Wednesday November 1

The Decade Between

American Video Art 1978-88: Bill Viola 7:30

Metaphysical curiosity and virtuoso craft have led Bill Viola to construct immaculate videoworks that call forth uncanny states of consciousness. Through an intense exploration of optical and temporal phenomena, tinted by his interest in non-Western mysticism, Viola's tapes resonate with an otherworldly poetics of perception. Nowhere is this transcendental quest more accomplished than in those works completed in the late seventies and early eighties. The Reflecting Pool (1977-79, 7 mins) captures a remarkable passage of multiple temporalities within a single image, a bucolic pool with a man hovering in mid-air above. Ancient of Days (1979-81, 12:21 mins) expresses time as a fluid medium unto itself. Various settings, a stormy glimpse of Mt. Rainier, a quiescent sitting room, obey their own peculiar chronologies. Hatsu Yume (First Dream) (1981, 56 mins) explores light and darkness as metaphors for the ethereal nature of being. Japan's lush landscapes--an unearthly bamboo forest, abstracted koi suspended in a pond, the nocturnal harshness of Tokyo--supply the bounty for Viola's pursuit. The play of light and shadow across these stunning images reveals an hallucinatory drama striving for elemental consciousness.--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: 76 mins, 3/4" video, From Electronic Arts Intermix)

Thursday November 2

The Ritual of Desire: Daniel Schmid

"I don't know what 'kitsch` is....The line between the sublime and the ridiculous is very, very thin....I've always wondered why people talk about the artificiality in my movies when reality is sometimes so unbelievably artificial and surreal..."--Daniel Schmid

Berkeley is perhaps the last frontier for Daniel Schmid, who is widely admired in Europe, and in Japan where he shot his latest film; whose Tosca's Kiss PFAaudiences adore and whose Off Season captivated the S. F. International Film Festival; and whose retrospective tribute here is long overdue. Schmid, who attended film school in Germany (and studied with Marcuse in Berkeley), was both a friend and close collaborator of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ingrid Caven, Fassbinder`s former wife; indeed, it was through her roles in Schmid`s films that Caven became a reigning star (as in "Cavenomania") of the German New Wave. While he was part of the close-knit group that made up the German New Wave, and shares aesthetic concerns with Schroeter and Fassbinder, as a Swiss national Schmid is both less known and more interesting in his own right. Something of a Renaissance man, he has made films in French, Italian, and German, acted in his colleagues` films, directed opera and incorporated its transcendent appeal into his cinema.

Amy Taubin wrote this appreciation, in an article titled "Fantasyland," in the Village Voice: "For Daniel Schmid, love is ultimately the projection onto the other of one`s own fantasy. No wonder then that cinema is his medium....[H]is most haunting film, La Paloma...is like most Hollywood movies, except that it exposes the fetishism that Hollywood naturalizes. Exposes it only to embrace it more passionately. It`s not incidental that the teenage Schmid decided to become a filmmaker after seeing a revival of Gone With the Wind. Like Fassbinder...and Tennessee Williams (whom he loves to quote), Schmid defines desire as identification and gender as masquerade....Overflowing with melodramatic emotion and Belle Epoque architecture, with flowers and furs, veils and velvets, Schmid`s films verge on kitsch, only to be rescued by an ironically modernist intelligence that acknowledges the Freudian construct of the unconscious but refuses its rationalization of desire. For Schmid, that obsession is absurd doesn`t lessen its transformative power." The Ritual of Desire: Daniel Schmid is presented in cooperation with Pro Helvetia, Switzerland. We wish to thank Cecile Küng. Unless otherwise indicated, all prints are from Pro Helvetia.

Do Everything in the Dark in Order to Save Your Master's Light and Tonight or Never 7:30

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, 1971)

(Thut alles im Finstern, Eurem Herrn das Licht zu ersparen). Daniel Schmid's first film--a short fictional documentary about the last servant's school in Europe--announces a principal theme of his work to come: that of the perverse relationship between master and servant, and of its reversal, the game of interdependence. And it previews a personal style as well, of long takes and slow movements that elevate every action to a ritual, and music that is infinitely more than background. It is the perfect style for a study of a setting that is already ritualized. Schmid goes one further: his servants are so perfect that we are unable to tell who is following the orders of whom, especially when a cunning servant follows his master's orders to the letter. As the son of a hotel owner, Schmid is familiar with the milieu of giving and executing orders in serving the upper class. Filmed on the quick, when Schmid was assistant director to Peter Lilienthal, and using Lilienthal's Venice sets for Jakob von Gunten, Do Everything in the Dark interprets the same novel, but in a novel way.

Written by Schmid. Photographed by Gérard Vandenberg. With Igor Joszà, Isabella Morellato, Stella Longo, Jenny Caputer. (45 mins, no dialogue, Color, 16mm)

Tonight or Never

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, 1972)

(Heute Nacht oder nie). In Tonight or Never, Schmid wonderfully reimagines traditional master-servant relations as a reflection of Europe in the thirties, drawing on a time-honored custom connected to a saint's day feast in which Bohemian nobles for one evening become servants to their staff. "The evening proceeds as usual. Against the background of a decadence that is sensed to be collective, all concerned do everything they can to play their parts with a maximum of hypocrisy." (DS) A troupe of actors engaged for the evening give a dramatic rendering of Emma's death scene from Madame Bovary. The thespians' attempts to disrupt the ritual by showing their solidarity with the servants is ignored by the latter, who are absorbed in various sexual flirtations and inter-class tango-dancing; the masters, however, applaud what they perceive as a clever addition to the spectacle. In a film that perhaps links Rules of the Game with Viridiana, Schmid introduces his hallmark melange of operetta and pop music, "high tragedy" and exaggerated aestheticism, what he calls "a transparent `tangle of art'...the revolution in rags. Madame Bovary dies daily in a myriad of blunders, and we are all her gravediggers." Schmid's first feature was acclaimed at its Venice Film Festival premiere and as a New Directors/New Films selection in New York.

Written by Schmid. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Ingrid Caven, Voli Geiler, Peter Chatel, Igor Joszà, Peter Kern. (90 mins, In German with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Friday November 3

United Artists Tribute

During November and December we celebrate United Artists` 75 Years in Hollywood with an eclectic series, in new 35mm prints, of film noirs, Westerns, fifties dramas, and rarely revived Kubrick; as well as Chaplin films that are now out of distribution. The new prints were made for this summer`s big tribute to United Artists at the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Los Angeles County Museum of Art; in response to our interest, MGM/UA Technical Services struck new prints of several titles not included in the UCLA tribute, as well. In a time when a good print is hard to find, due to neglect, fading color, and the ravages of "vinegar syndrome," this commitment to reviving films in fine prints is in itself worth celebrating.

In their introduction to the tribute, UCLA Archive said, "Born out of a power struggle between stars and producers in 1919, United Artists quickly turned into a magnet for independent producers and then struggled through thirty years as the smallest member of the studio system before becoming one of the most important companies in Hollywood in the 1950s. Founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford, United Artists was the only Hollywood studio that wasn`t a studio, but rather a distributor. Because of this difference, United Artists was free to release the films of independent producers like Samuel Goldwyn, Alexander Korda, the Mirisches, and even the Beatles. Given this history, it is no wonder that United Artists` roster of films is fascinatingly eclectic, studded with big-budget masterpieces, blockbusters, offbeat classics and oddities." New 35mm Prints!

We wish to thank John Kirk of MGM/UA Worldwide Services for making this series possible.

The Best Man 7:00

Franklin Schaffner (U.S., 1964)

Gore Vidal's biting, bulls-eye political drama is set at a national party convention in L.A., where Henry Fonda, the liberal-intellectual candidate, battles Cliff Robertson, the no-holds-barred convictionless candidate, for the endorsement of former president Lee Tracy. In a superbly ironic plot, the tension mounts to the degree that the real issues disappear, and the showdown is played over mutual threats of character assassination. Vidal's dialogue is the spice of the film, but Franklin Schaffner's surefooted direction and Haskell Wexler's black-and-white cinematography combine to add a sense of familiar absurdity to the proceedings. This, alas, does not date; just write in your own candidates in place of the film's Stevenson-McCarthy models.

Written by Gore Vidal, based on his play. Photographed by Haskell Wexler. With Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Edie Adams, Margaret Leighton, Shelley Berman, Lee Tracy. (102 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

The Big Knife 9:00

Robert Aldrich (U.S., 1955)

Hollywood didn't have to look far to find images of entrapment and despair; its own system was a ministry of fear, frequently interpreted as a form of Hollywood gothic, replete with gargoyles like Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond and, in The Big Knife, Rod Steiger's overstuffed studio head Stanley Hoff and Jack Palance's Charlie Castle. An actor who has long since abandoned art in favor of affluence and angst, Charlie tries to retreat behind the Castle walls but the megalomanical Hoff pulls a murderous skeleton out of the closet to lure him back onto the set. Playwright Clifford Odets obviously had his own axe to grind in lines like "You came in here and threw this mess of naked pigeons in my face!" Robert Aldrich's extremely stylized visual interpretation further externalizes the absurdity of Charlie's inner world, turning the living room he shares with wife Ida Lupino into a ranch-style hell.

Written by James Poe from the play by Clifford Odets. Photographed by Ernest Laszlo. With Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters. (111 mins, B&W, 35mm, From UA/MGM Classics)

Saturday November 4

The Ritual of Desire: Daniel Schmid

U.S. Premiere--Artist in Person

The Written Face 7:00

Daniel Schmid (Japan/Switzerland, 1995)

Introduced by Barry Gifford

Daniel Schmid and novelist and screenwriter Barry Gifford currently are collaborating on an opera film, directed by Schmid, libretto by Gifford, and with a score by Toru Takemitsu.

(Das geschriebene Gesicht). Schmid's newest film features the great Japanese kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando in a work that approaches (because it cannot enter) the world of kabuki, and creates "an impression, a possible picture, of Japan." "In Japanese theater," Schmid writes, "women's roles are traditionally played by men. The man playing the woman's role, the onnagata, does not imitate the woman, as in the West, but tries to capture her significance. He need not stick close to his model, but draws far more from his own identity: a shift of value takes place, which is nonetheless not a step beyond." Bando, who first appeared on stage at the age of five, is one of the last practitioners of an ancient and disappearing performing tradition. The same applies to his idol and teacher, the actress Haruko Sugimura, who worked with Ozu and Naruse during the flowering of Japanese cinema; and to the legendary geisha dancer Han Takehara. With these three remarkable figures, Schmid creates a work of "fictitious documentation" that offers "a variation on the ideal of female beauty hinted at by man, a confrontation with the cracks and fractures in the masks..."

