The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) turns a ripe young age of 29 this year, continuing its reign as the oldest and largest festival of its kind in the world. Over the course of 18 days (July 23 to August 10) SFJFF will present 71 films from 18 countries—showcasing the best Israeli and Jewish Diasporan cinema to emerge in the past year. Although I missed last week's press conference announcing the line-up, I've poured over the catalog and compiled this list of ten programs I don't want to miss.
1. Acné—Slowly but surely, 2008's bumper crop of acclaimed Latin American films is making its way into Bay Area festivals, rep houses and art cinemas. This first feature from Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj was a hit from Cannes' Directors Fortnight, and is said to be a bittersweet, deadpan comedy about a teenage boy's raging hormones.
2. The Yes Men Fix the World—I knew this film would turn up in the Bay Area eventually, but I didn't expect to find it at the SFJFF. In this follow-up to 2003's The Yes Men, anti-corporate, anti-government pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno take on Halliburton, Dow Chemical, and first-time film directing duties. If there are any heroes left in this crummy world, it's these guys, and I'm thrilled that Bichlbaum is expected to attend the July 26 screening at the Castro.
3. I Am Von Höfler—For me, the revelation of last year's SFJFF was Freedom of Expression Award winner Péter Forgács, a Hungarian director who transforms the forgotten photographs, diaries and home movies of European Jews into a singular form of documentary filmmaking. His new 160-minute epic tells the tale of one Tibor Von Höfler—bon vivant, chemist, cad—whose extraordinary life witnessed the German invasion of Hungary, the Holocaust and communism's rise and fall.
4. Defamation—In the most talked out doc at this year's Berlin Film Festival, Israeli director Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint, Flipping Out) looks into the nature of modern day anti-Semitism from both a global and personal perspective. I'm anticipating that his July 26 Castro Q&A will be the liveliest of the fest.
5. A History of Israeli Cinema—Clocking in at a butt-numbing 210 minutes, Raphaël Nadjari's two-part doc employs film clips and interviews to survey 60-plus years of Israeli filmmaking. Alissa Simon's Variety review is packed with qualms and quibbles, but one look at the list of participating directors and actors should render this essential viewing.
6. Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg—Who knew that television's first sit-com was about a nice Jewish family in the Bronx? The show was called The Goldbergs and Director Aviva Kempner's film profiles its creator, writer and star, Gertrude Berg—a mega-talent who was also a luminary of radio, Broadway and film. At the July 28 Castro screening, Kempner will receive the festival's 2009 Freedom of Expression Award. Additionally, in a program aptly titled The Goldbergs, you can watch four back-to-back episodes of the popular CBS sitcom (including one that features a young Anne Bancroft).
7. Hello, Goodbye—Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu star as a middle-aged Jewish French couple who leave Paris to start a new life in Tel Aviv. Variety's Jordan Mintzer unkindly characterizes the film as "one oy-vey after another," but the presence of Israeli heartthrob Lior Ashkenazi (Late Marriage, Walk on Water) in the cast pretty much critic-proofs the film for me.
8. Lost Islands—This was Israel's biggest box office hit of 2008, earning an impressive 14 Israeli Film Academy Awards nominations (and losing the top prize to Waltz With Bashir). Set in the 1980's with the Lebanon war as a backdrop, the film is about twin brothers in a tight-knit family whose loyalties are put to a test.
9. The Gift to Stalin—Films from Central Asia have become less of a rarity in recent years, and a high percentage of those I've seen have been quite extraordinary. In Kazakh director Rustem Abdrashov's new feature, a Jewish boy en route to Siberian exile is rescued and raised by an elderly Muslim villager. Of significance to the story is the film's 1949 setting, a time when the USSR used Kazakhstan as an atom bomb testing ground.
10. The Wedding Song—This year's SFJFF closes with Karin Albou's follow-up to her 2005 award-winning La Petite Jérusalem. In 1942 Tunis, two teenage girls of marriageable age—one Muslim and one Jewish—find their futures, and their relationship with each other, challenged by the Nazi occupation of Tunisia.
Of course, this list barely scratches the surface of what's on offer at this year's fest. Depending on time and inclination, here are some others I may check out. SFJFF has a reputation for its timely, issue-driven documentaries and this year is no exception. Rachel investigates the 2003 incident that saw a 22-year-old American killed while trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer in the Occupied Territories. Director Shai Carmeli-Pollak follows last year's tragic Bilin My Love with Refugees, a look at Sudanese refuges who've tried to emigrate from Darfur to Israel. One-third of Bedouin Israeli women live in polygamous households, and Ada Ushpiz' Desert Brides examines their unhappy plight. Emily and Sarah Kunstler direct a profile of their radical defense attorney father in William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.
Amongst the remaining narratives, here are a few more that caught my eye. Sundance favorite Adam features Peter Gallagher and Amy Irving in a tale of mismatched young lovers in NYC. (Adam will be preceded by Eve, a short directed by actress Natalie Portman.) This year's Sundance opening night film was the Australian animated feature Mary and Max, which features the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries (a.k.a. Dame Edna) and Toni Collette. Collette also stars in the SFJFF 2009 Australian opening night film, Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger. Noted French actors Charles Berling and Miou-Miou head the cast of Cycles, a family drama Variety's Jordan Mintzer unfortunately describes as "more Lifetime than real life." Israeli features The Tale of Nicolai & The Law of Return and Zrubavel tell stories of immigrants from Romania and Ethiopia respectively. And finally, there's Empty Nest, the latest from top Argentine director Daniel Burman (Lost Embrace, Family Law), which I saw on screener sometime last year. I'm a big Burman fan, but this labored, male mid-life crisis fantasy left me wanting. Perhaps a second look is in order.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
The San Francisco Film Society's longstanding working relationship with Film Movement ensures the theatrical exhibition of several festival-lauded films on the Sundance Kabuki's SFFS Screen. For this, Bay Area audiences should be especially grateful. Recently, Film Movement's collaboration with SFFS provided Munyurangabo; this week they're providing Eldorado (July 3-9); and in future weeks they'll be providing encore screenings of both La Ventana (July 17-23) and Lake Tahoe (July 24-30), which were featured at the 52nd edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
This week's entry, Belgian director Bouli Lanners' Eldorado—a "small but damn-near perfectly formed serio-comedy" (Leslie Felperin, Variety)—was selected for the 40th anniversary of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors' Fortnight) at the 2008 61st Cannes Film Festival where it won Best European Film. Eldorado was likewise the official entry from Belgium for the 81st Annual Academy Awards (Oscars®), received a special mention at Italy's Pesaro Film Festival, and was nominated for a César for Best Foreign Feature.
