2017 SFFILM & Cinequest Wrap

A big year for the newly branded SFFILM (formerly the San Francisco International Film Festival), which just celebrated its 60^th anniversary.  Here are some thoughts and impressions of the terrific cross-section of their programs (20 features, 49 shorts) I was lucky to catch this year.

There were more archival films and live music performances than usual, including an unlikely merging of the two with a screening of George Lucas’s first film THX-1138 (the revised 2004 “Special Edition” re-release version, not the original 1971 version) accompanied by a hard-driving rock score from Asian Dub Foundation.  This meant that Walter Murch’s sophisticated sound design was inaudible (the entire film played with subtitles), but it helped play up the dystopic visuals, which still pack a wallop 40+ years later.  It’s still my former boss’s most mature movie and a fun one to revisit in the glories of the Castro Theater.  The Castro was also where a rare screening of Jerome Hiler’s experimental shorts (both old and new) occurred, also to live music from Will Oldham.

The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968) was Melvin Van Peebles’s first film and that also enjoyed a rare archival screening.  Shot in France, it’s clearly a child of the Nouvelle Vague with its free-wheeling pacing and visual imagination, but also with what would be MVP’s familiar exploration of racial identity, brimming with wit and clear-eyed cynicism.  His next film would be his legendary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and it was great fun seeing where that ballsy attitude originated.  Another standout retrospective screening was the Russian film A Long Happy Life (Shpalikov, 1967), also infused with a warm French sensibility, but in the classic tradition of Vigo or Pagnol and a lovely and poignant film I saw for the first time.

Since this was my first year visiting the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose the month before (5 features, 58 shorts), I’ll also discuss some of my discoveries there, particularly since the new British drama Wilderness was a fitting companion to the Van Peebles film.  Both are about whirlwind interracial romances that take place in Europe around the same time (the late 60s).  And while it can’t completely avoid some narrative contrivances, the acting by the two leads (Katharine Davenport, James Barnes) is excellent and the eroticism is potent and very natural.  It’s sometimes hard to tell which festival features are destined for wider distribution but this one certainly deserves it.

Another one that does is the terrific Iranian thriller A Dragon Arrives!, part true-life mystery, part stylish 60s noir with some supernatural tensions, and part meta-examination of the melding of history and storytelling.  For those of us who love what the last couple of decades have brought us from that country via Kiarostami, Farhadi, and Makhmalbaf, this is a very, very different animal, but an exciting demonstration of western tropes taking root with Iranian themes and issues.

Festivals have often proven themselves a showcase for talented female filmmakers in ways that the studio and distribution worlds continue to fall short, and some of my favorite narrative films were directed by women (also not surprisingly, all international).  The best to these eyes was the Cinequest title Past Imperfect, grounded by a phenomenal performance by Evelyne Brochu about a woman who has her life turned upside down by having her son (formerly raised by family) thrust back into her life.  It’s a familiar premise, but handled with soulfulness and compassion, with an immense amount of gorgeous nighttime photography.

More wonderful female-helmed films included The Wedding Ring from Niger and The Wedding Plan (Burshtein) from Israel.  The latter is a very funny wry comedy in the spirit of Rohmer (one of my favorite directors) about a woman committed to a scheduled wedding for herself even though the groom is a complete mystery.  And the former is a beautiful, vivid tale of a woman living in Europe returning to her African homeland and navigating the tricky landscape of traditions around matrimony.  Both are warm, generous, and clear-eyed about making a stand in the face of cultural expectations—unapologetically feminist, with complex characters and conflicts.

There were also two quite lovely Latin American films that stood out.  The Winter is about a laborer in the Patagonian highlands who must take over managing a ranch from a seasoned veteran. Family Life is about a Chilean drifter who tries on a new identity during a housesitting gig.  While one has epic sweep with an eye for the isolation in landscape and the other is an urban drama with an immersive sexual immediacy, both are intimate meditations on the challenges of finding your place in the world.  And while it may have a few too many echoes with Brokeback Mountain, the English farm drama God’s Own Country, about a burgeoning rural, cross-cultural gay relationship, manages to meld sensibilities from both these films quite effectively, too.

