenous nature leads him to an entry-level position reclaiming cars from bad debtors. Stanton's his mentor. It's the sophomore effort for director Alex Cox, who gave the world Sid & Nancy two years later. Deep behind the scenes of this classic is Michael Nesmith, the only real musician in the Monkees, and the real inventor of the MTV-style music video format, with his legendary Elephant Parts (Pacific Arts, 1981). Repo Man plays at midnight Friday, 9/15 and Saturday, 9/16.

The tenth Madcat International Women's Film Festival continues with three screenings this week. Friday, 9/15, two documentaries explore Rural Women: Finding Independence. First is the U.S. premiere of Water and Atefeh, a 2001 mini-dv documentary from Iran about the struggles of a solitary woman, Atefeh, to maintain her small farm during a prolonged drought. Producer/director Nahid Rezaei studied film in Paris, and was once the director of the Iranian Documentary Filmmakers Society. Next is The Angelmakers, a 2005 Beta SP documentary from Hungary that probes the history of the village of Nagyrev. Astrid Bussink gets the residents to open up about a notorious event from 1929, when several women used arsenic to murder their husbands. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. at Artists Television Access.

Tuesday, 9/19, Madcat offers Motion Stopped: An Evening of Animation. The program is comprised of several short films, but the most intriguing is probably McLaren's Negatives (2006) by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre. The film explores the nature of legendary Scottish abstract filmmaker Norman McLaren, using the same animation techniques that made his own films so distinctive. Québec native Saint-Pierre gained note with Post-Partum (2004) a documentary about the depression her mother experienced following her birth. Also noteworthy is Phantom Canyon (2006), animated from more than 4,000 separate collages, including images from Eadward Muybridge's Victorian-era photographic examination of human and animal motion, by Stacey Steers. The program starts at 8:30 p.m., pre-show barbecue at 6:30 p.m., at the El Rio.

Wednesday, 9/20, Madcat presents Psycho Vision: 3D Hallucinations and the Vladmaster, a night of 3-D slides and 16mm movies. Claire and Don in Slumberland is a 30 minute combination of 3-D slides and 16mm film that explores the hyper-rationalism of the mid-20th century, using actual psychology films from 1949 to send two characters on a self-reflective 3-D journey of the soul. Created by Zoe Beloff, this experience looks very interesting. It's preceded by 16mm films from Beloff's own collection, including Dave Fleischer's Mysterious Mose, a 1930 Betty Boop cartoon, and Fleischer's Bubbles, a 1922 Koko the Clown exercise in surrealism. The show starts at 8:30 p.m., the barbecue at 6:30 p.m., at the El Rio.

An extremely rare silent film screens at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Sunday, 9/17, at 5 p.m. The Sentimental Bloke (1919) is one of the few surviving silents from Australia. Based on a 1915 poem by Australian C. J. Dennis, the film follows a larrikin (ancient Australian for fun-loving guy) who vows to clean up his act when he falls for a fair damsel. This print is from a new negative combining elements from Australia and a negative found in the George Eastman House of Rochester, New York. Musical accompaniment is by Jon Anderson.

Galileo was a liberal

2006-09-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

Today's entry proves that this blog is mostly about films: What follows has nothing to do with movies.

This is too easy. Iran's wingnut president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called on his nation's students to identify, persecute and oust liberal professors from its universities. “A student must yell against liberal thoughts and the liberal economy,” Ahmadinejad said, in a quote reprinted by the BBC. No one should be surprised by provocative statements like that from a leader who has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and suggested that the Holocaust is a “myth.” What makes Ahmadinejad's call for a purge of intellectuals grist for the mill is how neatly it corresponds with one of the tactics of American neo-conservatives.

American wingnut David Horowitz appears to be in agreement with Ahmadinejad's call for the harassment of liberal-minded educators. Horowitz has published a book called The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery Publishing, 2006), and he is one of the founders and backers of Students for Academic Freedom, an organization that attacks teachers who offend conservative students by expressing “liberal” viewpoints. Horowitz and Ahmadinejad are convinced that exposure to liberal ideas corrupts the youth of their respective nations. Here are their own words on the topic:

David Horowitz: “You see, beginning in the mid-1960s, the left made a concerted effort to take over our colleges and universities. The turmoil surrounding the Viet Nam war made our schools ripe for leftist pickings, and they did -- they methodically took over our campuses … now, four decades later, they have a stranglehold on hiring, teaching, and administering most of our schools in all 50 states!
“As they’ve taken control, they’ve trampled free speech, virtually banished conservative professors, and turned our schools into little more than huge megaphones for anti-American rhetoric from coast to coast.” (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Content/read.asp?ID=10)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "Today students should protest and shout at the president asking why some liberal and secular professors are still present in the universities. Our educational system has been under the influence of the secular system for 150 years. Colonialism is seeking the spread of its own secular system."
(http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1865730,00.html)

Both men have correctly targeted the key threat to the authoritarian regimes in their nations: educated people equipped with knowledge and the ability to make their own decisions. It's not easy to control a population that question edicts like ensuring airline safety by confiscating toothpaste, or that the “crime” of converting to a different religion is punishable by death. This ability to question is at the heart of a liberal education, and has always been a threat to those who seek to wield power autocratically, be they on the right or the left of political spectrum.

One of the tropes of neo-conservatives is that questioning any of their viewpoints is equivalent with supporting the most extreme opposite position. To question the war in Iraq is to support Saddam Hussein, the “insurgents” or Osama bin-Laden. Asking what the war in Iraq has to do with the “war on terror” is akin to supporting the “terrorists.” Anyone wondering how free trade benefits the jobless must be a protectionist or a socialist. Use of playground taunting to prevent rational discussion is a brilliant use of the current means of communication: TV news and talk radio for the professionals; anonymous blogs and online discussion groups for the amateurs.

This tactic was adapted from the Yippies, the anarchist group of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was lead by Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, Abbie Hoffman and Anita Hoffman, among others. The Yippies' prankish theatricalism revolved around extreme poltical polarity: Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey was as much a “fascist” to the Yippies as Republican Richard Nixon. The Yippies' inability to comprehend the definition of fascism, combined with their juvenile exhibitionism, caused befuddlement among mainstream newspapers and broadcasters, who still had managerial staff that took their public service responsibility seriously, and provided more than entertaining sound bites. The neo-conservative's adaptation of Yippie-style antics has been successful because its confrontationally binary approach makes for entertaining viewing in between the commercials that support the nine major companies that control most of the media today.

It's much easier to hold to a fixed idea than to consider alternatives. By looking at the horizon, a child learns that the world is flat; it takes effort to understand how this surface is part of a round planet. That same child sees the sun rise in the east, travel overhead, then set in the west. Much more effort is required to accept that the earth moves around the sun.

Of course, even more effort was required to develop this knowledge in the first place. Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher, taught in the fifth century B.C. that the earth was spherical. The Greeks clung to a view of the universe that placed the earth at the center of the cosmos. As their knowledge of astronomy grew, they continued to adapt their new learning to this belief, resulting in the Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe, which remained dominant for 1,500 years. In the 16th century A.D., Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus developed the first mathematical model that explained astronomical anomalies in the Ptolemaic view of the cosmos. Copernicus moved the earth out of its central position, placing it—along with several other planets—in orbit around the sun, which now occupied the center of the solar system. This model, which defined orbits as perfectly circular, failed to account for observational anomalies, e.g., the varying location of Mars in the sky. He refrained from publishing his theory until just before his death, afraid of persecution by the Roman Catholic Church, which invested much of its philosophy in an earth-centric world view.

The Copernican model defined orbital paths as circles, not ellipses, making it just as buggy as the Ptolemaic model. Refinements by Tycho Brahe of Denmark and Johannes Kepler of Germany improved Copernicus' model, but it took 17th-century observations of the heavens with the newly-invented telescope by Italian Galileo Galilei to verify not only that the earth orbited the sun, but that other objects orbited other planets, and that the stars were farther away and far more numerous than had been believed before. For this remarkable effort at adding to knowledge, a 70-year-old Galileo was brought before the Roman Catholic Inquisition (the Papal equivalent of Guantanamo) in 1633, and threatened with torture and death unless he declared that the earth was at the center of the cosmos.

Galileo was a liberal thinker. He observed the world, he studied the work of those who had come before him, he used the latest technology, and he trusted his observations and his knowledge more than his core beliefs—the geocentric view of the Roman Catholic Church—which were founded on nothing more than rote recitation.

Liberal thought is not the same as the “liberalism” defined by the nattering nabobs of Fox News and talk radio. Let's take a look at the definition of “liberal” from the American Heritage Dictionary:

Liberal. . . adj. . . 1. a. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and toleration of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded. c. Of relating to, or characteristic of liberalism.

The Fox News definition of liberal is much the same as its definition of “Islamo-fascist” or the old uses of epithets like “commie,” “red,” “papist,” “bourgeois,” “heretic,” etc., i.e., “a person whose ideas we find threatening.” A true liberal thinker remains open to new ideas. I've known liberal-thinking Republicans and soldiers. I've known closed-minded Democrats and pacifists.

I think the reason folks like Horowitz and Ahmedinejad get their knickers in a twist about liberal thinkers is that it threatens their own tenuous picture of the world. Both men are erstwhile radicals. Horowitz was an editor at the leftist magazine Ramparts. He was pals with Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton. Ahmedinejad was involved in the revolt that toppled Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1978, and was likely involved in the capture of American hostages in 1979, which lead to the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the U.S. in 1980. Both men found pathways to power, and found it easier to adopt an authoritarian philosophy that helps them maintain their position, than to cling to liberal thought, which is always fraught with uncertainty. In this way, Horowitz and Ahmedinejad have much in common with their respective bogeymen, like Bill and Hillary Clinton or Condoleeza Rice, all of whom surrendered any ideals they might once have had in favor of maintaining personal power and prestige.

Teresa Whitehurst, author of Jesus on Parenting (Baker Books, 2004), offered an interesting meditation on learning and liberalism in “Careful Not to Get Too Much Education...Or You Could Turn Liberal,” an article at Third World Traveler. She recounted overhearing a conversation between two students at Lipscomb University, a Christian school in Nashville, Tennesee. The elder passed along to the younger advice he'd received from a professor. “You have to be careful not to get too much education, because you could lose your foundation, your core values.”

That statement neatly encapsulates the fear that leads reactionaries like Horowitz and Ahmedinejad to condemn “liberal professors.” Knowledge is dangerous, especially when it's shared among the masses. An educated populace that develops its own conclusions, individually and collectively, is equipped to question the pronouncements of its leaders. That's bad for the people in power, especially when they're in that position undeservedly.

I'm enrolled in college right now, completing a long-delayed bachelor's degree. I've had several professors and teachers, in subjects ranging from math to film history to astronomy. To date, my only experience of a closed-minded, opinionated and arrogant instructor was a tenured English professor who displayed his neo-conservative ideology at every opportunity. His lectures were peppered with expletives, designed to shock and enrage students. One student who challenged him respectfully, following a particularly corrosive tirade of obscenity, was told she should “take this class from somebody else, because I'm not going to change the way I am because it makes you uncomfortable.”

It seems to me that the problem with education today is not a preponderance of liberal thinkers, but the volume of whining from those threatened by free thought.

(Note: This entry is dedicated to extra super special agent M. "It's not too bad.")

Recommended Films: 8/6-8/14

2006-09-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

San Francisco is awash in film festivals. There's the Silent Film Festival, the Jewish Film Festival, Noir City, Frameline (née the Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Film Festival), the SF Indie Fest, the Doc Fest, the Another Hole in the Head Fest, the SF Black Film Festival, the Ocean Film Festival, the International Asian-American Film Festival, the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival, the Hi/Lo Film Festival, the American Indian Film Festival, the Latino Film Festival, the Zeitgeist Film Festival, Resfest, Tranny Fest, Berlin and Beyond, and the grandmother of them all, the International Film Festival, just to name some of the regulars. And these are just some of the ones contained within the 49 square miles of the city proper.

This week, two of the most interesting festivals get underway with their tenth programs: The Arab Film Festival and the Madcat Women's Film Festival. Both, as you might expect, get my highest recommendation.

The Arab Film Festival offers Americans the all-too-rare chance to see films produced in countries that our pathologically perverse leaders would rather have us experience through their own myth-making apparatus. Almost none of these films will be distributed widely in the U.S., so this is your best chance to see the world through different eyes. Turn off your television and go learn something at the movies. These are the ones that look most exciting to me:

Zozo (2005) is about a young Lebanese boy who makes his way to Sweden as a direct result of the Lebanese Civil War in 1987. Director Josef Fares contrasts the harsh reality of Zozo's life in both countries with elements of magical realism (including Zozo's pet chicken) to craft what looks to be a compelling story about the prospects of a stranger in a strange land. Check out the film's trailer here. A clip from the film can be seen here. Fares is a 28-year-old Lebanese who fled, with his parents, to Sweden at the age of 10, where he's become a successful film director. Zozo won the Swedish Film Institute's Golden Beetle for cinematography (Aril Wretblad) and music (Adam Nordén), the Spirit of Freedom award at the Bahamas International Film Festival, and was Sweden's entry in the 2006 Academy Awards. It shows in 35mm film at the Roxie Cinema at 7 p.m. Friday, 9/8 and at 9:15 p.m., Tuesday, 9/12. You can also catch it at San Jose's Camera 12, Sunday, 9/10, 4:30 p.m.

Waiting tells the story of Ahmad, a Palestinian theater director whose plans to leave the country are disrupted when he takes on the job of assembling a new troupe for the Palestinian National Theatre. Director Rashid Masharawi uses a mock documentary style as the camera follows Ahmad as he travels through refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, seeking performers who best embody the current zeitgeist of Palestine: waiting. Masharawi was born in a Gaza refugee camp in 1962. He's made six documentaries. Waiting is his fourth feature. In the press notes, he writes: “We Palestinians have the feeling of not being in control of our destiny. The hope of a possible solution comes around regularly, but has fallen apart and then we just start waiting again. Waiting has become an integral part of our lives. It’s at the root of our entire being.” Waiting plays in 35mm at the San Jose's Camera 12 , 9 p.m. Sunday, 9/10, and at Berkeley's California Theatre, 5 p.m., Saturday, 9/16.

The Blood of My Brother tells the story of what happens after an Iraqi civilian—a portrait photographer—is killed by American troops. Director Andrew Berends offers an Iraqi-produced look at what is motivating the Shia uprising in the country America “liberated” so effectively that it must keep a force of 140,000 troops there. The official website is here, and you can see the trailer here. See it in Beta SP video at the Roxie Cinema, 6:30 p.m., Monday, 9/11, and at Berkeley's California Theatre, 9:30 p.m., Saturday, 9/16.

Sound of the Soul (2005) is a documentary about the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, held annually in Morocco. Jewish musicians perform alongside African Berbers, a Portugeuse Fado singer, a gospel band from Harlem, and artists from Ireland, Afghanistan, Russia, England, Mauritania and Turkey. Director Stephen Olsson captures a Sephardic singer as she says “I think the organizers of the festival are very brave, because it is not really easy at this time in history to invite Jews to play in public. But everything here felt fine. It was a very powerful moment.” Sound of the Soul screens in Beta SP video at the Roxie Cinema, 6:15 p.m., Saturday, 9/9.

Sacrifices (2002) is Oussama Mohammed's startling look at the ways that power and violence work in tandem to support each other. A Syrian patriarch is dying, and his family coalesces around him as his dissolution prompts changes. Compared to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Sacrifices is not an easy film to see in this country, so take this opportunity if you can. It's at the Roxie Cinema, 6:30 p.m., Thursday, 9/14. It's also at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, 8:45 p.m., Saturday, 9/9.

Sacred Space Denied: Bethlehem and the Wall (2005) is a 20 minute short video documenting the human cost of Israel's security barrier in the sacred city. Peter J. Nagle and Hanna Musleh demonstrate how the large structure occupies more and more Palestinian territory while it divides families and creates more disruption than security. It's part of a program of short films that screens at the Roxie Cinema, 2:15 p.m. Sunday, 9/10.

I Know I'm Not Alone is Michael Franti's documentary about his trips to Iraq and Palestine. A founding member of the Beatnigs, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and currently the singer and composer for Spearhead, Oakland native Franti uses the camera and his music to document the human cost of perpetual war. It screens at the Roxie Cinema, 9 p.m., Monday, 9/11.

