Mark me down for a deuce

by Ryland Walker Knight

Though in 2010 I largely strayed from the eat-everything cinephilia that drove a lot of my last decade (as I mentioned here), which makes me fear I'll be outpaced in this little group of us doing the Out of The Past series, I still saw a number of good, older flicks in the past twelve months. You can read my five that mattered most in The Notebook here. It's probably predictable given this, but there's more meat in it.

I should also take the time, here, since I'm up so early, to note my participation in the year-end Fantasy Double Bills, which I'm very happy Danny and I brainstormed last year, and continued this year. We both had a hard time picking this year (for very different reasons) and I love the fact that Danny, closing things out, took such license to not limit himself, to disobey his own rules. His picks are great. I kept mine pretty simple, to be fair, and only divulged one bill. Earlier, in December, Martha'd talked about pairing I Am Love with The Last Picture Show, but I guess time got away from her; in any case I didn't want to "steal" that one. So I wrote about some other forms of love. The kinds on the side of that word associated with mania, I guess, because I find them funnier. I also like the Resnais a lot more than that Tilda zig-zag (though I do love that one, too) and I hadn't written enough on why, though it could be simplified to my preference to favor (not that I always do) the ludicrously hilarious, not the ludicrously affective.

Top to bottom, I liked all the pairs, really, but there were of course stand-outs. Miriam's up top definitely stood apart beyond its placement in the scroll for its audacious pairing—and, it should be noted, her likely-unnecessary, more-than-welcome defense, which invokes Stanley Cavell a little further, is a good thing to read. My other favorite pairing, probably, was R. Emmet Sweeney's, though I've seen neither of the films he chose, because it does what my favorite criticism does: not only does he make connections, elucidating significance, but more importantly his note makes me want to see the movies. Along these lines, I have to thank David Ehrenst​ein for the comments he left, alerting me, non-scholar that I am, to Warren Sonbert and his lasting imprint on collage-like cinema that interests me so. Unimportant declaration: I'll make a mission of seeing his films in 20!! as I largely forgot such missions through most of 2010. Not sure how it'll happen, with my day job and my new image-making projects I'm throwing myself into, but with the help of a friend like Brian Darr—one of the truest cinephiles I've ever had the pleasure to meet and eat pizza with—I'll have a leg up for sure. In any event, please do follow those links! The internet's a wicked game, prone to circled wagon spats, but it's also full of good things.

Oh, and read Steve's 2010 wrap-up at The House why don't you. I'm biased, of course, but there's a unique take, a real individual, a jaunty run-through everybody'd do well to enjoy and not fight with, as many may well attempt.

Alain à la recherche #9SFIFF53 #6: Folles

by Ryland Walker Knight

i.



—See cyan slathers so ciel

ii.







iii.

—So stolen, so soaring

iv.

—So wild, yes please

v.







vi.

—Spit sardine cellophane

vii.


—Not a memory, not a dream, but both, maybe?

Viewing Log #45: Climb out, come on [5/10/10 - 5/16/10]

by Ryland Walker Knight

Didn't keep a log this week, to be perfectly honest, though I did watch a number of things of varying stripes. Didn't finish all of them, watched only pieces of some, and all because I was plumb worn out from some viral crazy weight that fell onto my head and heart sometime last weekend but didn't really register until early Monday when I could barely move a muscle. Which is a long sentence to say I was sick all week. But you may have gathered that if you follow my twitter or read that diary-like tumblr I reactivated a short time ago. To give a quick gloss, I watched a bunch of comedies to try to cheer me up and I kept at the Agnes Varda despite the haze (more on her to come). I even looked at the Martel movies again, Michael, in an abortive attempt to jog my brain that only lead me to fall asleep. That was a big problem with finishing movies this week: falling asleep. When the body needs rest, you must oblige it. The body is smart, complex, obnoxious in its stubborn patterns and wills and manifestations of improper treatment. And the brain cannot function without it! Go figure! So here's some images from the week that caught my eye enough for me to hit "pause" and "snapshot" in succession. This, of course, limits me to things viewed on my laptop and eschews a lot of the hilarious television I watched. In any case, here's to a better seven days to start tomorrow.
i.


—Like gravity

ii.


—Point at it

iii.

—Sometimes you gotta

iv.