Bouli Lanners—as profiled when Eldorado was featured in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs—was born in Belgium in 1965, opposite an orchard. Painter, autodidact, he worked in a wide variety of jobs on film sets before becoming popular on Canal+Belgium with Les Snuls. Since then, he has directed films and played supporting parts in Belgian and French films. In 1999, he wrote and directed Travellinckx, a black and white Super 8 road movie which traveled the international festival trail. Two years later, Muno confirmed the director's singularity and was selected for the Directors' Fortnight. Not only has he directed Eldorado, but he is also the film's screenwriter, and one of its two lead actors.
With Eldorado, Lanners returns to the genre of the road film to express his sad, absurd tale of temporary companionship on route to disparate destinies. The skillful balance between humor and melancholy is—as Felperin states it—"just so" and the film "never puts a wrong foot forward in the direction of sentimentality or cliche." Plot points "that cruder hands might have milked for more pathos" are "unfussily revealed." As Melissa Anderson states in her Village Voice review: "When the traveling companions reveal their backstories, the monologues avoid mawkishness, further upending all low expectations of this frequently trite genre. In its final act, Lanners's film is smart and confident enough to acknowledge that certain lives are dead ends, while others get tired of just spinning their wheels."
Though Slant's Joseph Jon Lanthier found the film flawed for its "sheer incredulity", he astutely acknowledged the "visual chemistry" successfully (and comically) engendered by the "mismatched physiques" of the film's two leads: Yvan (played by Lanners) is "beefy", "overweight and unkempt", whereas Elie (Fabrice Adde) is "smack-scrawny", "incompetent" and "pathetic." In a Cineuropa interview with Aurore Engelen, Lanners admitted he was "immediately touched by Adde's "beanpole appearance" when they first met. He added: "Our Laurel and Hardy-like duo interested me, for it had definite comic potential. It was a question of striking the right balance so as to avoid crude parody, whilst still infusing a sense of humor." Lanthier picks up on the Laurel & Hardy riff, describing it as "bewhiskered" and "bohemian."
Not only is the visual chemistry between the two lead actors notable, but the beautiful and desolate summertime landscape of the Wallonia region of Belgium—"filmed to resemble a miniaturized American West" (Stephen Holden, New York Times)—is contrasted against claustrophobic car interiors. Lanners explained in his interview with Engelen: "[T]he car is a sort of artificial cocoon in which the characters come into close contact with each other. It acts as a catalyst in the relationship between Yvan and Elie. Trapped inside the car, they are forced to listen to one another and communicate. We were originally supposed to shoot the film in a Cadillac Eldorado (whence the title), as it fitted the mood of the film." This contrast between exterior and interior shots stages a compelling visual tension. Lanthier states: "[E]ffectively placed edits juxtapose wide shots of the overcast Belgian countryside with tight, in-vehicle close-ups to emphasize the characters' isolation—as though the duo has been expelled from the rural Eden in their very midst as a punishment for their social atrophy." At Trustmovies, James van Maanen observes that the wide-screen format used by Lanners and his cinematographer Jean-Paul de Zaetijd "produce some memorable vistas", yet the view the audience takes away is precisely "interior." He articulates: "The bond that forms between the two stems from the need and desire to help, and this keeps the movie on a kind of moral ground from which it never veers."
That bond is particularly poignant for being so fugacious and—before the final act's reveal—nearly mysterious. The look Yvan gives Elie when he recognizes the boy is an incompetent heroin addict—a look that seems almost like Yvan has fallen in love—belies a commitment limned with regretful hindsight. Matched against a countenance of concerned resignation at film's end, a depth trembles in Eldorado's seeming insouciance. The haphazard and absurd adventures of their shared road trip converts into precise meaning and acquired insight.
"Once Yvan and Elie reach their destination," Stephen Holden writes, "Eldorado turns into a sad contemplation of fractured family relationships and eternal regrets. Elie's mother (Françoise Chichéry) regards her wastrel son with the stricken look of a woman who knows in her bones that he is doomed but loves him with a hopeless desperation. When Elie briefly disappears and we hear in the background the shouts of a savage father-son battle, the mother clutches Yvan's hand, her eyes wild with grief and terror." What makes this scene so wrenching, however, is that the camera is held tight on the two of them looking at each other as they overhear the argument, and only belatedly backs away to reveal that they have been grasping each others' hands. And when Yvan drives away from Elie's parents' home, Elie looks back bereaved, muttering, "Mama." The breadth of this scene is devastating.
Holden interprets this as a reflection on "the consequences of forsaking human (especially family) connections to go it alone in the world. Because Yvan understands the personal cost of ignoring ties that bind until it's too late, he tries to be an older brother to Elie. But for men fleeing pain for the freedom of the wide open spaces, whether of Montana or Wallonia, the movie suggests, the price of that freedom may be an unbearable loneliness."
If, for some reason, you're unable to catch Eldorado at the SFFS Screen, Film Movement will be releasing the film on DVD come July 14th, 2009.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Shortly before the hordes began chanting, "The Daily is dead; long live The Daily", David Hudson gathered reviews of Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro, first from its Cannes debut, and then later mid-June when it opened stateside. Here in San Francisco, Coppola met with his audience at the film's first screening at the Sundance Kabuki.