Goal Dreams follows the exploits of the Palestinian national football (soccer) team as it works to overcome obstacles (the players speak different languages, it has no home field, it's surrounded by soldiers, etc.) as they try to qualify for the 2006 World Cup. This Palestinian production, by directors/producers Jeffrey Saunders and Maya Sanbar, was screened on the Bethlehem Wall during the World Cup matches this past summer. See it in Beta SP video at the Roxie Cinema, 4 p.m., Sunday, 9/10, at Berkeley's California Theatre, 9 p.m., Friday, 9/15, and at San Jose's Camera 12, 2:30 p.m., Sunday, 9/17.

Ahlaam may be the most exciting film in the festival. Shot in Baghdad during the ongoing American occupation and the various insurgencies, Ahlaam tells the personal stories of a young woman who's been in a psychotic asylum since her husband-to-be was seized at the wedding by Saddam Hussein's thugs. American shells destroy the hospital, and she finds herself wandering the streets of devastated Baghdad, where she meets other lost souls—damaged by Baathist brutality and ravaged by American “liberation.” The production of this film makes the experience of Roberto Rosselini and the Italian neorealists look like a walk in the park: The crew carried AK-47 weapons. Some were abducted by insurgents, others were kidnapped by American troops. It's miraculous that the film was made at all. It's even more miraculous that it's made its way through America's blockade of information that runs counter to its own propaganda. This one is not be missed. (I'd point you to the trailer, but the site's been down for the past two days, and even Google's cached site is eerily empty.) See its U.S. premiere in 35mm at the Cubberly Auditorium at Stanford University, Palo Alto, 8:30 p.m., Tuesday, 9/12, at the Roxie Cinema, 9 p.m., Thursday, 9/14, and at Berkeley's California Theatre, 2 p.m., Sunday, 9/17.
The Arab Film Festival continues through 9/15. Check out their site for more programs and information.

The Madcat Women's Film Festival consistently showcases outstanding features, documentaries and lots and lots of shorts by women filmmakers. This festival earned a warm spot in my heart by introducing me to one of my all-time favorite documentaries, Caroline Martel's The Phantom of the Operator, which is sadly, not coming to a theater near you any time soon.

This year's 10th anniversary festival opens with a program called Dwellers, featuring meditations on the concept of habitation (a difficult topic here in the Bay Area, where there's an avaricious clone with a line of credit burning a hole in his/her soul, anxious to become an evictor-in-common and take over your home for a Sunset Magazine-inspired nightmare). Among the shorts in the program is Dear Bill Gates (2005), an imagined correspondence on the co-opting of history and culture for commerce, by Sarah Christman, co-director of Bush for Peace. Also featured is Kerry Laitala's Terra Firma (2005), a montage of images by Eadweard Muybridge and other photographers, plus footage from A Trip Down Market Street (1906), a Miles Brothers actuality filmed from a streetcar on San Francisco's main drag four days before the 1906 earthquake and fire. There's also Viewmaster Documentaries with Live Narration by Greta Snider, a four minute 3-D collection of GAF nostalgia. Plus more, of course, at the El Rio, Tuesday, 8/12, 8:30 p.m. (barbecue at 6:30 p.m.)

The second MadCat show is a retrospective highlighting 16mm films that screened at previous MadCat gatherings, at the El Rio, 8:30 p.m. Wednesday 9/13 (barbecue starts at 6:30 p.m.). Included in the program is Chris Willging's Standing at Ground Zero (2001), which focuses on the original “ground zero,” the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. in 1945, through the memories of soldier-turned-pastor Warren Kremi, who was at Nagasaki following the destruction. Also on the program is Sorry, Brenda (2003), the ultimate in subversive fan-fiction TV re-editing. Samara Halperin takes scenes from Aaron Spelling's tortured-teen exploitation series Beverly Hills, 90210, and recasts two characters into a relationship that would leave Tori Spelling speechless.

Madcat continues with more programs next week and the week following. Check out their site, or look here next week.

The Mechanical Age series at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley continues Thursday, 9/7, with L'Uomo Meccanico (The Mechanical Man), an Italian film from 1921, an early science fiction story about a female criminal mastermind and a giant robot. This incomplete 35mm is provided by Cineteca di Bologna. With La Marche des Machines (March of the Machines), a 1929 French cinematic symphony by Eugene Deslaw, in 16mm courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Plus Robots, a 1930 film by Deslaw, in 35mm, from the Cinematheque Française. The show starts at 5:30 p.m., and it's FREE!.

PFA offers more Mechanical Age treats 3 p.m., Sunday, 9/10, with the animated/live action shorts of Charley Bowers, a recently rediscovered filmmaker of the silent era, who combined Mack Sennett-style slapstick with innovative animation and Rube Goldberg inventiveness to craft cinematic japes about the increasingly mechanized world of the 20th century. There are three Bowers shorts, Egged On (1926), in which he creates an “egg that Mother Nature never considered,” Many a Slip (1927), involving the slip-proof banana peel, and A Wild Roomer (1926), which I'll leave a mystery. These are all in 35mm, courtesy of the Cinematheque Quebecoise, Lobster Films, and the Cinematheque Française. It's followed by Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990), with Johnny Depp, a blonde Winona Ryder and the final appearance of Vincent Price. One of Burton's better efforts, Depp plays the title character, a mad scientist's Frankenstein monster creation whose gentle nature alone can't help him to rise above his mechanical hands. With the Bowers-inspired Swiss short The Way Things Go, at 5 p.m.

The decks are awash with camp at the PFA as Judy Garland and Gene Kelly sashay through Vincente Minelli's 1948 musical parody The Pirate. With songs by Cole Porter, this witty send-up of the buccaneer films of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn is a true gem that doesn't get half the attention it deserves. And combining the themes of nautical marauding with they exaggerated spectre of copyright infringement, the show also includes Negativland's Gimme the Mermaid (2000), which mixes up Disney's Little Mermaid with “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” by Black Flag plus the ravings of a lawyer in the pocket of the major labels. Wednesday, 9/13 at 7:30 p.m.

The good folks at Oaklandish offer an unusual evening of films about Oakland at the Parkway Theater, Thursday, 9/14, at 9:15 p.m. Starting with something called Oakland Raider Parking Lot, the show continues with an hour-long collection of silent shorts about Oakland from the 1920s and 1930s, plus newsreels from the 1950s, footage of Bruce Lee in Oakland, the Black Panthers, Sun Ra, and more. This looks like it could be cinema verité that is truly verité.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Film Preservation: Too Important to be Left to Rocket Scientists

2006-09-02T16:33:00.000-07:00

NASA's giving $3.9 billion of tax receipts to Lockheed Martin to design, build, test and evaluate a new spaceship. Mind you, that doesn't include using the ship to go anywhere. That's $3.9 billion just to draw up the plans, build a prototype, run it through its paces, and write up a lengthy report explaining why more money should be spent on further tests. Actually going somewhere in the thing (or things, as they'll likely want to build a few of them, just like the original fleet of five Space Shuttles) will no doubt cost much more.

The new ship looks not unlike the old Apollo moonship might appear if it had spent its 30 years of retirement eating the modern American diet of high fructose corn syrup, corn chips, and beef fattened with cow parts and corn. NASA's goal is to get Americans back on the moon, supposedly by 2020. Beyond the obvious question—Why, man, WHY?!?!?—this foolish investment provides us an opportunity to look at why film preservation really matters.

It seems that NASA has mislaid the original videotape recordings of the first moon landing from 1969. It also seems that only a handful of scientists and technicians have seen the actual images transmitted from the moon. What was broadcast to the world was a second-generation copy made by pointing a TV camera at a black-and-white TV monitor showing the original transmission. This is a bit like seeing a photocopy of a photocopy of DaVinci's The Last Supper, or a Pixelvision recording of Fantasia (Walt Disney, 1940).

Video technology in 1969 was primitive. NASA, of course, had access to the best scientists and technicians possible, but they were still subject to the limitations of their time. Transmitting video images over a radio carrier wave using battery power channeled through a one-meter wide antenna from the moon to the earth, a distance of roughly 384,000 miles, is quite a feat. They also had to build a camera that could withstand the environmental extremes of the lunar surface, which has no air, lots of dust, and a temperature range of minus-387 degrees Fahrenheit to plus-253 degrees Fahrenheit. To reduce the amount of data contained in the radio signal, the engineers set the exposure rate at 10 frames per second, and this created the problem that led to the missing tapes.

The American standard video frame rate is just under 30 frames per second, or three times the frame rate of the video feed from the first moon landing. This required a non-standard videotape recorder to capture the actual video feed. While this custom VTR recorded the live images, a standard video camera, capturing 30 frames per second, was pointed at a TV showing what the custom VTR was recording at 10 frames per second. Every frame of the original video was copied approximately three times, without any mechanism ensuring frame or motion integrity. This mistimed, nearly asynchronous second-generation image is what was broadcast around the world and recorded by every TV news team in the world. And it's the only video image the general public (and most NASA employees) have ever seen.

The orbital position of the moon relative to the earth during the landing meant that the radio transmission could be received best by antennae in the southern hemisphere. The Parkes Observatory in Australia is where NASA set up its receiving and transmission station. (The story of the observatory's role in the moon landing is told in the film The Dish from the year 2000.) It's also the only place where the original 10 frames per second footage has ever been seen.

The tapes and the custom VTR made their way back to the U.S., stopping at the National Archives at the Library of Congress before they were sent to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. They were ignored for decades, until someone got the bright idea to “decommission” the custom VTR. Apparently somebody remembered that the original moon landing tapes could only be played on the obsolete deck, and thought clearly enough to strike a new copy to a modern medium before trashing the VTR. When they went to where the tapes were supposed to be, they found nothing.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all the time. Tapes and film reels are mislaid, mislabeled and misappropriated on a regular basis. The significance of this particular set of lost tapes underscores the importance of establishing a system to maintain visual and audio records. The only surviving moving images of one of the most significant events of the 20th century may turn out to be a mistimed, second-generation copy made in the most amateurish fashion imaginable. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to appreciate the magnitude of that loss.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

This week's film recommendations 8/30-9/6

2006-08-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

First this week, a mea culpa and an apology. In last week's post, I misrepresented the film Laura (20th Century Fox, 1944), describing the title character as a femme fatale. Whoops! Of course, Laura Hunt is nothing of the sort. In my haste to complete the column, I confused Gene Tierney's performance in Leave Her to Heaven (20th Century Fox, 1945) with her turn as Laura. (That's an explanation, not an excuse.) My apologies to everyone, and a tip of my dunce cap to special agent ML for bringing the mistake to my attention.

Lon Chaney is mistakenly considered a “horror” star by many, thanks largely to his performance as The Phantom of the Opera (Universal, 1925). Although it's based on a novel by Gaston Leroux, every subsequent version of the story—including the agonizing Andrew Lloyd Weber version—owes its very existence to this film. The Paris Opera House was constructed on the Universal Pictures studio lot in Hollywood, making this one of the legendary giant productions of movie history. What really makes it work is Chaney's performance—from behind two masks, he delivers an emotional impact that is astonishing to behold. This is another entry in my growing list of Film 101 entries. It's at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto this Friday, 9/1, 7:30 p.m., with Dennis James, one of the world's top silent film accompanists, at the might Wurlitzer. I've no idea which print they're using (there are several, including the gorgeous 1996 Kevin Brownlow/Photoplay print with the two-strip Technicolor sequence and all the tinting restored), but since it's the Stanford Theatre, you're assured of a thoroughly professional presentation, so go!

What may prove to be the most exciting film series of the year (or at least one of my favorites) starts at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley this Sunday, 9/3, with Fritz Lang's utopian nightmare Metropolis (UFA, 1926) at 3 p.m., and Charles Chaplin's dystopian comedy Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936) at 6 p.m. The series is called The Mechanical Age, and serves as an overview of the 20th century's fascination with machinery and the movies—which are themselves a mechanical product.

The Mechanical Age includes a double bill of Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr.—in which a film projectionist walks into the action on the movie screen—and Dziga Vertov's brilliant exercise in montage, The Man With a Movie Camera, on Sunday, 9/24, a presentation of Magic Lantern slides, cinema's direct predecessor and a chief Victorian thrill, on Saturday, 9/30, a program of silent-era serials involving mechanical threats on Thursday, 9/24, an evening of industrial films celebrating machines, from the Prelinger Archive (with Rick Prelinger himself!) on Thursday, 10/19, and much, much more. Look here for weekly reminders.

Metropolis is one of the essential silent films. Gigantic, mythical, naïve, often overwrought and frequently fascistic, it remains archetypal, even in the wake of its latest restoration. For decades, Metropolis has been incomplete, much of its original footage lost. In 2002, an entirely new version of Metropolis was prepared by the Friederich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, combining all of the known surviving footage in the sequence dicated by a recently discovered shooting script. Gaps in the script's continuity were filled by using stills and title cards describing the missing action. All of the disparate film elements (including 16mm strips) were digitally modified to give the images an overall uniform quality. This is a controversial approach to restoring films, but it seems quite appropriate as a topic for discussion in a series about films and The Mechanical Age .

Modern Times is the last appearance of Chaplins's Little Tramp character, and it's also the last major silent film made in the United States. Released with a synchronized score and sound effects track, the only dialogue heard in the film originates from mechanical devices in the frame (with the exception of Chaplin's own nonsensical musical number). The film also has a political viewpoint that helped his right-wing opponents exile Chaplin from America in the stupidly paranoid environment of the 1950s. As you might guess, both Metropolis and Modern Times are on the Film 101 list.

Hopefully everyone likes Berkeley, as there's more at the Pacific Film Archive. This weekend, there are two nights with a new 35mm print of David Lynch's break-out film, Blue Velvet (DEG, 1986). With Inland Empire (Studio Canal, 2006) Lynch's first feature in five years, premiering at the Venice Film Festival on 9/5, now's as good a time as any to revisit the first commercially-produced, genuinely Lynchian film. (Like you need an excuse!) Blue Velvet remains compelling, and it retains all of the power it had when it shocked audiences on its first release. The brutal and deranged Frank Booth may be the one role that Dennis Hopper will be remembered for. In an inspired bit of programming, PFA presents it on Friday (8:55 p.m.) with Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956), a CinemaScope examination of secrets and societally-approved drug abuse in the middle of the post-WWII American community and nuclear family. With James Mason in one of his best performances. Presented at 7 p.m., in a 35mm restored vault print from the Criterion Collection and 20th Century Fox.

On Saturday, Blue Velvet screens at 6:50 p.m., followed by Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious at 8:50 p.m. One year after the war's end, Hitchcock uses the trope of post-Reich Nazi spies in South America to explore dominance, submission and sado-masochism in this still astonishingly effective examination of personal power structures. Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Rains were never better than they are in this film, but Leopoldine Konstantin almost steals the show as the cruel Teutonic matriarch.

We're not done with the PFA yet. Another clever series starts Wednesday, 9/6 at 7:30 p.m.: Arrr, Matey: Pirates and Piracy. Examining the renewed interest in pirates of legend, in the wake of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), Talk Like a Pirate Day (9/19, me hearties), and the retail component of 826 Valencia, as well as the new corporate driven copyright regulations that are turning more and more of us into piratical outlaws, this promises to be a fun and thought-provoking series. The first program includes the swashbuckling Errol Flynn battling the delightfully unctuous Claude Rains in Michael Curtiz's The Sea Hawk (Warner Brothers, 1940). With the hilarious-yet-chilling The Artwork in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin as told to Keith Sanborn (1996), a four-minute short by Jayne Austen.

Anime fans and Hong Kong cinema enthusiasts will be lining up on Haight Street outside the Red Vic Movie House for The Great Yokai War (Kadokawa, 2005), opening Friday, 9/1, and playing through Thursday, 9/7. This is a live action/CGI anime-style eco-horror-fairy tale that appears to borrow liberally from the work of Japan's most successful animator, Hayao Miyazaki. It's directed by Takashi Miike, who's best known for nightmarish horror films like Gozu (2003). He also directed the 2005 television revival of Ultraman. The trailer for The Great Yokai War looks promising, but the question does remain: why bother re-doing in live-action and CGI what Miyazaki's already done exceedingly well in traditional animation? Let me know if you see it.

Johannes Vermeer was one of the great Dutch artists of the 17th century. Some 35 of his paintings are known to exist. One of them, The Concert, was stolen in 1990, along with 12 other significant works, from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and remains lost today. Stolen, a 2005 documentary by director Rebecca Dreyfus (with cinematography by Albert Maysles), follows art detective Harold Smith as he pursues what has become a personal obsession to locate the missing paintings more than a decade later. It looks to be an interesting examination of the world of high-priced artwork, competitive museums, shady collectors, and maybe the Irish Republican Army. It opens for a one-week run at the Roxie Cinema this Friday, 9/1.

