SFIFF 2013: Week One

Though I'd have liked to see Thérèse--I caught only glimpses from the booth as I was inspecting and repairing another knackered print (that arrived from Italy too late for its first festival screening), but it appeared to be shot Super-35--I couldn't slot it in. Big Blue Lake, despite being shot on a digital "still" camera, did at least indicate a certain lyrical touch and an eye for framing, so I deigned to attend a screening as an audience member. I liked what I saw well enough before succumbing to nods.

What do you see? (Verses)

The following program, thankfully, consisted of shorts--"experimental" ones. As with any experiment, there is the probability of failure, and with most of these I sensed little at stake, a parade of arbitrary imagery rather than a revelation of hidden necessities. In Artificial Persons (shown stretched as if on a pub's flatscreen), for instance, we see trains and mummified freakshow specimens, and only by scanning the program notes do we learn of the Cardiff Giant hoax and the contemporaneous lobbying by railroad companies for personhood. The video-piece itself is inscrutable, its meaning and payoff to be found only on the supplemental sheet of paper. The opening of Life is an Opinion Fire a Fact was more stimulating, being a TV image of a girl(?), prone and bleeding, seen up close and pixellated, as if obscured by the very act of close examination. My fascination was not sustained, though. The highlight of the program, despite the cropping of its extreme left, was James Sansing's Verses, a rapid page-flip through moldering juvey records that reveals the abstract cinematic order generated by an entropic process. One is reminded of Bill Morrison's Decasia, only more cogently structured and happily sporting a Rorschachian symmetry. The other 35mm offering, View from the Acropolis, offered little more than coffee-table book scenery.

Outrage Beyond lacks the lyricism of earlier Takeshi Kitano films like Fireworks and Sonatine. The Yakuza genre seems to lend itself less thereto than, say, samurai movies do, though they both work in a similar mythic milieu of blood loyalty and blood violence. Actually, blood as a visual motif is largely absent, though reports of firearms and other projectile launchers take up the slack. Ultimately, I can't say who's pulling the strings here, with all the ins and outs, the back- and front-stabbings, but Takeshi gets the last laugh. As previously noted, a DI was used, and there's plenty of CGI, but at least the photography is on film, and true anamorphic at that.

The Marketa Lazarová screening started auspiciously, with an announcement that (after an earlier DCP subtitle debacle) The Mattei Affair will be shown in 35mm at the Castro Sunday, as it was shown in the PFA's Francesco Rosi series a few years back. But then I was reminded why I remembered so little of František Vlácil's medieval dream-epic. It has perhaps the worst post-synced dialog in cinema history. Much of it is over-laden with reverb, which seems to situate it within the viewer's head, and for this viewer makes it impossible, despite much screen-scanning in search of moving lips, to assign it to any particular character (or narrator?) most of the time. Failing to assimilate the dialog, I am left unable to contextualize much of the stunning if often rather too contrasty visuals. I hope my next attempt at decyphering this reputed masterpiece will occur earlier in the day. (I don't mean to snark; I would genuinely love to be able to come to terms with this film!)

The titular Marketa (Magda Vásáryová), who enjoys precious little screen time