Outlining how The Godfather created a "tsunami of success" that irrevocably changed his life and filmmaking, Coppola has gleaned from the passing of years a restoration of creative spirit leaning into what he admits is his "second career." Tetro is, in fact, the second film of his second career; Youth Without Youth being the first. Lustrously shot in digital and projected in 35mm, the film is a rapture to watch, even as its rich visuals disguise an anemic narrative that doesn't quite ring true. One is grateful for what one has seen; but, not completely satisfied. I'm not a huge Vincent Gallo fan so I place the blame there—for me, he just couldn't carry the movie—but, Coppola's "discovery" Alden Ehrenreich has charisma to spare in his debut role and is a talent to watch in future years.
* * *
Michael Guillén: One of the images I'm going to carry away with me from Tetro is that of the staged dance sequence near the edge of the sea. It reminded me of One From the Heart for being thrillingly artificial; the kind of artifice that lends itself in some odd way to emotional authenticity. Can you speak to your use of theatrical artifice to create emotion in your films?
Francis Ford Coppola: Of course. Just as the story implies, when Bennie [Alden Ehrenreich] was a little kid, his older brother Tetro [Vincent Gallo] used to take him to movies that were a little bit advanced for a seven-year-old kid and gave him some books to read and what have you and that's why the boy idolized his brother so much. It's true, in my own life I have an older brother who took me to see the Korda films, The Red Shoes—of which there's an excerpt in Tetro—and also Tales of Hoffmann, which is much stranger for a young kid. Just as the character Bennie says, whenever he thought of his brother he always thought of Tales of Hoffmann.
My idea was that—when Bennie is reading [Tetro's] cryptic notes and writings—that he imagines the story as though it's scenes from a Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger dance film. The version of the story that the boy understands is as though it's told in dance. It's great that film is one of those mediums that can use different art forms to do different things. It was also fun for me—as someone who has admired The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus and all those beautiful Technicolor films—to get to fool with telling this little story in those images. The image you mentioned of the dancers on the stage with the sea coming in is very much inspired by the dance in The Red Shoes, as you can imagine.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Norwegian Black Metal, Graphic Sexual Horror and a Headless Woman. Jeez, is it Halloween already? No, it's just this summer's insouciant film/video line-up at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. But before we dig into what curator Joel Shepard has in store through September, here's exciting news for YBCA filmgoers. Starting July 6, ticket holders will be allowed FREE admittance into YBCA's exhibition galleries, whose days and hours of operation have been adjusted to align with evening film and video screenings.
Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us (July 9 & 11) shines a torch on the stygian world of Norwegian Black Metal, a musical subgenre that grabbed headlines for inspiring a wave of murder, suicide and over 50 church burnings in the early '90s. The filmmakers were reluctantly introduced to the music by an insistent employee at San Francisco's Aquarius Records, which subsequently inspired them to spend two years in Norway gathering materials for this film. Moving from extreme music to extreme sexuality, the following weekend at YBCA brings us Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Bell's Graphic Sexual Horror (July 16 & 17). This documentary tells the story of Insex, a now-defunct BDSM website featuring exclusively female submissives that was also an early pioneer of internet video streaming and live feeds.
"Where is The Headless Woman?" That was the big question on the lips of Bay Area cinephiles when the latest from Argentine director Lucrecia Martel failed to make the line-up of this year's SF International Film Festival. We'd been lusting to see this film since its world premiere at Cannes last year. My anticipation became further heightened when it got ranked #1 on Film Comment's list of 20 Best Unreleased Films of 2008. Well, leave it to YBCA to end up bringing us not only the film, but the director as well, in a program titled Holy Girls and Headless Women: The Films of Lucrecia Martel. The ground-breaking director will appear at a screening of her 2001 debut feature La Ciénaga on July 14, followed by The Headless Woman on the following evening. Her second and middle feature, 2004's The Holy Girl will be shown on July 23 without the director in attendance (Martel accompanied the film to the SF International Film Festival in 2005).
Anyone who missed Chantal Akerman's revolutionary Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when it screened at SF MOMA earlier this year, will get another chance on August 1 and 2. There may even be some repeat viewers—the SFMOMA screenings were marred by a missing second reel—replaced by a DVD at the first screening and 16mm at the second. This hypnotic, long (201-minute) 1975 film is considered one of the most important works in the history of cinema by many, and stars Delphine Seyrig as a middle-class widow and mother whose orderly universe s-l-o-w-l-y cracks apart.
Fewer things interest me less than sports, but I'm intrigued by several programs in Beyond ESPN: An Offbeat Look at the Sports Film. This month-long series, co-curated by Shepard and SF Bay Guardian Arts and Entertainment Editor Johnny Ray Huston, spans the full artsy to trashy gamut. Kicking off the series on August 6 is Rare Films from the Baseball Hall of Fame, followed by Jorgen Leth's A Sunday in Hell on August 9. Said to be the best film ever made about professional bicycle racing, Leth documented the grueling 1976 Paris-Roubaix race across northern France using 20 cameras and a helicopter. Contemporary audiences might know Leth best as the director assigned a series of wily filmmaking challenges by Lars Von Trier in 2003's The Five Obstructions.
Of all the films in the sports series, perhaps the one of most interest to cinephiles will be Claire Denis' 2005 never-seen-in-SF Towards Mathilde (August 13). Made in between L'intrus and 35 Shots of Rum, the film documents modern dance choreographer Mathilde Monnier as she creates a new work. The release of Criterion's Criteron's William Klein boxed-set last year generated renewed interest in the work of this American born and educated director who spent most of his career in France. He's represented in this series by The French (August 16), a documentary about the 1982 French Open tennis tournament in which Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe were participants (the film is not part of the Criterion set and is not available on DVD). Then on August 20 YBCA will screen Veronica Chen's visually striking Agua, an Argentine film set in the world of open water marathon swimming (specifically the 57-km Santa Fe-Cordoba river race.) The film appeared at the 2007 SF International Film Festival, and my review for The Evening Class can be found here.
Midnites for Maniacs—and its ebullient host Jesse Hawthorne Ficks—bring their swell act to YBCA on August 23, with Winning Isn't Everything: A Tribute to 1970s Sports Film. This triple-bill movie-marathon includes 1978 Robbie Benson-starring ice skating tear-jerker Ice Castles, Michael Ritchie's 1976 classic The Bad News Bears with Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal, and last but not least, The Cheerleaders, a 1973 exploitation film that threatens to reveal "everything you ever wanted to know about cheerleaders but were afraid to ask."