Written by Schmid. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Tamasaburo Bando, Han Takehara, Haruko Sugimura, Kazuo Ohno. (92 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Off Season 9:20

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland/Germany/ France, 1992)

(Hors Saison). Imagination and memory vie for favor in Schmid's look at his boyhood in a Swiss hotel owned by his grandparents. "Nothing is more fictional than the memories of one's own past," says Schmid. The director's alter ego is the narrator Valentin (Sami Frey). As he wanders the empty corridors of the now-condemned hotel, Valentin recalls the times he spent as a boy spying on hotel guests who now seem like fairy-tale characters. There is his blind grandfather who fools everyone into thinking he can see, and "the most beautiful woman in the world," as the boy describes her, whose raison d'être is the seduction of men. Lording it over the entourage is Valentin's grandmother (Maria Maddalena Fellini, sister of Federico Fellini), who tells him fantastic stories like the one about the Russian lady anarchist (Geraldine Chaplin) who assassinated a French businessman in the hotel lobby by mistake. Schmid tempers the comic tone of these vignettes with a dose of melancholy that makes the film more than a nostalgic entertainment: it is a reflection on how age reshapes our memories of youth. When Lilo (Ingrid Caven, exuding a frigid sensuality all her own) sings German love songs at the lobby bar in her Dietrich voice, the wrinkles on her still-beautiful face say it all: what once was can no longer be.---Beverly Berning, San Francisco Int'l Film Festival '93

Written by Schmid, Martin Suter. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Sami Frey, Carlos Devesa, Ingrid Caven, Maria Maddalena Fellini, Geraldine Chaplin. (95 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Sunday November 5

Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919

On Sundays through December 3 we present an extremely rare look at the cinema of Germany in the years prior to and just after the outbreak of World War I. This is a program of beautifully restored 35mm films, stunningly tinted and toned (in yellows, greens, blues, and "red for danger, fire, and love," as the series catalog is called), reminding us that black-and-white was no more the norm than was silence (our screenings feature piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb and Jon Mirsalis, alternating Sundays). Moreover, far from the expected prelude to Caligari, German films of this period were an impressively diverse lot, international in flavor (though touched with a darkling Germanic sensibility), and playing to a large and devoted audience. You`ll want to check your disbelief at the door to follow some of the preposterous story lines, but even these reveal much about the fantasy life of a time: women overstepping the constraints of class and common sense, deceived women suffering untimely deaths, and crime films with a rich gift for location shooting. A strong sense of atmosphere and a mastery of the play of light characterize many of these early films. Expect the occasional supernatural visitor. Among the stars, no one stands out more than Asta Nielsen, the Danish actress working in Germany, whose complete retrospective will begin at PFA in January 1996. Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919 is presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, San Francisco. A touring program prepared by the Goethe-Institut, Munich, and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin; the program features films restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. A Venetian Night, added to the tour, is provided by Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde, Wiesbaden. PFA thanks Brigitte Hubmann, Program Coordinator, and Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, Former Program Coordinator, Goethe House New York; and Ingrid Eggers, Goethe-Institut, S.F., for their assistance.

Synopses and complete program notes, as well as introductory essays, are found in the catalog Red for Danger, Fire, and Love: Early German Silent Films. This catalog, in German and English, is sold at PFA ($5).

Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919 5:30

Introduced by Russell Merritt

Jon Mirsalis on Piano

Russell Merritt is a film historian currently teaching at Stanford University, co-author of Walt in Wonderland and of the Emmy-nominated program D. W. Griffith: Father of Film (1993).

The Swamp Flower

Viggo Larsen (Germany, 1913)

(Die Sumpfblume). The sexual allure of a woman's foot comes into play in this film about a sculptor who falls in love with a nightclub dancer when he makes a cast of her foot. After she marries his wealthier friend, the foot and the affair it represents haunt the marriage. Set in Paris in the Montmartre demimonde, the film plays on what may already have been the mythology of the place, and on the stereotype of the naive gentleman tourist seeking thrills and becoming caught in a web of his desire. Performance is a key part of the action, from the dancer's blindfolded, half-naked dance among raw eggs laid out on a table, to a step-by-step lesson in how to mold a foot in plaster (should you be so inclined). "The film is among other things a speculation on the phenomenon of curious onlookers, a speculation revealed by the frequent appearance of an audience in the film. We can imagine the filmmaker winking his eye." (catalog)

With Wanda Treumann, Viggo Larsen, Richard Liebesny. (52 mins)

And the Light Went Out

Fritz Bernhardt (Germany, 1914)

The storyline is only an excuse for this film's real theme, and real beauty: light. A shipowner's daughter becomes the pawn in a rivalry between a merchant, whom she marries, and his young ward, whom she loves. With a lighthouse always in the frame, the film uses illumination--artificial, in the form of kerosene lamps, candles and torches; and natural, in the bright daylight of the harbor--to give the story its nuances. The transition from day to night is positively celebrated in the tinting of blue and yellow, and the climactic sequence of an assault on the lighthouse is breathtaking.

With Eduard Rothauser, Friedrich Forberg, Beatrice Altenhofer, Edmund Breitenbach. (41 mins)

Intermission

A Venetian Night

Max Reinhardt (Germany, 1913)

"As fantastic as an Arabian Night's tale."--Variety, 9/26/14, on the film's N.Y. opening.

As a stage innovator, Max Reinhardt was famously influential on the German silent cinema, but he also made films--four silents between 1908 and 1914, as well as the 1935 A Midsummer Night's Dream for Hollywood. A Venetian Night, telling of a young stranger in Venice who falls in with a reluctant bride, her bridegroom, and the officer she really loves, "was a combination of romance, farce, and fantasy, mistaken assumptions and the unreality of dreams....Reinhardt used [Venice] locations with intelligence and sensitivity in the film, incorporating the train station plaza, the cemetery island of San Michele, other Venetian landmarks, and of course the canals, into the story. A variety of cinematographic tricks, such as stop motion and double exposure, were also utilized to enhance the other-worldly character of the dream sequence....[Reinhardt] expected much from his cameraman [and] would ask for such demanding shots as the Venetian lagoon in moonlight or the Palazzi in the distance by the light of dawn, which suggests that he wasn't one to be bound, or over-concerned, by technical limitations." (Bradford Smith, in Before Caligari: German Cinema 1895-1920, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, ed.)

Based on the play by Carl Voemoeller. Photographed by Friedrich Weinmann or Karl Freund. With Maria Carmi, Alfred Abel, Joseph Klein. (c. 45 mins)

The Treacherous Woman

Urban Gad (Germany, 1911)

(Die Verräterin). Asta Nielsen stars as a vivacious, pampered young bourgeois, Yvonne, who projects the romantic qualities she desires onto an unimaginative Prussian officer whose attentions are at best by-the-book. Her rude awakening comes when she visits him at the front and is brusquely rebuffed. The embittered girl widens the net of her fantasy to a dangerous reality, betraying the location of her rejector's regiment to the partisans, which leads to her inexorable involvement in a war of which she has no understanding. An elegant mise-en-scène, which unfolds as Yvonne's world opens out, makes intertitles almost superfluous. Yvonne's projection-turned-reality becomes a metaphor for a cinema that allowed the audience safely to identify with strong women protagonists whose emotional sense of adventure led them into danger and (as punishment) sacrifice.

Written by D. J. Rector [Erich Zeiske]. With Asta Nielsen, Max Obal, Robert von Valberg, Emil Albes. (43 mins)

(Total running time: 180 mins, plus introduction and intermission; Silent, German intertitles with live English translation, B&W/tinted/toned, 35mm)

Monday November 6

Third World Cinema

Father, Son and Holy War 7:00

Anand Patwardhan (India, 1994)

(Pitra, Putra Aur Dharamyuddha). Confrontational, disturbing, and intense, Father, Son and Holy War is a landmark documentary....Not only concerned with the communal violence which has ravaged India since independence, director Anand Patwardhan asks what lies behind the fervor and blood. By examining, sometimes in harrowing, explosive "stolen" footage, the all-too-common signs of modern fascism--mob rule, anti-minority sloganeering, systematic destruction of property and life--he takes us to the very foundations of hate and religion....Trial By Fire, Part One, refers to the fires--"purifying" rituals, riots, wife-burning--occupying contemporary Indian political and social consciousness. And although [the] images are difficult to watch, Patwardhan balances them with his "firefighters," people committed to end misogynist and bigoted practices within their communities. Hero Pharmacy, Part Two, asks what this systemic violence stems from. Patwardhan posits an all-encompassing vision of Indian machismo which has, as its nucleus, oft-repeated tales of marauding Hindu warriors and Mughal princes who rape and pillage with impunity. He backs up his claims by interviewing a wide range of young people. [This film] reveals a new face of fascism that chillingly parallels political movements closer to home.--Noah Cowan, Toronto Film Festival '94

Written, Photographed by Patwardhan. (120 mins, In English, Color, 16mm, From First Run/Icarus)

Wednesday November 8

Video Documentaries

From Russia with Exposés: Iakov Poselski & Natalia Kosinets 7:30

Artists in Person

With the new "openness" of Russian society, journalists Iakov Poselski and Natalia Kosinets set out to test the limits of Glasnost policy. Since 1993, Iakov and Natalia, former workers at Russian Central Television, have completed nine investigative documentaries, going where no reporters have gone before. Their filmic style is dramatic, often poetic, and typically cross-cuts multiple storylines. I Murder for Apartments (1994, 29 mins) is a chilling exposé of private property in the new capitalist state. The Poselskis focus on a real-estate agent who preys on alcoholics and the elderly, swindling them out of house and home. The Fear Drug (1995, 35 mins) concentrates on two seemingly disparate stories--an agoraphobic's inability to be in the world, and military-oriented pharmaceutical experiments with a drug that conquers inhibitions. What the documentary reveals is the persistence of Cold War ideology. Moscow Fags (1995, 25 mins) is about gay life in contemporary Russia, centering on a Russian/American couple living in Moscow. Although homosexuality has been de-criminalized, gays still find themselves harassed or unjustly jailed. With this documentary, the Poselskis may have gone too far. Russian television refused to air Moscow Fags.--Steve Seid

(Total running time: 89 mins, plus discussion, 3/4" video, From the artists)

Thursday November 9

The Ritual of Desire: Daniel Schmid

Artist in Person

Tosca's Kiss with Notre Dame de la croisette and The Amateurs 7:00

Notre Dame de la croisette

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, 1981)

It had to happen: In Notre Dame de la croisette Schmid turns his abundant eye on that loved and despised Mecca of European film life, the Cannes International Film Festival. Bulle Ogier stars as a woman who goes to Cannes and, lost in its chaos and unable to obtain tickets, ends up watching it on television from her hotel room. But the spectacle-in-the-box brings her much more of the world than she bargained for, and she finds refuge in her dreams of Cannes as it was thirty years ago, when living myths walked the earth: Picasso, Langlois, Callas, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Arletty, and Cocteau.

Written by Schmid. Photographed by Renato Berta, Benoît Nicoulin. With Bulle Ogier, Kira Nijinski, Bob Rafelson, Jean-Claude Brialy. (56 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 16mm)

The Amateurs (1912-1931) (Les Amateurs). (Daniel Schmid, Switzerland, 1991). Using early family, tourist, and publicity films, Schmid articulates the pleasures of filming--the play of amateurs both in front of and behind the camera. Written by Schmid. (26 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Tosca's Kiss

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland/Italy, 1984)

(Il bacio di Tosca). All of Schmid's love for the opera and its ultra-human denizens comes out in Tosca's Kiss, a very droll and sublimely affecting documentary on the inhabitants of Casa Verdi, the Milanese retirement home for opera stars founded in 1902 by Giuseppe Verdi and originally supported by his royalties. In Casa Verdi, time has not so much stopped as transformed planes--it wafts through the halls and rooms of Casa Verdi like strains of operas past, which is the present for the aged divas. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman wrote this appreciation of the film: "Some documentaries are made to educate, others exist to bear witness. The most precious, however, are those that defamiliarize their subjects--films that literally put things in a new light....Schmid has made a film about old age and dying which is neither sentimental nor grotesque but cumulatively startling....[T]he film comes truly into its own when a roomful of crones suddenly breaks into a lilting aria from Traviata. At these moments, Tosca's Kiss could stagger Descartes with its visceral duality of body and soul. [It] gives new meaning to the cliché accolade, `the performance of one's life.'"

