When DreamWorks picked up Israeli émigré Oren Peli's effectively creepy lo-fi supernatural thriller Paranormal Activity at Slamdance 2008, it withdrew the film from its scheduled festival appearances in the Bay Area. As reported at the time on The Evening Class, SF IndieFEST resisted DreamWorks’ position and went ahead with its scheduled screening. Since then—as Dennis Harvey has detailed at Variety—"Paranormal's path to commercial release has been a laborious one: Initially, DreamWorks intended to simply use it as a DVD extra for a bigger-budgeted remake it signed Peli to create. When that fell through, the pic shifted to Paramount's shelf."
Nearly two years later, as Harvey enumerates, Paramount has taken an unusual approach in its distribution of the film, scheduling it at midnight screenings in various metropolitan and college markets, and encouraging viewers to urge wider bookings via online service Demand. The strategy appears to have paid off. The midnight screenings have been nationwide sellouts, demand for the film has increased, and sightings of Paranormal Activity can now be expected in a more conventional theatrical rollout. Our thanks to Peter Galvin for his review.
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Micah and Katie have got it all worked out. He's a day trader and his job pays well enough to support them both while Katie goes to school. Early on in Paranormal Activity Micha explains that they're "engaged to be engaged" and they've finally decided to move in together. The only thing gumming up the works is that Katie is being plagued by nightmares and strange voices while she sleeps. Concerned, Micah hatches a plan to film these mysterious phenomena with a camera set up in the corner of their bedroom in order to better understand the unwanted presence plaguing his and Katie's lives.
Shot entirely through a diegetic camera and posited as "found footage", Paranormal Activity probably shouldn't work. The weathered movie-goer in me immediately figured the set-up for a cash-in on an increasingly tired gimmick: "Those aren't scary noises, that's the director behind the scenes jiggling the lights and stomping his feet. No way will I be amused for an entire 90 minutes of light-jiggling." But let me tell you, when I walked out of that theatre, I was white-knuckled and grinning. Not only does this gimmick still have some legs, but this may be one of the best examples of it I've seen.
Largely, the film's success is due to the performances. Set entirely in one location, where the two main actors are on-screen for every frame, the film lives or dies on how willing the audience is to care about its characters. Katie (Featherston) is so steadfast in her belief that the anomalies that torment her are ghostly that dialogue which could have elicited laughs comes across instead as serious and sinister. Micah (Sloat) matches Katie's earnestness with a thick sense of humor, but his main function is ultimately as aggressor. His preoccupation with filming the house's curious displays and his stubborn unwillingness to stop and listen to what his girlfriend actually needs drive the film toward an uncertain conclusion. Neither give particularly showy portrayals, but the pair have a natural chemistry and authenticity, without which my belief would certainly have crumbled.
Another asset is writer/director Oren Peli's knack for subtlety containing the film from being an overblown shockfest. Sure, some of his willingness to downplay the scares can be chalked up to a meager budget, but Peli has an unwavering dedication to the illusion he has formed and understands when less is more. Many of the scarier sequences are spent merely watching the couple sleep, but our perspective from the tripod facing their bed—a spinning timecode on the screen counting down the hours 'til morning—creates an undeniable apprehension for what might happen before they wake. As the film continues, and the attacks become increasingly brazen, the static point-of-view also helps to transform the otherwise modest effects into impressive displays of movie magic.
Completed in 2007, Paranormal Activity has been withheld for three years while Peli figured out how to approach a proposed big budget remake. Whatever forces conspired to help that project dissolve, I'm glad, as the low-budget no-name feel of the film is one of its strongest distinctions. We've had more than enough verité horror in recent years, but if the execution continues to prove as effective as Paranormal Activity, I don't see that trend dying out anytime soon.
Cross-published at Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.
Who is Robert Beavers? The question is fair. Even the most committed Bay Area cinephiles have probably never had opportunity to watch the films of Robert Beavers. By remedy, the long-awaited multi-institutional celebration of Beavers’ film cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure—organized by the Pacific Film Archive in partnership with San Francisco Cinematheque and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—launches this evening at SFMOMA with SF Cinematheque’s inaugural program of four Beavers films: AMOR, Work Done, The Hedge Theater, and Pitcher of Colored Light. Followed by three more SF Cinematheque programs venued at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (Program Two on Friday evening; Programs Three and Four on Saturday afternoon), the series then crosses the bay to Pacific Film Archive where the cycle will be shown again in its entirety, although this go-round in its "official order". Beavers is expected to be present for most screenings at all venues, which can accurately be categorized as a not-to-be-missed once-in-a-lifetime experience.
As Susan Oxtoby has written: "The films of Robert Beavers are exceptional for their visual beauty, aural texture, and depth of emotional expression. …Beavers's films occupy a noble place within the history of avant-garde film, positioned at the intersection of structural and lyrical filmmaking traditions. They seem to embody the ideals of the Renaissance in their fascination with perception, psychology, literature, the natural world, architectural space, musical phrasing, and aesthetic beauty. The act of making things by hand is central to Beavers's cinema, as are the notions of self-reflexivity and portraiture."
To help prepare for a heightened appreciation of My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure, I offer a sampling of critical commentary on the films of Robert Beavers to accompany the exquisite monograph The Films of Robert Beavers published by PFA in conjunction with the series (which is being generously offered for free to the public at all screenings).
