They make for a fascinating comparison with the grave still lives of individual street demonstrators posted by “sandor krasna” (one of Chris Marker’s signatures) a couple of years back.

On a not completely unrelated note, San Francisco Cinematheque has launched a blog. I have a piece of writing up about a few of the films on tonight’s program at ATA, “Radical Adults Lick God Head Style: New Weird Urbanism and the Rapture of Decay.”

My capsule review of The Arbor (opening at the Roxie this Friday) was tucked in the back of this week’s Guardian, but don’t take that for a lack of interest. The film vividly registers the difficulty of recounting the past and should be seen by anyone with a passing interest in documentary form. Here is my blurb again, appended with a few words from Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians which well understand director Clio Barnard’s tangle with the interview problem.

*

An audaciously conceived and genuinely haunting chronicle of a family, The Arbor reinvents two of the most debased forms of nonfiction film: the venerating portrait of an artist who died young and the voyeuristic confession of abuse. The locus here is the short, bottle-strewn life of Andrea Dunbar, a brilliant playwright whose work distilled the manners and speech of the West Yorkshire housing projects. The Arbor effectively stages some of this work in a park near the same apartments, but the project’s focus is Dunbar’s shambling private life and its devastating effect on friends, lovers, and daughters. Our emotions are strained by their collective fury and grief, but never cheated. Curiously, Clio Barnard accomplishes this by being up front in her manipulations. After collecting interviews with the key players, she cast actors to lip sync the answers — that is, the voices are documentary while the images are staged, an uncanny effect that becomes even more so when Barnard stitches together responses to narrate a single event. The technique is eerie and literally disembodying. In the same way that one affected by trauma may experience a separation from his or her self, so the image of the actor speaking comes unglued from the “real” voice — and so too is there a crucial hesitation in our assigning authenticity to a single, undivided subject. There are shades of Greek tragedy in The Arbor‘s patient, distanced unfolding of its characters’ fates. The speakers are imagined as a chorus, and though the drama is offscreen, long since buried, the pain still lives.

*

“Oh, the tape recorder in some cases has been an inhibiting presence—which is why I rely for the most part on taking notes, a far meeker form of intrusion for some reason. And it has sometimes been quite a feat just getting to the people with whom an interview has been set up (fame, as may perhaps be deduced from the Merle Haggard story, sometimes does strange things to people, and certainly erects barriers that were never there before)…Some people tell you no more than they want to, most a great deal more than they mean to. The problem in fact comes more in sifting through the sprawling mass of opinion and background information to create a portrait; the challenge lies in respecting the spirit, or the naiveté, with which certain confidences were volunteered, in learning to make the determination (never easy) as to whether inclusion of a particular detail furthers the portrait or simply provides a headline that would throw the whole picture out of focus. You learn quickly that anyone you interview, anyone in real life, really, could be portrayed in exactly the opposite manner with exactly the same information…In this case the interview acts as a distorting lens, causing all attention to focus so exclusively on the subject that revelations are perhaps in order, things sum themselves up neatly in a way that denies the casual sprawl of real life.”

I sit and watch/As time goes by

There was obvious irony watching A Useful Life in the context of the San Francisco International Film Festival. The film, set around the Cinemateca Uruguay in Monetvideo, is deadpan in its portrayal of the unglamorous work and diminishing returns of cinematheque programming. We are far away from the heady charge of a Henri Langlois, and further still from the festival world. The SF Film Society has made great strides in year-round programming over the last several years, but nonetheless, the nature of the big event holds. The type of programming portrayed in A Useful Life is, by contrast, risked on an ongoing basis. This isn’t meant as any slant on the festival, but simply an observation of differences and a pathway back to my notes on the Radical Light “Timeline,” a gallery show of ephemera relating to the (now touring) survey of the Bay Area’s rich history of alternative cinemas. I intended to write about the exhibit before it closed last month, as it seemed to me then that it was being unjustly overshadowed by the film series and book release, but life got in the way.

The exhibit’s program announcements and calendars were particularly intriguing. Arranged as a chronological panorama, they told the story of a film culture busy being born. Several of these artifacts are reproduced in the Radical Light book, but I required seeing them in person to daydream over their contents (folded and faded with use). Film calendars are curious objects of historical contemplation. Scanning one from fifty years ago is not so terribly different from looking at one announcing next month’s listings: it’s all provisional. The ones from fifty years ago do reveal distinct film cultures, however. Many of the individual sheets were quite beautiful, but it was the whole menagerie of them that I found unexpectedly moving.

