Ben Russell is town. I just saw his Let Each One Go Where He May at the Yerba Buena: 13 10-or-so minute 16mm takes assembled with no further editing into a basically non-verbal loose narrative tracing the meanderings of two Surinamese brothers through their native land- and cityscapes.
Russell is quick to point up and then problematize the ethnographic aspects of his work. His primary concern, however, is our experience as onlookers. Long takes such as these demand that the filmmaker embrace such happy accidents as might occur, and we viewers are quick to ascribe dramatic import to them.
In the third shot, a handsome woman takes a prominent-in-the-frame seat on a bus next to one of the brothers. She does her damnedest to act nonplussed for the duration, while her seat-mate plays with his hair. The very absence of romance suggests romantic tension, such are our cinematic expectations.
Most of the time, we must content ourselves with less human dramas, such as the spatial progressions of walks down paths worn through countryside foliage or between village buildings.
Russell is best known for his TRYPPS series, most of which will screen Saturday night at Oddball Archives. The only one of these I've seen is Black and White Trypps Number Three, in which concert-goers pass in and out of a beam of light (our gaze) in slo-mo, continually re-defining the space they inhabit. I certainly look forward to checking out its series-mates.
Preceding this show at Oddball is, of course, FOFF's own debut at this venue. We've selected some rather fantastic shorts from Canada's National Film Board and we hope you'll come... see our Events page for more on that.
This week marks the start of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. It's one of the very few festival that makes a point on its website of publicizing the formats of every feature and short that they show, which makes compiling the Film Calendar a whole lot easier.
2007 festival honoree Hong San-soo, whose structurally adventurous films often reinvent themselves midway through, returns this year with Like You Know It All. It's about an insecure arthouse director--is it autobiographical? I may never know; I can't work it into my schedule.
I kick things off Sunday at noon at the Castro with Kim Ki-young's 1960 psycho-melodrama The Housemaid. While the film itself sounds interesting, I'm rather trepidatious about the "restoration"--a digital one--which involved subtitle removal from a couple reels. Like the current vogue of converting 2-D-shot movies into 3-D, this entails the wholesale invention, not just interpolation, of swaths of imagery to fill in the gaps.
I saw The Message in a press screening last month, and was reminded in all too many ways of one of those awful Star Wars prequels--over-complicated expository scroll, goofy CG, conflict between "rebels" (the Chinese) and "the Empire" (the Japanese)--to recommend it.
But I'll be back--after a 7-hour time-killing session--for the 9pm show of Love Aaj Kal, to attempt to make amends for my so-far near-total disregard for Bollywood films (I still haven't made it down to the Naz in Fremont).
Another lacuna to remedy: Philippine cinema, in the form of a mini-retrospective of Lino Brocka. Only two of the four shows will be on film: Bayan Ko at 9pm Thursday and Manila in the Claws of Neon at 6pm Saturday next week, both at the PFA. The latter will be followed by the Iranian film About Elly, which previously screened on video in San Rafael, but will be 35mm at the PFA, and should be beautiful.
Not part of SFIAAFF, but Asian nonetheless, well, sort of... Antonio Gaudí at the Red Vic Sunday and Monday. Hiroshi Teshigahara's '60's films are meditations on personhood and identity in which these concepts are often blasted into irrelevance. Antonio Gaudí, a near-wordless film whose characters are the wondrously organic structures by the great Catalan architect, is nothing like these other films, but it's damn good anyway.
Classic Euro-smut Night of Lust closes out the week at the Red Vic. This will be the American version, slashed to less than an hour's running time and dubbed. The black and white photography is claimed to be "stunning", however, and the show will start with a reel of naughty trailers, some of them from the Film on Film collection. You can bet I will be there.