Written by Schmid. Photographed by Renato Berta. Music by Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti. With Sara Scuderi, Giovanni Puligheddu, Leonida Bellon, Salvatore Locapo. (87 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, permission Kino International)

Friday November 10

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Prints!

Man of the West 7:00

Anthony Mann (U.S., 1958)

Reformed gunman Gary Cooper is entrusted with the savings of his community for the purposes of hiring a schoolteacher for the town. When he is robbed by his old gang, led by Lee J. Cobb, he takes refuge with Arthur O'Connell and singer Julie London in his former hideout--still, as it turns out, used by the bandits. Anthony Mann's last great Western inspired Jean-Luc Godard to write: "Each shot of Man of the West gives one the impression that Anthony Mann is reinventing the Western...in other words, he both...innovates and copies, criticizes and creates. Man of the West, in short, is both course and discourse, or both beautiful landscapes and the explanation of this beauty, both the mystery of firearms and the secret of this mystery, both art and the theory of art...of the Western, the most cinematographic genre in the cinema....I spoke earlier of vegetal beauty. In Man of the West, Gary Cooper's amorphous face belongs to the mineral kingdom, thus proving that Anthony Mann is returning to the basic truths."

Written by Reginald Rose, from the novel The Border Jumpers by William C. Brown. Photographed by Ernest Haller. With Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O'Connell. (100 mins, Color, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia 8:55

Sam Peckinpah (U.S., 1974)

Sam Peckinpah has always kept his own wild bunch in tow--shaggy, unruly supporting players like Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones. He believes in domineering eccentrics, and seems to take on stars only because it's hard to make a picture without them. This, his least known and most heartfelt picture, has the biggest part ever played by Warren Oates. Oates plays Bernie, a piano player, who goes after Garcia because the outlaw was last seen with the whore Bernie loves. He undertakes the quest to get money, to marry his whore, to redeem his lowly status. Or so it seems. Long before the end, we know the journey and the search are bent on fulfillment and destruction. More than any other modern Western, this picture opposes furious action and ultimate futility. Yet in the course of the mythic pursuit, through the special Mexico of Peckinpah's mind, a nobody has become a legend himself, a supporting actor has been ennobled.--David Thomson, "Supporting Parts, Extended Groups," PFA '83

Written by Gordon Dawson, Peckinpah. Photographed by Alex Phillips Jr. With Warren Oates, Isela Vega, Gig Young, Robert Webber, Helmut Dantine, Emilio Fernandez, Kris Kristofferson. (112 mins, Color, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Saturday November 11

The Ritual of Desire: Daniel Schmid

La Paloma 7:00

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, 1974)

La Paloma shows the ease with which Schmid can combine seemingly irreconcilable modes--"beauty and horror...and the aesthetic delight growing out of this unnatural mating" (Le Monde). Stone-faced burlesque underlines, while it undermines, the emotional lure of Romanticism à la Camille and Tosca, both of which are sent-up in La Paloma like so many doves. In a lushly envisioned Europe of the thirties, Ingrid Caven is a deadpan Dietrich, a chanteuse named Viola Schlump, a.k.a. La Paloma. This tubercular songbird is failing fast until she is miraculously saved by the love of a chubby but persistent admirer, Isador (Peter Kern), whom she marries--not for love of him, but for a distracting and finally healing fascination with the love he has for her. Enter his best friend, however, and Viola pushes love's limits, to the very grave. Schmid has his finger on the nature of Romanticism; shamelessly, but wisely, he draws Verdi into the realm of that cynic, von Sternberg, and even throws in a little of the German mountain film. (A final post-modern incongruity: Bulle Ogier, who would have been about thirty-five, plays the mother of the groom.)

Written by Schmid. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Ingrid Caven, Peter Kern, Peter Chatel, Jérôme-Olivier Nicolin, Bulle Ogier. (110 mins, In German with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Violanta 9:05

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, 1977)

"I love legends, they're what remain at the very end, and no one cares about the real truth."--Daniel Schmid

Violanta draws on a nineteenth-century Swiss classic that deals with incest, murder, suicide, and ghosts in the very sort of mist-shrouded valley on the Italian border where Daniel Schmid grew up, wandering the halls of a hotel peopled with its past. "That is why in Violanta the ghosts are more tangible, more highly colored, than the living," he explains. The tale turns on Violanta, a judge who has brought peace to the valley but who lives a lie. Violanta's personal ghosts, a slain husband and lover, return to take part in the action, while her daughter and stepson, guilty lovers, seem to be repeating the patterns of Violanta's own past. Tragedy à la Schmid eschews catharsis: the present offers No Exit from the past. Dissecting the soap opera by over-indulging it, he employs the proverbial all-star cast (including the wonderful Italian actress Lucia Bosé as Violanta) in dramatic ritual, shoots outdoors only to make the natural surroundings look somehow studio-shot. Filmex's Douglas Edwards called Violanta "bizarre, Byzantine, opaque, operatic, ludicrous, ecstatically beautiful."

Written by Ila von Hasperg. Based on The Woman Judge: The Great Sinner, by Conrad-Ferdinand Meyer. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Lucia Bosé, Maria Schneider, Lou Castel, Ingrid Caven, Gérard Depardieu. (95 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Sunday November 12

Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919 5:30

Introduced by Eric Rentschler

Bruce Loeb on Piano

Eric Rentschler, Head of the Program in Film Studies at UC Irvine, has written and edited books on German cinema from Weimar Cinema to New German Film.

The Right to Exist

Joseph Delmont (Germany, 1913)

(Das Recht auf das Dasein). Joseph Delmont, actor and former circus acrobat, directed and stars in the three films we present tonight. Delmont was an early exponent of outdoor and location shooting--thus his films tend to have an immediacy that appeals to our modern sensibility. He excelled in capturing action and seems to have been particularly drawn to the challenge presented by boats as vehicles or foils. In The Right to Exist he portrays an ex-convict who is wrongly accused and hunted for the assault of a woman he has tried to rescue. The film's first half details the police investigation, including making plaster casts, taking and developing fingerprints, raiding low-life taverns and (in plainclothes) more respectable establishments. The second half is a marvelous sequence of outdoor shots following the escapee on perilous climbs and occasionally placing the cameraman in precarious positions--on a moving train, for instance--to capture the odd angle. A true action-adventure with a moving theme: the right to exist of a compellingly beleaguered hero.

* With Joseph Delmont, Fred Sauer. (43 mins)

On a Lonely Island

Joseph Delmont (Germany, 1913)

(Auf einsamer Insel). On a Lonely Island involves two fishermen who love the same girl; one sets the other adrift to become beached on the proverbial desert island, and goes home to marry the girl. Most of the action is set against the backdrop of an actual village on the island of Marken in the southern Zuidersee in Holland; the local farm women and fishermen serenely go about their business in the background of the drama, and take part in the wedding scene dressed in traditional costume. One critic notes the film's painterly qualities, citing the Dutch Masters as well as German turn-of-the-century realist artists who took an impressionistic approach to light.

With Joseph Delmont, Fred Sauer, Mia Cordes. (31 mins)

Intermission

The Mysterious Club

Joseph Delmont (Germany, 1913)

(Der geheimnisvolle Klub). In a story evidently borrowed from Robert Louis Stevenson's tales of "The Suicide Club," a man learns that his brother has committed suicide in Rotterdam and sets off in search of any traces he may have left behind. With the help of a detective he uncovers a club where gentlemen card players stake their lives on the game. Delmont plays the confidence man who reaps the benefit of the suicides' estates, and who is no slouch in the climactic chase scenes either. Delmont's are among the most international and sophisticated of the early films, as he was apparently well versed in the dynamics of big-city life and intrigued by the cinematic challenges they posed. This film rings authentic in its exterior locations which include Rotterdam, its railway station and its docks.

With Joseph Delmont, Fred Sauer, Ilse Bois. (41 mins)

(Total running time: 115 mins, plus introduction and intermission; Silent, German intertitles with live English translation, B&W/tinted/toned, 35mm)

Monday November 13

Third World Cinema

Curfew 7:00

Rashid Masharawi (Netherlands/Palestine, 1993)

(Hatta Ishaar Akhar). "Restrained but immensely persuasive, Curfew, a first feature by Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, depicts twenty-four hours in the life of a family living in a refugee camp on the Gaza Strip in 1993, a few months prior to the peace treaty. [But] the film isn't rendered obsolete by symbolic political actions. Indeed, its purpose is to show how what we perceive as the immediate, concrete present is bound by history and memory. Curfew is shot mostly in a single interior space....A curfew has been imposed by the Israeli military; no one knows how long it will last. The family members...try to go about their routines--cooking, cleaning, making conversation, speculating, reminiscing as if these were `normal' circumstances....Living under such a calculatedly capricious military regime results in a permanent state of anxiety and anger....Masharawi...knows how to build dramatic tension from swallowed words and broken gestures. There's not a single forced moment."--Amy Taubin, Village Voice

"The filmmaker, born in 1962 and raised in a refugee camp, brings an insider's compassion and understanding....Salim Daw, one of the Arab world's leading actors, gives a finely nuanced performance as the head of a household unwittingly caught up in world events."--New Yorker Films

Written by Masharawi. Photographed by Klaus Juliusburger. With Salim Daw, Na'ila Zayaad, Younis Younis, Mahmoud Qadah. (73 mins, In Arabic with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From New Yorker)

Tuesday November 14

Avant-Garde Film

Deseret 7:30

James Benning (U.S., 1995)

Artist in Person

Both an exquisite landscape film and a fascinating historical investigation, James Benning's newest film, Deseret, is composed of approximately one hundred New York Times stories related to the history of the Mormons in Utah. Dating from 1852 to 1992, the stories are heard in voice-over and a different landscape seen for each sentence read. Running throughout the commentaries are references to polygamy and the defiance of federal laws which reveal the enduring, powerful sway these hold over the popular imagination. Timely in relation to contemporary anti-government movements, the stories also provide an intriguing glimpse of changing journalistic styles, from reports-from-the-West to supposedly objective reporting. Purposefully at odds with this social history is the contemplative state invoked by the minimalist desert and mountain views. These shots of the striking Utah land are repeatedly imbued with historical and social information, suggesting America's complex relationship to the West as a place representing freedom from tradition yet in need of taming. Utah has been the site not only of the Mormon Church, but of nuclear weapons and nerve gas tests, Japanese internment camps, Indian land-rights disputes, toxic waste dumps, and earth art. The title Deseret refers to the name proposed by the then-Territory of Utah for the state on admission into the Union.--Kathy Geritz

James Benning, who teaches at California Institute of the Arts, has been making films for over twenty-five years. They include 8-1/2 x 11, Landscape Suicide, and North on Evers

Photographed by Benning. (80 mins, 16mm, B&W/Color, From the artist)

Wednesday November 15

The Decade Between

Presented with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Endowment.