Set your calendars ahead for:
The tenth Madcat Film Festival, 9/12-9/27.
The tenth Arab Film Festival, 9/8-9/14.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved

Additional notes on Yellow Submarine

2006-08-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

There's a direct connection between the fair city of San Francisco and the availability of the 35mm print of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, and that connection is the one and only Anita Monga, one of the most gifted film programmers in the world.

In 1999, after the film was restored and enhanced (all of the music was remixed in Dolby 5.1, and an excised scene was put back in the film), MGM planned to have one public screening of the 35mm print in London, then shelve it, figuring that VHS and DVD was the only market for the film. Monga, who was programming the Castro Theatre at the time, latched onto her connections at MGM like a bulldog, and after months of wrangling, finally got them to come through with the print for a limited screening. The sell-out houses at the Castro convinced other repertory houses to ask for the print. By the time the unplanned theatrical release ended, it had played in 87 theaters throughout the U.S., grossing nearly half-a-million dollars, according to Robert Heironimus' book Inside the Yellow Submarine (Krause Publications, 2002).

So, were it not for the inspired work of Monga, MGM would probably have shelved, forgotten and lost their expensive, digitally-restored money-maker.

The sad and ironic end to this tale is that the management of the Castro Theatre chose to sack Monga in 2004, for no good reason that they've ever provided. In her 16 years of programming the Castro, she built the reputation of that theater, and helped to make San Francisco one of the best movie-going towns in the world. To what should be their ever-lasting shame, the San Francisco International Film Festival skipped over Monga when filling their executive director position last year, in favor of a publicist from New York, supposedly because hiring a San Franciscan would be seen as "too provincial." This is loony thinking, and betrays the actual provinciality of the board of the SFIFF, especially given that Monga was the protege of Mel Novikoff, the man who made the SF International Film Festival a success in the first place.

So, as you're watching The Beatles do battle with the Blue Meanies this Sunday, keep a kind thought for Monga, and skip the concession stand at the Castro.

There, the rant is over now.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Hot Tix 8/23-8/31

2006-08-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

Spent much of this past weekend almost entirely movie-free, at the California State Fair in Sacramento, wallowing in the 21st Century urban version of bucolic splendor mixed with heaping doses of the carnival. Not “carnaval,” but the darker, American version of carnival, the kind with the rides and the midway with games like Skeeball and Ringtoss, all guaranteed to fleece most comers.

This year's theme revolves around super-heroes, and there was a “Hall of Heroes,” of which about 75 percent was dedicated to crap for sale. The remaining quarter included a viewing room with a digital projector screening clips from heroic adventure films (saw about three minutes of a swordfight from The Legend of Zorro (Columbia, 2005), just enough to know that improved filmmaking technology and technique does not make for better movies—Rouben Mamoulian and Tyrone Power, Jr., did it much better in The Mark of Zorro (20th Century Fox, 1940), so did Fred Niblo and Douglas Fairbanks in the original The Mark of Zorro (United Artists, 1920). Heck, Walt Disney's TV unit did it better with Guy Williams in the series Zorro (Walt Disney/ABC, 1957-1959).

Sam Jones, the star of the delightfully bad Flash Gordon (DEG/Universal, 1980) was signing autographs. No sign of Dino DeLaurentiis, Brian Blessed or Max von Sydow.

The piece de resistance in the Hall of Heroes was the Batmobile! The real, genuine, TV show version of the coolest and dorkiest custom car ever made! Apparently it was one of the original cars made for the series by George Barris, that has been extensively and repeatedly modified over the years, but there's a plan to restore it to its original condition. This was the first time I'd ever seen the real Batmobile (I've seen the 1989 version—yawn) and I reacted like a kid.

But, the coolest thing I saw at the fair was a model of the Cerrito Theatre, a 1937 neighborhood screen that has been dark for 40 years, which has apparently been rescued from the grave by a local grassroots effort, and will reopen in October with all of its original murals and architectural details preserved and restored. Look for more news here as I get it myself.

Now, on to this week's films that are so cool, they're hot!
(Please kill me if I ever use that sentence again.)

Top of the list this week is a celebration of the 40th anniversary of The Beatles' last-ever concert, held at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966. There are four film programs at the Castro Theatre, Saturday, 8/26 and Sunday, 8/27.

Saturday's first show starts at 1:00 p.m. with a performance of the set list from the Candlestick show by Beatles sound-alike band The Sun Kings. Then the 1978 teen comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Universal), Robert Zemeckis' first major film, about a group of crazed fans intent on crashing the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. I've never seen it, and Zemeckis often gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies (Roger Rabbit notwithstanding), but it supposedly has a scene of Nancy Allen (Chris Hargensen from Brian DePalma's Carrie) in a romantic clench with Paul McCartney's Hofner bass guitar. That could be just strange enough to be fun. The real treat is a rare 16mm film screening of McCartney's notorious Magical Mystery Tour, the 1967 TV film about the Beatles on a psychedelic bus tour. Features John Lennon as an Italian waiter using a shovel to feed the portly Jessie Robins, portraying Ringo Starr's aunt, and a cameo by the Bonzo Dog Band. It's a film guaranteed to inspire confidence in any aspiring filmmaker: Yes, even I have made a better film than this. But it is a gloriously awful movie well worth sitting through for 55 minutes. And remember, Ringo is the cinematographer! Still, it's got great music: "I Am the Walrus," "The Fool on the Hill," "Blue Jay Way." (Bonzo Dog member Neil Innes would later collaborate with Eric Idle of Monty Python on the legendary send-up of the Beatles, The Rutles: All You Need is Cash.)

Rock historian (no, not a geologist) Ben Fong-Torres talks about the Candlestick concert, then shows footage of an interview he did with McCartney in 1976. (Yes, the Mulleted McCartney! Oh, the humanity. Thank dog The Ramones came along when they did.) Followed by a 35mm screening of Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (United Artists, 1964), the first and best of all the Beatles movies, and possibly the best rock movie ever made (even better than Rock 'n' Roll High School —let it play for a bit—the sound does kick in). Then more sound-alike music from the Sun Kings. Saturday, 8/26, 7 p.m.

Sunday opens with a brilliant idea for a matinee: The sing-along Yellow Submarine (Subafilms/United Artists, 1968)!!!! C'mon, one of the songs is called "All Together Now." It works! Of course, it will be interesting to see everyone try to keep up with George's “Only a Northern Song.” With a 16mm print of The Beatles Live in Washington D.C., a film of their actual first U.S. concert appearance (after the Ed Sullivan Show). Sunday, 8/27, 1 p.m.

It all wraps up with the astonishing 1966 Richard Lester anti-war classic How I Won the War (Petersham/United Artists), featuring Lennon as Pvt. Gripweed, in glorious 35mm Eastmancolor. This is black comedy at its finest. Dealing with the stupidity of war and the class system that enables war, it's reminiscent of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 and Robert Altman's film of M*A*S*H (20th Century Fox, 1970), only bleaker and funnier. This is the one to see if you can see only one. It will be followed by a preview of the new documentary about Lennon's years as an activist, The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which you've no doubt read all about at my earlier post below. Drew Harrison, lead singer of the Sun Kings will provide a musical tribute to Lennon as well. Sunday, 8/27 at 7 p.m.

The folks at Bay Area Film Events have promised lots of giveaways, prizes and contests throughout the films. For those who can't get enough Beatles, there's a couple of non-film events at the Hard Rock Cafe at Pier 39 on Friday, 8/25. The Sun Kings will play a set following a proclamation of “Beatles Week” by one of Mayor Gavin's staff at 11 a.m. Then, there's a “Beatles Party, ” also at the Hard Rock Cafe and with the Sun Kings, from 4-6 p.m.

Sadly, they tried to get Help! (United Artists, 1965) and Let It Be (Apple/United Artists, 1970), but both of those films are locked in a legal limbo. This trailer is also not on the schedule, but should be seen to be believed. (A tip of the Beatle wig to Agent LC for this gem.)

You can find out more about events an buy tickets here.

Film Noir is a tricky term. Is it a genre, a style, a technique, all or none of the above? Did it begin with John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros., 1941) or Stranger on the First Floor (RKO, 1940)? Is Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (PRC, 1945) the best noir, or simply the cheapest? One thing is certain, though. Most of the filmmakers responsible for noir had no idea that was what they were making. The term was coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, and the real study of the form began, again in France, during the 1950s. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto presents two of the seminal noir pictures this weekend, Gilda and Laura. Rita Hayworth is Gilda Farrell, one of the most astonishingly dangerous femmes fatale ever to rope a mook. Glenn Ford plays the mook, and Charles Vidor directs. Gene Tierney as Laura Hunt almost makes Hayworth's Gilda look like a librarian who rescues sick kittens. Dana Andrews is the shlub. Vincent Price is also on hand to help chew the scenery. These are both on my Film 101 schedule—you simply must see these. Laura plays at 5:55 p.m. and 9:40 p.m. Friday, 8/25 through Monday, 8/28. Gilda shows at 7:30 p.m. nightly, with matinees at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. They're in glorious 35mm and black-and-white!

Jesse Ficks continues to exhume the strangest films from the 1970s and 1980s for his Midnites for Maniacs series at the Castro Theatre. This Friday, 8/25, an astonishing triple bill begins with Heartbeeps (Universal, 1981), one of the great “what were they smoking” films. Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters are shiny robots who fall in love, flee their human masters, and attempt to raise a child who sounds a lot like Jerry Garcia (because it is his voice). The cast includes Christopher Guest (Spinal Tap), Randy Quaid, and the always-astonishing team of Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul). Directed by Allan Arkush (Rock 'n' Roll High School), this film is, well, something. Also on the bill is Weird Science (Universal, 1985), with Kelly LeBrock as the scientific abomination created by two hormonally stressed teen geniuses, with Bill Paxton as the abusive older brother. Plus a legendarily awful film about video games, breasts, and flaunting authority, Joysticks (1983, Jensen Farley). The title pretty much sums it up. It all kicks off at 7:30 p.m., with Joysticks starting at MIDNIGHT.

The Pacific Film Archive concludes its retrospective of films by Japanese director Kenzo Mizoguchi this week. Friday, 8/25, sees the first of the final three programs features a brand new 35mm print of Street of Shame (1956), a strange and troubling journey into Tokyo's Yoshiwara red-light district during the 1950s, examining the lives of five women working at the Dreamland brothel, 7 p.m. It's followed by Sansho the Bailiff (1954), set in 11th Century Japan, at 8:50 p.m.

Sunday, 8/27, the PFA screens The Life of Oharu (1952), considered by Mizoguchi to be his best film. It follows the degradation of a 17th Century lady of the court, who loses everything after she falls in love with page. It shows at 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday, 8/30, the series ends with The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), a Meiji-era drama about a woman's self-sacrifice in support of a kabuki actor. It starts at 7:30 p.m.

The Pacific Film Archive also presents a rare look at the father of animation, Winsor McCay, courtesy of one of the modern masters of the form, John Canemaker. McCay created the early comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, as well as the legendary Tales of a Rarebit Fiend. Although he didn't invent cinematic animation, he was one of its earliest champions and stars, with such films as Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912). Canemaker presents a program of McCay's shorts, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 8/26. Preceding that is a presentation of Canemaker's shorts, Marching to a Different Toon, including his adaptation of John Lennon's drawings in John Lennon's Sketchbook (1986). That show's at 5 p.m.

The Red Vic screens The War Tapes (2006), Deborah Scranton's interesting approach to embedded coverage of the war in Iraq. She gave digital video cameras to three soldiers, who documented their daily lives as they guard the financial resources of the Halliburton corporation. This is not an easy film to watch, as it takes you close inside the war, but it should be seen, especially by anyone with a “Support Our Troops” sticker on the car. Know what you're supporting. It plays at 2 p.m., 4:15 p.m., 7:15 p.m. and 9:20 p.m. Sunday, 8/27, and 7:15 p.m. and 9:20 p.m. Monday, 8/28, and Tuesday, 8/29.

The Roxie Cinema has a couple of interesting documentaries this week. The first, Our Brand is Crisis (Boynton Films/Koch-Lorber, 2006), is a look how political consultants from the United States, including Bill Clinton's lieutenant James Carville, used marketing, lies, rumors, lots of money and dirtier tricks to try to defeat the popular leftist Evo Morales, leader of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) Party, in Bolivia's 2005 presidential elections. Directed by Rachel Boynton, whose previous documentary was People Like Us: Social Class In America (Center for New American Media, 2001), this looks to be a fascinating examination of how the U.S. tries to control “democracy” in other countries—when it's not imposing “democracy” via missiles and ground forces. It opens Friday, 8/25, and plays through Wednesday, 8/31, 7:15 p.m. and 9 p.m. nightly, with additional screenings at 2:45 and 5 p.m. Saturday, 8/26, and Sunday, 8/27.

The second documentary of interest at the Roxie is Dark Water Rising: The Truth About Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues (Shidog Films, 2006), a look at the volunteer efforts to rescue the animals left behind in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina exposed the United States' callousness last year. This will not be an easy film to watch, but it's one that should be seen by everyone that has a pet or just likes animals. I'd say it should be seen by everyone, but the heartless will simply not get it. You can see the trailer here. Directed by Mike Shiley, who also did Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories (2004), one of the best of the un-embedded looks at America's “finest hour.” (Irony intended.) Dark Water Rising plays one night only, Monday, 8/28, at 6:30 p.m., 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Placeholder: Mark your calendars for Friday, September 1. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto is showing the inimitable Lon Chaney in the dazzling The Phantom of the Opera (Universal, 1925), with the astonishing Dennis James at the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ. This is a key Film 101 entry.

Friz Freleng: Wizard or Monster?

2006-08-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

Today's post is part of a blog-athon on the subject of Looney Tunes director Isadore “Friz” Freleng. Suggested by Brian at Hell on Frisco Bay, a damned fine movie blog, this involves a bunch of bloggers all commenting on the same subject. As soon as Brian's collected all of the links (sometime Monday, 8/21), I'll post my own link to it, so you can check out what other folks have to say about Freleng. As always, please let me know what you think, either by commenting directly, or emailing me at the “You know how to whistle?” link to your right. -- RH

I'd say that it's a safe bet that if you polled those who know the names of the real people who made the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, most would rank them in the following order: #1 or #2: Chuck Jones or Tex Avery, #3: Robert Clampett, #4: Friz Freleng, #5: Robert McKimson, then everyone else, from Frank Tashlin to Abe Levitow to Hawley Pratt, etc.

This ranking is subjective and non-scientific. It represents my experience of which directors most people are aware of. I suspect more people know of Jones and Avery because they have received the best publicity. They've been the subject of more books, articles, films and TV specials than any of the others.

Of course, that might also suggest that Jones and Avery had the most creative success. Their styles are much more distinct than the styles of the others, and are instantly recognizable to even the novice cartoon scholar. (Clampett's style is equally apparent, but his impact on the LT/MM canon is less obvious.)

What does this say about everyone else, including Freleng? While they were all innovative and frequently daring, the sum of their work is less than that of Jones and Avery. As weird as Clampett's Porky in Wackyland (1938) and its colorized doppelganger Dough for the Do-Do (1949)—repainted and enhanced by Freleng's team—are, they're not as surreal as Jones' Duck Amuck (1953) nor as delirious as Avery's Little Red Walking Hood (1937). Porky in Wackyland/Dough for the Do-Do draws attention to its inspiration: the backgrounds are obviously copies of the landscapes of Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy, the frenetic gags owe less to dada than to the best of Dave Fleischer's Koko the Klown and Betty Boop cartoons. The absurdity of Duck Amuck appears to be primary. The use of inappropriate sound cues and the insertion of an external animator draws attention to the movie-making process itself, making Duck Amuck truly surreal, not merely an homage. Their ability to repeatedly synthesize components of the work of other artists into a new form, as opposed to replication, is what distinguished Jones and Avery. Clampett and Freleng had their moments of brilliance, just not as often as Jones and Avery.