Above all, the documents represent the social and aesthetic conditions of the new filmmaking being done. In her fine appreciation for the Times, Manohla Dargis opens pondering, “Is geography destiny? Or, to put it another way, why did the San Francisco Bay Area became a humming hub for so many great avant-garde film and video makers, a veritable crossroads of the alternative world?” Yes, the relaxed social mores, bohemianism, sailors, island ecology all played a part in this liberating history—but it would be misguided not to recognize the primacy of Art in Cinema and the other artist-run film series that followed in its wake. Frank Stauffacher began programming Art in Cinema at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1946 in order to fulfill the promise of the series’ name. The story is often told that film noir was christened as such when French cineastes were suddenly inundated with several years’ worth of fatalistic Hollywood pictures after the war. Contemporaneously, Stauffacher exposed Bay Area audiences to the great works of the European avant-gardes, mischievously weaving in Walt Disney shorts and silent comedy. His programming cultivated a film audience that was well versed in traditions and open to new possibilities. This, more than any geographic destiny, set the table for a Bay Area avant-garde. Stauffacher’s own Sausalito, ZigZag, and Notes on the Port of St. Francis demonstrated how the lessons of Art in Cinema (e.g. city symphony, cinema as abstraction) could be applied in a local context . The first wave of Radical Light filmmakers largely arrived at cinema from other visual arts or poetry (Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Sidney Peterson, James Broughton, etc.) and one imagines they were inspired both by the material of Art in Cinema and its promise of an engaged audience. By the time you arrive at the calendar for the program’s Ninth Series running across five consecutive Fridays in October, 1953, you see the fruits of Stauffacher’s investment. Among other delectables, the “From Object to Non-Object” show advertises Charm of Life by the great French filmmaker Jean Grémillon; Lotte Reiniger’s silent animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed; new shorts by the scientifically minded Charles Eames and the mystically inclined Curtis Harrington; and “an experiment and an experience in 3-D” courtesy of local film artist Hy Hirsh.

These documents remind us that even taste has a history. Many of the European films included in the Art in Cinema programs retain historical significance, while only some of the “new” American works do—but the calendars remind us that the individual works were never considered in isolation. They were part of a program which was part of a series, and here we might note that the Art in Cinema calendars were not only calendars: they were also order forms. As with other membership film societies of the day, you could only purchase tickets to a full season of Art in Cinema. “(TEAR HERE)” the sheets instruct, asking you to go all or nothing. When I asked Scott MacDonald, who wrote the book on Art in Cinema, what impressed him most about the series, he jumped immediately to the size and hunger of the audience.

There were many other indicators of audience interest throughout the “Timeline.” I was especially struck by a poster advertising nine consecutive weekend shows of underground movies in 1966, both for the playful combinations (Kenneth Anger, Man Ray & Georges Méliès; Sidney Peterson & Charlie Chaplin; Richard Myers and Hollywood) and for their scheduling. Each program had Friday and Saturday 11pm shows at the Gate Theater in Sausalito and then moved across the Golden Gate for a Sunday show at Intersection. Today, the audience isn’t there to justify three weekend repeat shows of a Mike Kuchar and Gregory Markopoulos program. The poster provides some clues as to why there was then. It tells us the series was co-presented by Canyon Cinema and the S.F. Mime Troupe, a mainstay of the local counterculture. Further traces of the counterculture are evident in the lacy illustration of a woman and floating text (attendant to nothing: “magicians admitted free”). Though obviously distinct from Art in Cinema’s high-minded bohemianism or No Nothing Cinema’s punk inroads, the bills commonly place experimental film in a context other than itself.

More to the point, the calendars are never disinterested—and here we begin to get at the nub of what makes them special. More than simply listing the relevant information of time and place, they make specific propositions regarding the ideal nature of moviegoing. Whether the graphic layout is extravagant or ascetic, the mode of address utopic or dystopic, we are similarly invited to consider a cinema apart. The exhibit allowed you to trace a historical development of avant-garde attitudes, from the position staked by Art in Cinema that cinema could be Art (Stauffacher quotes icons like Henry Miller and Jean Cocteau for backup) to that of Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema that everything can be cinema.