When it comes to documentaries, the high-profile standouts I saw were the two on filmmaking, 78/52 (Philippe), about the shower sequence in Psycho, and Score: A Film Music Documentary (Schrader).  And while both are ambitious, on a micro- and macro-level respectively, they’re also both incredibly frustrating works.   78/52 does an interesting job of deconstructing the sequence (cue Walter Murch again for analysis) and provides some helpful connective tissue between this legendary scene and both Hitchcock’s work and film history in general.  But it revels too much in Hitchcock’s reputation as an auteur and provocateur; it’s all adulation when deconstructing the mythology of the man 50+ years later would’ve been more incisive (I discussed Psycho previously on my blog here).

Even more troubling is the film music doc, which tries to be both an historical overview and a broad examination of the creative process.  The latter is certainly much more effective than the former (where significant talents get short shrift), but as interesting as it is to see composers collaborate with film directors or conduct orchestras recording sessions, the film is blind to the conspicuous lack of women and people of color in this role.  This is particularly noticeable because so many contemporary composers are interviewed or filmed working on projects, virtually all of them white dudes.  It makes the craft feel like a big boy’s club, and while there might be an element of truth to this in an industry which still has a serious gender and racial imbalance in certain disciplines, it goes completely without comment throughout the film.  Amidst the air of simplified celebration, it’s the elephant in the room, and a token Rachel Portman or Quincy Jones can’t change that.

Some more effective documentaries included the remarkable The Force, about the Police Department in Oakland (my home) and the history of controversies it’s instigated through violence and scandal.  It’s a very clever film, giving the impression that access means the OPD embraces a new sense of transparency, only to discover that ugly cultural traditions behind the blue wall still run deep.  Talking the talk and walking the walk are very different things, and it’s a great lesson on why mistrust in a community can be pervasive when abuse of power goes ignore or unchecked.  Even better is In Loco Parentis, a thoroughly charming doc about a British boarding school and the loving, committed teachers on the staff.  Both films take a Frederick Wiseman-like view of their subjects (no interviews, voiceover, or score), which works incredibly well in both cases.

Also worth noting were two docs from Cinequest about a very different group of doctors.  Memento Mori (Thompson) is about the incredible logistical challenges and devastating emotion one encounters in the field of organ donation.  With The Twinning Reaction (Shinseki), sets of identical twins separated in infancy through a shady adoption agency under the guise of “scientific research” are interviewed--some reunited with their sibling and some not, but all dealing with the heart-breaking repercussions of a needlessly cruel policy that persisted for decades.  Not without their flaws, both are still well worth checking out.

10 Favorite new feature films

1. Past Imperfect (Teirlinck; Belgium)+

2. The Winter (Torres; Argentina)*

3. In Loco Parentis (Chianain/Rane; Ireland)*

4. A Dragon Arrives! (Haghighi; Iran)*

5. The Wedding Ring (Keita; Niger)*

6. The Force (Nicks; US)*

7. Wilderness (Doherty; UK)+

8.  God’s Own Country (Lee; UK)*

9. Family Life (Jimenez/Scherson; Chile)*

10. That Trip We Took with Dad (Lazarescu; Romania)+

10 Favorite new short films

1. Bagatelle II (Hiler)*

2. Pearl (Osborne; Virtual Reality version)+

3. Modern Houses (Dixon)+

4. A Brief History of Princess X (Abrantes)*

5. The Rabbit Hunt (Bresnan)*

6. Russian Roulette (Aston)+

7. The John Show (Sokolow)+

8. Real Artists (Wood)+*

9. Summer Camp Island (Pott)*

10. No Other Way to Say It (Mason)+

* = SFFILM; + = Cinequest

The Alfred Hitchcock stamp is Scott #3226, Bernard Hermann (who is featured in both films docs I mentioned) is #3341 and Editing, part of the American Filmmaking issue, is #3772h.  The Star Wars stormtroopers are #4143o and the stamp for the Sport of the Gods one-sheet (part of the Black Cinema release) is #4337.  The Jack O’Lanterns from last year’s Halloween issue are #5138 & 5139 .  The Iranian Film Festival is a cache I picked up at Westpex, which has its annual convention in San Francisco this coming weekend.  Hope to see you there!

She Certainly Can Cannes-Cannes

When people (quickly) discover what a big cinephile I am, the question I get the most often (besides “What’s your favorite movie?”) is “Have you been to Sundance?”  And they’re invariably surprised when I tell them No.  After all, isn’t that what cinephiles do?  Isn’t Cannes our Mecca?  But honestly, I’m not interested in going and never really have been.  The newest incarnation of this query is the Turner Classic Movies Festival every spring.  I’m a regular on #TCMParty, have met dozens of fabulous film fans from around the US on that hashtag, and even am lucky enough to have TCM follow me on Twitter.  But I’m guessing I’ll probably never go to that, either.