Freleng always seemed to be to be the workhorse of Termite Terrace. Steady, productive, competent but uninspired. What always comes to my mind is the DePatie-Freleng period. When Warner Brothers closed its animation division in the early 1960s, Freleng joined forces with David DePatie to form DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, which hired most of the line staff that Warner's had dismissed. Their big score was the opening sequence of The Pink Panther (United Artists, 1963), which they spun off into a series of cartoon shorts that played in theaters and on television. They also were one of the companies that Warners contracted to produce Looney Tunes until 1968. These cheaply-produced exercises in limited animation and static stories are among the worst of the entire series. Their failure is likely less the fault of DePatie/Freleng than of the budgets set by Warners, but I've never been able to get the sour taste of those late-era Daffy Duck/Speedy Gonzales films out of my mouth.

For this Freleng blog-athon, I thought I'd examine what I believe to be his best and worst work for Warners.

The worst is among the most offensive of the entire series of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944). There's a bizarre cult built around this film, as it's one of the cartoons that Warner Brothers all but denies exist. Its scarcity, coupled with typical knee-jerk responses to perceived “political correctness” makes this cartoon a “holy grail” for collectors. Unlike Clampett's Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarves (1943), another hidden short that manages to be funny despite its use of racist caricatures, Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips is an uninspired mess that would be boring if it weren't so astonishingly revolting.

It opens with what was already a well-worn trope: Bugs Bunny adrift on the ocean, waiting to be stranded on a desert island. Freleng and scenarist Tedd Pierce draw attention to this quotidian device, having Bugs declare that he's “just killing time until the the island that inevitably turns up in these kinds of pictures, turns up.” This reflexive awareness of being in a movie is often one of the best set-up devices in a cartoon, but it falls flat here, thanks to the prosaic animation of the opening. The first shot is of an empty ocean, with a title “Somewhere in the Pacific,” as a scale is rapped out on a xylophone. The camera tracks to the right, then Bugs, off camera, starts to sing “Someone's Rocking My Dreamboat.” The camera moves towards the empty horizon, and the frame dissolves to a new shot of a crate floating on the waves, two long grey ears protruding from the top. Another dissolve brings the camera in closer to the crate, then a cut brings the camera inside the crate to see Bugs. In almost every other cartoon where a character gets stranded on an island, the reveal is handled fluidly through the animation, not through clumsy editing. It's as if Freleng is warning the audience that what's to follow is of low quality.

The animation in this short presages the limited animation style that would define the work of DePatie/Freleng and Hanna-Barbera in the 1960s. There are lots and lots of repeated frames, giving the picture a static and occasionally jerky quality completely unlike most of the LT/MM shorts of the 1940s. Bugs spends an inordinate amount of time talking to himself in this film, providing exposition but mostly continuing to kill time. Of course, better he kill time than what he ends up killing.

In 1944, America was deeply engaged in war with Japan, the “Pacific Theater” of World War II. Racist portrayals of the Japanese weren't simply common, they were all but required. Fearful of what was perceived as an internal security threat, the federal government held some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans in “internment camps.” Most of these were American citizens. Nearly all of them lost their homes and businesses. Few, if any, had any connection to, or liking for, Imperial Japan. Given the sentiment expressed in Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, it's just possible that these imprisoned Japanese and Japanese-Americans might have been safer than if they had been free to be abused by yahoos inspired by racist dreck like this cartoon.

Bugs' tropical island is inhabited by Japanese soldiers, all drawn in extremely offensive caricature: bowed legs, sloping foreheads, buck teeth, slanted eyes, round-framed eyeglasses and receding chins. They speak gibberish except when they drop into heavily accented broken English when they have to say something the audience must comprehend (e.g., “Oooh, regrettable incident. Not-a-knowing honorable general. Oooh, excuse-a-prease. Ooooh, not-a-wanting make-a hari-kari.” Typing that made me nauseous.). These soldiers are colossally stupid and suicidal. As they pursue the “wascally wabbit,” they make Elmer Fudd look like Albert Einstein.

Of course, when Bugs does battle with Elmer, the ground rules are those of any good cartoon: No matter how many times the mallet strikes the head, no matter how point-blank the shotgun blast, no character is ever really harmed. When Bugs faces the Japanese soldiers (plus one sumo wrestler), everybody but the rabbit dies, albeit off camera. The worst moment may be when Bugs dons a white uniform while delivering “Good Rumor” ice cream bars to the infantilized soldiers. Each confection contains a live grenade. As he distributes the treats among the throng, Bugs chants “Here's yours, bow-legs. Here, one for you, monkey-face. . . Here ya'are, slant-eyes.”

After the massacre is complete, the cartoon completely falls apart. After Bugs notches palm trees with Japanese flags to mark his “kills,” he throws a fit, declaring that he “can't stand peace and quiet.” A U.S. ship sails by, and he furiously tries to flag it down, until he's distracted by a sarong-wearing female version of himself. He howls like a wolf, and she hops away. Bugs then hops after her, and the cartoon irises out. It's not unexpected for Bugs to pursue a female rabbit, but this occurs here without any prior motivation. Unseen during eight minutes of random slaughter, the drag version of Bugs Bunny shows up at the end, is supposed to be taken seriously as a genuinely female bunny, and Bugs turns into the Hollywood Wolf. I know Bugs is narcissistic, but this is ridiculous.

Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips will not be showing anywhere, anytime soon. I've long been a proponent of the idea that films with racist content should be available for viewing by adults, provided that the proper context is set beforehand. Those who cannot remember the past, etc., etc. This cartoon has historic importance as an example of war-tinged racism from the 1940s, but that's all it has. It may be the worst Bugs Bunny cartoon ever made, and it's likely the worst that Freleng ever did. Under no circumstances should this cartoon fall into the hands of an unsuspecting child (or an ignorant adult, for that matter). I viewed this cartoon on a 1992 laserdisc, from The Golden Age of Looney Tunes, Volume 1. After protests, the set was withdrawn by Turner Entertainment, and the cartoon replaced by Racketeer Rabbit (1946) on future printings. If you really want to subject yourself to it, it can be seen at Pistol Wimp's site. It's also part of Dennis Nyback's roadshow Bad Bugs Bunny, which also includes “gems” like Sioux Me (1939) and All This and Rabbit Stew (1941). According to his website, Warner Brothers sent Nyback a cease-and-desist order following a New York screening in 1997. Instead of backing down, Nyback dared them to take him to court, where he knew the news media would have a field day reporting about Bugs Bunny's racist history. Without saying a word, Warner backed down.

(Nyback has several programs of rare and unusual shorts, and he's available to come to your town. Check this out.)

At the other end of the spectrum is Freleng's Three Little Bops (1957), possibly his best cartoon. The late 1950s were a last hurrah for the Warner Brothers cartoons. What's Opera, Doc? (1957), One Froggy Evening (1955), The Honey-Mousers (1956), Robin Hood Daffy (1958), Stupor Duck (1956) and Rocket-Bye Baby (1956) are just a sample of what Termite Terrace turned out as the century moved past the midpoint. A few years later, Warners would shut down its animation department, and cartoons would be banished to television and limited animation, from the brilliance of UPA's Gerald McBoing Boing to the graceless Clutch Cargo.

Three Little Bops stands apart from the other LT/MM shorts, in that neither Mel Blanc nor Carl Stalling were involved. Radio genius Stan Freberg provided the voices and Shorty Rogers did the very hot jazz music, which drives the cartoon from start to finish. The Three Little Pigs are now a jazz combo, playing at the House of Straw. The Big Bad Wolf is an over-eager trumpet player who has talent in inverse proportion to his enthusiasm. Rejected by the pigs, the Wolf blows down the nightclub, then follows them to the House of Sticks, and you get the idea.

From the very first, when the characters that form the title literally bop into the frame, Three Little Bops moves in time to Rogers' musical rhythm. This is reminiscent of the early sound cartoons, the period some refer to as the “Sausage Era” (so named because most characters were designed using sausage shapes). Cartoons from the Fleischer Studio, especially the earliest Betty Boop shorts, are great examples of this style of animation. Everything in the frame moves in time to the synchronized music: city skylines, clouds, streetcars, automobiles, queues of characters waiting to get into a moving nightclub, etc. The early Warner Brothers cartoons used this same technique, and Freleng cut his teeth on this style. You Don't Know What You're Doing (1931) is a great example of Freleng's work in this style. The Piggy character gets drunk, and as he and a buddy drive along in their bopping car, the street undulates, while the skyline rocks and rolls. The movement in Three Little Bops is restricted to the characters—the buildings only move when the Wolf blows them down with his horn—but the nearly perpetual motion gives the cartoon a sense of fun from the very first 24 frame second.

Like the best of the earliest sound cartoons, the music drives the action. Freberg provides a running narration in a style not entirely unlike bebop (but not exactly like it either), that serves to enhance what's happening in the frame, not explain it. When the Wolf attempts to blow down the House of Bricks (built in 1776!), Freberg sings “he huffed and puffed and bleat and blewt/and at ten o'clock was completely pooped” as the Wolf does just that. The audience is already aware of the characters and the story (it is The Three Little Pigs, for crying out loud), so there's no need for any narrative development, and all the effort can be expended on jokes that arise by moving the story to the 1950s jazz club scene. The piano-playing pig provides a Liberace joke, the guitar-playing pig dances like Larry Collins of the Collins Kids. The Wolf's attempts to get into the Bops' act get cornier each time. At one point he enters dressed like a 1920s-era collegiate, strumming a ukulele, another time he comes in dressed in a marching band outfit, beating a drum. The Bops dismiss him easily each time, until he finally resorts to one of the great cartoon standbys: the giant keg of dynamite. Once the explosives are brought onscreen, Freleng wastes no time in dispatching the Wolf, who “didn't get to heaven, 'twas the other place,” where he can finally blow a mean horn. The piano-playing pig declares “you've got to get hot to play real cool.”

Three Little Bops is the opposite of Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. Three Little Bops moves and flows, Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips is static and poorly constructed. Three Little Bops is all about music and rhythm—a celebration of life. Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips is about death. The two cartoons were made under very different circumstances: one was made at the height of a brutal war, the other was made in a brief lull between skirmishes during the Cold War. Yet it's still amazing to think that two such different philosophies could come from the same director. Freleng, like most people really, must have been a complicated person. It's a shame that diverse nature wasn't better represented throughout the body of his work.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Hot Tix: August 16-22

2006-08-14T23:34:00.000-07:00

There are lots more 70mm films this week at the Castro (see last week's entry for my rant about 70mm film), and two competing MIDNIGHT shows. And mark your calendars for a weekend-long film-a-thon to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' final gig, at Candlestick Park, in 1966, coming up Aug.26-27. See Friday's post for a glorious rant about John Lennon.

Do let me know if you actually attend any of these shows. There's a direct email link now, to the right. You know how to whistle, don't you?

Now, this week's picks:

Elvis Presley left the building 29 years ago next Wednesday. To celebrate his assumption by space aliens, the Parkway Theater in Oakland presents the Elvis D-Day Bash, Thursday, 8/17. Featuring one of the dumbest movies the King of Rock 'n' Roll ever made (and that is one heck of a competition, let me tell you) Clambake (United Artists, 1967), with Shelley (The Donna Reed Show, Coach, “Johnny Angel,” Annette Funicello's best buddy) Fabares, Bill (My Favorite Martian, The Incredible Hulk, Yvonne “Batgirl” Craig's boyfriend) Bixby, and Angelique (Shahna from the “Gamesters of Triskelion” episode of Star Trek) Pettyjohn. Elvis plays a rich playboy who trades places with a water-skiing instructor—also played by the King, and the yoks begin. Songs include: oh, heck, it's 1967! Elvis recorded nothing deserving of his name that year. Look for the mountains of Florida, and a young Terri Garr frooging her heart out. Cari Lee and the Saddle-ites (who sound damned fine—check out their MP3s!) will set the musical tone.

If you have to pick only one Kenzo Mizoguchi film to see during the retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Osaka Elegy (Daiichi Eiga, 1938) is it. He explores the colliding worlds of the 1930s in Japan's chief commercial center, Osaka, as he shows us the development of young woman who becomes a mistress to her boss at the telephone company so she can better assist her family financially. As she leaves the traditional ways of her family behind for the luscious art deco world of her capitalist sugar daddy, she finds herself more adrift and over her head. Full of deep focus and traveling shots, this is a glorious proto-feminist film from a nation on the verge of a backslide to imperialism that imperiled the world. Friday, 8/18, 7 p.m. Plays with Ugetsu Monogatori (Daiei, 1956), Mizoguchi's anti-military film set in 16th Century Japan. Plays at 8:45 p.m.

Everyone's seen the picture of Harold Lloyd hanging several stories above downtown Los Angeles from the hands of a giant clock. See Safety Last! (Hal Roach, 1923), the movie this stunt is from this Friday, 8/18, 7:30 p.m., at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto. The incomparable Chris Elliott will provide live musical accompaniment on the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ. Lloyd was the third member of the silent era's trio of great comedians, the others being Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and Safety Last! is one of his funniest features. For years, Lloyd's films were unavailable, because his estate refused (at his instructions) to let TV stations cut them up for commercials. Fortunately, because of this restriction, most of Lloyd's features have survived intact, with very little if any damage or loss of quality. His granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, has had the films restored and preserved, and is making them available again, and we should sing her praises high and low for this gift.

Although Midnight Mass is done for the year, Peaches Christ isn't ready to be assumed to her reward yet, as she still has to host the Underground Short Film Festival, MIDNIGHT Saturday, 8/19, at the Bridge Theater. There are 17 films, ranging from one minute to nine minutes in length, and they're all by new filmmakers. They cover a wide range of subjects and styles, ranging from Deadly Finger and Deadly Finger Returns by Jose Montesinos (which looked damned funny in the festival trailer), to Uphill Both Ways' Sock Puppet Porn (ditto). I've seen one of the films in the collection, Steffen Frech's Torsten Kretchmar: Dunkleheit, and can say that it's brilliantly edited and damned funny. I believe I've also seen another, Dichotomy, by Joe Fitzgerald. If it's the film I think it is, it is visually arresting and insanely complex for a two-minute short. If it's not, I'll just say that Fitzgerald is an incredibly talented young filmmaker who you will worship once you see his work. Really. I do.

It's guilty pleasure time, with a midnight screening of Tron (Walt Disney, 1982), the original, cheesiest and most fun of all computer game movies, in glorious 70mm. See Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan become glowing avatars (now there's a word you don't hear much anymore) in a Pac-Man-inspired “digital” landscape. David Warner is the bad guy. Duh. The “science” is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The fantasy is so outlandish that Chevy Chase movies seem rational in comparison. The costumes are goofy. The visuals are really cool. But the best thing is the sound. The soundscape of this film is one of the most inspired bits of mechanical fantasy you'll ever hear. And did I mention it's in 70mm!!! Brought to you by the marvelous Jesse Ficks and his Midnights for Maniacs crew, at the Castro Theater, Saturday, 8/19, at MIDNIGHT!

The war films of the 1930s are remarkable, because if your reference is limited to the past 20 years, it can be hard to believe that Hollywood ever made anti-war movies. But it did, and Frank Borzage's Three Comrades (MGM, 1938) deals with the horrors of World War I (the first of many “War to End All Wars”) and hints heavily at the economic situation of the Depression era. The screenplay is by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) from a novel by Eric Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front). Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone, Robert Young and Margaret Sullavan star, 6:30 p.m. Saturday, 8/19, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. With The Mortal Storm (MGM, 1940), Borzage's frank examination of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and its impact on the Jewish population. With Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, 8:30 p.m.

It's Gary Cooper nights at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, with a double feature of Love in the Afternoon (Allied Artists, 1957) and High Noon (Kramer/United Artists, 1952), Saturday 8/19 through Monday, 8/21. Billy Wilder directed Love in the Afternoon as an homage to one of his mentors, the master of the witty romantic adventure, Ernst Lubitsch. Cooper pursues French cellist Audrey Hepburn in Paris, using a private detective played by Maurice Chevalier, who just happens to be the cellist's father. 7:30 p.m. each day, plus 3:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Fred Zinneman's High Noon is legendary as the first adult western made in Hollywood. Cooper is the retiring sheriff whose plans to leave town with his new wife (the incomparable Grace Kelly) are interrupted by the arrival of a group of old enemies. The townsfolk refuse to help the sheriff, who now faces a moral dilemma: run away and be safe, or defend a townful of ingrates for no reason other than it's his duty? This one is required viewing in Hildreth's Film 101 course. 9:55 p.m. each day, plus 5:55 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper made two films together, and you can see their second, Desire (Paramount, 1936), at the Pacific Film Archive, Sunday, 8/20 at 5:30 p.m. Directed by Frank Borzage, this is a smart and sexy spy thriller produced by Ernst Lubitsch. The Lubitsch touch combines with Borzage's passion beautifully, creating a film that is as romantic and it is cynical. Dietrich and Cooper are a fantastic screen duo, and this may be their best outing together.