The final weekend of YBCA's sports series brings us two more classic, rarely seen documentaries. Visions of Eight (August 28) is an omnibus film centering on the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, with segments directed by Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, Arthur Penn, John Schlesinger and others. Not too long ago, YBCA had a bona fide hit on its hands with numerous sold-out showings of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which followed French soccer star Zinedine Zidane through one complete match. The film which did this first, however, was Hellmuth Costard's 1971 Football as Never Before (August 30). Using eight cameras, soccer legend George Best is trailed though a 1970 Manchester United First Division game. Interestingly, Spike Lee employs the same method in an upcoming documentary on Kobe Bryant.
Although not officially listed on YBCA's website yet, there are two important films I'm anticipating beyond the current calendar. On September 10, 12 and 13, YBCA revives Nicholas Ray's 1956 Bigger Than Life, in which James Mason is transformed from mild-mannered schoolteacher to deluded megalomaniac—courtesy of the modern miracle drug cortisone. Then on September 17, 19 and 20 we get to see another critically acclaimed Latin American film from 2008, Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool. This latest work from the Argentine minimalist director placed 10th on the aforementioned Film Comment list of Top 20 unreleased films, and was another surprise omission from this year's SFIFF. Hopefully YBCA will continue to focus on Latin American cinema, given the fact that we no longer have a Latino Film Festival here in the Bay Area. At the top of my wish list you'll find Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero (#9 on the Film Comment list) and Rodrigo Plá's Desert Within (winner of eight 2008 Mexican Ariel awards).
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
Seventy years later and 1939 is still hailed as a benchmark year for Hollywood cinema. Celebrating that fact, this evening The Castro Theatre launches its 18-film tribute to 1939, including such classics as Son of Frankenstein and The Man They Could Not Hang, At the Circus and You Can't Cheat An Honest Man, They Made Me A Criminal and Each Dawn I Die, The Women and Ninotchka, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Destry Rides Again, Wuthering Heights and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Tarzan Finds A Son and Another Thin Man, Gunga Din and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, wrapping up with Golden Boy and Only Angels Have Wings.
If you prefer your home entertainment system to a movie palace, at least 10 of those titles are likewise included in Turner Classic Movies' 39-film tribute "1939—70th Anniversary of Hollywood's Greatest Year." Each Thursday night through the month of July, TCM will shoot off 1939's most celebrated fireworks, including all 10 Best Picture Oscar® Nominees (reminding—in the light of recent events—that everything old is new again). Robert Osborne offers a preview of the festival at Now Playing: The Show and the full schedule can be found at TCM's website. TCM's "39 From 1939" Film Festival also features the premiere of the new Warner Home Video documentary 1939 (2009), which recounts the astonishing accomplishments of Hollywood during this historic film year.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has, of course, been screening all 10 Best Picture Oscar® Nominees throughout the Summer, with only four screenings left to go.
Of related interest, at One Way Street Alan Rode angles in on 1939 by way of a sterling portrait of "the incredible twelve month run of film roles by the great character actor, Thomas Mitchell."
And, of course, no survey of any given year in cinema history would be complete without a tip of the hat to Thom Ryan's Film of the Year. He chose Confessions of a Nazi Spy as his focus on 1939.
So, out of sheer curiosity, what is your favorite film from 1939?
Cross-published on Twitch.
07/02/09 UPDATE: Dennis Harvey offers up his thoughts on the Castro program for SF360, as well as some of his fave raves from 1939 not included in the Castro schedule.
In full disclosure, I am one of the talking heads in Mike Black and Carole Summer's Queer Icon: The Cult of Bette Davis, a documentary that examines the many aspects of the gay fascination with Bette Davis, featuring film clips of Bette's most iconic moments, juxtaposed with camp burlesques of her by Matthew Martin, Charles Pierce and Arthur Blake. Featured is a profile of Martin, highlighting his long identification with Davis, and interviews with fans, entertainers, and gay cultural historians exploring the link between the gay community and Bette.
One of those interviews is with film historian Matthew Kennedy (Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory), who—when I asked him how he felt about his participation in the project—responded: "I loved having the opportunity to ponder what makes Bette Davis great and why I love her. She's so much more than easily imitated grand gestures that drag queens find so hard to resist. What a pure creature of the cinema she was—imagine if she had been born before movies were invented. It's almost unthinkable. A select few stars seem made for the camera, almost as though their very existence depends on the moving image. She was one of them."
As for having his sequence filmed in the auditorium of the Castro Theatre, Kennedy commented: "It was an honor to be interviewed in the Castro. And a little intimidating. It's hallowed ground!"
Likewise interviewed is impresario Marc Huestis, who was instrumental in facilitating the interaction between Black and Matthew Martin. "Congrats to Mike & Carole for finishing film, he offered. "Anything with/about BETTE DAVIS has to be entertaining, no?!"
But with customary aplomb, it was Peaches Christ who scored the poster pull quote: "There's a collective understanding that she is God." When I asked Joshua Grannell how Peaches became involved in the project, Joshua replied: "They emailed me about participating in the film and it was during the Midnight Mass season and I said, 'I love Bette Davis and I would love to participate and the best way to catch me is to come to the show with your camera and we'll do the interview at the Bridge Theatre.' That's what they did. They set up the camera and we did the interview. Often my brain is so dumb when I'm in drag—as far as memory goes or whatever, there's no filter over my mouth—so I'm looking forward to the screening because I have no idea what I said."
As for interacting with Matthew Martin: "Matthew has never done Midnight Mass and I've never shared the stage with him outside of performing on the same nights at Trannyshack. However, we knew of one another before we ever met. He'd seen me and I'd seen him and I was certainly an admirer of his so—when we met some years ago—it was like we had always known each other. Ironically, Matthew made his Baby Jane movie right around the same time we were making All About Evil. Here was another opportunity for him to either be in our thing or for me to be in their's; but, we were doing it all at the same time."
