To Film Calandar by date, with links to full film notes
November 2, 4, 9, 11, 18, 25. Daniel Schmid in person on November 4 at the U.S. Premiere of his latest film The Written Face, and on Thursday, November 9. PFA welcomes the eminent European director Daniel Schmid for a series of 12 films, many of which will be shown for the first time in the Bay Area. A friend of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and of Fassbinder's former wife Ingrid Caven, Schmid, a Swiss citizen, is often associated with the New German Cinema movement. Themes of art and artifice, desire as a projection onto the beloved, and the mysteries of memory are offered on screen in Schmid's beautiful, witty, and baroque films.Schmid's newest film, The Written Face, premiering on November 4, is a vision of Japanese performing traditions. It features Tamasaburo Bando, a distinguished Kabuki theater actor who plays women's roles; actress Haruko Sugimura, who worked with the great film directors Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse; and celebrated geisha dancer Han Takehara. The series includes two films that have delighted local audiences int the past: Tosca's Kiss (a delightful film starring the denizens of Casa Verdi, a retirement home for former opera stars) and Off-Season (a magical evocation of anecdotes and memories from Schmid's childhood in a Swiss resort hotel). La Paloma stars Ingrid Caven as a tubercular songstress in a romantic, creepy send-up of Tosca and Camille. (Schmid also directs opera productions; his next project is a filmed opera, with libretto by Berkeley novelist and screenwriter Barry Gifford, and score by celebrated Japanese film composer Toru Takemitsu.) The Schmid-Fassbinder connection is demonstrated on November 25, at a screening of Fassbinder's wonderful film The Merchant of Four Seasons, in which Schmid plays a small role; and Shadow of Angels, Schmid's film interpretation of a controversial Fassbinder play, The Garbage, the City, and Death. In Violanta, a woman judge confronts the ghosts of her past passions; Hecate centers on a beautiful, very mysterious woman (played by Lauren Hutton) who entrances the European colony in 1930s Morocco. (Schmid has said, " I don't like movies without women", and has quoted Betty Davis as saying "Beauty, Mystery and Suspense, that what it's all about." Jenatsch is concerned with mental time travel; it tells of a present-day journalist who falls into the past through his interest in the mysterious murder of a 17th-century political hero. PFA's retrospective also includes several notable shorter films, including Notre Dame de la Croisette, set at the Cannes Film Festival and starring Bulle Ogier; and Do Everything in the Dark in Order to Save Your Master's Light, a fictional documentary about the last European school for servants.
Premiere Revival! December 7, 8, and 9. Presented in memory of Jerry Garcia, whose generosity and kindness resulted in a beautiful new 35mm cinemascope print that was struck in Europe, and now resides in the PFA collection. The Saragossa Manuscript is a delightful fantasy, a classic Eastern European film that was an audience favorite after its 1964 release, but has long been unavailable. PFA's new print was recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival; Jason Vincz, writing in the Village Voice, called it a "gorgeous, sensual and absurdly hilarious film,...narrated with a mind-bending spiral of couched recollections--a character starts telling a story, then a character in that story starts his own tale, and so on..." The film was directed by Wojciech Has, and based on the 1813 writings of Jan Potocki (1761-1815). The first complete English translation of this book, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, has just been published by Viking. Reviewer Andre Alexis comments: "This edition...now takes its rightful place with the highest accomplishments in the novel of (eccentric) ideas: Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Tristam Shandy, and Jacques le Fataliste." The Saragossa Manuscript recounts the strange journey of a 17th-century army captain in the wild Sierra Morena region of Spain. The captain and his fellow travelers encounter phantoms, spirits, dreamlike maidens, gypsies, and more; they also recount the sagas of other adventures in their lives, leading to a dizzying and delightful series of stories within stories within stories.
Thanksgiving Weekend: 1 pm and 2:30 pm on Saturday, November 25 and Sunday, November 26. PFA invites Bay Area children to bring their favorite stuffed animals for the annual Teddy Bear Parade and Film Festival. This year's event offers animated and live-action films (recommended for all ages) about teddy bears, koalas, and other delightful animals. Before the films, the children and their toy animals will parade through the theater to the tune of The Teddy Bears' Picnic; after the films, there will be a free balloon for each child.
December 1. PFA pays tribute to a talented filmmaker and a friend of the Archive, Warren Sonbert, who died of complications associated with AIDS on May 31, by screening two of Sonbert's films, Noblesse Oblige and Short Fuse, along with Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, one of many Hollywood films Sonbert curated and introduced at PFA.
Premiere Screenings of a new, restored 35mm of CROSSROADS by Bruce Conner, plus Conner's newest film, TELEVISION ASSASSINATION. Bruce Conner in person. November 21. PFA is happy to unveil an important preservation project: Crossroads (1976) is a beautiful, evocative film created by Conner from military footage shot by some 500 cameras on boats, planes, and land on July 25th, 1946, when the first underwater atomic bomb was tested at Bikini Atoll. It creates an unforgettable mood through its powerful image sequences and its wonderful score, composed by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley. Television Assassination (1963-95), contains images--of Lee Harvey Oswald, the view from the window of the Texas School Book Depository, the Kennedy Motorcade, the Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery--that Conner filmed from a tv screen in 1963 and '64 and now uses as the basis of his newest film. The screening also includes a selection of short films by Conner, including The White Rose, featuring Jay DeFeo's monumental painting; Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, and Ten Second Film. The S F Cinematheque presents Television Assassination and a selection of Conner's film at the AMC Kabuki 8 Cinemas on November 19.
November 3, 10, 17, 22, 24, 30;
December 2, 10, and 12 through 17. With a selection of favorite
noirs, Westerns and Charlie Chaplin masterpieces presented in new, 35mm
prints, the Archive honors 75 years of United Artists, which was founded in
1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford.
Among the highlights are
Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, The Great
Dictator, City Lights, and Modern Times; Westerns--Anthony
Mann's Man of the West, Howard Hawks's Red River, Sam Peckinpah's
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Michael Cimino's full-length
cut (longer by some 75 minutes) of Heaven's Gate; the Gore
Vidal-scripted political thriller The Best Man; and fabulous
noirs, including Kiss Me Deadly,
Stanley Kubrick's Killer's
Kiss, Joseph Losey's The Big Night, Cornel Wilde's Storm
Fear, and Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter.
James Benning, November 14, with his newest film, Deseret, a beautiful and startling view of the mountains and deserts of Utah, seen with voice-over narration drawn from hundreds of newspaper stories about the history of the Mormons. Video artist Tony Labat with selected tapes on November 15. Russian video journalists Iakov Poselski and Natalia Kosinets with startling views of life and crime in the new Russia, including I Murder for Apartments and Moscow Fags. Eric Rentschler of U C Irvine, an authority on German cinema, introduces rare silent films in the November 12 program of the PFA series Before Caligari: German Films, 1911-1919. Local super-8mm filmmakers silt (Keith Evans, Christian Farrel and Jeff Warrin) with a multi-projector and sound performance; Janis Crystal Lipzin with Seasonal Forces--A Sonoma County Almanac, and Harun Farocki with The Workers Leaving the Factory -- all on December 5.