This year will be my seventh working for the Mill Valley Film Festival.  But long before that, I’ve been going to local film festivals, most notably The San Francisco International Film Festival.  So I love the energy film fans bring to a screening.  I'm excited by the marathon days, the triangulation of schedules across multiple venues, the bustling from one show to the next.  In particular, I love that festivals are usually the only place you can see short films projected, which I consumed voraciously long before it became my job to program them.

But destination film festivals have held little appeal to me.  As much as I love travel and movies, they’ve very rarely overlapped in my life.  When I’m somewhere new, foreign, different, I want to explore the landscape, not hole up in a theater.  I’ve seen movies in England and Ecuador when I was living there, and once in Thailand because the humidity was so oppressive, it was the easiest way to cool off (it was one of the Bourne films), but otherwise, my travels meant seeing parks and museums and centers of culture and history, never movies.  And that’s what it’d be like if I was in the south of France or Park City, too.

Some of it is also the cost.  Festivals can be expensive on their own, let alone the additional price tag of planes, hotels, food, etc.  The one festival I have been to outside the Bay Area was SXSW, and that was because I’d visited Austin already and my all-access badge was paid for.  But everything else on that trip still made a huge dent on my wallet.  It was undeniably fun, but not something I had any wish to make a habit of.  And that’s why I can’t see myself spending money to stay in LA for a week for TCM, no matter how great the crowd, the guest list or the program schedule might be.

There are lots of different types of festival patrons, too.  Some love to see the big stars, the legends or masters or household names.  Some people are drawn to the First Look appeal—the chance to see a film weeks or months before anyone else.  Festivals count on that kind of star-power draw and name recognition, and I totally get that.  But that’s not what draws me.  I love festivals for the chance to see films I’ll never see anywhere else, arthouse or otherwise.  Guests are great and Q&As can often be illuminating and memorable, but that’s not the reason I go.

And that’s why, given a choice, I’d always prefer SFIFF over TCM (whose schedules overlap annually).  Because I live in the Bay Area, there’s no shortage of classic films available on the big screen here.  Here’s a list of all the films that screened in June in a theater within 40 minutes of me that were made at least 40 years ago:

The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 25)

Behind the Front (Sutherland, 26)

Nell Gwyn (Wilcox, 26)

The Scarlet Letter (Sjostrom, 26)

The Big Broadcast (Tuttle, 32)

White Zombie (Halperin, 32)

Duck Soup (McCarey, 33)

The Crime of Doctor Crespi (Auer, 35)

The Great Garrick (Whale, 37)

Four’s a Crowd (Curtiz, 38)

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Curtiz, 39)

The Long Voyage Home (Ford, 40)

Santa Fe Trail (Curtiz, 40)

Hold Back the Dawn (Leisen, 41)

They Died with Their Boots On (Walsh, 41)

Double Indemnity (Wilder, 44)

The Dark Mirror (Siodmak, 46)

His Sister’s Secret (Ulmer, 46)

La Otra (Gavaldon, 46)

To Each His Own (Leisen, 46)

The First Legion (Sirk, 51)

The Forbidden Christ (Malaparte, 51)

Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 51)

The Lusty Men (Ray, 52)

The Devil’s Money (Galindo, 53)

Roman Holiday (Wyler, 53)

Giant (Stevens, 56)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Brooks, 58)

Suddenly, Last Summer (Mankiewicz, 59)

Butterfield 8 (Mann, 60)

La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 60)

The Great Race (Edwards, 65)

Tokyo Drifter (Suzuki, 66)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols, 66)

Spring Night, Summer Night (Anderson, 67)

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Straub/Huillet, 68)

Dillinger is Dead (Ferreri, 69)

The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 69)

Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 71)

Fat City (Huston, 72)

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Peckinpah, 74)

The Sugerland Express (Spielberg, 74)

Kings of the Road (Wenders, 76)

And that's not even including the SF Silent Film Festival, which featured 16 features--including films by Ozu, Clair, Lang, Lubitsch, Fleming, Micheaux, and Wellman's Beggars of Life, starring Louise Brooks--and even more shorts. 