As Michael Fox has written at SF Weekly, Davis' appeal "derives from her ambisexuality in combination with such timeless personas as the holy-terror diva, the stalwart solitaire, and the camp heroine." Fox adds: "More than simply a lovefest, Queer Icon questions whether gays still need a role model like the fabulous Miss D. The film will surely find an enthusiastic audience when it plays the queer capitals of New York and Los Angeles, but [Thursday's] world premiere is bound to be an only-in-San-Francisco event. It won't be tedious, darling."
Matt Sussman concurs at Flavorpill: "That been-around-the-block moxie; that sultry sophistication; and, of course, those eyes. There are many reasons why Bette Davis was one of the greatest actresses ever to grace the silver screen, but her x-factor has long held—indeed, continues to hold—particular sway over gay men."
Queer Icon: The Cult of Bette Davis boasts its San Francisco premiere at a one-off screening at the Roxie Film Center on Thursday, July 2, 2009, at 6:00, 8:10, 10:20PM. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased in advance at www.blacksummers.com. Photos courtesy of Black Summers Productions, LLC. Photo of Matthew Martin as Bette Davis courtesy of Marc Huestis.
[Part One of this interview can be found here.]
Guillén: It's been intriguing to monitor the critical response as "In the Realm of Oshima" has traveled around the country. Other than for Tony Rayns' fantastic response in Film Comment to the retrospective's presence as sidebar at the New York Film Festival, and Jonathan Rosenbaum's in Artforum, it appeared that the retrospective was best received at the Walker Art Center. I was impressed with how the films were partnered with scholastic introductions to provide insight; what I call the spectacular dimension of cinema literacy. Perhaps because audiences don't feel they can access or finesse a film on their own, nor have the authority to do so, I've come to believe they nearly require these add-ons.
Quandt: You bring up something so incredibly key for discussion of how we continue to maintain or even build audiences for what we do. At the annual FIAF Conference (held this year in Buenos Aires), the big topic this year was cinematheques and their audiences, addressing this crisis. In Europe especially—but I'm finding it true even in North America, specifically Canada where I've been discussing this with my colleagues—some of them are saying that after 25-30 years of doing what they do, they're finding it generally difficult for them to find audiences for retrospectives. They're moving more and more towards limited runs of films that commercial art cinemas in their cities are not showing. Some of the terms that are coming out of this constant discussion are interesting. One of the new terms I've been hearing is "the in-cinema experience." That refers to how an audience experiences a film, the social context you're talking about, the add-ons. Part of that might be because cinephiles have become used to the extras on DVDs. It amuses me when you read commentary on DVDs, so often it's commentary on the extras than on the actual film. There really is an obsession with the commentaries, the essays, the whole package.
Guillén: What pulled me into film studies was the sociality of film culture, the in-cinema experience of the films (as you're saying), even more than the films themselves (though I love films). What has emerged as the singular distinct impression from the Oshima films at PFA is sitting there in the dark and watching (and hearing!) the screen widen to accommodate his Scope creations. It's exciting!
Quandt: We had dinner before the screening of A Town of Love and Hope and Three Resurrected Drunkards last night (there were about seven people from the PFA) and I was saying to them that—even after 25 years of being a film programmer—I knew I was going to have the thrill of shifting from 16mm to Scope. Like you, I experienced that thrill. Sometimes you can worry in a venue when technical presentation isn't so great that such a shift will be problematic; but, I had no worries last night because I knew Carl, the projectionist, is one of the best in the business.
I'd like to go back to the Walker Art Center, if I may, where I went for the opening of the retrospective. They did a fantastic job. Film often gets sidelined in museums. At the Walker, it didn't feel that way. The minute I walked through the main doors of the Walker, I was completely aware that Oshima was on par with everything else that was happening in the museum in terms of the special exhibitions in the galleries, etc. That's rare. And they had all these add-ons, as you say, all these lecturers and talks, and Kathie Smith—who wrote up the retrospective for The Star Tribune and who I met at the reception—was incredibly passionate and intelligent. The whole experience with Minneapolis was thrilling, frankly.
Guillén: Further, the Oshima retrospective landed at the Walker just about the time we got our new President and there was a charge in the combination of that political event and that cultural event that made the presence of the restrospective at the Walker singularly unique and which enflamed interest. Definitely, the write-ups from the Walker retrospective were more politically tinged than elsewhere, emphasizing the political content of Oshima's films.
I consider you a true cultural warrior and you have been rightfully acknowledged for your contributions to cinema literacy and history. How did that start for you? What was the movie that made you realize, "I love movies. I want to study movies"?
Quandt: It's hard to describe. I have a piece that's out or just about to come out on the "new cinephilia." In it, I try to describe—because it's a generational thing—how I grew up in the far northern wilderness of Canada where there was no television. It was impossible to have television because it was all rock up there, cable was impossible, and television waves literally bounced off the rocks. So I grew up completely without television. My only recourse was the local cinema, which showed double-bills every night of the week. I even trained as a projectionist! But I always joke that the night he allowed me to show on my own as a test to see if I had "the stuff"—it was Love Story—I'm sure that in the version I showed, Ali McGraw lived. I screwed everything up so badly that night. I ended up in the concession stand selling popcorn for the rest of my high school years. But that was where my passion for cinema was formed. When I got to the University—which, again, in terms of cinema was still in the hinterlands—my first Japanese film was Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon. It was one of those experiences where the world just falls away from underneath you and you don't have any bearings, you stagger out into the street afterwards, and I turned to my partner of 33 years—I mean, it was back then, that long ago—and I said, "What was that? I've got to see more." But there was no chance to see more. That was the thing. Because at that time there was no video, no DVD, that was before all that. So what happened was that we started to take our annual holidays in New York City and I would make up a chart for the entire two weeks that we were in New York City and graph out from morning to night what was playing—what art shows, but especially what movies—and that's where I saw my first Bressons, my first Godards, my first you-name-it. All those venues that are now gone are part of the romance of New York film culture: the Bleecker Street Cinemas, the New Yorker, the Thalia (though the Thalia is still there, albeit in transmogrified form).
Guillén: I'm completely intrigued by the mystique of inaccessibility, which DVD access has blown out of the water.
