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With the introduction of the 16mm gauge in 1923 for the amateur market, the creation and presentation of films for the first time became practical outside the Hollywood studios and their overseas counterparts. Artists quickly seized on this opportunity to forge increasingly personal works with greater independence, and soon producers of industrial and educational films would embrace this small gauge as well. Today, this vast body of work, at its best unself-consciously artful and unabashedly reflective of its time, is largely ignored, poorly documented, and ripe for rediscovery. In collaboration with Oddball Archives, from whose extensive collection most of these films are drawn, we present, for your enjoyment, selections from the cream of the ephemeral genres.
The seventh program in this ongoing collaboration:
8pm
Admission: $10
With the holiday season ended and a new year beginning, it’s time to take a sober look at our finances. But
first, join us for a fun program of 16mm shorts about money: as physical object, as object
of avarice, and as it circulates through town. Additionally, we’ll take in some classic lessons in money management, responsible credit use, and consumer
smarts in general.
We start with a bit of numismatic porn. A stunning montage of extreme close ups of coins both exotic and
familar anchors this mondo money triptych. To round out the randomness, children demonstrate the barter
system and pennies are manufactured in classic scenes from the US mint.
Color 9 min.
Birthday card cash: an asset to carefully budget or an invitation for a spree? A young Janis Joplin fan has an
appropriately Dionysian attitude toward spending. Consumers of tender years are given gentle cues to avoid
some of the more emotional pitfalls of shopping faced by people of all ages.
Color 10 min.
Fuzzy animal puppets: so cute, so chirpy, so larcenous. When the cash for new band uniforms needs to be
raised fast, our woodland friends roll up their tiny sleeves and get down to honest work, mostly. The itty
bitty musical finale swings, and the puppet show within the puppet show will blow your mind!
Color 12 min.
A day-tripping greenback circulates through the wallets and cash registers of a typical small town, while a
supporting cast of humans makes darn sure we get a simplistic civics and economics lesson. Directed like a
live-action Gumby cartoon, with obvious delight taken in close-ups and insert shots.
Color 11 min.
Gumby and Pokey have budgeted a cool $100 for their road trip. But that won't get them far, not with the
blockheads out to fleece them at every turn. A lesson in expecting the unexpected when it comes to one's
personal finances, but perhaps just as importantly, a lesson in payback.
Color 7 min.
Jeff has his eye on a new van, but he earns minimum wage and can't get credit based on his Eric Stoltz looks
alone. This charismatic everyteen takes us through his ups and downs en route to destination Good Credit.
We get a smattering of still-relevant life tips and, yes, he gets the van.
Color 14 min.
The absurdity of USDA labeling gets a thorough skewering by our flustered consumer advocate, Marshall
Efron. Anarchic, off the cuff, and eye-opening, these syndicated spots endure as bright shining moments in
the history of consumer education.
Color 9 min.
Everyone loves Jonathan, the avuncular flower vendor who pushes his cart around the mall (and missed his
calling as a Hollywood song-and-dance man by a few decades). He knows every passerby and his credit
history, and each encounter is a goofy lesson in responsible money management.
Color 10 min.
Attendees: Please RSVP to (415) 558-8117 or info@oddballfilm.com to ensure sufficient seating.
Complimentary gingerbread doubloons with admission! (While supplies last.)
Saturday, November 27
at 6:00pm:
Admission: $10/$5 kids
Once more Oddball Archives, that veritable Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory of Film, opens its fuzzy door to budding cineastes of tomorrow! Film on Film Foundation and Oddball present a re-tooled selection of kid-centric films with ageless appeal. Classic cartoons feature Woody Woodpecker and Gumby and explore our micro- and macrocosmos, while live-action films pay homage to the pencil, backyard fauna, and that much-maligned meteorological phenomenon, rain. Plus, a legendary tribute to the greatest musical act of all time. Winsome fun for grown-ups and children alike! Come early to check out our preshow of surprise films.
The pencil in all its variety and ubiquity is celebrated in this colorful mini-documentary. Ever wonder how they get the lead in there? This and other mysteries are revealed during the energetic factory sequences while a time warp synthesizer score delights.
Color 7.5 min.
Woody Woodpecker passes on flying south for the winter, but once the food is gone he finds himself in a brutal battle of the wills with an equally famished visitor to his snowbound village. One of the first Woody cartoons ever made--the artwork is exquisite! Not for tender vegetarians.
Color 7 min.
Many exotic creatures can be observed going through life's daily rituals in this swinging little documentary: the inhabitants of the zoo and its equally fascinating human visitors.
B+W 10 min.
A fantastic, "continuous" voyage from a rowboat on the Ottawa river, upward and outward to a grand view of galactic flotsam, then back inwards through a rivulet of blood in the tip of a mosquito's proboscis, to examine an atomic nucleus. Remade a decade later by Charles and Ray Eames (Powers of Ten) with narration (and its jumping-off point moved to Chicago), then again as an Imax movie (Cosmic Voyage) with Morgan Freeman, Cosmic Zoom is where it all began.
Color 8 min.
The kids are alright... with bugs! Science cheerfully takes a back seat to hands-on curiosity as the neighborhood gang gets touchy-feely with creepy-crawlies. Entomology--it’s what happens between piggyback rides.
Color 11 min.