—Sometimes you oughta

v.


—Not like this

Convergence for birthday complexities (5/5/10)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Being alive is knotty! But it keeps happening!

Viewing Log #43, SFIFF53 #4: The word happy is sad [4/26/10 - 5/2/10]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Hey ladies!

• Cyrus [Duplass Brothers, 2010] I laughed my butts off and thought all the zooms actually served a purpose in the general uncomfortable zone of these dudes' idea of comedy: one premised on miscommunication and lies and making people squirm. Jonah Hill does deadpan better than most, and maybe better than "wacky" (though his "wacky" in Superbad is pretty great); Marisa Tomei is a babe, still, and this wows me along with every other drooly idiot boy in the audience; guess that's the point, too, since John C Reilly's all wide eyes and goofy "Love! Me!" freak outs most of the way. I'd say see it in theatres if only because that'll probably mean you'll see it with a crowd and being drunk in a crowd of similarly inebriated, jazzed young people definitely added to my pleasure.
  
• I Am Love [Luca Guadagnino, 2009] In one light (the wrong one, duh), this is the silliest movie ever. But in the right light, it's one of the most beautiful: everything baroque expression, an all-caps film brimming with canted angles and swoons and tilts and a score to die for all around Tilda's face. As much a film of affect as INLAND EMPIRE, but to practically opposite ends, with damn near opposite means. That is, both filmmakers score their images to sound how they look but Lynch makes mud cakes with a grin while Guadagnino crafts gourmet plates for twenty with tears. Put otherwise, all the images drip and some rack focus fast and everything's lit to look delicious. I can't wait to see it again. Wish I could see it with a Vitti (or a Tilda, hell) wrapped around me, fingers locked. I'll likely write a real essay when it comes out in wide release.
  
• Senso [Luchino Visconti, 1954] I made a joke on twitter about how I was bored, then I qualified that with a (still-reductive) explanation that I did like the opening—I'm a sucker for stages, and audiences—and the abruptness of the ending, but otherwise I didn't need it or its tableaux of "hurt" or all that "hysteria." And, call me crazy, but I go crazy watching those mouths move out of synch with the soundtrack. Further: the colors are nice, no doubt, but the restoration, which seemed muddied in spots, paled in comparison with the Ray from the day before, which was crisp like new. Could be a print traffic thing, but it seemed more like a print striking thing.
  
  
• To Die Like a Man [João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009] A real film. Maybe not as great as I want it to be, and surely hard to handle in a lot of spots, but boy does it have style. At the Q+A, Rodrigues said he wanted to structure it as a musical comedy but that it was also inspired by Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma!, which you can sense looking at this scene, but, to be fair, Rodrigues doesn't film any clouds the way Walsh does. What he does film, though, he films especially well. And we all know I'm a sucker for films about performance, and acting, and acting in the world in whatever determination that takes.
  
• The Music Room [Satyajit Ray, 1958] Caveat: got no sleep because of an airport run, so I dozed a few times. The restoration was beautiful. The film's craft was, too. But I tell you what: I'm kind of done with hubris. Doesn't feel tragic.
  
  
• Wild Grass [Alain Resnais, 2009] # At home, looking for images. Image-essay likely coming.
  
  
• White Material [Claire Denis, 2009] Didn't want to believe my buddies who'd seen it previously but, well, yes: this is not her finest two hours. Still ratcheted tight, and a few edits are jarring in the best ways, and murder by machete in any iteration is always terrifying, brutal, gross. Wish there were more ideas, and a better screenplay, but as it is there's just one and a kind of tired narrative structure. The filmmaking structure, however, proves its worth in its angles at end points and the camera's near hush. Every image seems stolen, as if they lucked out every time they turned the camera on and pointed it at things or didn't. The problem, though, with everything pointed inwards, is that it kind of cancels itself, proves its own null. I don't need Claire Denis to tell me about this kind of cesspool.
  
• Wild Grass [Alain Resnais, 2009] Had me from the get-go all the way up and down and around its folles follies to that finale that loops and dips and scans and pushes and soars and zooms and just feels great all inside my body and my brain. Danny was right: maybe the most generous. Dense, as ever, and "typically French," as many numbskulls said walking out, but I see those things as positives. Mileage varies, sure, but when you're flying you cover so much ground!
  