American Video Art 1978-88: Tony Labat 7:30

Artist in Person

San Francisco's own bad boy of video art, Tony Labat exercises provocation and wit to confront the dilemmas of cultural identity. From Babalu (1979, 10 mins), a randy mixture of folk and popular clichés, to Mayami: Between Cut and Action (1986, 13:54 mins), a complex gutting of Miami Vice's Hispanic misrepresentations, Labat has cut his own aesthetic path through the thicket of individuality and marginalization, mixing puppets, pastiche and performance with the poignancy of his Cubano roots. Central to his social critique are two superb works: Ñ(enn-yay) (1982, 8:03 mins) and Kikiriki (1983, 11:57 mins), both jumbled narratives with brilliantly engaging visual compositions. A pageant of archetypal emigrés, Ñ laments the emblematic loss of the Spanish tilde, victim to the violence of acculturation. In a staccato and often oblique exposition, Labat's outsider tale punctures the myth of America. Using ironic split-screen images, Kikiriki explores the cultural dislocation of the immigrant, tracking the media's insistence on their otherness. Paralleling the artist's symbolic journey with that of the viciously depicted Marielitos, Labat renders an aggressive politics of alienation.--Steve Seid

(Total running time: 44 mins, plus discussion, 3/4" video, From the artist)

Friday November 17

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Prints!

Odds Against Tomorrow 7:30

Robert Wise (U.S., 1959)

This exciting caper is film noir on the cusp of two decades. A worthy descendant of The Asphalt Jungle, shot at night in black-and-white and set to a gritty jazz track, it delves into the depths of human greed and self-destruction that laced the fifties crime melodrama with despair. But it also plays the odds on tomorrow by predicting the intensified brutality of the sixties films, and the socially conscious variants on the crime drama that the decade would produce--films about racial conflicts, psychopathic killers, etc. Robert Ryan, one of film noir's dark giants, for better or for worse is often at his best when playing the bigot (as in Crossfire). Here, he is a Southern drifter whose hatred of blacks is focused on his partner-in-crime, Harry Belafonte, a Harlem musician. Shelley Winters is in her element as Ryan's girlfriend, but it is Gloria Grahame, in a brief appearance, who culminates a decade of fatalistic femmes when she asks Ryan to excite her by describing what it's like to kill a man.

Written by John O. Killens, Nelson Gidding from the novel by William P. McGivern. Photographed by Joseph Brun. With Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame, Shelley Winters, Ed Begley. (95 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

The Halliday Brand 9:20

Joseph H. Lewis (U.S., 1957)

This Western by Joseph H. Lewis is "a work to place on a par with So Dark the Night, Gun Crazy, and The Big Combo. The most astute of Lewis's films in its use of space, this tale of son Joseph Cotten's revolt against his tyrannical rancher-father (Ward Bond) dramatizes the emotional price conscience can exact. Abusing his role as sheriff, Bond shoots his daughter's Chicano husband and later on kills the father of the half-breed girl (Viveca Lindfors) Cotten loves. Cotten is eventually forced to become an outlaw...to bring the domineering Halliday brand to heel. The film conforms to conventional Western patterns: the range baron with a racist streak; one son inheriting a `soft spot' from his mother...another, stronger physically but weaker morally....Yet Lewis imparts his personal flair to these familiar elements, his complex visual style....In many ways, The Halliday Brand anticipates Antonioni, not merely in terms of stylistic choices but also in the uses to which the choices are put....[T]here is a proper place for everything within a shot."--Myron Meisel, Kings of the Bs

Written by George W. George, George S. Slavin. Photographed by Ray Rennahan. With Joseph Cotten, Viveca Lindfors, Ward Bond, Betsy Blair. (78 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Saturday November 18

The Ritual of Desire: Daniel Schmid

Hecate 7:00

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, 1982)

"`Beauty, mystery and suspense, that's what it's all about,' Bette Davis once said. I don't like movies without women."--Daniel Schmid

"A lot of things come together at the end of the world."--Schmid, on Hecate

India Song and Somerset Maugham come together in Hecate, set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid's favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde (played by the American actress Lauren Hutton) really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a "woman looking out into the night." Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid's film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant--a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.

Written by Pascal Jardin, Schmid. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Lauren Hutton, Bernard Giraudeau, Jean Bouise, Jean-Pierre Kalfon. (105 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Jenatsch 9:00

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland/France, 1987)

Schmid enters Borges territory with this tale of a journalist, Christian Sprecher (Michel Voita), who interviews an anthropologist who has excavated the grave of the seventeenth-century freedom fighter Jenatsch and is drawn--literally--into the story of the murdered political hero. He enters a no-man's-land between centuries, while still attempting to function in this one. Various friends offer their theories of déjà vu but this doesn't help when Sprecher finds himself present at the masked ball where Jenatsch met his murderer. As often, Schmid uses source material from his childhood (Jenatsch is a figure from the mountains where Schmid was raised) and evokes the fluid sense of time he felt as a child. "When I was a child, I was very impressed by the story of the bird that sharpens its beak on a huge mountain once every thousand years, and when the whole mountain is worn away, only one second in God's eye has passed. Time is very relative....At home we have personal letters which go back to the seventeenth century. When you study them you discover that basic things were not that different then from today. Then, as now, everything sped by."

Written by Martin Suter, Schmid. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Michel Voita, Christine Boisson, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Laura Betti, Carole Bouquet. (97 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Sunday November 19

Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919 5:30

Jon Mirsalis on Piano

Twice Lived

Max Mack (Germany, 1912)

(Zweimal gelebt). Twice Lived has the kind of preposterously evolving story that leaves the modern-day viewer rather in awe. When a little girl narrowly misses being hit by a speeding automobile, her mother suffers a shock from which she will never recover. She emerges, an amnesiac, from the coma that all have interpreted as death, and her doctor takes her abroad to start a new life--together. This can only lead to tragedy of course. Among other things the film shows the impact on the German imagination of the automobile, rushing through the cities with previously unknown speed. Here and in Christmas Thoughts, "an ostensibly driverless car--a hurtling, soulless machine--determines the fate of the two young mothers." (catalog)

Written by Heinrich Lautensack. With Eva Speyer, Anton Ernst Rückert. (24 mins)

The Love of Maria Bonde

Emerich Hanus (Germany, 1918)

(Die Liebe der Maria Bonde). Like The Black Ball (below), this film deals with three showgirl sisters--stunt-riders--one of whom dies when her lover betrays her during an illness. This time, however, the rival is her own more robust sister, Maria. Maria finds brief happiness married to the man in question until she can no longer ride; thoughts of his turning to the third sister begin to haunt her in feverish visions of the dead sibling. The story is shot with a consciousness for filmic signs and references--the characters' internal imprisonment and external freedom play against each other in indoor/outdoor scenes--and for decor that suggestively breaks up the frame.

With Martha Novelly, Eva Maria Hartmann, Ursula Hell, Paula Eberty. (43 mins)

Intermission

The Black Ball

Franz Hofer (Germany, 1913)

(Die schwarze Kugel). The stage, and particularly the music hall, figures in many of the early silents. Having essentially two audiences--one privy to reverse angles--makes for an interesting play with point-of-view. The Black Ball, or the Mysterious Sisters deals with three performing sisters, one of whom has died of a broken heart. The man responsible for this disaster sits in the audience of the music hall, holding one of the two remaining stage sisters in each circle of his opera glasses. The performance involves the two women in a kind of masked doubling that will play into the plot: the sisters will use their near-identical looks to foil the villainous Vicomte. In contrast to the plush theatrical and backstage settings, location shooting in a factory district provides for a climactic rooftop chase.

Written by Hofer. With Paul Meffert, Mia Cordes, Manny Ziener. (39 mins)

(Total running time: 106 mins, plus intermission; Silent, German intertitles with live English translation, B&W/tinted/toned, 35mm)

Monday November 20

Third World Cinema

In a Time of Betrayal 7:00

Carmen Castillo, Guy Girard (France, 1993)

In a small red house in a residential district of Santiago, Chile, Carmen Castillo's friends were tortured to death. For survivors of the dirty war waged by the regime that toppled Allende's government, "the wounds have stood up to time--twenty years," Castillo says in the voice-over of this extraordinary documentary about facing up to a torturer: truth. Castillo, herself interrogated and expelled, went back to examine a Chile that, in 1993, suffers from amnesia. And this will to forget, she says, is its chief obstacle to democracy. With an anxious, searching camera as restless as her sense of incompleteness, she conducts extensive interviews with a woman who capitulated to the torturers and only recently came out to testify against them. She knows them all, all their secrets. Amnesia for her would be a blessing. In a moving and revealing radio discussion, she compares experiences with a woman who, also tortured, did not "talk." In that sordid red house, "time belonged to the torturers"; In a Time of Betrayal attempts to recapture time for the future.

Photographed by Maurice Perrimond. Commentary by Tessa Brisac, Castillo. (60 mins, In English and Spanish with English subtitles, Color, 3/4" video, From La Teletheque de l'INA)

Tuesday November 21

Avant-Garde Film

A Tribute to Bruce Conner 7:30

Artist in Person

The Pacific Film Archive is pleased to present Television Assassination, a new film by Bruce Conner, the San Francisco-based artist, who is one of America's leading independent filmmakers. Tonight's tribute is timed to take place between Conner's birthday, November 18, and the anniversaries of significant historical events related to the film. Television Assassination was filmed by Conner from a TV set in 1963 and '64. The images as described by the artist include: "Lee Harvey Oswald--View from window, Texas School Book Depository--Eternal Flame, Arlington National Cemetery--President Kennedy--Funeral Flowers at Dealey Plaza, Dallas...Kennedy Motorcade--Mail Order Bolt Action Rifle--Oswald in custody--Jack Ruby shoots Oswald...etc."

Our program includes the first public screening of a new 35mm print of Crossroads, a preservation project of PFA overseen with unfailing care and enthusiasm by Michael Friend, Director of the Archive of the Academy of Motion Pictures. Crossroads, Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, and Television Assassination feature music composed by Patrick Gleeson. The rarely shown Liberty Crown, an excerpt from a videotaped performance of the poem by Michael McClure, also will be presented, along with Ten Second Film, Vivian, and The White Rose.

(Television Assassination and a selection of Conner's films also will be presented by the S.F. Cinematheque, Sunday, November 19 at the AMC Kabuki 8 Cinema).

Ten Second Film (1965, 10 sec, Silent). Vivian (1964, 3 mins). The White Rose (1967, 7 mins). Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977, 5.5 mins, Sepia, Music by Patrick Gleeson). Liberty Crown (1967, 3 mins). Television Assassination (1963-95, 14 mins, Music by Patrick Gleeson). Crossroads (1976, 36 mins, 35mm, Music by Patrick Gleeson, Terry Riley).

(Total running time: c. 70 mins, 16mm except as indicated, B&W, From the artist, PFACollection)

Wednesday November 22

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Prints!