Quandt: Completely.
Guillén: The other night my friend Frako Loden and I were having dinner. She's an enthusiast of Japanese cinema and we were discussing the Oshima retrospective and she was offering tips on what to see or not see. I admitted to her that I hoped I could get into the retrospective because, lately, I'm weary of art cinema and all I want to watch are 1950s science fiction horror films. [Laughter.] She suggested that was probably because those were the films I loved as a child, which was absolutely correct. I'm recharging my cinephilia by returning to the source of my passion. I'm watching the films that I was in love with in the summers of my childhood. I asked her, "Why do you think I'm doing that?" and she answered, "You're probably unlearning them." So I'm curious in your experience, especially with these retrospectives where, undoubtedly, you have watched these films repeatedly, does that process of "unlearning" happen for you? Do the films lose their effect on you the more you watch them and the more you know what they're doing?
Quandt: God! I can think of the opposite happening. Certainly with Oshima—as I've re-seen the films in various venues—I find they have more power. Some of them I've seen 10 times. With retrospectives—and I use this as an analogy with art retrospectives—when an artist's work is brought together in concentration, many things can happen; but, one of two things mainly: their stocks go up for you personally as their strengths become much more apparent, or the terrible thing that can happen is the opposite, where you see all the weaknesses of an artist you've greatly admired once the work has been put all together. Filmically, that can also happen. I used to be a great fan in my earlier days of Peter Greenaway. There was a retrospective in Toronto—and this was even before he took the turn he did in his later work—and seeing his films all together, I thought, "What the hell did I see in him?" I still have some fondness for some of the early work that really "did it" for me in a sense. I also can go off certain films and I start to worry if it's just not jadedness, though I don't think I could ever become that jaded. I'll give you an example and it's a pretty shocking one. As I mentioned, we're doing a Preminger retrospective and of course I opened with Laura because you have to open with one of his greatest films to bring in the widest audience. But I was totally put off by the film.
Guillén: By Laura?!!
Quandt: By Laura. Isn't that shocking?
Guillén: Are you insane?! [Laughter.]
Quandt: We argued all the way home. The second night was Preminger's film maudit, so to speak, one of my favorite films of all time—Bonjour Tristesse—and I loved it even more. I was just knocked out by it. I don't know how many times I've seen it. But the thing that affects one's reaction to films—and how I think DVDs have changed expectations (which I talk about in this article on the new cinephilia)—is that the visual perfection of DVDs, which people expect from the Criterion DVDs, have made the traditional viewing of films at cinematheques that much more difficult. It's always been understood since the time of Henri Langlois that you were just lucky to see the film; the rarity of seeing it in a cinema. If the color had faded or it was splicey, had some scratches or whatever, tant pis (as he would say), it's all about its original format, its original form. Audiences are much more particular now. The pristineness of prints is a much greater issue than it ever has been. I don't know if you find that at PFA?
Guillén: I find that true in the Bay Area. Where I've especially noted it is with Eddie Muller and his Noir City Film Festival.
Quandt: Is this the festival that Meredith Brody was telling me about that has just recently shown?
Guillén: No, that was a program pulled together by Elliot Lavine for the Roxie Film Center comprised primarily of 16mm prints. Muller's Noir City is predominantly 35mm prints. Eddie's strategy—and it's extremely successful; he sells out his festival—is that the audience is participating in the preservation of film through ticket sales, which fund the striking of new prints from original elements. Eddie drums up audience excitation. We will be there for three or four days morning to night watching all these noir films—some of them in not such good condition—but then, every year, he presents a spanking new print of a film funded by ticket sales from the previous year.
Quandt: That's fantastic!
Guillén: As an audience member you go, "I did that!"
Quandt: What a great idea.
Guillén: It's an idea that has been quite successful, has promoted public awareness of film preservation, and instilled civic pride in Noir City audiences. It's also now become a project that's touring nationally. But what it made me aware of in terms of cinema literacy is that audiences want to be literate.
Quandt: I totally agree.
Guillén: Not to belabor the gay issue, but have you any thoughts on Hollywood Zen, the project Oshima was not able to finish about the interaction between Sessue Hayakawa and Rudolph Valentino? Were you ever privy to the treatment or an early draft of the script?
Quandt: No, he was elusive whenever I questioned him about it. It had a Toronto producer and so he came back to Toronto a couple of times after that first retrospective. In fact, during one of his visits, we were screening one of his films and it was a strange quality print….
Guillén: I read about this. You were showing one of his films on 16mm and were embarrassed that he was there to see it?
Quandt: Yeah. He called me up and said, "I'm in town. Can I come visit?" I told him, "We're showing your film tonight." I was doing a series on Japanese classics in CinemaScope and we were showing Violence At Noon. I forget the reasons why but all we could come up with was a 16mm not-very-good print. Anyway, he came by and introduced it, totally stunned the audience who didn't know he was going to be there; but, anyway, back to your question about Hollywood Zen, he was very elusive about it. I had the sense it was going to be another gay film. I had the feeling—and this is often the case with directors—that he felt talking about the project would jinx it. It had taken him so long to get the money together. Then, of course, he had his stroke and Gohatto became his last film.
Guillén: I know he became debilitated by his stroke and that he's not even aware that you have mounted this retrospective?
Quandt: That's what I'm told.
Guillén: As a hypothetical, having known him, how do you think he would have felt about this touring retrospective?
Quandt: He would have been thrilled—I'm convinced of that—as he was thrilled by the one in Toronto 20 years ago. Every director responds to the idea of a retrospective differently. You mentioned that Pedro Costa was positive about his experience but some directors dislike the idea. Some feel that it's almost a sign of the end of their career.
Guillén: Sort of like when Peter O'Toole received the honorary Oscar and complained that he wasn't done yet.
Quandt: But I'm totally convinced that Oshima would have been very happy with this retrospective. Whereas, I can give you two counter examples. I got to meet Shōhei Imamura at the time that I did his retrospective. It was at Cannes when he won the Palme d'Or for The Eel. I took him a copy of the monograph we had published to accompany the retrospective. He was nonplussed. He truly didn't seem to care that his work was being shown in all these cities in North America, etc. I mean, I could have gotten that wrong. We were at Cannes and he did have a film in competition and that skews everything for a director. It might not have been an ideal opportunity to discuss the retrospective.