  
• Cold Weather [Aaron Katz, 2010] So much fun. Somehow didn't expect it to be plain entertaining, but it was, and I really had a fun time with it. Since Aaron's a friendly acquaintance, I know I'm a little biased, but I don't think that fraternal thing is necessarily a part of what I dug. More so I loved that it wanted to be, and rightly is, a comedy at heart. Cris Lankenau and Trieste Kelly Dunn really play off one another well, seem to have fun in every scene (even the deadpan, annoyed ones), and I bet a lot of siblings will enjoy seeing this together. Also, Brendan was pretty funny in his cameo. I hope everybody involved gets a spring board off this project.
  
• Father of My Children [Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009] What a lovely little film. Shows a family resemblance to plenty of her country's best, including Pialat (elisions, candor) and Doillon (children and their brains), though her interest in ladies and the importance of being a lady dealing with the weight of men, even as ghosts, is distinctive and maybe even singular. I'll see it again and I'll see her first and I'll write more.

—Drive, die

SFIFF53 #1: Waiting for the lights

by Ryland Walker Knight

Next week, as I'm sure you know by now, the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival commences. There will be a big Opening Night at the Castro, where Jean-Pierre Jeunet's latest, Micmacs, will play and probably delight a lot of the audience. It's fine, it's cute, it's what you expect from the guy behind Amélie: it's absurdly "sweet" despite its revenge hijinks. Even I walked out of it smiling, surprised at least in part by its delicious final shot, which felt like the most natural thing in the picture, a literal bit of animation that signals exactly what this director should be doing: making real cartoons, not just a bunch of goofy faces. But, hey, the grey hairs will love it. You know the type, the kind who think "French cinema" is a genre.

In any case, there's a slew of other French flicks on hand (as soon as the next day, even) at the festival this year to prove that, as one of the three great national cinemas, those frogs contain multitudes, too. And, of course, the two films I'm most excited to see on a big screen—on film!—are French: Jacques Rivette's 36 vues du Pic St. Loup (or Around a Small Mountain), which is sublime and deft and smart, and Alain Resnais' Wild Grass, which I've been waiting to see, despite certain avenues open to me, since Danny wrote that bit of rapture from Cannes last year. Since SFIFF is basically the end of the line in terms of festival tours, many words have already been spilt on this pair, but I'm going to go for it all over again, so keep an eye out for that. Then there's other Frenchies to watch out for, including: a new Claire Denis (always anticipated over here) starring Huppert, some young lady's movie about some dad, that rescue job about a failed swan song, a Bruno Dumont, a Eugene Green (he counts, right?), a Sylvie Testud, a Gainsbourg biopic. Yet, stamp be damned, there's other countries making movies to attend. It's an international festival after all.

Mexico's Alamar is quite nice, and quiet, and a real pleasure. It's about three generations fishing together, primarily, and I don't want to say much more about it other than you'll get a better familial vibe in this one than Micmacs, but that's not saying much either. And the picture that Roger Ebert's highlighting at his event, Julia, takes place in part in Mexico, despite starring that British wonder woman, Tilda Swinton, as an American. There's borderlines of all kinds in that film, which I love, and am tempted to see again on film instead of on Netflix Watch Instantly. More exciting, though, is the screening of I Am Love, which boasts one of the best trailers I've seen in recent years, which I've watched approximately fifteen times. If you haven't watched it (if I haven't forced it on you yet), I'm embedding it below.

[You can also watch it in even higher quality over here.]
I love this thing for a few reasons. First of all, I love Tilda Swinton. Next, I like a lot of the images, with all those colors and all those hesitations, but I also like the words chosen to let through, like "fabbrica" and that little speech Waris Ahluwalia gives to close the spot. The close, too—and the clothes—that rush of multiple zooms—is a thrill—and scored so well, as is the whole spot. I also like stories about temptation, and lust's complication of love, as much as I love stories simply about love. And a Vertigo shout out? Sure hope the movie lives up to my anticipation. To say the least.

Moving along, but sticking with the editing theme, the one Live & Onstage event that really has me excited is the Walter Murch "State of Cinema" afternoon. Murch is a smart man and I've never seen him talk, though I hear he's been talking around the Bay a lot of late, so I may stop by that to hear what this once-pioneer sees in a "prehistory" of cinema of his own design/imagination. Maybe he'll have some things to say about the current festival, too, and where he sees good form. Hell, maybe he's seen the Rivette and he can say something about what it's like to whittle things. Which is what I'm going to do to this preview post right now.