First, in his own words, Robert Beavers' essays "Editing and the Unseen" and "La Terra Nuova" have been replicated in Millennium Film Journal No. 32/33 (Fall 1998) devoted to Beavers and his lifetime partner/mentor Gregory Markopoulos. These essays were later published in a monograph The Searching Measure published by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on the occasion of an earlier Beavers residency in February 2004. Likewise from the commemorative Millennium Film Journal issue is Tony Pipolo’s foundational interview with Beavers, wherein the filmmaker states evocatively: "I do not look upon the camera as simply a recording device. There is a living quality that can be reached in the elements of filmmaking, and this quality can carry the filmmaker forward beyond his initial intentions. A work cannot live if it only realizes intention, as fine as that intention may be."
In "Frames of Mind"—an Artforum interview with Henriette Huldisch, the assistant curator who organized the Beavers retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in September 2005—Beavers offers insight into his aesthetics, editing practices, and hopes for the future of the film cycle. Chrissie Iles’ introduction to that interview has been recently republished by Artforum in tandem with PFA's presentation of the Winged Distance / Sightless Measure cycle.
In an interview conducted earlier this year with Nicolas Niarchos for The Yale Daily News, Beavers opined: "I am not a filmmaker who came to filmmaking through the so-called 'plastic Hollywood shell' of the feature film. I am a filmmaker who became excited by the inter-subjective possibilities of the film-image and of sound directly, and also excited by the possibilities of the spectators who can open that door to the visual and not need the actor to carry them through the dream of film—I want them to be awake."
Perhaps due to the access to avant-garde cinema through the New York Film Festival's annual sidebar "Views From the Avant-Garde", in tandem with the first presentation of Beavers’s film cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure in its entirety at the Whitney, most critical response to Beavers’s films emerges from the New York press. Several Village Voice pieces are available online, including Amy Taubin’s September 1999 survey of the avant-garde films at that year’s edition of the NYFF ("Left of Center and at the Forefront")—wherein she recommended Beavers’s three entries "sight unseen"—and her October 2001 review of The Ground; Paul Arthur’s May 2001 review of Still Light, Sotiros and The Stoas; J. Hoberman’s March 2002 profile "Renaissance man: Robert Beavers's Spirit-of a Vanished Age"; Ed Halter’s February 2003 report on the Temenos Project ("Sacred Grove: Into the Vaults") and his October 2005 reaction to the Whitney retrospective; and Nathan Lee’s initial September 2007 review of Pitcher of Colored Light and his inclusion of that film in his Top 10 Films of 2007.
Comparable coverage is represented at The New York Times where Stephen Holden reviewed Efpsychi, Windseed and The Stoas when they were featured at the 1997 edition of NYFF's "Views From the Avant-Garde" sidebar. Holden also reviewed From the Notebooks of… at the 1999 edition, whereas at the 2001 edition Elvis Mitchell reviewed The Ground. When My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure opened at the Whitney in 2005, Roberta Smith reported to The Times.
Ed Halters approached Beavers’s material again in a May 2001 article for the New York Press that profiled the Lincoln Center’s Image Innovators film series, which included Beavers’s Still Light, Sotiros, and The Stoas.
When My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure traveled to the Tate Modern, Andrew Bonacina wrote it up for the June-August 2007 issue of Frieze.
10/16/09 UPDATE: At the SF Bay Guardian, Max Goldberg remarks that for 40 years Robert Beavers has done everything by hand, "off in the hinterlands of the avant-garde."
10/21/09 UPDATE: Tim Cawkwell is a British film enthusiast whose report on the 2008 Aurora Festival in Norwich UK "Touch, Focus, Memory: Robert Beavers and His First Principles of Film" is available in PDF format. His essay is particularly helpful in understanding Beavers' camera techniques.
Cross-published on Twitch.
One year after the smash success of its inaugural French Cinema Now (FCN), the SF Film Society has announced the line-up for its anticipated 2009 follow-up fest. This year's expanded program includes 11 new films and one revival, mostly culled from the Berlin Film Festival and Cannes' Directors Fortnight sidebar. It's an impressive roster—there are seven films I've been jonesing to see, plus four others which look plenty promising. Nothing has the marquee value of last year's Palme d'Or winner The Class, or all-star ensembler A Christmas Tale, but that's AOK. With the possible exception of the latest Claude Chabrol joint, none of these 11 films are what I'd call sure bets for theatrical distribution—exactly the stuff I want to see at a festival. Here's a brief rundown of what to expect from Oct. 30 to Nov. 4 at Landmark's Clay Theater.
I'd like to say that my #1 object of desire in this year's FCN is some tony art film, but alas, it's comedy OSS 117: Lost in Rio that's got me most riled. I got the biggest kick out of 2006's OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, featuring Jean Dujardin as the vain, meatheaded, culturally clueless secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath. I loved all the inane hijinks and sparkling 1950's art direction, and am counting on more of the same in this Rio-set sequel. An added bonus: director Michel Hazanavicius is expected to attend the film's sole FCN screening on Saturday, October 31.
Another comedy I'm looking forward to is Alain Guiraudie's The King of Escape. This one caught my eye because it stars Hafsia Herzi, the fiery young actress who wowed us in The Secret of the Grain (SFIFF51) and French Girl (SFIFF52). Here she plays a 16-year-old country teen who romantically pursues a dumpy, middle-aged gay tractor salesman—much to his surprise—and her family's extreme consternation. This got some terrific reviews when it screened in Directors Fortnight. Writer/director Guiraudie will be in town for the film's two screenings.
On a more serious note, conflict between a seemingly benevolent French-Arab factory owner and his Muslim employees is at the center of actor/writer/director Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche's Adhen. His first two features, Wesh Wesh (2001) and Bled Number One (2006) were both shown at our 2006 Arab Film Festival. I expected Adhen to show up in this year's AFF (Oct. 15 to 18 in SF, Oct. 23 to 25 in Berkeley), but am just as happy to see it as part of FCN. This is probably the "oldest" of FCN's 11 new films, having premiered in Directors Fortnight in 2008.