The Big Night 7:00

Joseph Losey (U.S., 1951)

"`We're all lonely....We've got to have somebody who knows what bothers us.' It's this sort of line which, I think, gives the picture its peculiar Gothic American flavor. Here, union by desperation is taken for granted."--T. J. Ross, Film Culture

In this rarely seen noir, the last film Joseph Losey made in Hollywood, now-familiar Losey themes are presented in a somersaulting pattern of events and images. George La Main (John Barrymore, Jr.), timid, bespectacled, persecuted by his peers, on his seventeenth birthday witnesses his bartender father receiving a brutal whipping from a sadistic rival. In setting out to avenge his father, George takes his first steps into manhood--that is, finding his own place in a world of violence, mutually exploitative relationships, and guilt. "Within the framework of a low-budget melodrama, it crams an uncommon amount of character insight, originality and intense feeling, as well as the seedy realism of cheap big-city backgrounds in the small hours. And young...Barrymore, in a turbulent, demanding role, convincingly earns his right to a famous name." (Time)

Written by Hugo Butler, Ring Lardner, Jr., Losey, based on the novel by Stanley Ellin. Photographed by Hal Mohr. With John Barrymore, Jr., Preston Foster, Howland Chamberlain, Joan Lorring. (75 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Storm Fear 8:30

Cornel Wilde (U.S., 1948)

Noir icon Cornel Wilde is on both sides of the camera in this one, which, like Leave Her to Heaven, reveals a sordid confusion underneath the veneer of the happy family. Following a bank robbery, Charlie (Wilde) and cohorts hole up in his older brother's New England farmhouse, holding the brother and sister-in-law (Dan Duryea and Jean Wallace) hostage to some bitter truths about the paternity of Charlie's "nephew." "These underlying tensions carried over from the guilty past are separated from the main narrative line...yet are coupled to such diverse morbid details as...Charlie's self-conscious stammer...and even the cheap dog collar that the family has used to decorate the Christmas tree after their pet's death, so that the melodrama develops with Ibsen-like pretensions....The use of locations for the flight over the mountain finally reduces the diverse interior conflicts to a graphically defined struggle between small, dark figures and a vast, snow-covered landscape."--Alain Silver, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style

Written by Horton Foote, based on the novel by Clinton Seeley. Photographed by Joseph La Shelle. With Cornel Wilde, Jean Wallace, Dan Duryea, Lee Grant. (88 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Friday November 24

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Print!

The Night of the Hunter 7:30, 9:15

Charles Laughton (U.S., 1955)

With its Depression-era setting and religious fanaticism, this film has a curious modern resonance. David Thomson wrote for PFA: "In The Night of the Hunter (set in the back-roads mood of Ohio River country), we have stolen money and a demon preacher (Robert Mitchum) who comes after it, chasing two lost children towards the indomitably sturdy homestead of Lillian Gish....As much as it draws on Hans Christian Andersen, D.W. Griffith, and German expressionism, Night of the Hunter knows an isolated state of the union (Amerikana) where the icons of the Western have survived by becoming grotesque....Harry Powell's chosen weapon is a knife. But with `LOVE' on one hand and `HATE' on the other, he is a twisted descendent of the Western's violent men of righteousness. In Charles Laughton's American masterpiece, that strain has driven Powell mad. The Night of the Hunter is all the more suggestive in arousing obsession in an actor (Mitchum) who had his own persona of laconic, stetson-shaded reliability."

Written by James Agee, from the novel by Davis Grubb. Photographed by Stanley Cortez. With Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce. (91 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Saturday November 25

12th Annual

Teddy Bears and Friends Parade and Film Festival 1:00, 2:30

Admission $3.50. Recommended for all ages. Balloons for all children!

Bring your teddy bear or other cuddly animal for a pre-film parade in our theater, followed by films about real and imaginary animals, including the animation Happy Birthday Moon, a gentle celebration of a teddy bear's love and friendship; Koalas, which introduces us to this lovable marsupial; Hug Me, award-winning animation about a lonely porcupine; Frog Goes to Dinner, a wonderfully mischievous live-action comedy; and The Animal Movie, animation about a boy's first encounters with the creature world, exploring why and how animals move the way they do.

Program is repeated Sunday, November 26. Advance tickets can be purchased at the PFA Box Office or charged by phone (details, p. 20).

(Total program approx. 65 mins, 16mm and 3/4" video from Churchill Films, Film Fair/Altshul, Phoenix/BFA, PFA Collection)

Daniel Schmid & Fassbinder

The Merchant of Four Seasons 7:00

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany, 1971)

(Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten). Daniel Schmid has a bit part in the late R. W. Fassbinder's breakthrough film but he played a larger part in the director's life as friend and collaborator. The Merchant of Four Seasons, set in Munich in the "prosperous fifties," shows how that hollow phrase reflects failure back on itself for the average Hans, whose path in life might depend more upon the treacheries of family than the vagaries of the marketplace. This particular Hans (Hans Hirschmüller), a street vendor, is despised as he is dominated by his mother, then by his wife (Irm Herrmann) who looks like a cadaver on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but who is a surprisingly supple manipulator of her world. She'll be middle class over his dead body. Still, Hans is no prize and his collaboration in the conspiracy against him leaves little room for sentiment. Thus Fassbinder's approach combines distance with grizzly humor, a stark and startling, elegant tableau saturated with color--Sirk's reds and blues for the Sirk-inspired dreams of a ridiculous man. Daniel Schmid's commanding screen presence is notable but brief as one of the beefy guys Hans interviews to push his cart. He doesn't get the job.

Written by Fassbinder. Photographed by Dietrich Lohmann. With Hans Hirschmüller, Irm Herrmann, Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla. (88 mins, In German with English subtitles, Color, 16mm, From New Yorker Films)

Shadow of Angels 8:45

Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, 1976)

(Schatten der Engel). One of Fassbinder's most controversial productions was his stage play The Garbage, the City and Death. Daniel Schmid, employing Fassbinder's repertory company, sketches Fassbinder's cryptic dialogue, characters, and action in broad, operatic terms characteristic of his own work, sometimes jarring scenes alive with unexpected riffs of Latin music. His style adds to the generally disquieting mood of this tour of prosperity's grotesque underside. Set amid the Frankfurt lowlife--prostitutes, pimps, sadistic police, and perverted businessmen--the story concerns a streetwalker (Ingrid Caven) who is reportedly too chic for her own good and can't make a go of it among her only available clientele. She is brutalized by her pimp (Fassbinder), who continues to send her out on the streets while he indulges his preference for men. Luck comes her way in the form of a Jewish businessman (Klaus Löwitsch); he hires her only to listen to him talk and, occasionally, pose as his bride in the murky nocturnal street scene.

This character, "the rich Jew," is the center of the controversy over which Fassbinder was denied State funds to film his play himself. American critics have responded in a somewhat more favorable light to the character, J. Hoberman (Village Voice) noting, "Making Frankfurt's ace capitalist a Jew is aggressively tasteless but not, I think, anti-Semitic....Löwitsch is neither unsympathetic nor racially stereotyped." Schmid himself notes, "For us, Shadow of Angels was a film about a Germany where no one is starving and no one is scared anymore, and the only two people who are still sensitive are the prostitute and the Jew, because both of them are outcasts."

Written by Schmid, R. W. Fassbinder, based on the play, The Garbage, the City and Death by Fassbinder. Photographed by Renato Berta. With Ingrid Caven, R. W. Fassbinder, Klaus Löwitsch, Annemarie Duringer, Adrian Hoven. (105 mins, In German with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Leisure Time Features)

Sunday November 26

12th Annual

Teddy Bears and Friends Parade and Film Festival 1:00, 2:30

Admission $3.50. Recommended for all ages. Balloons for all children!

For program notes, please see Saturday, November 25.

Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919 5:30

Bruce Loeb on Piano

The Devil's Church

Hans Mierendorff (Germany, 1919)

(Die Teufelskirche). Cinema was always a place to try out our temptations and this fantasy about a rural village that sells its collective soul to the devil seems to be trying sin on for size. It starts with a woman giving herself to the devil, disguised as a passing tinker, on the promise of being blessed with a child. They hie to the green-tinted forest where local nymphs romp. Through editing and extraordinary tinting the film equates the sexual act with a house on fire, and the image of the disheveled, half-naked wayward wife leaping about like a dervish in front of her burning domicile still is powerful. But this is just the beginning: by the end, even the pastor has been won over to a Faustian pact.

Written by Adolf Paul. With Hans Mierendorff, Otto Werther, Agnes Straub, Paul Rehkopf. (44 mins)

The Queen of the Stock Exchange

Edmund Edel (Germany, 1918)

(Die Börsenkönigin). In case you thought the Ida Lupinos and Ruth Chattertons of Hollywood had a corner on this market, here is Asta Nielsen as the owner of a copper mine who reigns behind a heavy desk, plays cards and plays hardball with the guys--all but smokes cigars. She dons overalls to inspect a new vein in the mine, and ermine to woo the mine manager whom she means to have. Nielsen, so much more natural and animated than as the merely "treacherous woman" of the film of that name, here registers the confusion of a woman for whom emotions are a new vein. The film cuts between Helena, dressed to the nines and working her wiles in the gardens of her mansion, and women mine workers pushing heavy bins, their heads covered by gray scarves.

Written by Edel. With Asta Nielsen, Aruth Warthan, Willi Kayser-Heil. (53 mins)

Intermission

Wanda's Trick

Dr. R. Portegg (Germany, 1918)

A worker in a cigarette factory wins the lottery and gains a marriage proposal from her boss, who is in financial straits. Rather than accept his proposal, she quits her job and offers him a plan for an advertising campaign with a prize--herself in marriage to the winner. It was produced the same year as Ernst Lubitsch's Carmen, with Pola Negri playing a cigarette girl, but by comparison Wanda's Trick depicts factory life with almost documentary realism, and its heroine, however engaging, is nothing if not pragmatic.

With Wanda Treumann, Heinrich Schroth, Maria Grimm-Einödshofer. (46 mins)

(Total running time: 143 mins, plus intermission; Silent, German intertitles with live English translation, B&W/tinted/toned, 35mm)

Monday November 27

Third World Cinema

Strawberry and Chocolate 7:00

Thomás Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Carlos Tabío (Cuba/Mexico/Spain, 1993)

(Fresa y Chocolate). "Upon its release last year, Thomás Gutiérrez Alea's tale of a gay man who befriends a straight member of the Communist Party sparked discussion across the island [of Cuba] about censorship and social tolerance. Early in Strawberry and Chocolate, flamboyant Diego endeavors to seduce the doctrinaire David, first with elliptical comments about their differing tastes in ice cream and later, after luring David to his apartment, with allusions to artists banned under the communist regime. Diego embodies two cross-cultural myths about gays--they're forever on the prowl, often for heterosexuals, and they `contaminate' a society intellectually as well as sexually....Gutiérrez Alea introduces these notions, then quickly challenges them by hinting that sophisticated Diego has something important to offer David, namely the cultural heritage Cuba's censorious revolution has denied him....In the U.S., Strawberry is strictly arthouse fare, but in Cuba it was a mainstream hit that popularized an ongoing debate in the country's academic circles....This glimpse into Cuba's internal politics is Strawberry's chief attraction....As queer cinema [it] is less impressive...in spots naive, even skittish, about homosexuality..."--Daniel Mangin, SF Weekly

Written by Senel Paz. Photographed by Mario García Joya. With Jorge Perugorría, Vladimir Cruz, Mirta Ibarra, Francisco Gatorno. (110 mins, In Spanish with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Miramax)

Tuesday November 28

Avant-Garde Film

Haunted Places: The Presence of the Past 7:30

Films by Dan Eisenberg, Peter Hutton, and Gunvor Nelson, selected by Ernie Gehr

Lodz Symphony (Peter Hutton, U.S., 1991-93) "A portrait of Lodz, Poland that exists in a timewarp of sad memory...an empty world evoking the 19th century industrial atmosphere that is populated with the ghosts of Poland's tragic past."--P. Hutton

* (20 mins, Silent, B&W)