The third film in Deep Mehta's elements trilogy, Water (Fox Searchlight, 2005), caused a firestorm of protest among Hindu fundamentalists in India, who prevented the film from being made in 2000 by burning the sets and then tossing the remains into the Ganges River. Mehta's feminist approach is an easy target for fundamentalists, and by dealing with historic and religious aspects of Indian life, she attracts a great deal of negative attention in her native country (she's lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, since 1973). Water was shot in Sri Lanka under a false title, and there is no definite date for its release in India. Set in 1938, during British colonial rule, it details the life of a child bride who finds herself widowed at the age of seven years. Difficult but rich, Mehta's films are a far cry from Bollywood, and provide a glimpse of life as lived by far too many people, still. It's at the Red Vic, Sunday, 8/20, at 2:00 p.m., 4:30 p.m., and 7:00 p.m., and Saturday, 8/21, at 7:00 p.m. And 9:30 p.m.

Kenneth Branagh may be the Orson Welles of our era. A brilliant actor who proved to be a damned fine film director, undone by a meddling studio who wouldn't leave well enough alone—Nah, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the subsequent damage to his career was Branagh's own damn fault. He should have stuck with the William Shakespeare films, like his stunning adaptation of Hamlet (Castle Rock/Columbia, 1996). The Bard does not adapt easily to film, as his plays are truly of their original medium, the stage. But Branagh makes daring choices (like casting Billy Crystal as a gravedigger) and expands the frame of the play to fit the expanse of the wide, wide screen. There are many brilliant reasons to see this film, from Derek Jacobi's turn as Claudius, to Judi Dench as Hecuba, Branagh himself as the prince, and the titanic Brian Blessed as the ghost that kicks it all off. But the best reason is that the Castro Theater is showing it in glorious 70mm!!! Sunday, 8/20, 2:00 p.m. And 7:00 p.m.

Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot character is as iconic in France as Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, and he's just as funny and touching. In 1967, Tati unveiled his grandest comedy with Mr. Hulot, the epic Playtime. In an expensive and grand homage to Chaplin's Modern Times (Chaplin/United Artists, 1936), Mr. Hulot becomes trapped in the bizarre architecture of a futuristic Paris. The mid-century modern architectural styles are skewered relentlessly. Tati literally built a small city of steel and glass as his set. The production took three years to complete, and longer to recoup its investment. It was also the penultimate appearance of Mr. Hulot. At the Castro Theater, in 70mm!!!, Tuesday, 8/22, at 7:00 and 9:30 p.m.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Gimme Some Truth - The U.S. vs. John Lennon

2006-08-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

Today's post is a little different. It's not so much about a movie as it is about history—personal and general—that sprang to mind when I saw a trailer that hit me so hard, I put aside the other articles I was working on . I look forward to anything you might have to say about this one. —RH

There's a trailer out for a new documentary called The U.S. vs. John Lennon (LSL/Lion's Gate, 2006). I cried when I saw it, because it brought back a John Lennon I had all but forgotten, a naïve political activist caught up in events beyond his control, targeted as a threat to a corrupt politician fighting to hold on to power while conducting a hopeless war. Who also happened to have a large influence on the creation of my mind.

The relevance of this documentary to current events is evident when disgraced President Richard Nixon is shown addressing the nation about the Vietnam War. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to George Bush, he says “As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.”

If the documentary is half as good as the trailer, The U.S. vs. John Lennon could be one hell of a movie. It's directed and written by the team of David Leaf and John Scheinfield, who appear to specialize in TV documentaries about musicians. I reserve judgment, as their previous efforts include Rosemary Clooney: Girl Singer (LSL/PBS, 2004), Beautiful Dreamer: The Story of Brian Wilson and “Smile” (LSL/Showtime, 2004) and Sinatra: The Classic Duets (LSL, 2002).

I was on a pay phone in a college dormitory in Storrs, Connecticut, when I learned that Lennon had been killed. The phone conversation was a farewell hiding behind a please-write-often to an ex-girlfriend, as I was days away from boarding the Greyhound bus that brought me to California, where I've lived since. What I remember was my traveling companion, Peter, bursting into the wooden booth, his eyes wild and wet, asking if I'd heard what happened. I thought that the Soviet Union might have invaded Poland, or that the U.S. could have struck at Iran, given Peter's evident panic. When he said “John Lennon's been shot,” my adrenaline must have kicked in, because my perception of reality was suddenly so acute that the words were suspended in my ears, and time slowed. The amber light in the foyer appeared to grow in candlepower, and the sound of the Buzzcocks coming from the stereo in the kitchen was very, very hollow. With Ronald Reagan taking over the White House in January, I was prepared for—even expecting—war, not Lennon's assassination.

My early musical tastes were formed by the Beatles. I was 11 years old when their break-up was announced in early 1970. I'd been aware of their music since I was nine years old—my fifth grade binder was covered with transcriptions of the lyrics to “Help!,” “Nowhere Man,” and other Beatles songs. Abbey Road was the first record I bought with money I'd saved myself. It helped that my parents hated the Beatles. The current image of the Beatles is as cuddly as a Sanrio character, but they were anything but cuddly in 1970. All my parents saw was the long hair, the beards, the drugs, the LP jacket with a full frontal nude photograph of Lennon and Yoko Ono—and for that matter, Ono herself—and they were frightened for my future.

It might appear laughable in the iTunes era that rock 'n' roll could be considered dangerous, but there was a clear link between music and the politics that were dividing America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bob Dylan released “Masters of War” in 1963, Joan Baez encouraged young men to refuse to be drafted into military service. San Francisco's Jefferson Airplane was boldly activist, protesting America's war in Vietnam. Detroit's MC5, who performed at the protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago right before the riot began, even had its own arsenal.

My family lived just outside the city limits of New Haven, Connecticut, where the promise of the 1960s counterculture came to an end with the arrests of eight members of the Black Panther Party, plus its national chairman, Bobby Seale, for the May, 1969, torture-murder-lynching of fellow Panther Alex Rackley, who was suspected by the Panthers of being a police informer.

The first of two trials began in spring of 1970. Students at Yale University joined the Panthers in protests. The school's president, Kingman Brewster, added fuel to the growing fire when he told protesters that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve fair trials in the United States.” The first week of May saw demonstrations culminating with some 15,000 protesters on the New Haven Green (about two miles from our home, as the crow flies). Governor John Dempsey ordered the National Guard to New Haven, but police chief James Ahern kept them largely out of sight, keeping a lid on the powder keg, although there are reports of minor skirmishes. That same week, another troop of the National Guard opened fire with live ammunition on unarmed student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four and wounding nine.

In retrospect, I can almost understand why my parents were worried. At the time, I really didn't know what was going on. I was 11 years old, and I liked rock 'n' roll. That blissful ignorance didn't last. It gradually dawned on me that the Vietnam War wasn't going to end any time soon, and when I turned 18, I would be a likely candidate for the military draft. The only way out of the draft was a college deferment, and my folks, neither of whom had been to college (my mother didn't finish high school), weren't in a position to send me to school. My father suggested I consider the Navy, where he had spent the Korean War as a SONAR operator, well away from combat.

I'd enjoyed the feel-good politics of Lennon's “All You Need is Love” and “Give Peace a Chance.” Who wouldn't be in favor of love and peace, if only as abstract ideals? “Instant Karma,” his single from February, 1970, made me think. The music was great, a hard driving rocker with a literally screaming vocal. The label bore the words “PLAY LOUD.” But I had to look up “karma” in a dictionary. A library's dictionary, because the one we had at home hadn't included the word, which only entered common usage in America after the success of Lennon's song. What I learned was the Hindu definition, which boils down to: your negative actions will come back to you, which seemed to be exactly what Lennon was suggesting:

Instant karma's gonna get you
Gonna knock you off your feet
Better recognize your brothers
Everyone you meet
Why in the world are we here?
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Why on earth are you there?
When you're everywhere
Gonna get your share

This was heady stuff for a Catholic kid who thought he might have a calling for the priesthood. It flies in the face of the basic tenets of Catholicism: That Christ died for my sins, that I can't help but be a sinner, and only by accepting Christ as my savior could I gain everlasting life. Karma suggests I'm responsible for my own fate in this world, and the next, if there is one. This eliminates absolution, the defining event of Catholicism. It bothered me at first that this seemed to make more sense than what I was learning in catechism. But a switch had been thrown in my brain.

About this time, my parents had a party for my father's relatives. Vietnam and the anti-war protests were a major topic of discussion, and I finally understood something that I'd heard from my uncle before. “You've got to remember,” he told my father, “the g---s just don't have the same respect for life that we have.” I'd been reading about the My Lai massacre in the newspapers, and the entire concept of “we” versus “them” was coming undone in my mind. Did any group of people have more or less respect for life than any other group? If so, wouldn't there be at least one group that wasn't ready to slaugher another? The further realization that each of us was ultimately responsible for our own actions—whether or not Christ died for sins—threw the concept of America's moral superiority into question.

Then Lennon released an album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. A raw precursor of psychobilly, it was a deeply introspective record that seemed designed to demolish the legend of the Beatles. The song “I Found Out” featured the lyric “There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky/now that I found out I know I can cry.” It went on to skewer another religious option: “Old hare Krishna's got nothing on you/ just keep you crazy with nothing to do/keep you occupied with pie in the sky/there ain't no guru who can see through your eyes.” “Working Class Hero” offered: “They hurt you at home and they hit you at school/They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool/Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules.” Lennon was describing his own experiences and offering his own view of the world, but he was also describing my life at that moment.

He delivered the coup de grace in “God,” saying “God is a concept/by which we measure our pain,” then offering a litany of things he didn't believe in, from Jesus to Kennedy to Buddha and finally, Beatles. His proclamation that he only believes in “Yoko (Ono) and me” is frequently and incorrectly cited as a precursor of Tom Wolfe's “Me Generation.” What Lennon was really saying was that no person could realize his potential as long as he sought meaning outside of himself. All gods are false, he says, and he was among the most false:

I was the dreamweaver
But now I'm reborn
I was the walrus
But now I'm John
And so, dear friends
you'll just have to carry on
The dream is over.

Although he'd relinquished his divinity, I found myself looking up to him even more than I had before. His message, which could be distilled to the title of a George Harrison number from the Beatles' Rubber Soul LP, “Think for Yourself,” took some time to take root and grow amidst the citizenship lessons, the “duck and cover” drills, and the fear of eternal damnation. But the looming spectre of being a target in Vietnam was a hell of an incentive to learn how to think. And one of the first things that bubbled up from this new thinking was that I had not yet really formed an opinion of my own—including this new thought. I had formed my first discursive loop.
There were many other influences and causes for my discovery of critical thinking. Books by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, my ninth grade biology teacher (a devout Catholic who was as big a proponent of evolutionary theory as Stephen Jay Gould), Colin Turnbull's The Mountain People, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, an interest in science, and my own curiosity were also involved. But I have no doubt that the songs from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band helped to shape my thoughts.

Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August of 1971, and quickly hooked up with the American anti-war movement. In December, They appeared in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at a benefit concert for John Sinclair, the manager of the MC5, who, in 1969, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for providing two marijuana joints to undercover cops engaged in a sting operation. Many leftists believed that the harsh sentence was due more to Sinclair's support of the Black Panthers (he formed a “partner” organization naively named the White Panthers) and his anti-war activism. Lennon performed a song he'd composed about Sinclair's situation, and this was noted by an observer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The feds were interested in Lennon because he had been associating with Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and was considering a national concert tour that would directly oppose the re-election of President Nixon.

The 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, permitting 18-year-olds to vote in national elections, was adopted in July of 1971, some 30 years after it was first submitted to Congress. Anti-war protesters frequently pointed to the fact that 18-year-olds were being drafted to fight and die in Vietnam, but that they had no voice at the ballot box. The amendment was resubmitted in the summer of 1968, sailed through Congress, and was ratified by three-quarters of the states faster than any previous amendment. It meant that the 1972 election would be the first time 18-21-year-olds—widely considered to be monolithically anti-war—would help to choose a president. These new voters were also believed to be slavishly devoted to rock 'n' roll, and to Lennon. Keeping Lennon from inciting a democratic uprising became an obsession for Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Republican senator from South Carolina. He advised attorney general John Mitchell that kicking British citizen Lennon out of the U.S. would be a “strategic counter-measure.” Mitchell passed the suggestion along to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which began deportation proceedings against Lennon on March 6, 1972. The reason cited was Lennon's 1968 guilty plea to possessing marijuana—an arrest that was considered by most to be a staged event, with the drugs planted by a policeman notorious for busting rock 'n' roll stars. (The arrest also resulted in Ono's miscarriage.)

A long nightmare began for Lennon, who found himself shadowed clumsily by agents who apparently wanted him aware of the surveillance. The legal proceedings against Lennon continued for more than three years, ending when a U.S. Court of appeals overturned the deportation order in October of 1975. This was 10 months after Rolling Stone revealed the political motivation of the INS by publishing a copy of Thurmond's 1972 memo to Mitchell. In the intervening time, much had happened:

Nixon was re-elected, then forced to resign in August of 1974, when it became obvious that he was about to be impeached by Congress for obstructing an investigation into a break-in at a Democratic Party campaign office in the Watergate hotel.

Lennon and Ono continued their activism, joining New York anti-war demonstrations, attending the 1973 International Feminist Planning Conference in Boston, protesting outside the South Vietnamese embassy, and releasing an album comprised solely of political songs, Sometime In New York City.

Lennon and Ono separated in October of 1973, and Lennon moved to Los Angeles.

Compulsory military service in the U.S. ended with the cessation of the draft in 1973.

Lennon released three albums with little or no political content: Mind Games, Walls and Bridges, and Rock 'n' Roll. He also collaborated with Ringo Starr on Ringo and Goodnight Vienna, Harry Nilsson on Pussycats, David Bowie on Fame, and appeared in concert with Elton John.

Lennon engaged in self-destructive behavior, exemplified by a widely-reported fracas at a Los Angeles nightclub in March of 1974.

Lennon and Ono got back together in New York in January of 1975

The Vietnam war ended with the withdrawal of U.S. forces at the end of April, 1975, and the capture of Saigon by Ho Chi Minh's troops.

After Lennon received his green card, he all but disappeared from public view. On October 9, 1975, Lennon's 35th birthday, two days after the deportation order was rescinded, Ono gave birth to Lennon's second child, Sean. The new father walked away from music and partying and activism, and proclaimed to the world that he was now a “househusband.” Ono ran the family business while Lennon cared for the child. There was no news from Lennon for five years.

I had already moved on. My political and religious views were formed, and they were (and remain) my own, based on readings from diverse sources, many discussions, and my own conclusions. I became bored with Lennon's later records, moving on to the Roches, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, XTC, the Clash and the Talking Heads. I still loved John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, though. I read anthropology and primatology and worked at a dry cleaning plant and as a reporter and then studied theater at college.

Lennon and Ono released a new album, Double Fantasy, in November of 1980. Ono's songs seemed more interesting than Lennon's. Her staccato wailing and application of “music for non-musicians” to pop rhythms, which had once been universally derided, had been discovered by a new generation of musicians raised in art schools. The B-52s in particular owed Ono a great debt. Lennon's songs were tuneful but innocuous. His lyrics seemed self-absorbed and fatuous: “I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go 'round and 'round/I really love to watch them roll.” But the overall effect was pleasant. It was as if Lennon had borrowed from his former partner's palette, while declining the syrupy cuteness that marred much of Paul McCartney's post-Beatles music.

Then Lennon was killed.

An early death is sometimes the best thing that can happen to a pop star's legend, if not the person. Imagine how insignificant James Dean might be today if we had watched him grow old and fat like Marlon Brando. Would Marilyn Monroe still be an icon if she were alive today as an 80-year-old? How much cooler would Elvis Presley be today if the only image we had of him was the young rocker, not the fat man in white jumpsuit? And how sad is the spectacle of the occasional reunion of the surviving Sex Pistols?