The other case was Ichikawa. Mark Schilling, the film critic for The Japan Times, did an interview with him for our book and I asked Mark to ask Ichikawa this question, which was how he felt about the fact that his films many years on were going to be shown at all these places in North America. Ichikawa said he truly didn't care. I don't think Oshima would have said such a thing.
Guillén: Especially because the Oshima retrospective is truly underscoring his innovative and adventurous breadth. The retrospective serves his body of work.
Quandt: A question I would ask is which contemporary director can we think of who is that brave? It's not just the bravery, the courageousness, of alienating an audience, of making the work guarantee that you're not going to have a very large audience—although Oshima was always angry at the studios for not leaving his films in the cinemas long enough or not promoting them, etc.; he obviously thought there was a potential for a larger audience than there was—but, more in terms of political courageousness. Japan, less so today than then, was a monoculture. I frankly think Oshima probably put his life on the line with a lot of those extreme right wing people, given what his films say about Japan and about politics and about the persecution of minorities, etc.
Guillén: The only film that I've seen recently that might fit that bill is John Greyson's Fig Trees, which is astoundingly opaque and thrillingly intertextual. It is a complicated film and difficult to watch. It nearly necessitates repeated viewing and yet inspires the wish to do so. It's a film that's going to be a hard sell and yet, politically, one of the bravest I've seen in some time. I'm not sure it can even have a theatrical run.
Frako Loden, when we were having dinner the other evening, wanted me to ask you how fluent you are in Japanese?
Quandt: Not at all.
Guillén: You don't speak Japanese?
Quandt: No.
Guillén: You don't write Japanese?
Quandt: No.
Guillén: You don't read Japanese?
Quandt: No.
Guillén: And yet you are one of the main proponents of the classic Japanese masters?
Quandt: I got this award that involved a private audience with the Emperor and Empress of Japan. My friends are almost all political and some of them gave me considerable hell for accepting the invitation and perpetuating the imperial system. But I wasn't going to pass it up, I'm sorry. The totally shameful thing in all of this was that they speak perfectly fluent Japanese and something that was really thrilling for me was that—in both cases—he talked about Ozu, whose films he knew very well and who he had met, and the Empress talked about Kore-eda, who she had just read about winning an award at Cannes for Nobody Knows. The point being that—in the talk I gave to accept the award—I had to have Don Richie teach me a few Japanese phrases. It's a language I don't have an ear for.
Guillén: Another question I was asked to relay comes from Adam Hartzell, an enthusiast of Korean cinema, who wanted to know about The Catch, Oshima's cinematic version of Kenzaburo Oe's story. Oe, I understand, was also quite the taboo breaker? Have you come across any commentary either way about Oe's opinions about the film or Oshima's opinions about Oe?
Quandt: This isn't really the answer, but, Oshima changed Oe's story quite a bit. It's somewhere between a long short story and a novella. As with everything—whether the samurai genre or anime—whatever Oshima took, he turned it into a vehicle for his own concerns. My understanding is that he did the same with The Catch. He took the basics but amplified certain things, left out certain things, and—again—homosexuality comes into it. I don't know if I've ever read what Oe's reaction to Oshima's film might have been. My sense of it is that the lineaments of it are there but that it's much more an Oshima work than an Oe work. The Catch is one of Oshima's most underrated films. It's a devastating film.
Guillén: You mentioned in your introduction last night that Oshima was quite fond of the "suave tone" in Luis Buñuel's later films, which had a direct influence on Max Mon Amour. Can you speak more on Oshima's attraction to Buñuel?
Quandt: When Oshima said that Buñuel was his favorite director, he was referencing the iconoclastic Buñuel. When Buñuel entered that late period of The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire, they weren't exactly de-fanged Buñuel but they are much more serene than his early work. That also appealed to Oshima because by that time Oshima was middle-aged and there was a mellowing—there's no question—in Oshima, as there was in Buñuel.
Guillén: Finally, to wrap things up here, you mentioned earlier that you've written a piece on the new cinephilia and mentioned a "generational" distinction. Jonathan Rosenbaum seems all for the new cinephilia in contrast to Gerald Peary whose stance is skeptical. Where are you?
Quandt: I'm conflicted. My article on the new cinephilia is designed as a polemic. I think we're all lying to ourselves that—when we analyze a film on DVD—that we act as if we've seen it and we haven't. I'm convinced of that. I give all kinds of examples in this article. Critics and film professors fool themselves when they say they can make believe watching a DVD is the same as watching a film and that the differences can be translated sufficiently. I don't think they can. It goes from subtle, embarrassing things such as the color coding of a certain film where—when I came to see the film again on screen—what I thought was white on DVD, was actually pale rose. I've had this discussion with people at work where one person said, "That's inconsequential"; but, I'm sorry, it isn't to me. You wouldn't have an art historian do a visual analysis of a Renaissance painting from a reproduction. They would be laughed out of their profession. There are so many things they could get wrong because of the differences in reproduction. It's the same thing with cinema, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a piece on Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool, which I'd seen twice on screen, but I was doing my analysis from a DVD. But then I saw it again at the Toronto Film Festival for the third time on screen and I remember reeling—this sounds melodramatic—but, I couldn't wait to get out of the screening to get back to my office to email my editor to say, "I got this wrong. I got that wrong." In the DVD there were certain details that you just couldn't get. They were obscured. Alonso is one of those artists who does foreground/background things and he plays with focus, etc. These are key elements and—as much as I am thrilled by the accessibility of films through DVD—people don't have to go to New York to see their Mizoguchis. I can't imagine what such accessibility is like for nascent cinephiles.