Frame Line (Gunvor Nelson, U.S., 1984) "Glimpses of Stockholm, people, gestures...appear through drawings, paintings and cut-outs. It is a film with an eerie flow between the ugly and the beautiful, about returning, about roots, and also about reshaping."--G. Nelson

* (22 mins, B&W)

Cooperation of Parts (Dan Eisenberg, U.S., 1987) "The film begins at a train station in Calais, France and ends on a street in Radom, Poland. In between are images of Paris, Munich, Dachau, Berlin, Warsaw, and Auschwitz/Birkenau. Unlike most films that deal with the Holocaust, Cooperation of Parts takes place firmly in the present and does not attempt to recapitulate history....The film explores the territory of the recent past with a second-generation perspective, distanced through time and reflection."--D. Eisenberg

(42 mins, Color)

(Total running time: 84 mins, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema)

Wednesday November 29

The Decade Between

American Video Art 1978-88: The Vasulkas 7:30

Few artists have conversed so intimately with the machine as Steina and Woody Vasulka. Their explorations of image plasticity have developed an evolving formal language that is rigorous, expansive, and uniquely beautiful. Designing their own processing devices, the Vasulkas have created a body of work markedly their own, consisting of ecstatic landscapes, enigmatic constructed imagery, and oblique narratives. In Search of the Castle (1981, 9:29 mins) employs a peculiar spherical device used to distort camera input. City- and landscapes are captured, then further processed in a journey of electronic transformation. Progeny (1981, 18:28) combines the organic sculptures of Bradford Smith and singular digital effects in a seamless alteration of perception. Steina's Lilith (1987, 9:12 mins) grafts the haunting face of a woman onto a backdrop of swaying trees. Shifting focal planes and temporal codes simulate a world in flux. Woody Vasulka's grand Art of Memory (1987, 36 mins) studies the dysfunctions of recollection. As Vasulka sees it, this recuperative function is both personal and historical. His raw materials are documentary films and photographs from the century's great upheavals. These images are digitally torn from their context and set adrift in a sea of tragic memory.--Steve Seid

(Total running time: 73 mins, 3/4" video, From Electronic Arts Intermix)

Thursday November 30

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Prints!

Network 7:00

Sidney Lumet (U.S. 1976)

Sloganeering is the shrill charm and also the self-righteous weakness of this tirade about television. When Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a nerve-wracked, failing anchorman, intones "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," we enjoy both the gloating cynicism and the facile wisdom of Paddy Chayefsky's manic script. Yet this exaggerated drama of unchecked ambition and frenzied audience-seeking makes a compelling statement about the vulnerable position of the motiveless TV viewer, vis-à-vis the conspiratorial execs behind the video camera. When Beale makes some news of his own by announcing his impending suicide, it's first-blood in Tubeland: he finds himself unanchored and cruising towards stardom as the "Mad Prophet of the Airwaves." Though Network's evangelist "inveighs against the hypocrisies of our time," alienating the show's audience, his pleas and condemnations are quickly absorbed by the greater spectacle of the United Broadcasting System. And here lies the insight of this breakneck story: even jarring moments of anti-television can be consumed and defused by the diabolical onslaught of programming.--Steve Seid

Written by Paddy Chayefsky. Photographed by Owen Roizman. With Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall. (121 mins, Color, 35mm, From UA/MGM Classics)

The Fugitive Kind 9:15

Sidney Lumet (U.S., 1960)

From the opening soliloquy--Marlon Brando pleading before an unseen judge (the camera eye)--The Fugitive Kind announces itself as a film that, like its protagonist, takes crazy, brilliant risks. Brando's Val "Snakeskin" Xavier is a wayfaring stranger in the American tradition, but in this Louisiana backwater he has wandered into one of Tennessee Williams's waking nightmares, where the men are sadists and the women are caged birds. Our first glimpse of Anna Magnani's Lady Torrence is in longshot, looking used-up in an old cloth coat; her desire, ambivalence and beauty are aroused by the newcomer whom she takes on as a shop assistant and lover. Brando and Magnani are beautifully mismatched actors: he unmasks in verse (lines like "We're all sentenced to solitary confinement within our skins" do not roll trippingly off the tongue), while she reveals herself in bruised bluntness. There is no Method to her madness. Maureen Stapleton also is a revelation as the wife of the vigilante sheriff, who paints her way to sanity. Cinematography is by Boris Kaufman, who shot the films of his brother Dziga Vertov and of Jean Vigo.

Written by Tennessee Williams, Meade Roberts, based on the play Orpheus Descending by Williams. Photographed by Boris Kaufman. With Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, Maureen Stapleton. (119 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Friday December 1

A Day Without Art

On A Day Without Art, December 1, we pay tribute to artists and friends of art who have died of AIDS. This program is presented with support from the museum's Education Department.

Remembering Warren Sonbert: Noblesse Oblige, Short Fuse and There's Always Tomorrow 7:30

For some twenty-five years, Warren Sonbert's elegantly formal and brilliantly edited films graced the PFA screen. But Warren was also a frequent contributor to PFA, writing film notes, curating programs, and introducing his favorite films and directors, such as Hitchcock, Minnelli, and Sirk. We take this occasion to remember and honor an artist and friend, presenting two of Warren's own films and one of his favorite Douglas Sirk films.

Noblesse Oblige (Warren Sonbert, U.S., 1981).

"In Noblesse Oblige, Sonbert utilizes his imagery--non-narrative, figurative images alternating with the more abstract--to treat political issues in the media: reportage, journalism, the Six-O'Clock News...and Douglas Sirk."--W. S.

"Warren Sonbert's passionate Noblesse Oblige, a twenty-five minute lyric, offers the most sustained outpouring of visual pleasure in the whole series [of the Whitney Museum 1983 Biennial Film Selections]. Although Sonbert touches upon the grim and the political, as he seems to do by bringing us back again and again to the gay demonstrations in San Francisco, his irrepressible enthusiasm for montage lifts rage from its context to an imaginary fiesta of colliding images....Sonbert's affluent and munificent effusion of color, rhythm, and spectacle."--P. Adams Sitney, Village Voice. Filmed in New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Houston, and the Southwest. (25 mins, Color, 16mm, From Ascension Serrano)

Short Fuse (Warren Sonbert, U.S., 1991). Sonbert's fluid montage brings together images from around the world in a mounting rage at living in an age of AIDS. (37 mins, Color, 16mm, From Ascension Serrano)

There's Always Tomorrow

Douglas Sirk (U.S., 1956)

And so here the curtains part to reveal the blissful household of Fred MacMurray with perfect wife Joan Bennett (one of the most devastating characters in all cinema: so wretchedly unknowing in her smothering of her husband, so cheerfully oblivious of all the pain around her, the only personage to escape even a tinge of anguish, existing in a dream world of smug politeness...), a charming Father Knows Best trio of offspring (who vow to revere their father but promptly walk all over him again--watch their faces at the dinner table and try not to quake), and a lucrative toy-manufacturing concession. Enter Barbara Stanwyck. The man who plays with toys grows up but it's too late. At the end Stanwyck leaves alone on a plane to start anew (like Malone in Tarnished Angels). And in both films the unknown is better than the reality we've just witnessed. In no other movie does the claustrophobia of domestic rigidity become so shattering as in this Greek drama of a complacent, insulated man becoming aware.--Warren Sonbert

Written by Bernard C. Schoenfield. Photographed by Russell Metty. With Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Bennett, Pat Crowley, Jane Darwell. (84 mins, B&W, 16mm, permission Swank)

Saturday December 2

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Prints!

The Killer Is Loose 5:30

Budd Boetticher (U.S., 1956)

Wimpy bank clerk Leon Poole (Wendell Corey) heroically gets clunked on the head during an attempted robbery--and turns out to be the inside man on the heist. After his wife is killed by detective Joseph Cotten's policemen, Poole, from prison, plans his revenge on Cotten's wife (Rhonda Fleming). Barry Gifford writes, "A wife for a wife....This movie really got to me when I first saw it and I was ten years old. Especially the milk bottle shattering [splattering blood and milk all over the kitchen wall] and all the pots and pans falling off their hooks when Poole guns down Otto. Also the creepy stalking scene with Corey disguised as a woman as he follows Fleming. It's not a complicated movie but somehow serious, believable. Corey is clearly a nutcase...a man who doesn't need anybody else, doesn't want help, and so he's legitimately dangerous....A solid job all around, with perfect flat '50s photography. Nothing poetic, just the straight goods." (The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Other Unforgettable Films)

Written by Harold Medford, based on a story by John and Ward Hawkins. Photographed by Lucien Ballard. With Wendell Corey, Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Alan Hale. (73 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Kansas City Confidential 7:00

Phil Karlson (U.S., 1952)

This film is one long identity crisis: it begins with a masked robbery and is propelled by twists and reversals of identity as innocent ex-con John Payne takes on the moniker of a mobster in order to track down the gang that framed him, while crooked Kansas City cop Preston Foster poses as a stand-up guy throughout. Barry Gifford again: "A good lowdown drama on a par with director Karlson's 1955 exposé docudrama The Phoenix City Story. But K.C. has a more developed story line, a more exotic setting (Mexico), and a super noir group of actors....The story is pretty slick....George Diskant's powdery black-and-white photography traces the events streakily, making perfect use of the mood, forcing eeriness on us; and unrelieved visual stress. In this way Kansas City, Tijuana, and Barbados have a uniformity of tone, giving us the bad side of the picture in which everyone already has one foot in the grave."

Written by George Bruce, Harry Essex, from a story by Harold R. Greene, Rowland Brown. Photographed by George E. Diskant. With John Payne, Coleen Gray, Preston Foster, Jack Elam. (98 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Witness to Murder 8:55

Roy Rowland (U.S., 1954)

Barbara Stanwyck plays an interior decorator named Draper (hey, why not?) who witnesses a murder, Rear Window-style, and becomes caught up in a curtain of anxiety and mortal fear. George Sanders's suave author, a neo-Nazi, goes to lengths to prove her an unreliable witness, and succeeds in having her committed to a mental hospital. "Here we have the standard dilemma of many a movie heroine in the fifties: she is isolated, left in a vulnerable limbo in which she cannot escape the threat to her life, because no man in authority will believe her." (R. F. Wilson, The Velvet Light Trap '76)

John Alton's cinematography makes West Los Angeles far more interesting than we might have thought--a place where, in the hot nighttime winds, one more lonely apartment window becomes a frame for madness.

Written by Chester Erskine. Photographed by John Alton. With Barbara Stanwyck, George Sanders, Gary Merrill, Jesse White. (81 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Sunday December 3

Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919 5:30

Jon Mirsalis on Piano

Christmas Thoughts

director unknown (Germany, 1911-12?)

(Weihnachtsgedanken). In this short film, as in Twice Lived, a mother is made crazy by her child being hit (here, killed) by that modern menace, the automobile. As the now derelict mother spends a drink- and grief-laced Christmas Eve, flashback and dream (including one in which the wall of her abode is "pulled back" to allow for the image) propel her to do one last act for her daughter. (9 mins)

Lotte of the Marionettes

Emil Albes (Germany, 1913)

(Kasperl-Lotte). In this one-act play, two children, Lotte and Hans, find refuge from the adult world in the puppets of Lotte's abusive foster-father, a traveling puppeteer. But they must create their own safe haven; when the puppeteer moves on, Lotte stays behind with Hans. "As in the adult dramas, the theater is part of the seductive force which draws Hans into its spell. Together with Hans we become observers of an entire--and very symbolic--scene in a puppet show." (catalog) A surprise final shot sets this seemingly innocent story on its head.