Other Cinema persists, and the twenty-year old posters in the “Timeline” helped to situate its now deeply embedded worldview. For one, it’s high-wire programming, upping the ante of the intelligent, sometimes goofy correspondences drawn by Stauffacher and the early Canyon/Cinematheque programmers (Films of Brakhage and 3:10 to Yuma together at last!) to achieve something like a conspiracy of cinema, one which might take in Helen Levitt, Alexander Kluge, Robert Gardner, Germaine Dulac, Dziga Vertov, Peter Kubelka, Les Blank and silt in just a couple of columns. The poster design throws down this gauntlet. It’s black-and-white, oddly proportioned and jammed with text—enough to defeat even the most practiced calendar scanner. It’s the same riotous rigor we find in Baldwin’s own films.

Total Mobile Home, a 25-seat microcinema run by David Sherman and Rebecca Barten out of their basement in the 1990s, cultivated a very different aesthetic and politics of “small is more.” The postcard sizing, DIY photocopying and elegant logo all echo the proudly lowercase style of indie record labels like Olympia’s K. The programming was often iconoclastic, still showcasing local film traditions but also reaching out for experimental theater groups, the Lettrist Cinema of Venom and Eternity, and a rare print of Faces. This heavy lifting was dished out with a sense of humor: the description of Marguerethe von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages concludes in bold caps, “Come journey back with us to the leftist feminist West Germany of the 1970’s! Free turtlenecks if you don’t wear a bra!” Such levity was a consistent element in the “Timeline,” but the only object that actually made me laugh out loud was Total Mobile Home’s “Wheel of Film Fortune,” featuring such alliterative avant-gardes as Penniless Psychodrama, Very Vaginal, Never Rented, Bountiful Brakhage, Testosterone Travelogue, Swinging Structuralist, and Wetly Writing Water Women Whispers.

The most acerbic wit in the exhibit belonged to No Nothing Cinema, a breakaway group from SF Cinematheque led by Dean Snider and other “emergency filmmakers” (Steve Polta’s dossier history of this volatile split constitutes one of the most entertaining sections in the Radical Light book). Marian Wallace explains that the guiding principles of No Nothing Cinema were set forth on an “Independents Day” flier: “No censorship, no cross, no crown, hot barbeque, cold drinks.” No Nothing was also fixedly No Money, something reflected in the show bills:  rough Xerox jobs with appropriated imagery and impolitic text. Ever poised to kill its idols, the No Nothing signs savaged the mystique of masters and a pure cinema. With its brilliant steal of a National Rifle Association shooting target, the “Help Keep Film Dead Show” poster epitomizes the organization’s “rip it up and start again” mandate.

In one flier from the mid-90s, the original No Nothing’s address is appended with the sardonic exclamation, “Soon to be a ballpark!” Indeed, the San Francisco Giants moved in, and the new stadium (originally Pac Bell, then SBC, now AT&T) definitely costs. It hardly needs saying that a venue like No Nothing Cinema exists in a very different relationship to urban space than an international festival, which, for better and worse, is part of the culture of development. Accordingly, whereas the festival catalog is, well, a catalog, the calendars and announcements in the “Timeline” show seemed more akin to pamphlets or placards. Today’s film festival catalog may be an important source of information for tomorrow’s historian, but the “Timeline” materials still glow with the power for their convictions.

Allow me one final detour. Casting a wide net, the Radical Light book links the local development of alternative cinemas to technical innovators like Eadweard Muybridge and Philo Farnsworth. Perhaps if the book’s purview had extended beyond 2000 to the present day, it would have weighed in on the Bay Area players who are once again transforming the means of moving images: Netflix, Apple, Fandor, MUBI and so on. They bring us a future streaming the past, and a different, immaterial vision of the membership film society—a place where film culture is simultaneously at our fingertips and ever more remote.

Thanks to Peter Cavagnaro at Pacific Film Archive for help with the images. The Canyon Cinema flier is by Steve Arnold, courtesy Lawrence Jordan. The No Nothing Cinema poster is courtesy Scott Stark.

