SFIAAFF 2010: Preview, Like You Know It All

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Nothing mundane
For whatever reason, be it school or myopia or plain ignorance, I've not attended any of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festivals prior to this year. However, now that I'm here, and was kindly invited, and now that I'm more "knowledgeable," or appropriately curious, I'm greatly looking forward to next week's run of films. Actually, it starts this week, this Thursday, at the Castro as always, with a film starring Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi called Today's Special.

But for me the festival starts Friday. I'll be seeing the Thai film, Agrarian Utopia, which festival director Chi-Hui Yang spotlit as one not to miss. Its title says a lot, I worry, but I'm told it lives past that pegging through a unique visual style attuned to mud and snakes as much as trees and humans. Chi-Hui even called it part of the Apitchatpong school as a way of short hand. Also under that umbrella is Mundane History, which I plan to see Sunday night. It's too bad both of these films have such jejune titles. Hopefully I can talk about more than that when I see them.

Yet more exciting is the minor Lino Brocka retrospective. Four films will be shown, starting with Insiang, which Noel Vera claims is a masterpiece, an inversion of what we ought to teach our children; that is, a survival guide premised on moral wrongs not rights. Part of my interest, no doubt, is pure cinephilia, but I will cop to also wanting, plainly, to see what the Philippines looked liked in 1976. That's always an interest in foreign cinema, but rare artifacts like these seem to push that interest to the fore. (This is also true of stuff like the Thai films mentioned above.) I know this borders on exoticism, and tourism, but I'm okay with that; it's not, after all, anything but curiosity. So I hope to learn some other things about that world when I see You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting (1974, a broad-canvas melodrama; perhaps an opposite to Insiang), Bayan Ko: My Own Country (1985, the film that prompted the Marcos regime to revoke Brocka's citizenship) and Manila in the Claws of Neon (1975, a defining Filipino neo-noir) through the week.

The final curiosities I've earmarked are a pair of shorts programs. The first I'll get to see is called Memory Vessels and Phantom Traces, which pulls together a video about a boat, a little film that reappropriates propaganda films from the Vietnam war to talk history and historicity, and a little five minute landscape film about an Indian salt flat. Should be pretty, and quiet. The other program, called What We Talk About When We... is kind of a who's who of the festival circuit's Asian contingent: Joe's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (which I wrote about here), Tsai Ming-Liang's Madame Butterfly (which Danny saw at Rotterdam), Jia's Cry Me A River (which I've been wanting to see since it debuted at Cannes) and Hong Sang-soo's Lost in the Mountains (which I'm sure will be funny and deadpan and bifurcated, even if smaller than normal).

—You don't know nothing
As it happens, I had the pleasure of seeing one of the festival's other films by Hong, his newest feature, Like You Know It All, on a screener. It's just the third Hong feature I've seen (or maybe second and change), after Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000; thanks to Brian) and the first half of the first half of Woman is the Future of Man (2004; which I've reacquired for reacquaintance). And it made me think like it was actually the first one I've seen. In fact, I barely remember Virgin, and Woman is the Future is hazy at best. What I can say is that this new one feels wildly different despite obvious consistencies such as the doubling/mirroring and the surrogate/stand-in protagonist.

Like You Know It All isn't a knee-slapper by any stretch, but it seems funnier than those other two I've seen (if equally deadpan), and some of the jokes come from the style. He's using a zoom now, not just a tripod, and many scenes are bookended by not-quite pillow shots where the image jerks from its putative subject to reorient and reframe the surroundings. Sometimes this is just a simple whip-pan to a window. Others, it's like he's trying to find a postcard image. I'd call it sloppy if it weren't so intentional. It makes the film more buoyant, for sure, and helps skip over that ugly rape narrative in troubling ways (you're laughing to not look back), and it sets up the final scene on the beach, with its wayward idiots going in opposite directions, to show just how fickle people (and the world) can be. Which is all to say go see it; it plays three times at the festival.

There's not much more to say, I don't think, but there is a movie there—a real film—complete with a dream sequence worthy of late Buñuel and all kinds of self-flagellation. I can say that: Hong never lets himself off the hook. Like any good, suffering type he knows his own hypocrisy and how to poke at it while simultaneously inflating himself. I'm guessing this is consistent based on everything I've heard or read so I'm curious to see one that people think is a masterpiece to suss out why. Case in point: 2008's Night and Day, which Danny says is pretty close to perfect. I'll have to report back on that, but maybe it has something to do with the move outside of Korea? Unsure, but okay—and piqued, of course.