Written by Luise Heilborn-Körbitz. With Hilde and Lotte Müller. (12 mins)

Atonement

Emerich Hanus (Germany, 1917)

(Die Sühne). Renate, a sculptress, and Ludwig are childhood sweethearts now grown; after Ludwig is blinded in an accident Renate could not prevent, she puts her commissions toward finding a cure for him. Following an operation, however, Renate no longer looks as good to Ludwig, who is "blinded" by his attraction to a dancer. This Magnificent Obsession with the sex-roles reversed looks at women artists and at the female art.

Written by Claudia Cornelius. With Martha Novelly, Kurt Vespermann, Olga Engl, Lore Rückert. (67 mins)

(Total running time: 88 mins, Silent, German intertitles with live English translation, B&W/ tinted/ toned, 35mm)

Monday December 4

Third World Cinema

Once Were Warriors 7:00

Lee Tamahori (New Zealand, 1994)

This film made by Maori filmmakers is the highest-grossing film ever in New Zealand, and of course played to wide success here. The story of domestic violence in an urban Maori family could be the story of a dysfunctional family anywhere--the parents whose sexually charged yet violent relationship leaves bruises on their five children; the mother who "holds the family together" till they all go down together. But it is not just anywhere, it is a run-down suburb in New Zealand where marginalized Maoris live between two cultures, poverty having driven out the old ways and made the new inaccessible. From New Zealand, Jonathan Dennis notes, "It's a stunning film--riveting, compelling, terrifying. The hyper-real urban setting of concrete motorways, beer barns, and slums would seem like science-fiction if it weren't so painfully recognizable. This is the Lower Depths, far away from the soft rural landscape of Ngati and so many other New Zealand films. [But] it does offer hope, that the spirit can survive, that there is still mana, and pride." (transcribed from Radio New Zealand)

Written by Riwia Brown, based on the novel by Alan Duff. Photographed by Stuart Dryburgh. With Rena Owen, Temuera Morrison, Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell, Julian Arahanga. (99 mins, Color, 35mm, From Fine Line Features)

Tuesday December 5

Avant-Garde Film

Serendipity: A Selection of Recent Short Films and Videos 7:30

Works by Yervant Gianikian/Angela Lucci-Ricchi, Janis Crystal Lipzin, silt, Jim Hubbard, and Harun Faroki

Janis Crystal Lipzin, Harun Faroki, and silt in Person

In Aria, Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Lucci-Ricchi continue their exquisite transformation of early film history images. Here they draw primarily on turn-of-the-century science films, discovering magic in the demonstrations. (1994, 7 mins, Tinted/B&W) Local filmmaker Janis Crystal Lipzin's super-8mm film, Seasonal Forces--A Sonoma County Almanac, Part 1, explores her relocation to a rural environment. Diaristic images document the "force" of man's encounter with nature, from the destruction of floods and arson to the construction of a garden and house. (1995, 22 mins) silt, the Bay Area group of super-8mm filmmakers Keith Evans, Christian Farrell, and Jeff Warrin, will present a multi-projector and sound performance. Their imagery is startlingly beautiful, due both to the alchemy of working collaboratively and to their process of transforming their materials biologically and chemically, through hand-processing, re-photography, and exposure to the environment. (1995, c.15 mins) Memento Mori, Jim Hubbard's haunting cinemascope film, uses an Emily Dickinson poem and hand-processed images to meditate on loss and rituals surrounding death. (1995, 17 mins) Harun Faroki's newest work, The Workers Leaving the Factory, takes its title from the first film ever projected. Faroki notes that "the workers' film has not become a main genre in film history....Most films begin when the work is over. I have collected images from several countries and many times, both staged and documentary, expressing the idea of `exiting the factory.' The time has come to collect film sequences, in the way that words are brought together in a dictionary." (1995, 37 mins, 3/4" video)--Kathy Geritz

(Total running time: c. 98 mins, 16mm except as indicated)

Wednesday December 6

Oh! Godzilla! A Gargantuan Tribute 7:30

Presented by Patrick Macias and August Ragone

Monstrous prizes provided by Kimono My House!

Tonight we accept Godzilla as our personal screen-savior. A veteran character actor with over twenty explosive films to his credit, Godzilla began his career in the groundbreaking 1954 epic Gojira, which to his great bemusement co-starred Raymond Burr. Since his debut, Godzilla has shared the bill with such household maims as Mothra, Gamara, Rodan, Gigan, Hedora, and the schizo King Ghidrah. A survivor of the Atomic Age, Godzilla's off-screen reputation has risen to match his growing on-screen stature: a mere 150 feet tall in the 1950s, he now stretches to a post-inflationary 300 feet. Two of the Bay Area's most remarkable monster mavens, Patrick Macias and August Ragone, will be our Gojira guides as they stomp through the wreckage of his illustrious and slightly radioactive oeuvre. Presenting the chronological history of the biggest of the beasts with psychotronic genre analysis, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and highly flammable gossip, we'll follow Godzilla from his breach-birth by H-bomb to his explosive conflict with this year's nemesis, the scorpion-like Destroyer. A trivia contest with prizes and some mega-surprises promise to topple the house.--Steve Seid

Special thanks to Susan Horn of Kimono My House for her help with this tribute.

Thursday December 7

through

Saturday December 9

In Memory of Jerry Garcia

Thanks to the generosity and kindness of Jerry Garcia, this beautiful new print of The Saragossa Manuscript now resides permanently in PFA`s collection. Our acquisition of the film was instigated by Jerry Garcia almost two years ago, but it was not until last April that we were able to confirm its purchase. Its eagerly awaited arrival from a lab in Poland was scheduled for August, but the print was delivered the eve of Jerry Garcia`s death. Sadly, for all, he never had the pleasure of seeing his favorite film again.

We wish to thank Henry Kaiser for all the assistance he provided to fulfill Jerry Garcia's wishes and facilitate PFA`s acquisition of The Saragossa Manuscript.

The Saragossa Manuscript 7:00

Wojciech Has (Poland, 1964)

(Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie). The Saragossa Manuscript, one of the great masterpieces of Eastern European cinema, is a story without end--a closed loop that begins with ghosts and the supernatural, proceeds with a series of strange evanescent experiences, and finishes where it began, with rousing derring-do and spooky magic. These are the picaresque adventures of a young nobleman of the seventeenth century, who encounters phantoms, spirits, fiery Gypsies, and dreamlike maidens of all sorts. The film is a baroque fantasy based on a collection of bizarre stories under the same title by one Jan Potocki, a peripatetic nobleman whose life was as strange as his book. Not available in decades, this cult classic is now presented in a glorious new black-and-white cinemascope print.--Dennis Jakob, Telluride Film Festival '95

Written by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, based on the writing of Jan Potocki. Photographed by Mieczyslaw Jahoda. Music by Krzysztof Penderecki. With Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, Joanna Jedryka, Kazimierz Opalinski, Franciszek Pieczka. (152 mins, In Polish with English subtitles, B&W, 'Scope, 35mm, PFA Collection)

Sunday December 10

United Artists/Chaplin

We thank Roy Export Co. Establishment, Paris, and Madame Paumier for permission to exhibit four films by Charles Chaplin (tonight and December 17) which currently are not in U.S. distribution.

City Lights 5:30

Charles Chaplin (U.S., 1931)

Chaplin in Hollywood and Ozu in Japan were about the only directors stubborn and poetic enough to continue making silent features well into the thirties' din of sound. Chaplin wasn't against sound, per se--he composed and carefully supervised scores for the films. In City Lights, the little Tramp's efforts to restore sight to a beautiful blind flower seller who thinks he's a rich gentleman, far from being maudlin, occasion his most brilliant comedy. The boxing match that plays like a minuet; the Tramp as pietà on the city's new sculpture; the millionaire who loves him to pieces, when drunk--sight-gags cut through sentiment like a cake-knife, and not just for artistic purposes: you can't be alert while you're crying, and Chaplin doesn't want to anesthetize, he wants to provoke. Martyr and mayhem. Then City Lights ends with one of cinema's most inexplicable moments; closure is in the mind of the beholder, where hope battles all that Chaplin has just taught us about life in the big city.

Written by Chaplin. Photographed by Rollie Totheroh, Gordon Pollock, Mark Marklatt. Music composed by Chaplin. With Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Harry Mayers, Hank Mann. (87 mins, Silent with music track, B&W, 35mm, From Roy Export)

Modern Times 7:15

Charles Chaplin (U.S., 1936)

It starts with an overhead shot of pigs, cuts to the throngs coming out of a subway station. Was Chaplin a Surrealist, or just a realist? His version of modern times looks forward in equal measure to Jacques Tati and 1984. This "silent" is full of modern sounds, heard over loudspeakers and big corporate television screens (not to mention the Tramp's outburst of oddly French-inspired gibberish). Charlie the ever-elegant Tramp is an industrial swashbuckler with an oil can for a sword, but he's begun taking on the characteristics of factory machines, obsessively twisting buttons no matter where they reside. Can't have this anti-social behavior, can we? He's released to the rest-and-relaxation of unemployment, eventually to be arrested as a Communist. Paulette Goddard as a starving gamin becomes his comrade in loving arms against an overmechanized world. Only Chaplin could both satirize their kitschy dreams and have them walk off into the sunset in the most poignant Depression image ever faked.

Written by Chaplin. Photographed by Rollie Totheroh, Ira Morgan. Music composed by Chaplin. With Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Chester Conklin, Henry Bergman. (89 mins, Silent with music track, B&W, 35mm, From Roy Export)

Tuesday December 12

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Prints!

Separate Tables 7:00

Delbert Mann (U.S., 1958)

The separate parts of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, presented on stage as two one-act plays, are merged in the screen version, allowing for the interactions of an all-star cast in lieu of the play's field-day for two actors. The eponymous tables are in the dining room of a small English seaside hotel where the resident guests include a British "major" (David Niven) whose calling card is the suppleness of false memory; a despotic mother (Gladys Cooper) and her cowed daughter (Deborah Kerr); an American man of letters and liquor (Burt Lancaster); the hotel proprietress (Wendy Hiller) who ministers to his habits; and the woman from his past (Rita Hayworth) who bursts into everyone's present. The question of whether we are destined to dine at life's separate tables is variously approached and avoided by the characters using healthy portions of dialogue--a kind of stage frankness that is striking on film, where such subjects are often alluded to in black and white.

Written by Terence Rattigan, John Gay, based on the play by Rattigan. Photographed by Charles Lang, Jr. With Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Wendy Hiller, Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth. (98 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Two for the Seesaw 8:55

Robert Wise (U.S., 1962)

Two vaguely miscast actors play two vaguely outcast characters making Two for the Seesaw a rather delightfully offbeat sixties film. Shirley MacLaine's a nice Jewish girl--too nice, and to the wrong people. Her Gittel Mosca, née Moscowitz, is a would-be modern dancer who can't dance because she's busy being a doormat, an ulcer-ridden mamele for every wastrel in Greenwich Village. Robert Mitchum fell out of some film noir into a William Holden role, straight-man to a loony lover, an Omaha lawyer far from the heartland in New York City. But he's the real loony here, and watching him struggle with emotions-capital E is the more interesting for his poker face and the long shadow of the Mitchum swagger. He picks Gittel up off the floor but then he doesn't know where to put her. Bright, unrelenting psycho-dialogue and a camera that slyly pretends the screen's a stage help retain the "seesaw" effect of William Gibson's original Broadway play.