Last month's headlines concerning French police raiding and bulldozing immigrant camps in Calais directly relates to another FCN selection, Philippe Lioret's Welcome. Vincent Lindon (La moustache, Friday Night) portrays a swimming instructor with a wrecked marriage who wrestles with helping a 17-year-old Kurdish Iraqi refugee—one determined to swim across the English Channel from Calais to Great Britain. This is one of three FCN offerings which world-premiered at Berlin.
As with last year's FCN, there's one documentary in the 2009 mix, Thorn in the Heart by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep). Combining home movies, interviews and a bit of animation, Gondry's film is a portrait of his Aunt Suzette, a rural schoolteacher for 35 years. Her titular thorn is a troubled relationship with gay slacker son Jean-Yves. This got wildly mixed reviews when it screened as a Special Presentation at Cannes, with many critics damning the project as too personal and of interest only to actual members of la famille Gondry. Given the director's reputation and the subject matter, I plan on giving this a shot.
For this year's Closing Night, the FCN programmers have selected a formidable pairing of Benoît Jaquot's Villa Amalia and Claude Chabrol's Bellamy, both of which premiered at Berlin. The former represents director Jacquot's fifth outing with Isabelle Huppert, starring here as a respected composer/pianist who radically alters her life after discovering a lover's infidelity. All vestiges of her persona get discarded—family, friends, profession and possessions—sending her on an existential journey southward to an island off the coast of Naples. Relatedly, Huppert has made seven films with Claude Chabrol. In his 57th film Bellamy, the 79-year-old "French Hitchcock" works for the first time with screen legend Gerard Depardieu in a role written specifically for him. His titular character is modeled on Jules Maigret, the beloved French detective created by writer Georges Simenon in 1931. Bellamy is about a Parisian police commissioner who becomes involved in a murder case while vacationing in the south of France. It's said to be the director's wittiest, most accessible film in years—a perfect note on which to end the festival.
There are four FCN selections of which I was previously unaware, starting with Opening Night film The French Kissers. This teen comedy is the directorial debut of comic book writer Riad Sattouf, and is beguilingly described by Screen International's Mike Goodridge as a cross between American Pie and André Téchiné's coming-of-ager Wild Reeds. Newcomer Vincent Lacoste stars as Hervé, a 14-year-old class nerd who finds himself being pursued by the class beauty. Playing his mom is Noémie Lvovsky (the best friend in FCN 2008's Actresses), accompanied by some intriguing cameos from the likes of Emmanuelle Devos, Irene Jacob and Persepolis writer/director Marjane Satrapi. Director Sattouf is expected to attend the screening. (Interesting to note that all three filmmakers attending FNC are directors of comedies).
Another adolescent-centered film is Sylvie Verheyde's Stella. Set in 1977, it concerns an average 11-year-old who has inexplicably been admitted to a prestigious Parisian preparatory school. Hanging out in her parents working class bar has made her tops in pinball and pop music. When it comes to academics, however, she'll need the help and friendship of the class brain, a daughter of Argentine-Jewish intellectuals. This film has received critical raves all around. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing singer/songwriter Benjamin Biolay (a.k.a. Catherine Deneuve's ex-son-in-law) as Stella's father, plus Guillaume Depardieu in one of his final screen appearances (as a sympathetic bar customer).
Ex-film crtitic Axelle Ropert makes her feature directorial debut with The Wolberg Family, a dramedy in which a small town Jewish mayor struggles in vain to keep his family from unraveling. Ropert is best known for the off-beat screenplays she's written for director Serge Bozon (La France SFIFF51). Here Bozon returns the favor by taking on a pivotal acting role as Mde Wolberg's needling Bohemian brother. Making the film a total Bozon Family affair is Serge's sister Celine, who's responsible for The Wolberg Family's wide-screen cinematography. Boyd Van Hoeij waxes rhapsodic in his Directors Fortnight review in Variety.
Yet another 2009 Directors Fortnight selection is Yuki & Nina, a collaborative effort from formalist Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa (2005's A Perfect Couple with Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini) and actor Hippolyte Giradot (last seen around here in A Christmas Tale and Amos Gitai's One Day You'll Understand). The two co-wrote and co-directed. Giradot also stars as the divorced father of Yuki, a desperate 10-year-old girl determined not to abandon her best friend Nina by moving to Japan with her mother. The story is told entirely from the children's POV and is said to contain elements of magic realism when the duo escape to a forest.
Last year's FCN featured three revival screenings, which represented fully one-third of the fest's line-up—French Cinema Now (and Then) if you will. There's only one vintage film this year, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, chosen to mark the somewhat arbitrary 40th anniversary of French New Wave. It's not a terribly interesting choice, at least when compared to last year's Six in Paris omnibus and two early Arnaud Desplechin works. But it's as appropriate as anything else to mark this commemoration. As unlikely as it may seem, perhaps not everyone has seen this essential classic in 35mm.
French Cinema Now is one element of what is now officially the San Francisco Film Society's Fall Season. Be sure and check out Cinema by the Bay (Oct. 22 – 25), Taiwan Film Days (Nov. 6 – 8), SF International Animation Festival (Nov. 11 – 15, line-up TBA Oct. 9) and New Italian Cinema (Nov. 15 – 22, line-up TBA Oct. 5).