Lastly, there's three other "banner" inclusions. The most famous and controversial (maybe of the festival?) is City of Life and Death, which will have a rare US screening, and is sure to make me cringe, or so I've been lead to believe. Less famous, I guess, is Raya Martin's Independencia, which actually played at Cannes last year, and which looks beautiful. Unfortunately it only plays twice and I'm going to miss the first showing this Friday (because I'll be at Ben Russell's film at YBCA), so I hope to squeeze it in between a showing of The Housemaid (1960, Korean, free to see on The Auteurs if you want to deny yourself a theatrical screening) at the Castro and Mundane History back up at the Kabuki on what's stacking up as a packed Sunday this weekend. For that matter, it'll be a packed week. Should be fun. Stay tuned.

Quick Plug: Medicine for Melancholy

by Ryland Walker Knight

Last Thursday I had the pleasure, first, to finally see Barry Jenkins' debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, and, second, to meet Barry briefly alongside the film's star (also a Daily Show correspondent), Wyatt Cenac. They proved as affable as their film and it came as no shock that Barry named three lady filmmakers as his favorites, whose influence one can trace in his work: VINYL-favorites Claire Denis and Lynne Ramsay as well as another we here would like to know more about (that is, we would like to see something), but have not yet encountered, Lucrecia Martel. And while I've not seen a Martel film, if pressed I would say that what ties these three filmmakers is their interest in the cinema of sensations, or impressions, built from oblique (yet discrete) moments. There is a delicious passage in Medicine for Melancholy where our leads, Cenac's Micah and Tracey Heggins' Jo, jump aboard a carrousel that can easily be seen (for all its yummy and tender singularity) as bearing a certain tradition's stamp. However, this film's image, made with digital cameras fronted by "old" SLR lenses and pushed in post towards a sepia hue, tends to bleed light in a way more akin to what Jia Zhang-Ke and Yu Lik-wai capture with their kino-eyes. And, like Jia's films, Barry's is definitely about witnessing a space (here San Francisco instead of, say, the World Park) and how its angles and complexities play out in both the private and public spheres, and what's available in both those arenas. Medicine builds into this project an often-angry portrait of how unwelcoming the upper-middle-class skew of San Francisco's demographic can be to its marginal residents, and specifically how one young black guy can't shake his anxieties during what has to be one of the most blissfully ignorant 24 hours of his young life.

It's a love story, see? Only, not so much one of those everlasting kind of things. More like one of those, "This is a one night stand," she says, kind of things. It's about naive assumptions, about willful ignorance to look beyond your lap, about youthful indiscretions many of us have indulged for better or (more likely) worse. It's a really lovely thing to watch. Especially since its vision of young San Francisco is shockingly similar to the one I recently left behind. For instance, Micah and Jo go dancing at the Knockout where we see the guys behind Elbo Room's Saturday Soul Night spinning 45's. (For the record: Barry confirmed in the post-screening Q'n'A that these dudes were spinning their usuals but for the sake of consistency he scored the dancing to "indie stuff"...)

The film opened yesterday at the IFC Center here in NYC with plans to roll out across the country, which you can check up with at this website. So go see it. It may not be earth-shattering but it's easily a lovely, thorny letter to a city I miss and a lot of its often-annoying problems, including but not limited to the consistent shunting of any people of color. I'd love to say more, and dig in, but plenty have already so for more reviews, consult the guru Hudson right here. I just felt good that night so, well, I thought I'd repay the favor and say, Thanks, one more time. I hope all you VINYL readers in the Bay who have yet to see the film (that is, I know Michael was hip before us all) will track it down. I'd love to hear what you have to say. If anything, it'll make you smile with pride that Micha's right: San Francisco is beautiful, and you shouldn't (in fact you do not) have to have money to enjoy that. Here's the tasty trailer:

A gallery of refusal: Xiao Wu

by Ryland Walker Knight

An accomplished if ragged debut, Jia’s first feature, Xiao Wu (or Pickpocket), itches around restless, looking for things—an escape, maybe—with its eyes cocked at and always reigned in by the repeated traps of the social.

Today marks my first contribution to The Auteurs Notebook, which you can continue reading by clicking right here. It's a little ditty about Jia Zhangke's debut feature, Xiao Wu, which I saw at the PFA last week. I'll be seeing his 2007 documentary, Useless, tonight at 6:30pm.

VINYL IS PODCAST #2: Future calendar highlights, with Brian Darr.

by Ryland Walker Knight and Mark Haslam

RWK here. This episode: we're joined by local hero and blogging buddy Brian Darr, of Hell on Frisco Bay, to talk the upcoming rep calendar. Of course, any talk about movies, especially a talk meant to cover so much, will spill over into other topics and other films other than the films and film series at hand. We even divert into a talk about Cut Copy and their upcoming, sold-out show in San Francisco on Sunday, October 5th, as well as Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke, among other things, including my trip to Telluride, again, of course. Speaking of: a big apology to Howie Movshovitz, one of the real cool pair of moderators/hosts for our Student Symposium (the other: Linda Williams), whose name I totally blanked on during our recording session. If you make it that far, you'll hear me grasping, failing, griping -- and coming up with Harvey. The reason I didn't follow Brian's "on air" advice and splice in some kind of edit correction is because I just want to let the tape run. As I say at one point, this is not planned. I like it that way. I did a better job of projecting my voice this week, I think, which might make it easier to listen to, but I still dig how un-NPR we are on these experiments. Thanks for indulging us. We're still trying to make this mic work, but it's tough. I've got a (pretty cheap) directional mic so it really needs you to talk at it -- it doesn't record the space of the room all that well -- and, as is natural, Brian and Mark turned towards me to talk, to perform our conversation, so their voices are a little lower than mine in the mix. So turn it up.