I was just talking to a friend who lives at a relatively small university town in the States where there's no art cinema or cineclub or anything and we were talking about Apichatpong Weerasethakul because I had just finished writing a book on him and I wanted to send it to her. Somehow, I don't know, I had an obviously condescending attitude that she wouldn't have seen his films; but, she had seen them all! She'd seen them on DVD and I was stunned. She knew all about his work. How could I argue with that? How could I argue that's a bad thing? I can't. But, at the same time, what has been lost in the whole discussion is the fact that you are seeing a facsimile, sometimes a very good facsimile, but we're fooling ourselves that we're seeing the real thing. I fear that the real thing is going to be lost.
Guillén: By the "real thing" do you mean the medium of celluloid or the method of projection?
Quandt: I mean both. I can't say celluloid because many films are made digitally now and celluloid doesn't enter unless they're transferred to celluloid.
Guillén: Are you then talking about the scale of the image, the loss of seeing the image on a large screen and being—as Sontag phrased it—"kidnapped" by the image?
Quandt: Yes, absolutely. I'm not just talking about the social context or the indivisibility of what is consciousness when you're in a cinema as compared to watching something on a small screen, no matter how concentrated you are, no matter how good your home video system is. Can you imagine—I use this as an example—of encountering your first Oshimas on a television screen? Those tightly battened Scope images? They wouldn't have the same power or effect at all.
Guillén: I learned that fully in Toronto where I was watching a small film from the Global South at one of the larger venues and there was a tight close-up and suddenly there was this huge face on this large screen which engendered a visceral response I knew I would never achieve by watching the same image on DVD on a small screen. I often use DVDs to decide whether to catch a film on a large screen or not. They're like a relay station for me. DVDs are helpful for discerning narrative devices but rarely, if ever, for visual aesthetics—as you were saying—because of course you're going to miss out on color coding, scale, all those aspects that are important for a complete in-cinema experience.
Quandt: Another example I would give you since you talk about the visceral, there is a physiological element in cinema that is greatly lost in watching a film on DVD and Bresson is a perfect example of that. When you do an analysis of his editing in Au hasard Balthazar, the physiological effects of his abrupt editing where you're thrown out of one space into another without any establishing shots completely emphasizes this effect you can get that is thoroughly physiological. It's completely anodyne on DVD. It loses its strangeness. You've lost a lot in that case.
I worry about saying this because Criterion does an absolutely fantastic job and have done more for film culture than any of us. I love working with them. But it's the falsity of film professors, critics, historians, academics, etc., doing their analysis and criticism from DVDs to which I totally object. The quote I use to begin my article on the new cinephilia—and, again, is it a false analogy? Probably. But in a way you have to make these in order to express the idea—is that of the character of Konrad (Helmet Berger) in Conversation Piece by Visconti where he says something to the effect of, "Oh, I haven't been to a concert in ages; but, oh, the recordings!" As if one easily replaces the other. I'm sorry, it doesn't. It's only a recording. You're not going to get the effect of Mahler's sixth symphony in a concert hall on a CD.
Cross-published on Twitch.
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) turns a ripe young age of 29 this year, continuing its reign as the oldest and largest festival of its kind in the world. Over the course of 18 days (July 23 to August 10) SFJFF will present 71 films from 18 countries—showcasing the best Israeli and Jewish Diasporan cinema to emerge in the past year. Although I missed last week's press conference announcing the line-up, I've poured over the catalog and compiled this list of ten programs I don't want to miss.
1. Acné—Slowly but surely, 2008's bumper crop of acclaimed Latin American films is making its way into Bay Area festivals, rep houses and art cinemas. This first feature from Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj was a hit from Cannes' Directors Fortnight, and is said to be a bittersweet, deadpan comedy about a teenage boy's raging hormones.
3. I Am Von Höfler—For me, the revelation of last year's SFJFF was Freedom of Expression Award winner Péter Forgács, a Hungarian director who transforms the forgotten photographs, diaries and home movies of European Jews into a singular form of documentary filmmaking. His new 160-minute epic tells the tale of one Tibor Von Höfler—bon vivant, chemist, cad—whose extraordinary life witnessed the German invasion of Hungary, the Holocaust and communism's rise and fall.
6. Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg—Who knew that television's first sit-com was about a nice Jewish family in the Bronx? The show was called The Goldbergs and Director Aviva Kempner's film profiles its creator, writer and star, Gertrude Berg—a mega-talent who was also a luminary of radio, Broadway and film. At the July 28 Castro screening, Kempner will receive the festival's 2009 Freedom of Expression Award. Additionally, in a program aptly titled The Goldbergs, you can watch four back-to-back episodes of the popular CBS sitcom (including one that features a young Anne Bancroft).
7. Hello, Goodbye—Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu star as a middle-aged Jewish French couple who leave Paris to start a new life in Tel Aviv. Variety's Jordan Mintzer unkindly characterizes the film as "one oy-vey after another," but the presence of Israeli heartthrob Lior Ashkenazi (Late Marriage, Walk on Water) in the cast pretty much critic-proofs the film for me.
10. The Wedding Song—This year's SFJFF closes with Karin Albou's follow-up to her 2005 award-winning La Petite Jérusalem. In 1942 Tunis, two teenage girls of marriageable age—one Muslim and one Jewish—find their futures, and their relationship with each other, challenged by the Nazi occupation of Tunisia.
Amongst the remaining narratives, here are a few more that caught my eye. Sundance favorite Adam features Peter Gallagher and Amy Irving in a tale of mismatched young lovers in NYC. (Adam will be preceded by Eve, a short directed by actress Natalie Portman.) This year's Sundance opening night film was the Australian animated feature Mary and Max, which features the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries (a.k.a. Dame Edna) and Toni Collette. Collette also stars in the SFJFF 2009 Australian opening night film, Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger. Noted French actors Charles Berling and Miou-Miou head the cast of Cycles, a family drama Variety's Jordan Mintzer unfortunately describes as "more Lifetime than real life." Israeli features The Tale of Nicolai & The Law of Return and Zrubavel tell stories of immigrants from Romania and Ethiopia respectively. And finally, there's Empty Nest, the latest from top Argentine director Daniel Burman (Lost Embrace, Family Law), which I saw on screener sometime last year. I'm a big Burman fan, but this labored, male mid-life crisis fantasy left me wanting. Perhaps a second look is in order.