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
Continuing with my survey of the diasporic dimension of San Franciscan film festival culture, Chi-hui Yang—Festival Director for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAF)—invited me to the offices of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) to discuss the Center's mission objectives and the Festival's ongoing relationship with Bay Area Asian and Asian American communities. Chi-hui is a graduate of Stanford University and the founder of the Stanford Asian American Performing Arts Series. He has written about culture, music and film for Spin, Giant Robot, and other magazines and on-line outlets and has curated film programs that have been screened at venues and festivals nationwide, including the Seattle International Film Festival and Minneapolis' Sound Unseen Festival.
The San Francisco-based Center for Asian American Media was founded in 1980. Formerly known as the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), CAAM has grown into the largest organization dedicated to the advancement of Asian Americans in independent media, specifically in the areas of television and filmmaking. In 1986, CAAM took over planning, programming and management of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Since then, SFIAAFF has become the largest festival of its kind in North America.
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Michael Guillén: Chi-hui, what prompted CAAM's decision to create the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival?
Chi-hui Yang: When NAATA was founded in 1980, its main purpose was to present works on public television. Then we added the film festival, then our Media Fund which funds documentaries, and then our educational department. Most recently we've added a digitial media department.
The public television work had a national focus. CAAM is one of the five minority consortia funded by the U.S. government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The funding for the entire organization is relying upon commercial appropriations. The money that we get is the same money that ITVS and PBS gets, committed towards building public media.
Guillén: So, in contrast to several of the other film festivals in the Bay Area, you're receiving funding on the Federal level?
Yang: For the organization. The Festival's resources come from a different pool of money, primarily from earned revenue, corporate sponsorship and foundation grants, which is the same as every other festival. The Federal money that comes into CAAM funds our public television and our film funding efforts.
Guillén: What was the perceived need to develop a film festival?
Yang: At that point in the late '70s, early '80s, there was a loose confederation of Asian American filmmakers. There had been a lot of movement in the early '70s in Los Angeles and New York with community-activist filmmaking happening through Visual Communications in Los Angeles and Asian Cinevision in New York; but, those were very much regional. All those groups and more came together for a convening in Berkeley in 1980 to found a new organization which would try to fulfill the promise of public television, or hold public television to what it promised to do: i.e., offer diverse programming for the entire nation that reflected the composition of the country. At that point there was very little Asian American programming on public television. It was still primarily imported British programming. That calculation was strategic in that—with regard to interest in terms of sheer audience reach—nothing can really compete with a public television broadcast. It couldn't then and even still you can reach millions of viewers through one broadcast, which is the large impact the founders thought they could have. That's the reason why the organization was started: to take advantage of American public television to reach modern audiences with Asian American content.
The festival component came after that when the organization decided that it wanted a local component that built community and interaction in the Bay Area as opposed to just a national broadcast that was beamed into homes but didn't actually bring people together.
Guillén: In determining the content that you wanted to show at the festival, what were you looking for? Was it specifically Asian American representation?
Yang: Yes.
Guillén: Yet, you also profile Asian film?
Yang: Our interest is to look at the continuum that happens between Asian American and the diaspora from Asia, to really see what the connections are because in a lot of ways the original impulse was to offer more diverse views of Asian people with a focus on Asian American filmmakers. There's an interesting tension that happens between Asian American and Asian programming in that—politically, in the U.S.—Asian and Asian American often are conflated to be the same thing. They might presume someone from Japan is the same as a Japanese American, even though they couldn't be more different. With cinema there's a strong tension to disassociate Asian from Asian American as a political statement; but, then there's so many interesting cultural, linguistic, and different types of artistic linkages between Asians and Asian Americans that flow back and forth. Part of our interest is to address that tension and look at what it produces. Also to look at what Asian filmmakers in other parts of the Diaspora are creating to reflect upon the cinema from the U.S. Increasingly, you have Asian American filmmakers who are working not in the U.S. but somewhere else. For example, you might have an American indie that is being shot in a non-English language. Those ideas are starting to blur a bit but are the ideas that we're interested in exploring.
Guillén: By giving Asian American filmmakers the opportunity to strengthen themselves, has that cross-pollinated Asian cinema? Is the tension you're referencing a collaborative tension?
Yang: I think it definitely is and the areas where we see it the most are actually where there are the most Asian Americans returning into Asia to make films. A good case study is Vietnam. There's a strong Vietnamese American film movement happening now. There's a number of filmmakers, including people like Ham Tran who made Journey From the Fall (2006), Stephane Gauger who made Owl and the Sparrow (2007), and others who were raised in the U.S., went to film school in the U.S., grew up within the domestic scene here, and returned to Vietnam to reinvigorate Vietnamese cinema. Vietnam is an interesting example, as is Taiwan where Taiwanese Americans are making investments in Taiwanese films. A different model is Korea where a lot of Korean Americans are finding work in Korea. It's not so much about Korean American filmmakers going back to Korea and changing the film scene there, but more that the Korean film industry has seen a route to finding a market in the U.S. to make money for Korean films; their vehicle being Korean Americans. So there's a number of different interactions happening, some based upon personal dynamics, others more on the global film industry processes.
Guillén: Which addresses the question: do Asian American film festivals provide a distribution/exhibition channel by which Asian films can reach diasporic audiences situated in the U.S.? When you're programming content for your festival, how much are you aware that your audience is more than just Asian American? Especially here in San Francisco where the last census revealed that more than one third of the city's population is of Asian descent?