Lennon's post-death legend has been carefully cultivated to ensure maximum marketing potential. Most of his political activity has been hidden. What's left is a middle-aged version of the smart Beatle as a saintly father figure. The image wizards working for EMI/Capitol records, the Beatles/Apple trust and Ono have worked hard to strip the controversy from Lennon, as that might affect sales (especially in the all-important Bible Belt). And sales have grown. Since 1981, there have been four different “greatest hits” compilations (plus one released in 1975). There have also been five albums of unreleased demos and live performances (one of which is a four-disc boxset). There's been an official “John Lennon®” eyeglass collection. There have been two different “John Lennon®” baby collections, ranging from bedding and clothing to a series of limited edition dolls wearing “John Lennon®” baby clothes, from the prestigious (and expensive) “Madame Alexander” company. There's even an “exclusive” set of disposable diapers printed with Lennon's baby-oriented drawings available at Wal-Mart, which in itself represents 32 flavors of wrong.

When "John Lennon®" became a product destined for landfills, his legacy as an anti-war, feminist and civil rights activist was buried. Which, I hope, explains why I cried when I saw the trailer for The U.S. vs. John Lennon. The Lennon I'd forgotten had been exhumed. In the trailer, he's shown at the 1969 Amsterdam Bed-In for Peace, saying “We're selling it like soap—peace or war—that's the two products.” It's nice to see Lennon exploited in service of something I can appreciate.

A preview of The U.S. vs. John Lennon will be shown at the Castro Theater Sunday, Aug. 27, following a rare screening of Richard Lester's 1966 How I Won the War, starring John Lennon. It's part of The Beatles, 40 Years Ago Today. More about this soon.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth, all rights reserved.

This is just darned funny

2006-08-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

This arrived in my inbox today, courtesy of agent EZ. Click, share and enjoy.
I Hate Juice.

Hot Tickets: August 8 - August 15

2006-08-07T22:09:00.000-07:00

Before we begin this week's round-up of films so amazingly wonderful that you'll want to kick yourself if you miss them (really), some words about my current favorite thing:

How did I go nine years without making it to Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass? These midnight screenings of the bizarre, strange, bad and downright weird are just plain delightful. The pre-show sketch she stages for her annual presentation of Showgirls (Carolco, 1995), sending up the film's abominable “volcano dance” is a breathtaking spectacle that gives that mind-bogglingly misogynistic film the buggering it so richly deserves.

Showmanship aside, perhaps the most amazing thing about Christ is her understanding of the films she programs, and her skills as an event booker, a film sleuth, and an onstage interviewer/moderator. For her presentation of Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (20th Century Fox, 1968), she had three stars from this 38-year-old masterpiece, Erica Gavin, Marcia McBroom, and Z-Man himself, John Lazar. At times, Lazar—who was a very early member of San Francisco's own American Conservatory Theater— threatened to run roughshod over the panel and the crowd, but Christ always brought his ego back to earth without ruffling his well-preened feathers. The ability to control a panel discussion while maintaining respect among the participants is a rare gift. Topping the experience off is the well-researched and witty flyer describing each week's show, written by “Bobby B.”

Sadly, this year's Midnight Mass series draws to its close this weekend with one of the great drag spectacles of all time: Mommie Dearest (Paramount, 1981). This film paints a truly horrific picture of Joan Crawford, as remembered by her daughter Christina, then re-imagined by director Frank Perry (his career highlight, unless you want to consider the 1987 TV-movie JFK: A One Man Show with M*A*S*H's Mike Farrell) and four credited screenwriters (there were probably another half-dozen lucky enough to have their names off the credits.) Faye Dunaway's face is frozen into Crawford's late-career mask, and she compensates for the rigid eyebrows by exaggerating every other gesture to the point of absurdity. This is one truly wretched film, and Midnight Mass is the place to see it. The pre-show, Trannie Dearest, will feature Christ and her frequent co-star, Heklina. At the Bridge Theater, Friday, 8/11 and Saturday, 8/12, MIDNIGHT. Get tickets early. This will sell out.

If ever there was a face made for the big screen, it was Ingrid Bergman's. You can see her visage 50 feet tall at Palo Alto's Stanford Theater Friday, 8/11, through Monday, 8/14, in two of her best features: Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, RKO, 1946), and Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros., 1942). They're among the most accessible and frequently seen movies from the classic Hollywood era, but they must be seen on a big screen to be fully appreciated, and the Stanford is one of the best places to see them.

Notorious is a delicious thriller with Bergman playing against type as a drunken German living in the U.S. following WWII, pressed against her will into helping to crack a Nazi spy ring directed by mama's boy Claude Rains. Cary Grant is alternately charming and despicable as he drags Bergman into foreign intrigue.

Casablanca is the best example of what Hollywood could do when every component of its assembly line worked. A formulaic programmer given A-picture treatment, it completed the transformation of Humphrey Bogart from second-rate gangster to top-drawer romantic hero, made “As Time Goes By” one of the great 20th Century romantic songs, and gave Claude Rains some of the best lines of his career— “I'm shocked—shocked to learn there is gambling here!”

I've always believed that I awoke to how media totally fails to reflect reality when I realized that almost every character on TV drama shows kept a handgun in their house, glove compartment, cookie jar, vest, garter, etc., and that I knew almost no one with a handgun—and those that did were the sort I wished I didn't know. This is a roundabout way of getting to a criticism of new filmmakers: Enough already with the gritty urban crap about prostitution, drug addiction, mules, gangs and the like. Unless you've actually lived that life yourself, there's not much you can say about it that hasn't already been said by much better filmmakers than you—because your film will inevitably be a fiction based on someone else's fiction, based upon another's fiction in a cascading loop of infinity back to Homer. And no one wants to see that.

That said, there are interesting films being made by new filmmakers who've been inspired by something other than derivative clones of Pulp Fiction, and you might catch one at the San Francisco International Festival of Short Films, Wednesday, 8/09, through Saturday, 8/12. There is a metric crapload of films scheduled. These are the ones that look promising to me (although I've seen none of them, so be warned):

For Seid, Mimi, and Amelezewd, by Randy Bell, is a documentary about life at an Ethiopian orphanage for children with AIDS, or children who have lost their family to the disease. The film focuses on three kids. It's about real people, in a real, difficult situation that we should all think about before ordering a $4 latte. It's part of a program that runs at 8:30 p.m. Thursday, 8/10 at California College of the Arts, 3 p.m. Friday, 8/11 at the Roxie Film Center, 9 p.m. Saturday, 8/12 at the Victoria Theater.

Punk Wall, directed by Karen Gleinke, about a houseful of dodge-ball playing punk-rockers (isn't that just the quaintest term now that Joey Ramone's been dead for five years?) isolated by a concrete wall from their frowning neighbors. I can't tell if it's a documentary or fiction, but either way, it's an intriguing idea, and it's only 20 minutes long. It's part of a program that runs at 8:30 p.m. Thursday, 8/10 at California College of the Arts, 3 p.m. Friday, 8/11, at the Roxie Film Center, 9 p.m. Saturday, 8/12 at the Victoria Theater.

K-7, by Christoper Leone, is the film with all the buzz. It's been in pretty near every damned film festival in the country, and picked up a whole bunch of awards. But we shouldn't hold that against it, nor should we dismiss it because Leone is a Hollywood special effects artist with credits on merde like The X-Files, The Crow: Salvation, and The Cable Guy. A guy's gotta eat. The idea of the film is pretty cunning: a young job applicant learns that his aptitude test results show he's best suited to be a CIA assassin, and he needs to prove he's ready for the job NOW, or forget about it. Forever. (This could be that rare instance where the use of violence is not merely derivative.) On a program at the Roxie Film Center, 7:15 p.m. Friday, 8/11, at the Victoria Theater, Saturday, 11 p.m., 8/12.

Let's talk about film for a minute. I mean the actual acetate strip that you can hold in your hand against a light source to see a photographic image. This was the media form everyone referred to when they said “movie” until the home video recorder became affordable in the late 1970s. Now people think a piece of shiny mylar sandwiched between two pieces of clear plastic is a “film.” It is nothing of the sort. No film archive in the world uses digital storage as a solution for preserving movies, because all video forms have proven far too volatile. They use film. (Don't get too smug about your DVD collection. In about five years time you'll be in a big hurry to dump them all in favor of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, and you can bet the new machines won't play your old DVDs. Here's Kevin Murphy—Tom Servo from MST3K—on the topic.)

Film, projected in a theater, is still the best way to see a movie, and the best format in use today is 70mm, so called because that is the measure of the width of the acetate, making it ideal for the wide, wide screen. Most widescreen films are projected anamorphically—the image is compressed to fit on a 35mm frame, then expanded when projected through a special lens. (Check this out for a good explanation.) So what you're seeing is an image that's been altered by two lenses, or gone through a glass darkly. Fortunately, the Castro Theater still has a 70mm projector, and they're running a bunch of widescreen classics from 70mm prints, Friday, 8/11 through Thursday, 8/24. If you haven't seen them in 70mm, you haven't seen them. My recommendations:

2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, MGM, 1968), Friday, 8/11, 6 p.m. & 9 p.m. This is my desert island film. Difficult, rich, beautiful, cold, frustrating, enlightening, bleak and full of hope, it remains one of the most intelligent films ever made. It's iconic for a reason. (Here's a pretty interesting attempt at explaining the film—the Flash animation is precious, but the authors are on to something. Well worth checking out.)

Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, Horizon/Columbia, 1962), Sunday, Aug. 13, 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m., Monday, Aug. 14, 7 p.m. This is THE MOST GLORIOUS FILM DAVID LEAN EVER MADE! It's still astonishingly relevant today, and Peter O'Toole gives the performance of his career, as does Omar Sharif. T.E. Lawrence, the titular character was a remarkable person, and I can't help think that if the British government had actually paid him the attention he deserved, we might not be in the damned mess we're in today. Check out this, this, and this for more about Lawrence.
More widescreen recommendations coming next week!

Kenji Mizoguchi was a pioneer of Japanese cinema. In a career that lasted from 1923 through 1956, the year of his death at the age of 58, he helped to define the movies in Japan. Marked by a lack of closeups, a fascination with desire and a surprising feminism, his films remain important. (Although not without controversy—I'd love to see Manmo kenkoku no reimi, his 1932 justification for Japan's criminal occupation of Manchuria.) The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley begins a small retrospective of his films with Sisters of the Gion (1936), an unblinking look at life for women in a Tokyo red-light zone, examining the clash of traditional geisha style and the onset of modern, Western prostitution. Friday, 8/11, 8:45 p.m.

Preceding Sisters of the Gion is a film from an American master of desire, Frank Borzage, Man's Castle (1933, reedited 1938). With Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young as victims of the Great Depression, the film remains refreshingly frank despite the 1938 edits that made it conform to the censorious Production Code Authority. Friday, 8/11, 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive.

Entire contents copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.

Save Films, Save the World part 2

2006-08-04T20:02:00.000-07:00

This continues the post about the 11th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival. To see the first part, look here.

Amazing Tales From the Archives
Sunday arrived bright and early with some 600 folks back at the Castro for a symposium on film preservation called Amazing Tales From the Archives. Admission was free, but – 600 people, most of whom had been at Pandora's Box the previous night? Foregoing a Sunday brunch in San Francisco during a summer heat wave to listen to a bunch of film archivists talk about the technical and political problems of their business inside a theater with no air conditioning?

Maybe there is a god, after all.

(Those of you more interested in movies than in film preservation should feel free to jump down to the next header.)

The panel, assembled by Stacey Wisnia, the Festival's incomparably brilliant operations director, featured:

Patrick Loughney, curator of the Motion Picture Department at the George Eastman House
Mona Nagai, film collection curator at the Pacific Film Archive
Mike Mason, curator of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress
Peter Limburg, chief executive officer of Amsterdam-based Haghefilm Conservation

These four represent the top tier of film preservation, that necessary discipline that remains chronically under-funded and misunderstood. The assembled audience had already drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid, and were rapt as each speaker started their PowerPoint presentations, accompanied by 35mm film clips demonstrating various preservation efforts.

Of particular interest (to me, anyway) was Mashan's slide show about the Library of Congress' new National Audiovisual Conservation Center in Culpepper, Virginia. Built inside a series of bunkers that were designed to defend a cash reserve against a nuclear attack, the new facility is a preservationist's wet dream. The nitrate film vaults are designed with individual firewalls and extinguishers, so that if a spontaneous combustion occurs, only the self-immolating reels would be lost. The new center will also provide increased resources for transferring deteriorating recorded media to new forms, including new digital techniques designed for preservation rather than restoration. (For more information on the new center, check out this.)

Much of the funding for this new facility has been provided by the Packard Humanities Institute. David Packard's passion for old media forms has produced an immeasurable benefit for folks in the Bay Area lucky enough to have gotten down to the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto; this new investment goes a long way to keeping the future in touch with the past.

Also noteworthy was Limburg's presentation. Haghefilm is probably the leading technical innovator in film preservation and restoration. They preserved Beyond the Rocks, lost for nearly 80 years and found, unlabeled, in the collection of an eccentric hoarder who slept amid cans of decomposing, inflammable nitrate filmstock. (The only film to feature Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, two of the iconic figures of early Hollywood, Beyond the Rocks was screened by the Silent Film Festival last November.)

Haghefilm designs and builds hardware and software that allows for preservation of a wide variety of film stock gauges. Although 35mm is the most common gauge (even Thomas Edison used it), a wide variety of different sizes have been used throughout the history of moving pictures, from 8mm, Super-8mm, 17.5mm, 9.5mm 22mm and more, to professional sizes of 65mm, 70mm and 16mm. One of Edison's early experiments mapped moving pictures onto a rotating cylinder.

Limburg demonstrated Haghefilm's preservation of a disc-based format, the Spirograph. Invented in England by Theodore Brown as a home-viewing device, the 10.5-inch-diameter discs contained 1,200 images, approximately 5.6mm by 4.1mm, allowing for less than two minutes of viewing time. The format was promoted by American expatriate Charles Urban, until his business collapsed in 1924. It's nigh impossible to screen any surviving Spirograph discs, but Haghefilm is on the job.

Using a combination of traditional (film-based) and digital techniques, Haghefilm was able to take the extremely small frames on the original Spriograph disc and produce a 35mm print.

What sets Haghefilm apart is their use of digital technology in service of preservation. Typically digital techniques are used to restore missing or broken elements in a film–create new fill-ins for missing frames, correct faded colors, mask scratches, etc.—but Haghefilm uses its computers to extract and preserve films as they are found. For more, look here.

Laurel and Hardy
Next up was a textbook example of why film preservation is important. The legendary comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made their Silent Film Festival debut in a collection of shorts. The reason this duo hadn't been featured in previous years is that there are very few 35mm film prints of their silent-era shorts in good condition. One of the three films screened, Liberty (Hal Roach/MGM, 1929) was presented from a 16mm print. The result was a fuzzy image that filled only half of the Castro's screen. That there aren't 35mm film copies of Laurel and Hardy shorts would be unthinkable if it weren't so obviously true. Yes, there are very nice digital versions on DVD (made from 16mm prints), but these larger-than-life comedians deserve to be seen in a theater full of fans and kids, not just on a TV screen. Although digital projection has gotten much better, it is no substitute for film. In a large theater, film means 35mm.

The Laurel and Hardy program was introduced by Terry Zwigoff, the director of Crumb (Superior/Columbia, 1994), Ghost World (Advanced Medien/United Artists, 2001) and Bad Santa (Dimension, 2003). A lifelong fan of “the boys,” and a member of the Silent Film Festival's advisory board, Zwigoff talked about the importance of understatement in the comedy of Laurel and Hardy. Although the situations they find themselves in are outlandish, their responses are never out of scale to the event, although as events escalate, so do their responses. Zwigoff said that he had difficulty getting Billy Bob Thornton, star of Bad Santa, to understand this basic fact.

The short Wrong Again (Hal Roach/MGM, 1929) provided an excellent illustration of the equation: subtle response + outrageous circumstance = funny. The boys mistakenly deliver a race horse name Blue Boy to a swanky home, where the owner is expecting the return of the stolen painting “Blue Boy” by Thomas Gainsborough. It ends up with the horse standing on top of a grand piano. There's no need to embellish an already outrageous situation, and the result is sidesplitting.

The Laurel and Hardy program concluded with a rare treat: the last home movie ever made of Stan Laurel. Shot at Laurel's Venice home by Bob Chatterton, the comedian performs his trademark facial expressions as he toys with his Oscar statuette and marionettes of Laurel and Hardy. Evocative and touching (a tear came to my eye, at least), the rare color footage was purchased at an auction by collector Ron Merk, and preserved by Frank Buxton, a member of the Silent Film Festival's board of directors and one of the writers of Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? (American-International, 1966) and the original Casino Royale (Columbia, 1967).