I was delighted when the SFIFF folks asked me to write a catalog note for Foreign Parts, a sparkling documentary portrait of uncommon (and intertwined) social and sensory acuities. I watched it again with an appreciative crowd last Thursday and had the distinct feeling that I’ve only just started in with this movie. Without a top-heavy narration, the experience of the film is akin to that of getting to know a place. You begin disoriented and maybe a little stunned, ears and eyes freshly naïve. Little by little you form a mental map of routines and landmarks. The film gives you those cognitive sparks of familiarization: as a diner is a hub for the yard, so it is for the film’s structure. After the screening, J.P. Sniadecki spoke about organizing the film to reflect his and Véréna Paravel’s gradual adaptation, so that while the early fixed views convey distance and frank amazement at the filmmaking possibilities of the chops shops, eventually the camera comes to express recognition, concern, responsibility. As subjects unburden themselves or just show off, the shots take on more of a weight (patient docs like this film and The Arbor, also showing in SFIFF, revive the dramatic possibilities of the monologue). The camera drifts through the smoke of steaks on the grill and ducks snowballs—and it listens. The turning point towards this fuller embodied presence is a shot by Paravel: the camera spins around the diner with Julia, who’s often dancing, channeling a tenderness and intoxication that’s unavailable to the majority of American documentaries. Foreign Parts doesn’t mean to outrage us as a more standard expository presentation might, but the immersive aesthetics and ethics of the filmmaking leave us pained by the politics of indifference that shrouds the place.

I write this now because the film only shows once more in the festival, today at the Kabuki at 6:45. There are other solid options at this time,  but you may not want to let this one slip away. In a couple of weeks, another resonant catalog of place will come to town as part of SF Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS weekend: Thom Andersen’s marvelous Get Out of the Car. The fact that you could conceivably switch the titles of the two films is inspiring me to consider them jointly…

James Quandt writes beautifully about the diverging “Late Styles” of Nouvelle Vague messieurs Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol in the February Artforum, but what about they of the Left Bank? Varda’s beaches still turn up jewels, but I thought the last Resnais was hokey—much of its critical praise read to me as if written on a vanity mirror. Meanwhile, Chris Marker, always elsewhere… Occasionally a fresh dispensation comes across my desk, always unannounced—a stolen subway still life, murmurs of Second Lives, and now a picture postcard for a new Damon & Naomi song, “And You Are There” [The musicians are still best known for their falling out with Dean Wareham. This is not just. Besides their fine run as a duo, they run the Exact Change press, purveying books of disquiet, hearing trumpets, Denton Welch and many remarkable works by strangers to the publishing industry, including Marker’s own Immemory). Naomi writes that this ode to lost time was partly inspired by Marker’s work, and he responds in kind with a lustrous collage that, as per the lyrics, “reappears and disappears” without moving. It’s especially nice when Michio Kurihara’s guitar streaks across the long close, swirling in with the woman’s hair.

It has taken me a long time to realize that although you may find an intelligent defender for every filmmaker of merit, no intelligent person would defend them all. This does not mean one should necessarily trust one’s instincts—but we must be mindful of difference and insistence. I often think, “What would Marker make of this?” (wishing recently, for instance, that it was he and not Spielberg that had the rights to the WikiLeaks story, though maybe he’s already made that movie—it’s yet another “current event” his work has prepared me for). His forever uncollected works do not reach us via the heavily leveraged channels of the film festival; he seems too busy exploring to abide the rules of reputation. Not an oeuvre, but a consciousness.

Frozen in reverie and protest, are his subjects looking backward or forward? Let the creative mind be a little promiscuous, conspiratorial, punning—this will help with the serious work. That’s one thing Marker teaches us. Another is to work the wires. Yang includes a note Marker appended to his video: “Dunno if it fits your pretty proustian melancholy, but I thought it could…And thanks for linking me to music, the only real art for me as you know (cinema? you kiddin’…).” I hope you won’t think I’m a complete bore if I say that it reminds me of something Edward Said wrote in his essay “Professionals and Amateurs,” about the role of the intellectual in society (a concern in all Marker’s films). The argument is not new, but his lucidity serves the point. He cautions,

In the study of literature, for example, which is my particular interest, specialization has meant an increasing technical formalism, and less and less of a historical sense of what real experiences actually went into the making of a work of literature. Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art of knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies. To be a specialist in literature too often means shutting out history or music, or politics…Specialization also kills your sense of excitement and discovery, both of which are irreducibly present in the intellectual’s makeup. In the final analysis, giving up to specialization is, I have always felt, laziness, so you end up doing what others tell you, because that is your specialty after all.

And then near the close,

In addition, the intellectual’s spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.

Always keep an eye out.

Best,
MG

Dear L—,

Looking out over the new snowfall — how much heavier it appears at this afternoon hour, before turning back to lightness at night — I’m reminded again of your photographs of the tree in different seasons. This impulse to catalog a fixed view in its changes seems basic to the pleasure of taking pictures. One naturally takes up some kind of repeated gesture, and this one is an especially poignant expression of the camera’s power as a resonant instrument. The changed appearance of the single location betrays the fact that these extricable moments are fundamentally unalike but for your click, and so of course these photographs are always self-portraits, though of a fugitive kind. And anyway, I like that you settled on the tree, as it allows me to imagine you and the oak regarding one another, transfixed by a different scale of time.