Written by Isobel Lennart, based on the play by William Gibson. Photographed by Ted McCord. With Robert Mitchum, Shirley MacLaine, Edmond Ryan, Elisabeth Fraser. (119 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Wednesday December 13

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Prints!

Thief 7:00

Michael Mann (U.S., 1980)

In a modernist noir, James Caan scores as a Chicago highline thief for whom silk shirts and fancy cars don't begin to make up for a youth lost to eleven years in Joliet. Time is of the essence in any good caper film and this one (which owes a debt to Jean-Pierre Melville of Bob le Flambeur and Le Samourai) is about time: time lost, time risked, time to steal a future before the seconds run out. Caan's Frank is a working professional safecracker (Tangerine Dream's drilling score whistles while he works). By his own admission, he's a straight guy. But like any state-raised child he's a control freak. He wants a family, he gets Tuesday Weld (in a wonderful, terse coffee shop moment they describe their lives and negotiate a love); he buys a kid. But unbeknownst to him, he also wants a dad, so he gets crime boss Robert Prosky, one of cinema's more chilling father figures; when he takes off his mask, there's Beelzebub. What you don't know, you can't control. Melville could have told Frank that.

Written by Mann, based on the book The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer. Photographed by Donald Thorin. With James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Willie Nelson, James Belushi, Robert Prosky. (122 mins, 35mm, Color, From MGM/UA Classics)

Born to Win 9:20

Ivan Passer (U.S., 1971)

It would take a Czech--specifically, Ivan Passer, director of Intimate Lighting, in his first American film--to make a comedy about New York junkies. "Been down so long it looks like up to me" could have been the theme of many a black comedy from that region. Born to Win was originally titled "Scraping Bottom," less sardonic, but which might better have prepared Americans for the film, which has been unjustly neglected. Pauline Kael wrote, "Maybe the mixture of moods (comedy and horror) frightened off the producers; they didn't open it, they just let it out. George Segal gives his most prodigious and imaginative performance as a hipster junkie who is so giddy that he really digs the hustling lower depths he inhabits. The film isn't totally satisfying, but even at its most ragged, it holds one's interest." (500l Nights at the Movies)

Written by David Scott Milton. Photographed by Jack Priestly, Richard Kratina. With George Segal, Karen Black, Paula Prentiss, Jay Fletcher. (90 mins, Color, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Thursday December 14

United Artists Tribute

Red River 7:00

Howard Hawks (U.S., 1948)

New 35mm Print!

"Red River is one of Howard Hawks' greatest works, perhaps his most profound exploration of the deeper meaning of companionship (a standard Hawks theme). In an unusual role, John Wayne plays a tyrannical cattle-baron driving his herd, and his men, on a grueling journey across Texas to Kansas. The conflict between Wayne and his more sympathetic foster son (Montgomery Clift) over matters of leadership and logistics culminates in a dramatic confrontation of Oedipal dimensions and near-epic catharsis." (Richard Hutson) "With catastrophes ranging from a tense face-off with hostile Mexicans to a terrifying stampede, this is one elating epic, full of vivid action and emotion....[The] stage-trained Montgomery Clift pulled off his rugged role with a daring combination of intensity and restraint. He's a soft-shoe gunfighter--quiet and suave, quick and alert. For Wayne, this movie was an equally daring breakthrough, toughening his boyish image into that of a leathery sage--and bringing this new persona to the edge of psychosis." (Michael Sragow, S. F. Examiner)

Written by Borden Chase, Charles Schnee, from the Saturday Evening Post story "The Chisholm Trail," by Chase. Photographed by Russell Harlan. With John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Walter Brennan, Colleen Gray, John Ireland. (133 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Paths of Glory 9:30

Stanley Kubrick (U.S., 1957)

Kubrick's anti-war film remains one of the most cool-headed assaults on cold-blooded murder ever filmed. A Korean War-era audience could take little comfort in the fact that these scenes of ritualized slaughter were set during World War I. The story, said to have been based on a true incident in the French army in 1916, traces the court-martial and execution of three soldiers chosen as scapegoats for the failure of a suicidal French infantry attack against superior German forces. A suave, uncaring Adolph Menjou and a pathologically paranoid George Macready are the generals who shield themselves from blame; Kirk Douglas is entirely convincing as the white knight who challenges their scheme. Paths of Glory is a stunning masterpiece of composition and cinematography, comparable in its beauty and pathos to the classic anti-war films such as All Quiet on the Western Front. But in its concentration on lunacy in the high command, and in its brittle cynicism, it is pure Kubrick of Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket.

Written by Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson, based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb. Photographed by George Krause. With Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready. (87 mins, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission MGM/UA Classics)

Friday December 15

United Artists Tribute

New 35mm Print!

Killer's Kiss 7:30

Stanley Kubrick (U.S., 1955)

Kubrick's second feature is an experimental film noir whose effect is to weirdly deconstruct the genre. But maybe that's "taking life too serious," in the words of the protagonist, a beaten-down boxer with a rented room and a fishtank to his name. Across the courtyard is a blonde taxi dancer whose physical demeanor is the closest thing film noir ever came to Eyes Without a Face. Somehow, in the inexplicable spaces Kubrick negotiates, and with just a few short dialogues and ambient sounds, they meet and have their lives threatened (by a jealous nightclub owner). Kubrick creates a surreal mood using obtuse flashbacks and negative film stock, fetish objects and real Manhattan locations. The boxing match is shot from as many angles as there are punches; it looks forward to a fight scene shot as a constructivist comic book, all body parts, and another actually set among body parts in a mannequin warehouse (and don't those dolls look like our heroine?). And though it seems to end where it began, in a train station, it's not over till the fat lady walks in front of our view.

Written, Photographed, Edited by Kubrick. With Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, Irene Kane. (67 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Kiss Me Deadly 8:55

Robert Aldrich (U.S., 1955)

Aldrich melted down the B detective thriller into a vision of Armageddon: Kiss Me Deadly was years ahead of its time in being so very audaciously about its time. From the opening sequence--a desperate ride through nowhere shot in glistening blacks and not much white--Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo evoke a world that is not quite recognizable, yet is frightening familiar. It is Los Angeles. The tackiness here is almost palpable, abetted by the sincerely deadpan acting of Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, a nihilistic anti-hero whose mediocrity is well met by the company he keeps. (The one sensitive character in the film is institutionalized.) The plot is played out in paranoid glances and unanswered questions; at once comic-book naive and amazingly cynical, it involves a search, not for jewels or statuettes or even drugs, but for a lead-lined box containing a small atomic bomb. Mere greed is a thing of the past. Welcome to Alphaville.

Written by A. L. Bezzerides, based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Photographed by Ernest Laszlo. With Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman, Albert Dekker, Maxine Cooper. (105 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Saturday December 16

United Artists Tribute

The Complete Uncut!

Heaven's Gate 7:00

Michael Cimino (U.S., 1980)

A rare opportunity to see the uncut version of Michael Cimino's monumental Western, a film best known for the heads that rolled following its drubbing by New York critics--or, the film that brought down a studio. (It was the subject of a book, Final Cut:Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven's Gate, by Steven Bach.) American critics tagged it as an intellectual exercise lacking characters we can "care about"; the re-edit, shorter by seventy-five minutes, further damaged its reputation. The complete film re-emerged briefly in 1983 in Europe, where reviewers were ecstatic and Heaven's Gate was re-examined as "one of the most underrated and more important American pictures of recent years" (Derek Malcolm, Guardian). If brevity is not the soul of Cimino's wit, no one disputed that the cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond was spectacular, the locations magnificent, the period detail painstaking. Set in 1890, Heaven's Gate tells of the Johnson County War in Wyoming, when cattle barons, with the more-than-tacit approval of the State, banded to systematically wipe out destitute East European immigrant farmers who were stealing cattle for food. Kris Kristofferson, as an idealistic Harvard-educated marshall, and Christopher Walken, cattlemen's henchman, line up on different sides of the battle. Cimino saw the story as "a prelude to the Twentieth Century"--already, as one character observes, it was "dangerous to be poor in this country."

Written by Cimino. Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond. With Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Isabelle Huppert. (225 mins, Color, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Sunday December 17

United Artists/Chaplin

A Woman of Paris 5:30

Charles Chaplin (U.S., 1923)

This drama of desire and loss is a masterpiece of naturalism in glamorous trappings: "the beauty--the sadness--the touches--the gaiety, all of which are necessary to make life interesting" (Chaplin). It galvanized directors like Eisenstein, Clair, and Lubitsch (its clearest heir), then it disappeared for some fifty years after Chaplin pulled it from distribution. Edna Purviance and Adolphe Menjou star in the story of a French country girl who moves to Paris and becomes the mistress of a wealthy and sophisticated playboy. Skating the perils of falsehearted friends and the magnetism of an elusive love, Purviance is perfection in conveying how far Marie has come in the course of one year from the parental abode in which she was literally imprisoned; and yet how much like a prison expensive chocolates, satin sheets, and sexual desire can be. Menjou was never more subtle and natural than as the peripatetic aristocrat who has Marie's number, and calls it. Chaplin can't resist being funny; his cynicism here is marvelously indirect even when it brings about a woeful climax.

Written by Chaplin. Photographed by Rollie Totheroh, Jack Wilson. Music composed by Chaplin in 1976. With Edna Purviance, Adolphe Menjou, Carl Miller, Lydia Knott. (85 mins, Silent with music track, B&W, 35mm, From Roy Export)

The Great Dictator 7:10

Charles Chaplin (U.S., 1940)

The Great Dictator was an absurd, improbable attempt to undermine fascism with comedy--to reach hearts and minds through belly laughs. Today, Charlie's rendition of Adenoid Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, and the Jewish barber who doesn't know an Aryan from a vegetarian, but who quickly learns, seems like one of the most honest films of the era, paying close attention to the persecution of the Jews and pinpointing, in its faux-naive fashion, the banality of evil. Variety's review in 1940 indicates the passions placed on this little picture that wanted to change the world: "No event in the history of the screen has ever been anticipated with more hopeful excitement than the premiere of this film...no picture has promised more momentous consequences. The prospect of little `Charlot'...directing his superlative talent for ridicule against the most dangerously evil man alive has loomed as a titanic jest, a transcendent paradox. And the happy report this morning is that it...turns out to be a truly superb accomplishment...and, from one point of view, perhaps the most significant film ever produced."

Written by Chaplin. Photographed by Karl Struss, Rollie Totheroh. Music composed by Chaplin. With Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner. (128 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Roy Export)

Movie Image in Berkeley generously has provided videotapes for our research.

PFA closes for the winter break and will reopen January 4.

COMING ATTRACTIONS!!

In January PFA celebrates its 25th Anniversary with these special programs and events:

*The museum`s Cine-Ball, January 27

*A Retrospective Tribute to William K. Everson

*The first complete U.S. retrospective of the films of Asta Nielsen

*Dennis James and Amy Crocker performance of an original score for The House on Trubnaya Square

*The Magic Lantern, presented by David Francis, Head of the Motion Picture Division of The Library of Congress

*Jean-Pierre Gorin lecture on Chris Marker

*Remembering the Kawakitas, Ambassadors of Japanese Cinema

*Selections from PFA`s Avant-Garde Film Preservation Program