Девyшкa c кopoбкoй (The Girl With the Hatbox)
Девyшкa c кopoбкoй (The Girl With the Hatbox – Mezhrabpom, 1927) was almost as surprising as Au Bonheur des Dames. The slapstick, screwball comedy from the Soviet Union – yes, a slapstick, screwball comedy from the Soviet Union – was a refreshing bracer for anyone familiar with the classic Soviet silent cinema of Sergei Eisentstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov and other revolutionaries. A print supplied by the British Film Institute, taken from a 1968 Soviet restoration, included an opening scroll announcing that the movie was an effort to encourage the purchase of lottery tickets. Then things got weirder.

Directed by Boris Barnet, The Girl With the Hatbox was part of an effort to compete with an influx of foreign films. Anna Sten plays Natasha, an attractive young woman who lives in the country with her grandfather. She makes hats that she sells at a store in Moscow. A room in the building that houses the store is registered with the Soviet housing authorities in her name, but it's used by the husband of the store owner. Sporadic inspections by officials prompt the store owner to suggest that Natasha stay in the room occasionally. Meanwhile, Natasha and a homeless student, Ilya (Ivan Koval-Saborsky) have met cute on a train. Taking pity on him, she suggests that Ilya use her Moscow room, which annoys the store owner and her husband terribly. At the same time, Fogelev (Vladimir Fogel), a country postal clerk who longs for Natasha, steps up his awkward courtship. Then, a winning lottery ticket is added to the mix, and Barnet sets his blender to screwball frappé.

What made this film so exciting was the opportunity to see elements of classic Soviet cinema in service of screwball comedy. Early in the film, the forlorn Fogelev is seen walking across the snow-covered countryside in an extreme long shot. The horizon bisects the screen horizontally. Above and below the horizon are expanses of empty white space. Trudging across this horizon is the tiny figure of Fogelev, a black shape moving from the right to the left, each step a struggle in the vast wintry wasteland. But thanks to the set-up (we know that Fogelev is the nice guy who hasn't got a prayer to get the girl, but he keeps trying anyway) the scene is funny–very funny. Montage in the style of Eisenstein is used during the climatic chase for the lottery ticket, ending in a bit of slapstick that could have taught Laurel and Hardy a thing or two.

Sten's performance was a revelation. She is marvelously comic in her interactions with the husband of the store owner, and she is alternately funny and touching when dealing with Ilya. She was brought to Hollywood in 1933 by Samuel Goldwyn, who thought he could market her as his answer to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. He dubbed her “the Passionate Peasant” and featured her in three films, including Dorothy Arzner's Nana (1934) and King Vidor's The Wedding Night (1935). None of the films clicked, and the trade magazines redubbed Sten “Goldwyn's folly.”

The Unholy Three
I wrote the program notes for The Unholy Three (MGM, 1925), and I got a bit too involved with the strange worlds of Tod Browning and Lon Chaney. Browning is best know for directing Dracula (Universal, 1931) and Freaks (MGM, 1932); Chaney is best known for being the “Man of 1,000 Faces.” They made ten films together. The best is probably The Unknown (MGM, 1927), but The Unholy Three is a very close second best.

From my program notes:

Chaney was a model of American 'bootstraps' discipline – hard work was his path to success–and he learned his craft on the legitimate stage. Browning also worked hard, but learned the tricks of a con artist while a carnival showman. Together they made ten features that explored the tension between two American philosophies: Benjamin Franklin's “God helps them that help themselves,” and P.T. Barnum's “There's a sucker born every minute.”

Both men were—and remain—unique. No one before or since has essayed the believably flawed characters that were Chaney's stock in trade. And no director, not even John Waters, has matched Browning's flair for exploitation while retaining sympathy for the subjects he appropriates for his films. Which brings us to Harry Earles, who made his film debut in The Unholy Three, as the dwarf Tweedledee.

Earles would become legendary when Browning made him the star of Freaks (MGM, 1932), a film that remains notorious to this day. Born Kurt Schneider in 1902 in Stolpen, Germany, Earles was one of four performing midget siblings. In 1914, Kurt and his sister Frieda were brought to the United States by Bert Earles, who booked them as “Hans and Gretel, the Smallest Dancing Couple in the World,” into Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, a touring carnival. Kurt and Frieda started using the names Harry and Grace, and also adopted the last name Earles. They were joined by sisters Hilda (in 1922), who changed her name to Daisy, and Elly (in 1926), who became known as “Tiny.” Together they joined the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus as the Doll Family sometime during the late 1920s. When Bert Earles died in the mid-1930s, they changed their surname to “Doll.” They toured with Ringling Brothers until 1956, when the circus stopped touring by train. They joined the smaller Christiani Circus, then retired to Sarasota, Florida, in 1958, where they had bought a house together.

All of the Earles/Dolls appeared in movies, but Harry's screen career was the richest, with appearances in 11 films, including the talking remake of The Unholy Three (MGM, 1930) The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939), as one of the Lollipop Guild Munchkins. He reunited with Browning for Freaks, which also featured his sister Daisy as his wife. Freaks remains singlularly disturbing, as it revels in all of the exploitation possibilities afforded by the circus sideshow, while remaining resolutely sympathetic to its denizens.

Earles is nothing short of brilliant in The Unholy Three. Part of the titular trio, he sets the tone of the picture early on. As part of a carnival sideshow, Earles chafes under the taunts of a crowd that gets rowdier as he gets angrier. When a fight breaks out, Earles takes the opportunity to kick an especially abusive boy in the face, bloodying his nose.

Earles joins Echo, the carnival's ventriloquist (Chaney), and Hercules the strongman (Victor McLaglen) in an elaborate criminal operation. The three open a pet store, adopting disguises. Chaney becomes a kindly grandmother, McLaglen a young father, and Earles a baby. Dressed in baby clothes, Earles smokes cigars and connives against Chaney, establishing an archetype echoed throughout dozens of animated cartoons, such as Baby Herman from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Amblin/Touchstone, 1988) and even the recent Keenan Ivory Wayans film Little Man (Revolution/Sony, 2006).

The forgotten Mae Busch also stands out in The Unholy Three. Just hard enough to be believable as the carnival's resident pickpocket, whose affection for Echo leads her to join the thieves, she is also not so hard as to be unsympathetic. In this respect her performance rivals that of Chaney's.

Jon Mirsalis, a leading expert on Chaney's life and films, provided an effective piano score that aided the strange machinations of Browning's film.

Show People
This was one of the films I was most anxious to see, because it's considered to be Marion Davies' best film. She is remembered mostly for being the very public mistress of publisher William Randolph Hearst. As such, her reputation is confused with that of Susan Alexander, the talentless singer forced into an embarrassing operatic career by the Hearst doppelganger in Orson Welles' debut film Citizen Kane (RKO, 1940). Because her films are screened so rarely, her actual talents are largely forgotten.

In the foreword to The Times We Had, a compilation of Davies' journal entries edited by Pamela Pfau and Kenneth S. Marx (Bobbs-Merrill, 1975, Ballantine 1979), Welles himself wrote:

As one who shares much of the blame for casting another shadow—the shadow of Susan Alexander Kane—I rejoice in this opportunity to record something which today is all but forgotten except for those lucky enough to have seen a few of her pictures: Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen. She would have been a star if Hearst had never happened. She was also a delightful and very considerable person.

Welles was right. In Show People (MGM, 1928), Davies delivers a sidesplitting performance as a naïve Southern belle who comes to make her fame and fortune in Hollywood, is rejected, then humiliated, then finds success, becomes conceited, suffers failure because of her hubris, learns the value of humility, has her initial success reconfirmed, and discovers true love along the way.

Reflexive pictures are common in Hollywood. Show People stands out because it still feels fresh, some 78 years after it was made, thanks largely to the performance of Davies and her co-star, William Haines. They manage communicate a sense that they are having fun, and that they know they're fortunate. As Davies' character, Peggy Pepper, makes her way up the Hollywood ladder, many of the era's biggest stars, from Douglas Fairbanks to Norma Talmadge, appear in cameos. Pepper shuns an autograph seeker, only to learn that the man was Charles Chaplin who looked like he was having the time of his life on the set. (He was a frequent guest of Davies at Hearst's San Simeon estate.) Davies even makes her own cameo, running into Pepper on the fictional studio lot.

Gloria Swanson essayed similar territory in Stage Struck (Paramount, 1925), which the Silent Film Festival screened in 2005. That film opened with a stunning two-strip Technicolor sequence of Swanson dressed in an architecturally outlandish costume as Salome, mocking the clothes-horse roles she had been playing in Cecil B. DeMille's blockbusters like Male and Female (Paramount, 1919). Funny as that was, Davies sent up the Swanson glamour more effectively and simply when, at the height of Pepper's fame, she poses for photographs while simultaneously pursing and opening her lips, producing a comic combination of Swanson's trademark “bow” lips and a drunken chipmunk.

As proof of the the timelessness of Show People, Silent Film Festival researcher Margarita Landazuri said that she saw a mother with a daughter of about 10 years outside the theater following the film. The girl was practicing Davies' pursed, opened lips pose, which is funny to look at, even for those unfamiliar with Gloria Swanson.

The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Recovery, 1906-2006
Adding to the cornucopia of this year's festival was a collection of short films related to the centennial commemoration of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.

Before Seventh Heaven, the film known as A Trip Down Market Street was shown. An actuality that shows nothing more than a trip down Market Street to the Ferry Building from the vantage point of a camera strapped to a cable car, this film was thought to have been made in 1905. Early in 2006, David Kiehn, a historian with the

Niles Essanay Film Museum in Fremont, California, and the author of Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, discovered that the film was actually shot a mere four days before the big earthquake. The Miles Brothers, San Franciscans who had one of the earliest motion picture companies on the West Coast, took the footage on a train to New York, which kept it safe when their offices were burned in the post-earthquake fire.

Another earthquake related treat was Fatty and Mabel Viewing the World's Fair at San Francisco, 1915, which screened prior to The Unholy Three. San Francisco struggled mightily to host The Pan-Pacific Exposition, which was intended to mark the opening of the Panama Canal, but became a celebration of the resurrection of a devastated city that had been nearly completely rebuilt from the ground up in less than nine years. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mabel Normand were two of the biggest comedy stars of the day, and they were shown taking in the sights of the city and the fair, mugging with the city's mayor, “Sunny Jim” Rolph. The newsreel was an excellent fit with Tod Browning's film, as Arbuckle and Normand spent several minutes enjoying an exhibit of torture devices, including an iron maiden.

Before Show People, a brand-new silent newsreel of the 2006 earthquake commemoration was shown. Produced by the

Niles Essanay Film Museum, the color film captured the pre-dawn events at Lotta's Fountain, where the anniversary of the earthquake is noted every April 18 at 5:12 a.m. Legend has it that Lotta's Fountain was one of the few sources of fresh water in the days immediately following the fire, and it became a gathering place for people seeking lost loved ones. The new film used classic silent newsreel techniques, and the hand gestures of Mayor Gavin Newsom were transformed into high comedy by an intertitle proclaiming “Gavin's fish story.”

Conclusion
The official attendance figure for the 2006 Silent Film Festival was 8,700, up from 7,500 in 2005. It's still peanuts compared to what Talladega Nights will draw on its opening weekend in the Bay Area, but that's an unfair comparison. Talladega Nights is a purely commercial endeavor, a product for mass consumption supported by an international marketing system that actively brainwashes people into thinking they want to drop $10 for a ticket to watch it and a bunch of pre-show commercials. Of course, when Show People, The Unholy Three and Seventh Heaven were first released, they too were purely commercial endeavors, supported by an international marketing system that brainwashed entertainment consumers. Even The Girl With the Hatbox had commercial aspirations – it was intended to promote the Soviet national lottery.

The difference is that the films in the Silent Film Festival have stood the test of time – eight or more decades since they were made, they're still here, and they're still worth watching. There were many bad films made during the silent era. Even the coveted long-lost relic Beyond the Rocks turned out to be rather inconsequential—the best thing that can be said about it is that it had Swanson and Valentino together for the only time. London After Midnight, a 1927 Tod Browning-Lon Chaney vampire film, is the Holy Grail of lost films, but all but the most slavering fans suspect that if it were found, it couldn't possibly live up to the expectations created by the surviving stills and descriptions. (A rough idea of what the film might have been like can be gleaned thanks to Rick Schmidlin's recreation, which can be found on TCM's Lon Chaney Collection DVD set, which also has The Unknown.) The nerdiest of film historians can become passionate about the discovery of nearly any film relic (see the Spirograph entry in the From the Archives section above), but just about anyone can enjoy a film like Show People, because it is a good movie, and a good movie remains good, regardless of its age.
Past Silent Film Festivals have featured films from Brazil (

Sangue Mineiro), India (Prem Sanyas, Shiraz) China (Shennü, The Peach Girl), Mexico (Tepeyac), and Italy (Maciste All'Inferno). It's also run Within Our Gates, one of the surviving silent films by pioneer African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, and its first-ever program, produced by its far-sighted founder and one of my greatest inspirations, Melissa Chittick, was Ich möchte kein Mann sein, a 1919 German film that involves cross-dressing, gender politics and issues of sexual identity.

These films speak to us across time. The subjects of these films are, at their core, the same issues any people have to deal with in any era or any location. The problems facing Marion Davies in Show People are the same facing Lindsay Lohan in real life right now. The lives portrayed by Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven aren't really so different from those faced by any young working couple faced with the prospect of an imminent call-up to service in Iraq. The central issue of Au Bonheur des Dames is being played out by communities resisting a Wal-Mart invastion.

The slogan of the Silent Film Festival is “True Art Transcends Time.” It's true. It's really true.

Hildreth's Hot Tix

2006-07-31T23:38:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm resurrecting a really ancient column that I used to write for a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz that will remain nameless. Hence the dorky heading. I always liked that column title, dumb as it is. These are my recommendations of events, people and things I think you need to pay attention to.

Janet Gaynor is finally getting the revival that she richly deserves. Thanks to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, many of her best films have been preserved on new prints, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is running many of them right now. Coming up on Wednesday, Aug. 2 is The Farmer Takes a Wife (Fox, 1935), which is also Henry Fonda's debut film. Also coming up is her best-know film: the original (and best) A Star is Born (Selznick/United Artists, 1937), on Saturday, Aug. 5. Check out http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/janetgaynor/index.html for more.

Louise Brooks' second film with German director G.W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl (Pabst-Film, 1929), can be seen at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto on Friday, Aug. 4. Dennis James, easily one of the best theater organists in the world, will accompany this amazing film. Check out http://www.stanfordtheatre.org/stf/calendar.html for more details.

One of my all-time favorite films, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968) will screen in 70mm at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, Friday Aug. 11. If you've never seen this one in a theater, you've never seen it. http://www.thecastrotheatre.com/

So you won't get the wrong impression about me: I love cheese, too. Warriors (Paramount, 1979), Walter Hill's gloriously awful punk-era-won't-the-fin-de-siècle-ever-bloody-well-get-here-already-for-crying-out-loud journey into wierdness, plays at the Red Vic Movie House in San Francisco Friday and Saturday, Aug. 4 & 5. http://www.redvicmoviehouse.com/ to come out and pla-a-a-ay.

And the absolutely most fun show in town, Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass, brings you Death Race 2000, Paul (Eating Raoul) Bartel's post-apocolyptic automotive masterpiece, featuring Sly Stallone and David Carradine, at the Bridge Theater in San Francisco, Saturday, Aug. 5 at midnight. Ms. Christ's shows are quite possibly the coolest thing happening in the Bay Area. Mary Woronov will be at this show in person. You've been warned. http://www.peacheschrist.com/mmass/2006/week6.html

Person of talent to watch out for:
Nichole Carlson is a truly gifted filmmaker who is going to knock your socks off. She is working on her first feature, a neo-noir film called Vicious. Her sense of timing, her flair for frame composition and her talent for visual storytelling is astonishing for someone who's still fairly new to filmmaking. She's so good that pretty soon she'll stop returning my calls. You can learn more about Vicious at http://www.viciousthemovie.com/ and you can see some of her short films on YouTube at http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=nmcgillicuddy . I strongly recommend Give Up the Ghost for sheer brilliance, Remote Control for sheer fun.

Save Films, Save the World

2006-07-31T23:16:00.000-07:00

The single best moment of the eleventh annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, held at the Castro Theater this past July 14-16, came on Saturday afternoon. Before the screening of Sparrows, a 1926 melodrama about Mary Pickford's efforts to rescue a group of orphans from a Dickensian villain, the crowd erupted in wild applause when Mike Mashan, curator of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress, said “I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have my tax dollars going to support film preservation than war.”