TCM fans are drawn to their festival by the opportunity to see those classic films on the big screen (many of which I already have), by the stars, the interviews, and the camaraderie.  And I don't doubt for a second that I would have a lot of fun in their company.

But there are far more things I would feel I missed out on by not attending SFIFF--new foreign treasures, innovative docs, experimental shorts I'll never see anywhere else.  Every month is like a TCM festival living here in the Bay Area anyway--beautiful Art Deco houses, or film archive theaters, or dungeon-like screening rooms specializing in 16mm arcana--so I save my pennies (or rather, maximize their cinematic heft) by staying put.  There are still a lot of places in the world I want to visit.  But movies have very little to do with any of them.  Which suits me fine.

The Ingrid Bergman stamp is Scott # 5012 .  The stamp of Aaron Douglas's painting The Prodigal Son (Scott # 4748g) is part of the "Modern Art in America" series.

SFIFF59 Round-Up

With 17 features and 60 shorts screened, this was definitely the most productive SFIFF I’d ever attended.  The POV award to Aardman Animation (with guest Peter Lord) accounted for 1/3 of that short tally, with an impressive survey of the studio’s output since its inception 40 years ago.  While Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep are the most famous franchises they’ve created, this fantastic collection they screened covered not only their familiar stop-motion style but some really wonderful cel and CG creative efforts, too.

The short collections have always been my favorite part of SFIFF and this year had some very strong programs, including two shorts in particular that really blew me away.  Brouillard #14 is an experimental film that used in-camera double exposures of the same nature path traveled over and over again to yield a phenomenal explosion of color, creating a throbbing pointillism effect that evoked both the density and illusory quality of memory in a way I’d never seen before.  And Night without Distance used simple film negative imagery to create an extraordinary other-worldly effect as men with guns posted as silent sentries in a remote landscape.  It was a short that was beautiful, tense, immersive, subtle, sometimes disorienting, and endlessly fascinating.  I can’t imagine either of these remotely having the same effect as a Vimeo link so keep your eye out on the festival circuit in case they screen anywhere near you.

As for the features, it’s always interesting to see what kinds of trends and motifs recur across various titles quite inadvertently (since what I see is often based as much on geography and scheduling as it is on my specific interests).  So here are some thematic trios that emerged:

Deconstructing masculine tropes in slyly humorous fashion was the main order of business in the Greek Chevalier and South Korean Right Now, Wrong Then.  In the former, from Athina Rachel Tsangari (who was also part of a fun Q&A), a small pleasure cruise turns into the S.S. Oneupsman ship as a group of men try to determine who’s the Best among them by contriving more absurd and arbitrary contests to compete in.  In Hong Sang-soo’s latest, two parallel stories follow a hapless film director as he courts the same woman to very different effect as we’re reminded that love and chemistry often rely on the most unlikely variables and not on us putting our best feet forward.  By contrast, the man-child of the Spanish The Apostate has his own problems he hasn’t sorted out, but while the lead (Alvaro Ogalla, another SFIFF attendee) is fun, his religious change-of-heart is so low-stakes and frustratingly flimsy that it was hard for me to care if any of his issues are resolved.

In opposition to this were some exceptional and unnerving films with women forced to confront some internal and external demons.  To call Under the Shadow an Iranian Babadook is no slight, since it’s still very scary and nerve-wrecking as a mother and child during the Iran-Iraq war confront a phantom that’s born not from an emotional trauma but a political one.  The Swedish Granny’s Dancing on the Table is a dark tale of a young girl using her family history (rendered to wonderful effect by rough-hewn stop-motion animation) and her own resourcefulness to survive her single father’s brutal oppressiveness in the wilderness.  As for the German Wild, my favorite feature of the festival, a young office worker’s obsession with a wolf devolves into a full feral transformation (or actualization).  Call it a lupine Repulsion or 50 Shades of White Fang, but it’s riveting, uncompromising storytelling.

In addition to Granny, animation is also used to clever effect in Penny Lane’s bizarre biopic NUTS!, the story of an early 20^th-century media pioneer and medical quack who builds a very unlikely empire.  A simple animation style is used to do most of the dramatic heavy-lifting (in historical reenactments) and while the film mines the absurdity of this man’s life well, a third-act inversion is as inevitable as it is tonally unsatisfying.  Better is Lewis Klahr’s dizzying evocation of the 60s in Sixty Six, where he uses collage animation, including cut-outs from period comic books (like those pictured below) to convey his own strange mythologies, melancholy memories, and affectionate paeans to the period and pop culture.  Very personal, sometimes even impenetrably so, but unquestionably vivid and unique.
  