Yang: Our audience demographics tell us that about 60% of our audiences are Asian and the other 40% is a mix of other communities. Our audience is broad. The films that we show are a mix of English language and a lot of other languages too. The audiences that we have are primarily second-generation. As a rough estimate, one fourth of our audience is first-generation where their first language is a foreign language. That dynamic is interesting because a lot of the films that we show are more independent or artistic in nature. We don't show a lot of commercial films. We found that a lot of first-generation immigrants don't gravitate as much to independent films as to commercial films. There's an interesting barrier there that we are trying to address. At the same time, when we show films like Mother India (1957) or other important classic films for certain communities, we see those folks come out. There were certainly a lot of people from the Indian diasporic community who came out to watch that film.
Guillén: Would you say that—by placing a revival screening within your program—you broaden your constituency?
Yang: Absolutely. What's interesting about this idea of what "Asian American" is, it's a term that some people embrace while other people don't quite know how they fit within it. Certainly, within second-generation Asian people living in the U.S., they are the group that embraces that identity more, which is essentially the identity of the festival. At the same time a lot of the offerings that we present are just as interesting to either first-generation immigrants or other groups which haven't historically identified as Asian American but whom we see as part of that.
About 10 years ago we did a big focus on cinema of the South Asian diaspora. At that point we noted that our audience stats for the South Asian community were fairly low and—from talking to people in research—we understood that a lot of folks didn't identify solely as Asian American; they were more South Asian. So that was our effort to bring in and build connections with that community. That program worked well and was about the time that we started working with 3rd i to build in-roads into that community. In this coming year, 2010, we will have a focus on the Filipino American community. In the Bay Area, after the Chinese community, the Filipino American community is the second largest. It's quite big. For that community, there are a lot of ties to homeland, a lot of movement back and forth, both culturally and linguistically, and in terms of travel. There are a lot of first-generation Filipino immigrants in the Bay Area and so that's another community that we want to build connections with and bring into the festival.
Guillén: Is your demographic data from the last census, now 10 years out of date?
Yang: Yes. But we also do a lot of data gathering at the festival so we have a sense of who's coming matched up against the last census information for the city. Also, we acquire information anecdotally, just from being in the community and understanding where those communities are at. The place we've actually found the most interesting demographic data is with advertising agencies who work with us closely. Their intent is to move into the Asian American market and our festival is actually the largest Asian American arts event in the nation. We offer them a great laboratory and an in-road into the Asian American community in the Bay Area. Those advertising agencies actually have the most up-to-date information because they've done a lot of their own in-market research.
Guillén: Having attended SFIAAF for about 10 years now, I've noted that your festival's audiences stand out as some of the most fun, ebullient and engaged audiences of any film festival in the Bay Area. Clearly, as you've been indicating, you have built this audience through community outreach. Do you have a specific community outreach position within your festival staff?
Yang: Yes.
Guillén: So when you're bringing in Asian American content to your festival, its audience is presumed; but, when you're bringing in Asian content, such as Vietnamese or Filipino, as you've mentioned, how do you shape your audience? How do you reach your first-generation, second-generation Asian audiences? What efforts does your community outreach perform specifically?
Yang: There are a number of different key ways that we do that. We work with ethnic press first. We also connect with community social service and cultural organizations, and we work through them to reach communities who often need to be communicated to in their first language. By example, we create a lot of in-language publications and flyers to the Vietnamese and Korean communities.
During the festival, we usually partner with 80-100 community-based organizations. Our marketing, promotion and community outreach strategies exist both on broad-based publicist PR to mainstream publications, all the way to going to grass roots organizations, going to community events, and working through their lists. We have found that these organizations want to be a part of CAAM and the festival. In a way it's a win-win because it allows them to have exposure at the festival and helps them reinforce their relationships with their communities.
Guillén: How do you fit your community organizations to a specific film? I imagine you have a rolodex of opportunity; but, how do you know which organization to approach to co-present?
Yang: Our approach is to go as specific as we can. For example, we often show films about adoption, and if we show a film about Vietnamese adoption, we'll zero in on the handful of organizations that deal with that and invite them to participate in the festival. We'll send them information about the film and make sure it agrees with their politics, as a lot of these social issues are quite contentious within the community.
Guillén: How about consular assistance?
Yang: Consulate help is usually for resources and hospitality; bringing in filmmakers. For example, we had Kiyoshi Kurosawa this last year and the Japanese Consulate hosted a reception for him and helped with travel support.
Guillén: How much is your festival supported by regional collaborations with sister organizations on the West Coast? Do you pool resources to coordinate the visit, let's say, of high-profile talent to the West Coast?
Yang: Not so much. We're good friends with the Los Angeles festival; but, because of the time gap between our festivals—they're a month and a half after SFIAFF—it's harder to coordinate that way. The main way that we coordinate is that every year at the festival we have a convening of all the Asian American film festival organizers in the country. We usually have about 15-17 cities represented, about 40 people, who all come to our festival because it is strategically the first Asian American festival of the year and the largest. A lot of them come to our festival to look for films to lock into their programs. So we have an afternoon meeting to discuss common challenges, collaborations, the state of the field, and how we can help each other out.
Guillén: With the documented proliferation of film festivals world-wide, there is some concern that there is more competition than collaboration among festivals. As most of them are organized on a similar non-profit model, competition for both economic and demographic resources has become a pressing concern. Though that might be generally true, I seek to suggest that in the Bay Area—with its incredibly high incidence of film festivals—there is a strong collaborative ethic between our community-based film festivals, who often co-present for each other, weaving their audiences into each other. Do you find this to be true?