Such bold honesty from one of its priests demonstrates that the church of film preservation warrants faith. At a time when even low-level government functionaries have to swear they'd rat out their grandmother if she wasn't a neo-conservative robot, hearing such words from a man in Mashan's position is like hearing the sermon on the mount. Mashan's brave declaration not only offers hope, it demands action. Those who write the history of the future are without direction if they rewrite the past and condemn the present to ignorance and lies.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have been fortunate to volunteer for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival as a film researcher for the past four years. As such, don't expect an objective approach to this review of the 2006 event. You may expect, and you should demand, honesty. This essay was neither approved nor reviewed by the Silent Film Festival, and does not in any way represent its views or those of its staff and board of directors.

Why is preserving old films a better use of government money than supporting the lords of the military-industrial complex in the luxury they've grown accustomed to? Apart from what should be obvious to anyone who still has a soul – that killing babies is wrong (Hello? Israelis? Any soul left?) – cinema is a record of history that was unavailable prior to the late 19th century. And those, as George Santayana said, “who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (If you don't understand the full import of that statement – and the relevance of cinema as history – go rent David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia [Columbia, 1962], and compare it to current events, rinse and repeat.)

Yes, movies are an inexact record, but so are most of the tools available to historians. Niccolò di dei Machiavelli's The Prince is no more accurate an account of 15th century Florence politics than Bill Clinton's My Life is a faithful record of late 20th century life in the United States. (On the other hand, Homer's Iliad may be a more exact recounting of the Trojan War than any accounts of modern wars as described by CNN, Fox, The New York Times, etc. Go figure.)

More than their historical significance, early films are an art form unto themselves. The progenitor of modern media, silent films demand critical attention as a communication form with unique properties rarely evoked in post-talkie cinema. Silent films were not silent, they were mute. Music and sound effects were common to presentations of these movies, but the actors on the screen had no voice. Intertitles provided essential dialogue, but audiences hadn't come to the cinema to read a story – they'd come for the emotional experience that only moving pictures could provide. The best of these films use intertitles sparingly, allowing the art of the unique art of the cinema – a combination of photography, lighting, art direction, acting, montage and music – to achieve a greatness that was all but obliterated by the arrival of the talking picture. Not that there's anything wrong with talking pictures. One form is not better than the other. Memory wasn't kind to silent films. See Singin' in the Rain (MGM, 1952) or Sunset Boulevard (Paramount, 1950) to get a sense of how the silent era was remembered. Or take a look at Jay Ward's Fractured Flickers, a hilarious 1963 TV series that chopped up silent films and presented them with new voice tracks written and recorded by much of the same crew behind Ward's classic Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. It was extremely difficult to see silent films as they were intended to be seen – projected from film in a theater with live music – for decades. For most, myself included, silent films were limited to TV, usually shown at the wrong speed, and almost always limited to slapstick comedy shorts.

Fractured Flickers is now available on DVD (as are Sunset Boulevard and Singin' in the Rain), and it's worth seeing to appreciate the level of disrespect accorded to silent films. In one episode, the breathtaking performance of Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Universal, 1923), one of the monumental epics of the silent era, is used for a comic tale about a University of Southern California cheerleader. Of course, it's hilarious, but it's important to recognize that today the original movie is also available on DVD. There was no way to see it when Fractured Flickers was first broadcast, unless you had a friend with a print and a projector. If your only contact with this film was via Ward's revisions, you might fail to recognize the value of the original.

There are plenty of opportunities to see tasteful presentations of silent films now. Most Sunday nights, cable TV channel Turner Classic Movies offers a silent film at midnight Eastern time, 9 p.m. on the West Coast. DVDs from Kino, Image, Turner Classic Movies – even Paramount and Fox, who've long pretended they had nothing in their vaults older than 1958 – make many silent classics readily available for home viewing. But this is not enough.

Watching a silent film on a TV, even if it's the latest model plasma screen with a home Dolby 5.1 surround sound system, is a bit like listening to Mozart's Symphony in D on a mobile phone speaker – something almost completely unlike the actual performance and wholly unsatisfying.

Within the frame of the screen and the space of the theater, cinema can become a dreamscape, and the best of the late-era silent films, when accompanied by musicians inspired by the form, can create emotional experiences that Stephen Spielberg and John Williams – in all their calculated, manipulative glory – can only fantasize about.
Which finally brings us back to the Silent Film Festival. While there are many causes leading to the current revival, this organization's efforts have, in my opinion, played a major part in opening people's eyes and ears to the form. It certainly opened mine. But that tale's for another time.

Seventh Heaven
The 2006 festival opener was a prime example of the artistic acheivements of Hollywood's late silent era. Directed by Frank Borzage, Seventh Heaven (Fox, 1928) is an improbably melodramatic love story rooted in poverty, dragged through the trenches of World War I, and chock full of overt Christian propaganda. Instead of provoking ironic laughter, the film creates a cinemascape of mythic proportion that makes one believe that love and faith can be the greatest forces in the universe. It takes a lot of willing suspension of disbelief to accept the hunky Charles Farrell as Chico, a lunky Parisian sewer scavenger who dreams of one day becoming a street sweeper. But his grudging rescue of street urchin Diane from her evil sister and her own suicide attempt helps to put the illusion over. It helps that Diane is played by Janet Gaynor, who deservedly won the first-ever Academy Award for best actress for this film (along with Borzage's Street Angel and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise). Gaynor presents a thorougly convincing display of hunger, fear, loneliness and desperation, using her petite frame, big eyes and bow-shaped lips, which could, under other circumstances, resemble those of a cartoon character. Combined with Harry Oliver's astonishing art direction and the cinematography of Ernest Palmer and Joseph Valentine (there's an absolutely breathtaking elevator tracking shot that follows Farrell and Gaynor up seven flights of stairs), plus the beautiful score played by Clark Wilson on the Castro's mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ, the performances of the two leads and the other actors make this improbable saga a fable for the ages.

Bucking Broadway
Bucking Broadway (Universal, 1917), directed by John Ford , was the first western presented at the Silent Film Festival, and made for a perfect Saturday morning matinée. With Harry Carey, one of the first cowboy stars (and certainly among the best – John Wayne later borrowed many of his mannerisms), the film offered a fascinating look at the development of the western, arguably the central myth underlying the American identity. Carey's character, Cheyenne Harry, is sweet on the daughter of the owner of the ranch where he and the other cowboys punch cows and threaten the solitary Mexican vaquero. He shows Helen (Molly Malone) the homestead he's built, hoping that by laying claim to a patch of land, that she'll return his affection, which she does. Harry then sheepishly asks the boss for permission to wed his daughter. This scene is unintentionally comical because Carey looks every day (and then some) of his 39 years, despite his best efforts at fawning like a schoolboy. The action begins when Helen's head is turned by a city-slicker who lures her back to the eastern fleshpots of Manhattan. Naturally, Harry and the rest of the ranchhands rescue the innocent during a rollicking fistfight in the lobby of a grand hotel.

What makes this film fascinating is its place in the creation of the western mythology, particularly its focus on the importance of owning land. Cheyenne Harry wouldn't consider asking for Helen's hand before he's established a homestead. Helen's father agrees to the marriage when Harry tells him about his property and his thrift. Interestingly, the western United States is an empty expanse in this film. There are no Native Americans visible, indicating that there is no struggle with the land's previous occupants. Helen is attracted to the city life represented by her Manhattan suitor, but she learns too late that the city dweller is a hollow man, little more than swagger and bluster, with nothing real, like land, to support him. The final battle takes place in a hotel, an emblem of transience. Helen returns to the west and Harry, both supported by the fixed value of the land. Ownership of land was the bedrock supporting America's western expansion, which had been pretty well completed when Bucking Broadway was produced. The myth continued, along with the subidivisions and the damming of rivers and the watering of Kentucky bluegrass lawns in what had been desert, supported by and supporting a growing population and an economy of consumption. And here we are today, with peak oil use imminent, climate change all-too-evident, and homes being financed by variable-rate mortgages with payments that don't begin to touch the loan principal after 20 years. Ride 'em, cowboy.

Au Bonheur des Dames
A similar economic upheaval is the focus of the festival's third offering, its first-ever French film, Au Bonheur des Dames (Le Film D'Art, 1930), directed by Julien Duvivier from the novel by Emile Zola. A sweeping saga of the displacement of traditional merchants by a cutthroat retail giant, this was the surprise of the festival. One of the last silent films made in France, Au Bonheur des Dames uses every cinematic device developed to its date: tracking shots, crane shots, elevator shots, glamour closeups, Rembrandt lighting, matte paintings, Soviet-style montage, classic editing, entire city blocks created on soundstages, location shooting, documentary images, art deco design, gritty urban landscapes, even the occasional kitchen sink (full of dishes, no less). This is a beautiful film, a complicated film that examines power relationships from many angles and levels while telling a story about believable characters caught in overwhelming circumstances. The orphaned Denise Baudu (Dita Parlo) comes to Paris to find succor with her uncle (Armand Bour), only to learn that his fabric store is being crushed by the department store Au Bonheur des Dames. The youthful Denise takes a job with the enemy, catches the eye of its founder and mastermind, Octave Mouret (Pierre de Guingaund), and is drawn into a titanic tale of lust, dreams and betrayals.

The film's ending provoked a great deal of conversation. As events lead to tragic consequences, with Denise's uncle and cousin dead, and Mouret having been forced out of his own company in a hostile takeover lead by his former lover, Duvivier appears to take the film suddenly to the right. As Mouret bemoans the destruction his folly has wrought, Denise upbraids him, tells him his vision of an all-encompassing retail giant dedicated to endless consumption is the future that everyone must seek. She blames her own family for failing to see the light and holding tight to their outmoded ideals. As she tells Mouret that he must take back his business and redouble his efforts, an image of a monolithic deparment store rising several stories into the sky and occupying many city blocks appears. A biplane lifts off the rooftop runway, flying into a capitalist future.

The post-presentation conversation was dominated by disbelief that, given the classically populist message of most of the film (i.e., big business bad, small business good), the ending must have been forced upon Duvivier by the film's financial backers. I suspect the genesis of the ending is much more complicated, and probably owes a great deal to the economic and political realities of France of the late 1920s. The nation was still trying to recover from the devastation of World War I (1.4 million dead, including some 10 percent of the active male population), and the Third Republic was beset by growing divisions between socialists, communists and fascists, all of whom were paranoid that one of the other groups would seize power in a coup. The rise of the United States during the years of irrational market exuberance (1920s vintage, not 1990s)and the continuance of the British Empire while France struggled to maintain its grip on its few colonial possessions could easily lead one to the conclusion that failure to adapt in a changing world assures doom.

Even more interesting is how this cultural and economic shift was reflected in the fate of the film Au Bonheur des Dames itself. As researcher Laura Horak points out in her essay accompanying the presentation, the film, produced in 1929 was kept from release while Film D'Art added a synchronized music and sound effects score. When it appeared in the summer of 1930, in direct competition with American talkies, its primitive soundtrack acted like a lead weight, and the film sank from view, a victim of its own failure to keep up with changing times.

The Hot Club of San Francisco, a Django Reinhardt-influenced jazz quintet, provided a very effective score for Au Bonheur des Dames, strumming, plucking and fiddling furiously throughout the film, always in synch with the emotion and the action.

Sparrows
Charles Rosher is one of my all-time favorite cinematographers. His use of lighting and composition is never flashy, but always effective and evocative of the correct mood. Murnau's Sunrise, one of the most beautifully photographed films of all time, was one of Rosher's, along with the German Karl Struss. He was Mary Pickford's favorite, until she sacked him when he interrupted the shooting of a scene during her first talkie, Coquette (Pickford/United Artists, 1929), because a shadow crossed her face. Flustered by the demands of the microphone and unaware of Rosher's reason for halting the filming, Pickford lashed out and lost the best photographer she'd ever know.

Rosher's eye is evident throughout Sparrows, the fourth film of the 2006 Silent Film Festival. With help from Struss and Hal Mohr, Rosher shot a spectacular set by Harry Oliver, who literally built a swamp, complete with quicksand bogs and alligators, from the ground up. Pickford is charming as Molly, the eldest of a band of orphans trapped in a Southern baby farm operated by the Dickensian Mr. Grimes, played by Gustav von Seyffertitz with an obvious nod to Max Schreck's portrayal of the vampire in Murnau's Nosferatu (Jofa-Atelier, 1922). Director William Beaudine and scenarist Winifred Dunn deliver a well-paced adventure story and morality play, with lots of Biblical references that help propel the story rather than derail it into the swamp of solipsism.

Sparrows offers something that producers of modern “family films” choose to ignore: that innocents can suffer without good reason. Among Molly's charges is an infant. Denied nourishment by Grimes, the baby dies in Molly's arms. Beaudine and Rosher create a dreamscape in which Christ appears, tending lambs. He takes the infant from Molly, and returns, adding it to his flock. The landscape vanishes, replaced by the original clapboard wall, and Molly awakens to discover the dead child. A harsh lesson, no doubt, for a nation that has worked very hard to hide all evidence of pain and suffering from its elite. Ironically, as this film unspooled in San Francisco, Israel was unleashing a rain of bombs on many innocent Lebanese children, with the blessing of the United States government.

Mashan and the Library of Congress brought along an additional treat: rejected effects shots of the infant's death scene. The double exposure/matte combinations featured different interpretations of the infant being taken from Molly by an angel. As effective as they were, the scene used in the final movie was more effective. Interestingly, the angel outtakes were remarkably reminiscent of the final scene from David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (CiBy 2000, 1992), when the spirit form of incest and filicide victim Laura Palmer finds comfort in the visit of an angel.

Pandora's Box
Saturday ended with one of the iconic films of the silent era: G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (Sud-Film, 1929), the signature Louise Brooks movie. Pabst knew Brooks was destined to be his Lulu after seeing her portrayal of a voracious and cold-hearted femme fatale in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port (Fox, 1928). After a succession of largely forgettable turns as either a flapper or a vamp in Hollywood, Brooks took the opportunity to work with the noted strassefilm director during the waning period of the Weimer Republic.

Pandora's Box is a revelation – and not necessarily a welcome one, at least according to one friend of mine – for those familiar only with the classic still images of Brooks. Those languid eyes staring out from underneath the bangs of the oh-so-modern 'do, the shapeless chemises that accentuate her lithe figure – these have become conflated with the mythical flapper – the “liberated” sex toy of the Roaring '20s. The trouble is that Lulu is no flapper. She is a force of nature, the very essence of desire embodied in one woman who, like Pandora, releases forces from within herself that she can not control and which ultimately consume everything they touch, including her. If you want flappers, check out Clara Bow in It (Paramount, 1927) or Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters (MGM, 1928). Pandora's Box is Greek mythology for the early 20th century.

Pabst delivers a remarkably dark film that questions the very concept of sexual desire while reveling in the debauchery that defined the Weimar era. Brooks is nothing short of brilliant. Her performance is understated and engaged. It's as if she is working out the conundrum of her Hollywood persona – the flapper who is also a vamp – in the only environment that would allow such an exploration. Pandora's Box is one of the great achievements of the silent era, and it is an enduring pity that Brooks would make only one more film in Germany, then be wasted in a string of decreasingly important roles in decreasingly important Hollywood films until her retirement in 1936.

Organist Clark Wilson delivered a suitably dark musical score for Pandora's Box, providing just the right amount of tension and despair. The print, from the George Eastman House, was excellent, but there is apparently an even newer, improved print on the way.

Thanks to the utterly amazing and incredible Stacey Wisnia, the Festival's operations and festival director, Pandora's Box was introduced by artist and experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner, who grew up in McPherson, Kansas, the same town that Brooks had been raised in, and the place she returned to when she left films. He spoke about how he desperately wanted to meet her, and to take dancing lessons at her studio, not because he knew anything about her films, because he'd never seen any, but because she was: a.) a movie star, and b.) someone his parents didn't want him to meet. Frankly, I just got a kick out of the man behind A Movie (1958) and Crossroads (1976) [http://www.canyoncinema.com/C/Conner.html] being a guest of the Silent Film Festival.

Next, Part two of the 11th Annual Silent Film Festival: Amazing Tales From the Archives, Laurel and Hardy, The Girl With the Hatbox, Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three and Marion Davies in Show People.

Copyright 2006 by Richard Hildreth. All rights reserved.