The point is the festival is practically upon me and us and it should be fun, full of great films I'm happy to finally see after skimming so many articles and closely reading a few others. If anything, it'll be worth it for those New Wavers and their wacky attacks on what's cinema. Is is all a show? Does it need an audience? Is it the neon haze from the marquee carried inside and glossed onto the screen? Is it clownish? Is it creepy? Can I see it all?

—Hang time
Last year, my pal Mark Haslam was still living and teaching in California and he covered SFIFF52. You can click here to read what he wrote. This year, now that I'm back home after a wild ride around the country in 2009, I'm happy to have my credentials and my sanity (or some) and enough free time (or some) to follow suit. Like Mark, I'll use a catalog-count as I write my way through the festival. Unlike Mark, though, you might see some of my coverage at places other than VINYL IS HEAVY; that is, in addition to the words I write here; but more on that later. If you see some goof who looks like this walking around the festival, don't hesitate to say, "Hi," and compare notes over some coffee.

Keep it light.

by Ryland Walker Knight

After I submitted that essay on Bright Star, Ekkehard asked me to give him three things that marked my year—and they needn't be strictly cinematic. But, as this year was marked by all kinds of junk and dumps (as much as true highlights) and plenty of fear and trembling and loathing to go along with flight and dance and cheer (life felt like a real Søren leveling at times), I chose to not bore this blog world with me. Thus, I kept my miniature missive to maximum light, kept it pithy and kept it to cinema. You can read my list (and so many others!) in German by clicking here. Or you can read the English I sent to EK below:

1. Any time you get to see Playtime in 70mm is a highlight. This time, it was an unofficial introduction to my stint in New York early in 2009. I saw it at the Walter Reade Theatre with Keith Uhlich, Matt Zoller Seitz and Glenn Kenny. Then we ate yummy Italian food in Park Slope.

2. The DREYER at BAM series was an education this spring. Very happy to have met those films in that setting, that is the cinematheque over the home, and to have written something about each screening.

3. Jumping back into the PFA swing of things with an Alain Resnais series was just plain fun, from the Marienbad beginning all the way through—forwards and backwards, of course—to the end, which was a film from that often-cloudy, always-jumpy second phase in the 60s, fittingly calling an end in its title: La guerre est finie.

Viewing Log #25: Get on the bus [12/14/09 - 12/20/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

• North by Northwest [Alfred Hitchcock, 1959] # All in all, a gas. Simply one of the most fun movies of all time. And smart, too. Stanley Cavell would have you believe that this picture, by consistently referencing Hamlet, is Hitch telling you he's as good at making movies as Shakespeare was at writing plays. If you run with the idea that, as a film obsessed with performance, and whose plot spurs on from a poisoning at town's end, in a hamlet called Glen Cove, as we see "TOWNSEND" spelled on screen and pronounced "Towns-end" by Grant, then this makes sense.
  
  
• Paprika [Satoshi Kon, 2006] # Trippy and funny and scary, as ever. I still want Soft Pack to remix the opening credits song.
  
  
• Vertigo [Alfred Hitchcock, 1958] # Too bad the print was a 1996 restoration antique and some scenes were too dark. But, still, gorgeous and haunting, as ever. Danny said, "Every single shot is sad." And he's right. Jimmy-Scottie's the worst detective in the world and it shows right off the bat—he even says so!—"It's not my line..."—which makes us complicit in the worst case of not-seeing this side of Jim Crow. My entire body hurt walking out of this one this time.
  
• Avatar [James Cameron, 2009] More to come in a dedicated post both for the simple fact that it might garner some traffic and also because I thought the thing was, well, kind of awesome. And, just watch, it'll win Best Picture. [click here]
  
  
• Au hasard Balthazar [Robert Bresson, 1966] # Sometimes I feel compelled to immediately watch some Bresson after some Hitchcock. Can't explain it. But this movie rules, duh. I fell asleep almost instantaneously.
  