Yang: Yes, film festival work in San Francisco is much different than other cities where they are more competitive for audiences and films. While we do compete for audiences and films in San Francisco, we have found that we have gained more by cross-pollinating audiences. One study that hasn't been done and would prove interesting is how much overlap there is between audiences from Frameline, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, and 3rd i, to determine what the percentage is of people who attend all these festivals or just a few of them. We don't really know; but, what we do know is that we're all working with a similar group of people that we're trying to engage with film. We've found that if we collaborate or even just communicate programmatically—What are they going after? What are we going after?—it helps save a lot of time and effort. If we co-present, then we get our festival in front of their viewers and give a benefit to our membership too, in terms of letting them know about something that's exciting. A lot of times, a film that we might co-present at another festival is a film that we might have wanted to show but couldn't show because it's showing up at another festival, but which we continue to want to support.
Guillén: CAAM and SFIAAF are ahead of many of the other community-based film festivals for having an active arm of distribution/exhibition, specifically through your public broadcasting. What is the protocol, if any, of determining which films that have played at your festival become eligible for further exposure through public broadcast?
Yang: We look at the organization as, in a way, a full-service organization for filmmakers. There's a particular type of film that might make its way through all strands of the organization. Starting with our funding department, we fund primarily non-fiction films for public television broadcast; for example, a film like Hollywood Chinese (2007) by Arthur Dong or Daughter From Danang (2002) by Gail Dolgin. Often when the films we've funded for public television are finished, we will show them at the festival and then present them on public television, and then follow up with the educational distribution to colleges and universities. Every year there are a handful of films that go through all those phases. Then again, there are a lot of films that don't. For example, we did everything with Hollywood Chinese except the educational outreach; Arthur Dong did that on his own.
Though ordinarily it is the non-fiction films that make their way through these stages, this year we produced Fruit Fly (2009) by H.P. Mendoza. We funded it, produced it, showed it at the festival, and the next step would be whether we get it onto public television or educational distribution, which we're still working out to see if its appropriate for either of those channels.
Guillén: And this opportunity for "full-service", as you say, is specifically for Asian American filmmakers?
Yang: It is, though we have a fairly expanded idea of that. For example, a recent film we funded was City of Borders (2009), a documentary about a gay and lesbian bar in Israel. It's about Palestinian-Jewish communities there. Under the broadest possible definition, you could conceive of that documentary as being Asian American—by way of the Palestinian story, which caters to a very broad definition of Asian—but, moreso, we're supporting a talented Korean American filmmaker Yun Suh who had this important film to make.
Guillén: So you're saying that it's not that the content of the film must be specifically Asian American? That the director is Asian American qualifies its inclusion?
Yang: Our interest is in supporting our audiences and filmmakers. A lot of times those interests will coincide where—though we know our audiences want to see Asian American stories and we also want to support the work of filmmakers—a film may have Asian American content and be made by an Asian American filmmaker; but, there are other permutations.
Guillén: How does SFIAAF address the value added of the spectacular dimension of film festival culture?
Yang: We realize we need a good balance between our offerings. Programmatically, our inclination is to go towards smaller, more director-driven projects, because those are the films that have the least support and which audiences would have the least chance seeing. At the same time, knowing our audiences are diverse with a broad range of interests, we do want to balance with some commercial films, namely blockbusters from Asia. Unfortunately, there are no Asian American blockbusters, though—when they happen to come along—we will show the Harold and Kumar movies or films like that, which have a broader recognition. Above all, we want our audiences to have a good time and in a lot of ways the festival is—speaking of the spectacular—as much a community gathering point as it is a festival. Some people come for the films but just as many, or more, come to be a part of something, which they can't find anywhere else. For that reason, we want to enhance that experience by—not just having films—but providing outdoor screenings, concerts, parties, multiple social events where that kind of community gathering happens. That way we can also take a look at Asian and Asian American artists who are working in different mediums than film to explore what the connections might be in Asian American culture between, let's say, music and film. There are a lot of overlaps.
Guillén: You usually include at least one open air free-to-the-public screening at the festival?
Yang: We usually do two a year. We'll stage one in the summer—which we did last week with Kamikaze Girls (2006)—and then we'll stage one during the festival.
Guillén: I see community building as the participatory and celebratory aspect—the "festive" part—of a film festival. You're saying SFIAFF is committed to that?
Yang: Yeah, absolutely. But it's not just fun-for-fun's-sake either. There's a real social value to creating a space within the festival that allows ideas, creativities and connections to be made. Normally at a film festival, those connections you see are often more business-driven or industry-driven; but, here at SFIAFF, it really is more community-based. You see a lot of film projects or collaborations that might emerge out of a casual conversation. Or we have those 80-100 community organizations involved who become part of the mix and other ideas are born from there too. So the festival is a real gathering point for the community and also for people who are outside the Asian American community to see what else is happening.
Guillén: Absolutely. I have to commend that embrace. As a Chicano, I took great pride when your former cohort Taro Goto invited me to contribute a capsule to SFIAFF because it was an open invitation into your community. By contrast, the International Latino Film Festival never once invited me to write a capsule, and barely acknowledged me as press.
Yang: In a lot of ways it's born out of this idea that the Asian American community is so diverse that it's almost contradictory. It's impossible to sum up. Linguistically and culturally it is vast and growing. Out of that, there has to be this acknowledgment of multiplicity. It's inherent within the Asian American experience.
Guillén: I would say that acknowledgment of multiplicity leans into the future, moreso than adherence to identity politics. Local artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña has deeply influenced me with regard to looking past identity politics to explore questions of allegiance in the future: what do you have when a Salvadorian boy and a Korean girl fall in love, marry, and have a child? To what community will that child identify?