Once again, we've got some dance music to introduce and end the episode, and you can grab it here. Yes, it's Cut Copy. Oh, you want a link to the podcast itself? Well, you can click this link to load iTunes and subscribe there or you can click this link to find our podomatic page or you can click this link to download the file directly from podomatic or you can click this link to subscribe to the RSS feed. The choice is yours. And, of course, please tell us things in the comments. If you're in the Bay, tell us what you're most interested in, what we may have forgotten. For one, I know there's a certain en vogue auteur we didn't talk about that will be exhibited in San Francisco in October. Do you know who? Where? When, exactly?

Since this episode is about twice as long as the previous one, and I always appreciate Rob's breakdowns, here's some minute markers for our rambling talk:

• 0:00 - 7:00: Intro, Jia Zhangke.
  
• 7:01 - 9:45: Envisioning Russia.
  
• 9:46 - 11:11: Manoel de Oliveira.
  
• 11:12 - 12:12: David Lean at PFA and The Castro (Lean Sundays in October), even a mention of Film Forum.
  
• 12:13 - 17:05: Godard in the 60s and Jean Eustache and Cut Copy.
  
• 17:06 - 18:36: The recent Milos Forman series that Brian enjoyed and wanted to highlight, if briefly.
  
• 18:37 - 20:08: Ning Ying's residence at PFA and the current BAM exhibit Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection.
  
• 20:09 - 24:30: The current Alternative Visions line up of Avant-Garde Cinema, which will feature the Bay Area premiere of RR, which has Brian and me excited given James Benning's reputation and the words from Toronto, like those of Darren Hughes.
  
• 24:31 - 30:00: Running down the current Castro line up with a diversion to allow us some time to talk about this brand of cinephilia that privileges theatrical screenings over home screenings. We pick up a thread of last week, too, to talk about audience reactions, which then leads to some brief thoughts about Burn After Reading and a few trailers: W. (that's not the version we saw) and Milk.
  
• 30:01 - 38:45: The talk of those trailers spills into talk about Gus Van Sant and Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke and James Franco. Here's that Reverse Shot issue I mention; here's Michael Koresky on Psycho, and mine on Cowgirls. BTW: Milk will premiere at The Castro on November 26th.
  
• 38:46 - 40:50: Lola Montez revival at the Castro.
  
• 40:51 - 44:50: The Mill Valley Film Festival, including talk of the tributes to Harriet Anderson and Paul Schrader and Happy-Go-Lucky and Kelly Reichardt.
  
• 44:51 - end: Goodbyes and some parting Cut Copy.
  

Post-punk, mainland style. Jia Zhangke retro at PFA.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke begins tonight at PFA with a screening of Still Life at 6:30 followed by Dong, with the short Our Ten Years, at 8:45. I'm new to Jia, but I love me some Joy Division (see sidebar), so the first things that popped to mind when I first heard of this Chinese auteur are those Manchester post-punks, which makes the series' title that much cooler. Spread over a month of screenings, the PFA will exhibit all Jia's features from Xiao Wu (Sept 18) through Useless (Sept 26). Plenty has already been written about Jia across the interwebs but, to drum up tonight a little more, here's a list of Still Life reviews, collected by Michael Guillen. As is my practice, I've not read much but cursory notes about why Jia is important (I've got my cocktail party knowledge), so this will be another learning experience. What I do know, and what intrigues me, is his interest in documentary fiction (I feel there should be a slash or an n-dash in between those terms, like, always) and digital (a recent turn in his work), both pet obsessions of mine ever since Pedro Costa rocked my world earlier this year. That, and I'm excited all my missed opportunities with Still Life's recent run will be absolved, and I hear he's into performance as well. I'll have to wait until October to see Unknown Pleasures (3rd) and The World (8th) and Platform (15th) on that big screen but I trust tonight's double bill will get me jazzed and primed. And, failing a trip to the art house, all three are available on Netflix. His Beijing Film Academy thesis film, Xiao Shan Going Home is not readily available for home viewing (for most viewing), and its Bay Area premiere will be accompanied by the short In Public on September 19th.

For more, read Hoberman (and again), Andrew Chan, Michael Koresky, Zach Campbell, Kevin Lee, Girish and pore over Harry Tuttle's links at Unspoken Cinema. I'll try to add to this conversation as the month progresses. [Pix stolen from all over.]