• Marnie [Alfred Hitchcock, 1964] # Still so frightening. That shot of Marnie's mom ill-lit atop the stairs, beckoning her to dinner, gives me shivers as she struggles back down those stairs, one shuffle-grunt at a time. The print was beautiful. [A quick hit.]
  
  
• Law of Desire [Pedro Almodovar, 1987] # Genuinely sad and maybe Pedro's best movie. I continue to find it hilarious how America never understood the real treasure that is Antonio Banderas: he's completely crazy. There's a reason Pedro kept casting him as an amor loco. He's so pretty that you believe he's dumb enough to follow his heart to such idiotic, devoted, mostly unrequited ends each and every time.
  
  
• La guerre est finie [Alain Resnais, 1966] A dead-end, all dopey with dreams of revolution long since calcified; nobody works for good, or achieves much of it. All the game's a jumble. The young bend around anarchy and the old hold tight old night moves. Yves Montand just beds babes with a frown and talks around his life, one scene using one name and then another scene plying another name, eventually slipping nearer that grave he's evaded so long. His star, his guiding light so he says, is fading with the age. [Here's the final '09 recherche.]

Alain à la recherche #8: La guerre est finie

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Riddled with overlays of misinformation and suspicions, to say projections and reflections, that act as interpolations, La guerre est finie is close to a second person narrative, calling "you" in almost every scene, putting you into Yves Montand's cluttered head of dead ends. Before all, the title is past tense: this fight is already done. What remains are fantasies, ideals, while reality continues and refuses these so-called revolutionaries. Instead, we see a rootless man (Montand), essentially homeless and process-bound—always moving, shifting—not even tied to a name. He's Carlos to start, then Domingo (Dimanche/Sunday), then Diego and back. And when he's Diego, we gather that's his Christian prenom, he's not: he lies to his wife's friends, his wife tries to lie for him, but he can't keep things straight. In fact, despite his ability to bed the too-yummy-for-words Geneviève Bujold, the film is about his fade. Everything is not in its right place. The game is up. His war has been over, he's a hanger-on, like his fat and/or stubborn comrades—a relic, even, relevant no more. But nobody will listen when he says so, when he says things should stop; he gets stopped, and then not. The halt's not halting: even in the end it's a relay, an ill-conceived gamble that we know won't work because of that dissolve to Ingrid Thulin—so desperate, trying not to run—that just hangs there. You feel the "FIN" before it emerges. After all, you felt it at the start.

Viewing Log #24: Exact xylophone xerox extract [12/7/09 - 12/13/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Multiply. Make it happen.

• Baby Mama [Michael McCullers, 2008] Sure, that was fine. I laughed enough. [Cough.]
  
• The Hurt Locker [Kathryn Bigelow, 2008] Puts other Iraq movies to shame, no doubt, and makes Jarhead in particular, despite its strong cast and factual basis, feel all the more counterfeit. For one, it's an actual action film: its subject is action and action, here, dictates character. Pathologies dominate, but it's not a psychological film—we only see surfaces, and our visibility is poor. Still not sure if the film deserves all of its accolades since its tertiary characters and subplots are rather broad and the final "act" (so to speak) is expected, but it makes sense why it's such a favorite: terse, spatially aware, and, in one way, a very "safe" narrative structure built on camaraderie that plays to our vicarious thrill—way more than horror—at seeing these set-pieces go boom or whisk away from the safety of our hometown haunts.
  
• False Aging [Lewis Klahr, 2008] A lovely little ode to relics remaining relevant, and alive, through art. Viewable here, with thanks to Matt for the tip.
  
  
• The San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Winter Event, 2009. More to come in a dedicated post. But here's a few words on each of the films, each one a pleasure to take in, even with some beyond-brazen yakkers behind me for the Keaton segment.
  
• West of Zanzibar [Tod Browning, 1928] Depraved, as ever with these guys. A hell of an ending.
  
• Sherlock Jr. [Buster Keaton, 1924] # Movies inspire life, duh, on top of recording it or creating havens from it; also, "objective reality" can, without a doubt, be a lie.
  
• The Goat [Buster Keaton and Malcolm St. Clair, 1921] That shot of Buster riding the train up to the camera is something special: hilarious, daring, a tad ludicrous, seemingly unreal and yet wholly real.
  
• J'accuse [Abel Gance, 1919] Unbelievably gorgeous print; insane, great fantastical final third.
  
• Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness [Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1927] Talking animals, and lots of them, made this a blast.
  
  
• All of these Resnais shorts listed below are recounted and read, maybe even narrativized, over here.
  
• Statues Also Die [Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953] 27min, 35mm, a blemish.
  
• Guernica [Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens, 1950] 12min, in English, 35mm, crisp.
  
• Toute la mémoire du monde [Alain Resnais, 1956] 20min, English version, 16mm, kinda grubby.
  
• Le chant de styrène [Alain Resnais, 1958] 19min, projected digitally, looked great.
  
  
• Whatever Works [Woody Allen, 2009] Pretty damned bilious, though it tries its hand at sweet. Still, its fantasyland made me laugh and Evan Rachel Wood in white pants is a vision. Also, it's simple, and that helps. Maybe the best movie Woody's made since, um, Sweet and Lowdown? It's still such a mystery to me how little he trusts his comedy in these later years. Don't get me wrong, a lot of his 00s comedies aren't exactly hilarious, but they're always more interesting/enjoyable than those dunderheaded "tragedies" he dreams up.
  
  
• Mélo [Alain Resnais, 1986] # For the recherche; it was just as painful.
  
• Broken Embraces [Pedro Almodovar, 2009] What else? A fiction about fictions, an onion that wants you to cry so bad it chops itself, a film about a woman (or her trace) as not just fatal but fated. Almodovar's got style on tap and colors that pop and perhaps the sexiest, most beautiful lead actress in pictures—who is most game with her maestro mate—but the picture's almost rote. Nothing surprised me, though Pene always excites me, except the site of Chus Lampreve still kicking jokes like a champ. You know the tropes, and you know the wistful feelings—you even know Pene's body—by now, so the biggest pleasure to be had with the film is watching it construct itself and peel off its trappings.
  
• You Can Count On Me [Kenneth Lonergan, 2000] # I've been needing this. Up there with A Man Escaped and Kings and Queen for those "it's gonna be okay" moments.
  
  
• Beowulf [Robert Zemeckis, 2007] Zemeckis calls his motion capture company Image Movers, which is pretty perfect, since all he wants to do, it seems, is fly his images all over the map from wherever he sees fit. A truly bizarre, prurient, silly spectacle. Maybe I'm just tired, but beyond the obvious myth riffing (self-mythologizing, historicity, etc) I have zero idea why the man would make the film other than some kind of nerd macho impetus. That is, a nerd's idea of macho seems to motivate this balloon of a "cartoon" the way a bro's idea of cool seems to motivate Bay's movies. That and what I'm guessing some trumpet as cinematic freedom. Probably should have seen it in a theatre, with 3-D goggles. Phelps is a big fan, and you can read why over here.
  
• Kill Bill: Volumes 1 + 2 [Quentin Tarantino, 2003 + 2004] # A few bits and pieces, in HD on Spike, while on commercial breaks from a few basketball games. Boy did it look good (Uma, too), and boy does QT know how to light a scene. But, boy, this sure is a one-note kind of movie. Also, I continually ask myself: Who did what to wrong this dude? And when? How early on?

Alain à la recherche #7: SHORTS

by Ryland Walker Knight

—The halls have eyes
[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Though I arrived halfway into Le chant de styrène, it still tickled me into the goofiest posture possible all teeth, every limb under another, as if pushing into the chair hard enough would help release the giddy brio building up in my bones. Put otherwise, Queneau's puns (oh to be actually fluent!) and Alain's balletic geometry pretzel'd me up into a great mood. Then Toute la mémoire du monde grumbled onscreen out of focus and an odd English voice started escorting me around the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, trying its damnedest to not "do a Borges," to just present a topographical index, we can suppose. However, Alain's image-making inflects this portrait—everything's a tracking shot—with both pride and unnerved anxiety, a weird fear of the calculation of this repository. Each structure our Alain encounters seems to strike him as a possible tomb, and every system a trap, however useful it may be, for any system can ossify. Next: Guernica's a dirge. Solemn though fiery and sometimes mannered, its idea of barbarism will be further fleshed with "real" documentary work in the opening salvo (anti-salve) of Hiroshima, mon amour (still some of the hardest images for me to watch; the sexy sand-shower just prior must play a role, of course, in that reaction). Then the treasure of the night, the very rare (and neglected) Statues Also Die, whose title sounds so much more elegant in French, Les statues meurent aussi, with that "aussi" dangling, like a tsk. Talk about angry: as Rosenbaum already lined out, the final reel of this bad boy is one of the most direct anti-imperialist/anti-racist screeds in cinema—and in 1953! It's a text by Chris Marker, which is another level of cool (and smarts), which is another reason to root with it, which is (of course) really easy. It's also a fine object lesson outside of the polemic, though the political is unavoidable (I must remind myself), as we see just how loaded every thing is in these so-called aboriginal cultures; how histories are most often mythologies; how tradition cannot be ignored; how, ultimately, revolution is a dream and hardly a reality; that is, how little we fight these worlds we're locked into every day. Another way at this idea is right up front in Night and Fog: that, yes, weeds grow but scars and train tracks remain reminders, and nothing's been razed. I quickly realized I was too tired to let that movie work me over (as it always does), and I tipped out in the dark to a misty rain outside.