Which leads me to ask, is there a point at which your festival will not be necessary? Is there a point where your community, your audience, will be so woven into the multiplicity of the general populace that it will no longer be necessary to specifically address and express the Asian American experience? Or, alternately, with international film festivals broadening their European predilections to include cinema from Asia and the Global South, will a specific venue for such cinemas still be necessary?
Yang: Well, I look at it in two ways. One is through the lens of a specific ethnic original community. The second is in terms of independent media. I think there will always be a need for venues to show independent media, which is primarily what we focus on. In terms of the Asian American focus, sure, there is more integration and assimilation; but, in terms of representation in mainstream media, it actually hasn't progressed very much. In a lot of ways that goes back to why our audiences are so enthusiastic. If you look at, say, other more identity-based film festivals in the Bay Area or across the country—gay and lesbian, Latino, Jewish—they all have more mainstream media representation than Asian Americans.
Guillén: Why is that? I've spoken with Eric Byler about this. He complains about how Hollywood will fly in talent from China or Japan to star in some blockbuster before they think of casting an Asian American actor. Do you have a sense of why that is?
Yang: It's a complicated dynamic. There are marketing researchers saying that American audiences are more comfortable with an Asian foreigner than an Asian American. It's bizarre; but, people are familiar and accustomed to what they have already seen. They want to see more of what they have seen. What they have seen on television or at the movies is that foreigner. That's the dominating image you see of Asians. So when you see an Asian who's an American, it confuses people a little and—when you confuse people—that doesn't make you money. That's one of the overriding dynamics which controls this. Because, certainly, there's no lack of talent.
Guillén: When I think of mainstream Asian cinema, I think of genre. When I think of genre, I think of audience appeal. Does independent Asian American cinema concern itself with genre?
Yang: I would say independent Asian American cinema is a response to genre, to that pigeonholing. Most Asian American filmmakers aren't interested in that, or—if they are—they're doing it in an ironic way to escape the pigeonholing. What's interesting is that there is this idea of the qualifier. You're watching a film and it's crazy, or it's a new action film, right? It's the same thing as the debate over having or not having a hyphen for "Asian American". The hyphen is a qualification. There's a qualifier that has to happen for people to watch certain things that have an Asian American or an Asian in it. Without that qualifier, it's not that interesting—it's a domestic drama; it's a romantic comedy—but, it's not an absurd, spectacular crazy film that would qualify you to see it, even if it has a non-White cast.
Guillén: Do you think Asian American cinema has any influence on Asian cinema, by way of style, themes?
Yang: I don't think there's a whole lot of that. I think Asian filmmakers are probably looking to some of the big American auteurs. Certainly, I think they might look to people like Ang Lee, M. Night Shyamalan, or Mira Nair, who are well-established filmmakers; but, not so much to independent filmmakers.
Guillén: Shifting to the festival's interaction with press, do you tier press?
Yang: No. But I have encountered that at Cannes.
Guillén: Cannes is the mother of all press tiering, which adheres strictly to their spectacular dimension. I understand what's going on there. You could be Manohla Dargis and have trouble getting into a film.
Yang: I can also understand the administrative, logistical and business aspects of press tiering. If your festival is big enough that you have hundreds and hundreds of members of the press attending, then you need to figure out how to accommodate their various needs. You would probably have to figure out some kind of tiered press system because you wouldn't be able to accommodate all their needs. You'd have 100 interview requests for a single director, which you can't accommodate, so you have to figure that out. That's the only reason I can think of. But, no, we don't tier press. I don't see any reason to. It also has to do with a philosophical approach towards marketing, outreach and publicity. What do you value? We certainly value the mainstream press—television, radio and print—but we know that equally as important, perhaps even more important, is community-based ethnic online bloggers who dictate people's tastes and interactions just as much or more than the mainstream press. There has to be that recognition. That's something SFIAAF really values.
Guillén: So SFIAFF draws no separation between print and online press?
Yang: No, not really. We're aware of the value of having a photo placed in The Chronicle; that's great. That's gaining us a lot of people. But equally important to us is having good, critical, more-in-depth coverage, which a lot of times print can't allow for space issues, which online can. This is not to criticize anyone, but sometimes when you have short pieces in print, it doesn't allow room to go into depth. Online coverage gives good copy to our filmmakers that they can take home and do something with. That's the reality of it.
Guillén: I'm heartened to hear that. Beneath the aegis of film festival studies, consideration of the "written record" of any given film festival has become of importance to me. Much of it is manifesting online where the actual experience of a film festival can be chronicled, relying less on a thumbs-up thumbs-down critique of content. Social networking, microblogging, have become a new frequency of immediate and intense buzz for a festival.
Of related interest:
Want to ask the programmers your own questions? The San Francisco Film Society is sponsoring a SFFS Arts Forum panel on Monday, October 12, 7:30PM—"Meet the Programmers"—at The Mezzanine. Panelists include Nancy Fishman (SFJFF), Jennifer Morris (Frameline), Rachel Rosen (SFFS), Jeff Ross (SF IndieFEST), and Chi-hui Yang (SFIAAF), moderated by SF360's Susan Gerhard.
Film International Special Issue on Film Festivals (Vol. 6, Issue 4)
Film Festival Yearbook 1—A Response to Section One
Film Festival Yearbook 1—A Response to Section TwoDiaspora By the Bay: SFJFF—The Evening Class Interview With Program Director Nancy K. Fishman and Program Coordinator Joshua Moore
Diaspora By the Bay: 3rd i—The Evening Class Interview With Artistic Director Ivan Jagirdar and Administrative Director Anuj Vaidya
Photo of Chi-hui Yang courtesy of Jay Jao. Cross-published on Twitch.