 

Sixty Six was not the only feature to take liberties with traditional narrative structure.  Otar Iosseliani’s Winter Song is a loose and limber free association piece about an assortment of Parisians whose paths cross in countless variations, all with playful anarchic panache.  Famed cinematographer Chris Doyle’s Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous doesn’t work as well.  Despite being resolutely affectionate to the different generations of the city, it often feels too eager to please and the sober political shadow of the protests that serve as a hub of the action jars with the whimsy that often feels forced.

In addition to NUTS!, there were a couple other films I saw that had medical concerns as their focus.  The deeply compassionate Czech Home Care chronicles a nurse who is diagnosed with cancer and must confront her own mortality as she explores alternative solutions to her condition.  This was also the most lively Q&A I attended, with director Slavek Horak, equipped with plum brandy, giving a shot to each audience member who asked him a question.  But even more thoughtful was the documentary Haveababy, which approaches a fertility clinic’s lottery with objective ambivalence as assorted “contestants” vie for the opportunity to create a family, with results both happy and heart-breaking.

And no SFIFF would be complete without the archival screenings.  New to me was Cast  a Dark Shadow (Gilbert, 1955), with the irrepressibly sleazy gold-digger Dirk Bogarde biting off more than he can chew when his wife-killing M.O. locks horns with some very uncooperative women in his orbit.  The 20^th Anniversary of The Watermelon Woman (a film I hadn’t seen since its original release) was an occasion to revisit this landmark indie film about identity politics and see how much in the film industry hasn’t changed when it comes to inclusion and ready acceptance.  The deft meta-language of its reframing of film history is now fairly commonplace while black lesbian representation is still sadly outside the mainstream’s comfort level.  Kudos to director Cheryl Dunye for an enlightening Q&A.  And to round things out was the dense discord of Mercury Rev & Simon Raymonde who treated Dreyer’s classic Vampyr (1932) like a silent film in their musical accompaniment, giving it a whole new dimension of creepy.

But the archival highlight was Nick Park’s (1993), still one of the greatest animated films ever made and a film I dearly love but hadn’t seen on the big screen since it first came out.  It’s a wonderful heist film with one of the greatest silent nemesis ever portrayed, the stoic, sinister penguin, which is why I added the penguin stamp to the Wallace & Gromit card above (even though he doesn’t appear in their Oscar-winning feature film).  The short also features a few stamps itself, when Gromit sifts through the mail and opens his birthday card.  

 

  

 

The train, of course, foreshadows one of the great film chases in the climax and sharp-eyed Aardman fans will recognize the puma from Creature Comforts on display in the museum (a set that I once saw on display in the National Media Museum in Branford, UK).

Top 10 SFIFF features (non-archival)

1. Wild (Krebitz, 2016)
2. Granny's Dancing on the Table (Skold, 2015)
3. Chevalier (Tsangari, 2015)
4. Haveababy (Micheli, 2016)
5. Winter Song (Iosseliani, 2015)
6. Under the Shadow (Anvari, 2015)
7. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong, 2015)
8. Neon Bull (Mascaro, 2015)
9. Sixty Six (Klahr, 2015)
10. Home Care (Horak, 2015)

Top 10 SFIFF shorts (non-Aardman)

1. Night without Distance (Patino, 2015)
2. Brouillard #14 (Larose, 2013)
3. Edmond (Gantz, 2015)
4. Jaaji Approx (Hopinka, 2015)
5. Extremis (Krauss, 2016)
6. Partners (Imbach, 2015)
7. When You Awake (Rosenblatt, 2016)
8. False Start (Barrada, 2015)
9. Manoman (Cartwright, 2015)
10. Bob Dylan Hates Me (Zahedi, 2016)

Top 10 Aardman shorts

1. The Wrong Trousers (Park, 1993)
2. The Pearce Sisters (Cook, 2007)
3. Winter Trees (Freed/Freed, 2012)
4. Sledgehammer (Johnson, 1986)
5. Dot (Sumo Science, 2010)
6. Creature Comforts (Park, 1989)
7. The Flight of the Stories (Dubicki, 2014)
8. Going Equipped (Lord, 1990)
9. Full ANL (Burrascano, 2015)
10. Shaun the Sheep: 3DTV (Grace/Wilton, 2014)