Represent Repertory #2: Silent sight magnified colors, wipes

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Get in line
Though the Resnais series at the PFA is ending shortly, with tomorrow night's program of shorts and next Tuesday's screening of La guerre est finie, there are still some things on the horizon to get excited about. There's a few more oh-nine sights across the bay, but more importantly, maybe (because, lucky me, I live on this side of the Bay these daze), are some things at the Castro.

First, this Saturday, the 12th, there's the all-day winter event put on by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Though there are breaks, it's a full 12-hour block of films, complete with live accompaniment, and I hope to attend each screening since I've only seen one of the featured films before (the Keaton), and that only on a television set. There really is no comparison for seeing these films in an auditorium like the Castro, as was proved to me a couple summers ago (read more here and here), even if I'd often prefer way less live accompaniment and kitschy anachronisms/laugh tracks. Not only because it's on film, and the flicker matters, but because of the size. It's a real palace in there. Further, they're showing some really cool sounding pictures that all highlight the cinema's capacity to document:

• 11:30 AM, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness [Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1927] A film shot entirely on location in Thailand, it's a precursor to King Kong without the stop-animation.
  
• 2:00 PM, J'accuse [Abel Gance, 1919] The epic, 162-minute pacifist picture of The Great War has long been unseen in its original construction here in the U.S. so this is quite a rare opportunity to see this (equally epic) restoration.
  
• 7:00 PM, Sherlock Jr. [Buster Keaton, 1924] That brisk comedy about the comedy of interpretation, and its frequent failure through projection, should shine bright. Further, it'll be introduced by Keaton's granddaughter, and there will be live foley, too, which might prove its own set of jokes both good and bad.
  
• 8:00 PM, or so The Goat [Buster Keaton and Malcolm St. Clair, 1921] I've never seen this short, though it's available on YouTube, but apparently it's another identity comedy (this one of the mistaken variety), and that can only lead to good gags, and chase scenes.
  
• 9:15 PM, West of Zanzibar [Tod Browning, 1928] Another Lon Chaney vehicle sure to get under everybody's skin since, right off the bat, his character is paralyzed fighting with his rival, Lionel Barrymore, and thereafter goes by "Dead Legs" as he plots his revenge for 18 years.

Hopefully I can add a few more cogent thoughts post-festival about what stung and what tickled from the day. You can probably bet on some of the same from my buddy Brian Darr, who not only writes Hell On Frisco Bay (and tweets up a storm @HellOnFriscoBay) but also serves as one of the festival's researchers and writers. —Inside, furtive, teasing tip: next summer's festival should be even more spectacular than previous years. —Further reading: the Silent Fest's blog, with notes from Brian and others.


What else? Oh, nothing but a bunch of Hitchcock. The real highlight for me and my boy Danny will be seeing Marnie on 35mm on the 17th since we both missed it during The Late Films. But there's also Vertigo the next day, and more than too many to choose from the other days, though I'll be prioritizing Preminger on the 19th for Skidoo and Bonjour Tristesse back over for what will probably be my final trip to Berkeley for the calendar year. If you happen to see me/us around town at one of these screenings, don't be afraid to say, "Hello." Even if I'm reading, chances are I'm paying more attention to other people talk around me than to the words entering my eyes.