"What if your urban legends are real?" One of the biggest mysteries in the annals of New York criminal history is now the subject of Cropsey (2009), a gripping documentary by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio that debuted at this year's Tribeca film fest. At Variety, John Anderson assessed: "A real-life multiple-murder tale that could have been called A Guide to Recognizing Your Boogeyman, Cropsey has all the trappings of a true-crime TV special, but with an undercurrent of cultural exposition that is intelligent, profound and unsettling." At Slant, Nick Schager complained the filmmakers exploitatively reprinted the legend ad nauseum, turning "what might have been a portrait of the boogeyman myth's lingering societal role into merely a crude episode of 48 Hours." San Franciscans can decide for themselves when Cropsey screens at this year's edition of San Francisco's Docfest. Peter Galvin weighs in for The Evening Class.
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On Staten Island, the name Cropsey belongs to one of the oldest boogeymen on the East Coast. An infamous spook to pass around the campfire, his was the story of a madman who stole children in the night, and his legend persisted through generations, even making an appearance in the 1981 slasher film The Burning. But when children began disappearing in the early '80s near the Willowbrook State School, the notorious mental hospital that marked the beginning of Geraldo Rivera's blockbuster exposes in the early '70s, Staten Island came face to face with a real-life Cropsey.
Following a month-long hunt for a missing child in 1987, police produced one man as their suspect—Andre Rand. A former therapist at Willowbrook, Rand had remained in the area after its closure, camping in the woods surrounding the hospital. For a community that had grown terrified and angry, here was a face to put to the evil. In Cropsey, directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio—who grew up on Staten Island in the '80s—return to lead an investigation behind the events surrounding the five missing children and the man many called "The Pied Piper of Staten Island."
Zeman and Brancaccio uncovered a wealth of archived news reports and photographs, and—through their investigative research—introduce viewers to many key players in the famous case that resulted in Rand's conviction and 25-year sentence. The footage is beautifully reproduced and moves like a speeding bullet in its utter comprehensiveness. Speaking practically, it could be argued that the rise of crime television has spoiled American audiences a bit, and the aesthetic of Cropsey reminds of an extra-long episode of Cold Case Files, but through its evenhanded thoroughness it distinguishes itself.
As we unfold the facts of the case, the story begins to change shape and sprout new angles, resulting in more questions than answers. While the outraged families of Staten Island have chosen to vilify Rand, the evidence linking him to the crimes is less certain, and the directors have chosen to concentrate on unraveling the past rather than creating a monster. The pair themselves soon become characters in the film, Zeman narrating and both of them revisiting the many landmarks that darken Staten Island's history—most notably a genuinely unsettling, nighttime exploration of the abandoned hospital that had me wondering if it was an outtake from The Blair Witch Project.
Most of today's horror films offer escapism. When I watch a scary movie, I'm choosing to experience a little taste of fear in return for a cheap thrill, and then I go home and sleep safe and sound in my bed. In Cropsey, the horror doesn't fade away with the credits; the audience is offered the rare chance to confront a truth that often lies behind our cinematic boogeymen. No, Andre Rand is not the legendary Cropsey who caused so many shivers around the campfire, but his story is a reminder that the titular madman did likely stem from a real place and person in history.
Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.
When DreamWorks picked up Israeli émigré Oren Peli's effectively creepy lo-fi supernatural thriller Paranormal Activity at Slamdance 2008, it withdrew the film from its scheduled festival appearances in the Bay Area. As reported at the time on The Evening Class, SF IndieFEST resisted DreamWorks’ position and went ahead with its scheduled screening. Since then—as Dennis Harvey has detailed at Variety—"Paranormal's path to commercial release has been a laborious one: Initially, DreamWorks intended to simply use it as a DVD extra for a bigger-budgeted remake it signed Peli to create. When that fell through, the pic shifted to Paramount's shelf."
Shot entirely through a diegetic camera and posited as "found footage", Paranormal Activity probably shouldn't work. The weathered movie-goer in me immediately figured the set-up for a cash-in on an increasingly tired gimmick: "Those aren't scary noises, that's the director behind the scenes jiggling the lights and stomping his feet. No way will I be amused for an entire 90 minutes of light-jiggling." But let me tell you, when I walked out of that theatre, I was white-knuckled and grinning. Not only does this gimmick still have some legs, but this may be one of the best examples of it I've seen.
Largely, the film's success is due to the performances. Set entirely in one location, where the two main actors are on-screen for every frame, the film lives or dies on how willing the audience is to care about its characters. Katie (Featherston) is so steadfast in her belief that the anomalies that torment her are ghostly that dialogue which could have elicited laughs comes across instead as serious and sinister. Micah (Sloat) matches Katie's earnestness with a thick sense of humor, but his main function is ultimately as aggressor. His preoccupation with filming the house's curious displays and his stubborn unwillingness to stop and listen to what his girlfriend actually needs drive the film toward an uncertain conclusion. Neither give particularly showy portrayals, but the pair have a natural chemistry and authenticity, without which my belief would certainly have crumbled.
Another asset is writer/director Oren Peli's knack for subtlety containing the film from being an overblown shockfest. Sure, some of his willingness to downplay the scares can be chalked up to a meager budget, but Peli has an unwavering dedication to the illusion he has formed and understands when less is more. Many of the scarier sequences are spent merely watching the couple sleep, but our perspective from the tripod facing their bed—a spinning timecode on the screen counting down the hours 'til morning—creates an undeniable apprehension for what might happen before they wake. As the film continues, and the attacks become increasingly brazen, the static point-of-view also helps to transform the otherwise modest effects into impressive displays of movie magic.