The Scott #s for the stamps pictured:

Year of the Dog - 3895j
Sealed with Love - 4741
Where Dreams Blossom - 4764
Penguins - 4989
Quilled Paper Heart - 5036

Shameless Plug

Though my job has nothing to do with postage stamps, it has everything to do with movies, so I thought it couldn't hurt to put in a quick shout out to my (relatively) new employer, the Mill Valley Film Festival, which runs from October 4-14 this year. It also seems unlikely that my collection will converge with our annual festival fare too often, but this year yielded a couple of offerings I couldn't ignore.

The first is the new documentary Wonder Women!, written and directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and showing at our venues both in San Rafael and Mill Valley. Of course, this is a different film than the truly kick-ass 1973 Robert Vincent O'Neill one-sheet depicted, but the films (and stamps) dovetail nicely since this festival film is a self-described "Untold Story of American Superheroines" and mines the history of the DC Amazon princess and her pop culture legacy through print, film and TV that still resonates today.

Coincidentally, when these comic book stamps came out in 2007, I decided to use this postcard to feature all the women from the comics on postage stamps that I was aware of.  So featured here are Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Spider-Woman, and Elektra (Scott #'s 4084m, 4084i, 4159g & 4159i).

Also depicted is Brenda Starr from the USPS comic strip stamp series (Scott #3000t), plus two stamps from Canada of the comic book heroines Nelvana and Fleur de Lys (like the Brenda Starr stamp, issued in 1995)

Another film we're featuring is a 35th Anniversary screening of Star Wars, which originated from the mind of George Lucas, a Marin county resident (in fact, Skywalker Ranch isn't far from our offices here at the California Film Institute). For those who haven't had the pleasure of seeing it on a big screen in a while (or perhaps ever), it's bound to be an event to remember.

The Princess Leia & R2-D2 stamp is Scott #4143f.

I'll be doing film introductions and Q&A's every day throughout the festival, so who knows?  Maybe our paths will cross at the MVFF (it's our 35th anniversary, too).  Hope to see you there!

Louder Than Words

I first worked for the San Francisco International Film Festival back in 1998, and have been a faithful attendee for long before that (enough for my wife to know, even before we were married, that she’d be a Festival widow for a good week every year). The Festival always comes within a few days of Westpex, so late-April always represents the annual sweet spot for the Filmatelist.

My very first FDC was for these Silent Film Star stamps (Scott #2819-28). I bought my own postcards of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Valentino and had them postmarked right in the lobby of the legendary Castro Theater, a beautiful art deco palace in San Francisco. But since those didn’t turn out so hot (a blog post for another day), I picked up one of these caches as well. There was also a special screening of Safety Last that day, the first time I’d ever seen that film.

People often ask if I ever want to go to Cannes or Sundance one day. And I tell them if I could only visit one film festival in the world, it would be the Pordenone Silent Film Festival near Venice, Italy. For while I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to preferring to see any movie in a theater over TV or video, silent movies in particular benefit from the live music, the energy of the crowd, and the beautiful evocation of a time long past, preserved in those indelible flickers on the screen.

Although there are still plenty of silents I haven't seen, I try to seek out as many as I can on that big screen, and the Bay Area is certainly an embarrassment of riches in that department. For those who've never experienced a silent film in a theater before, they are often surprised by how raw, funny, sophisticated, and emotionally complex films from that time could be. The technology may be dated, but the sensibility and artistic vision on display rarely is. And while most of the stars in this USPS issue don't appear in my personal Top 10 (below), that's just a tribute to how many wonderful silent films are with us (despite so many still having been lost over the decades)--and all well worth discovering.


My Top 10 Silent Films
1. The General (Keaton/Bruckman, 1926; w/Buster Keaton)
2. Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)
3. Pandora’s Box (Pabst, 1929; w/Louise Brooks)
4. Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)
5. Greed (von Stroheim, 1924; w/Zasu Pitts)
6. The Italian Straw Hat (Clair, 1928)
7. The Freshman (Newmeyer/Taylor, 1925; w/Harold Lloyd)
8. The Wind (Sjostrom, 1928; w/Lillian Gish)
9. Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
10. The Lighthouse Keepers (Gremillon, 1929)