The discipline of vision…This is what I was I was after when I quoted Monet in my piece on Gary Beydler’s short films: “One does not paint a landscape, a seascape, a figure. One paints an impression of an hour of the day.” Last week I saw two of Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral at the National Gallery, and then four more reproduced in John Berger’s essay in Harper’s (“The Enveloping Air: Light and Moment in Monet”). The artist’s study of the cathedral’s infinitude of shades — its constancy of shape is only a container (as the church to the spirit) — makes for a vivid demonstration of the above adage. Seeing the vertical portraits arranged side by side, I can’t help but think of a film strip — though of course a series is not a sequence.

Similarly to the Rouens, Beydler’s Venice Pier is comprised of successive realizations of a scenic view. The pier’s strong perspective lines dissipate in the imagination, floating upon a boundless array of light and mood. Beydler constructs a linear progression down the pier — a kind of walk — but the individual shots are free from narrow chronology. It is Beydler’s final film project and the first he created in editing (the earlier ones are variations of the single-take film).

Venice Pier is animated by countervailing forces: Beydler’s rigorous blueprinting and his surrender to happenstance (both what happens and how it appears). I trace this joyful tension back to Monet’s Rouen. Besides resulting in a lucid film structure, Beydler’s sequencing first of all makes us acutely aware of variations we would not otherwise see — something that extends not only to atmospheric conditions, but also to changes in the social field, which in turn intimate the pier as an accessible, democratic space. Of course we know that the sky looks differently from one day to the next, or that a destination like the pier has a distinct feeling on a sunny Saturday as compared to a rainy Tuesday, but it’s quite another thing to register this truth in a compressed, sensual frame. Secondly, we experience each shot both in its immediacy — peeling off postcards from past afternoons — and its relation to a whole. From this comes an incandescence akin to focusing one’s attention upon a familiar sight — a landscape, a lover’s face — and blurring the perceptual lines between what is present and what is remembered.

Perhaps it suffices to remark that returning one’s attention to the same view in a more or less concentrated way is one definition of melancholy.

Regards,
MG

While working through some ideas on archival images at the movies this morning, I came across the following two items. The first is excerpted from Craig Baldwin’s jubilant essay on the signal importance of found footage to a Bay Area avant-garde (“From Junk to Funk to Punk to Link,” collected in Radical Light). The second comes from a recent email to the students of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia.

The dadaists tried to grind letter-forms down into pure non-sense, while the Beats…wanted to get past intentionality with their I Ching. But you and I have been through that, and that is not our fate. For this here semiological guerilla, during wartime (never stops), the crucial work is at the level of the symbolic—exposing intentions, harnessing meanings, and then the redeployment onto the, ahem, metacinematic plane.

* * *

Hi students,

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

Regards,

Office of Career Services

Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows plays the Castro tomorrow at 2pm, and while I already wrote about the film here, I’m worried that it’s getting lost in Berlin & Beyond’s festive glare. For all the fine writing being done about how Olivier Assayas’s Carlos (which gets a local run starting November 5th, just in time to soak up some of the midterm election’s bloated rhetoric) brokers an ambivalent, “distanced” interest in its ubiquitous lead, I can’t help but think that Arslan’s zero degree heist flick works a similar angle with much greater grace. Who knows if it will come back, so see this movie now! (And also see Girish’s recent post for an excellent entryway to the Berlin School, an important backdrop for Arslan’s films).

Just wanted to make special mention here of Paul Clipson’s show at SF MoMA Wednesday evening. It’s fitting that this event is sandwiched in with the Radical Light season, as Clipson’s cinematographic montage and loose performance reels flow from the same waters as Baillie, Conner, and many others. I did not have space in the article I wrote about Clipson’s work  to mention the striking collages he produces using stills from his films, such as the one featured in the above poster (images from Union, showing tomorrow night), but their grid layouts provide a nice gloss on the material pleasure of his films, their lyrical fluidity and bold compositional sense.

Also, an extended version of my interview with Yael Hersonski about A Film Unfinished is online at the Guardian site, here. And a special mention for the first two entries (here and here) in what promises to be a wonderful series on the mysteries of Christopher Maclaine by Brecht Andersch with help from Brian Darr. The End blows up at the PFA tonight.