An all-time Gumby favorite! Our bendy green friend and his sidekick Pokey stumble upon a prehistoric enclave whose inhabitants are anything but camera-shy. A brisk, surprisingly friendly Lost World redux.
Color 6 min.
A decade-long pop-culture revolution distilled into 15 minutes of cinematic bliss. Rapid-fire montage of song snippets, iconic clips, apocryphal stills, and animation: a prototype of the modern documentary, only without the talking heads and fourfold as fab!
Color 14.5 min.
A gentle study of the city, the countryside, and children in the rain, featuring wonderful water-suffused photography. You won’t see a better learning-to-read film, ever. Beautiful and precipitation-positive.
Color 6 min.
Admission: $10
It's impossible to exhaustively assay the prodigious 16mm film collection housed at Oddball Archives--one can but attempt to hint at its diversity. We have, quite arbitrarily, turned our attention to shelf 4P, a glistening vein in this cinematic silver mine, and offer a selection of feel-good films, feel-bad films, delightful animation, educationals, industrials, porn, and more.
All he wants is to pick up his date, but first our hero has to meet her parents. As Mr. and Mrs. Peterson size him up, and he them, the magic of cinema puts their thoughts on the soundtrack for us all to hear. Comedy gold, in a beautiful print with perfect color!
Color 10 min.
Budding breeders of grade school age demonstrate the chilling effects of the projected population boom. Made in an era when 6th graders weren't reproducing in significant numbers, it's hard to fathom any cogent message in this Malthusian polemic other than "enjoy those hot dogs now".
Color 7 min.
An explosive 3-minute fantasy of trains, tracks, and tunnels, all drawn directly onto film. With a bluegrass score as dynamic as the images, Red Ball Express is sure to delight all lovers of the color red.
Color 3 min.
A Castle Films compilation of water sports, just in time for the holidays. Witness an underwater turkey dinner, as well as basketball and outdoor water ballet.
B+W 8.5 min.
An off-screen "director" frantically puts a vintage screwball comedy's cast through its paces. Bill Scott perfected his Bob Newhart vocal impersonation in TV's Fractured Flickers, from which this segment is drawn.
B+W 3 min.
In this "amateur" film, a young couple has found a secluded spot in which to picnic. Oh no, they forgot their basket! Perhaps in an attempt at censorship, or to render it unviewable, magic marker scribblings pervade the film, adding accidental avant-garde overtones.
B+W 3 min. Silent
A gentle study of the city, the countryside, and children in the rain, featuring wonderful water-suffused photography. You won’t see a better learning-to-read film, ever. Beautiful and precipitation-positive.
Color 6 min.
One of the last films from the legendary Crown Film Unit paints an optimistic portrait of Britain's soon-to-be moribund motor industry. In 1952, Vauxhalls, Triumphs, and Morris Minors were symbols of national pride and middle-class prosperity, and we see them being built, tested, and driven in this jaunty romp. A car fetishist's delight!
B+W 11 min.
Who better than mimes to reenact the pain of being teased? They gracefully highlight their differences while other mimes mock them, their silence broken by a delightfully reassuring soundtrack.
Color 9.5 min.
Attendees: Please RSVP to (415) 558-8117 or info@oddballfilm.com to ensure sufficient seating.
8:30pm
Admission: $10
Personal and societal ills have long been fodder for small-gauge cinema. Nestled between the faux-clinical health films of the '50's and earlier and the overly simplistic "just say no" school of '80's didacticism, the films of the '70's stand out for their aptly sensitive approach to sensitive problems. Whether through free-form discussion, improvisation, or full-on narrative, room is given for real life to assert itself and introduce messy, complex, even contradictory subcurrents into these works. We'll view films about alcohol abuse, drug dependence, and suicide that situate these issues within the dynamics of family and friendship, often raising more questions than answers. Along the way we'll take a light-hearted detour into the emotional lives of children. Underlying all these works is a rare sense of empathy and humanism.
Like the quietly devastating The Summer We Moved To Elm Street, this ABC After School Special couches its message in domestic melodrama. Burdened with a tippling mother and a traveling father, poor Francesca must take on the role of materfamilias, and her social life crumbles under the burden of hiding her problems from schoolmates. Posterity has accorded this episode camp classic status, but we dare you to remain unaffected by the emotive force of its mise-en-scene. You'll need a drink after this one. And keep an eye out for Large Marge from Pee Wee's Big Adventure!
Color 47 min.
Due to this film's length, we will start the evening with part 1 and conclude with part 2. In between...
From the studio behind The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo comes this unlikely live-action drug scare film featuring a rogues gallery of sleepy-eyed reformed dopeheads engaged in a dynamite bull session about their sordid pasts. Bookended by amazing psychedelic music montage sequences that seem to promote a contrary agenda.
Color 17 min.
When young James can't find a play partner, he goes into his closet to discover a very peculiar man dressed in what appears to be a costume prototype from TRON. Fortunately, he's there to help, and James will learn that even if he can't catch a ball, that's OK since he can tie his shoelaces just fine.
Color 8 min.
From wandering dark alleys, to meeting people at parties, to losing ones mother at the playground, this film delivers a taxonomy of childhood phobias in the lyrics of a charmingly melancholic ditty. Though our fears are oft unfounded, sometimes it does pay to be afraid. A delightful entry in the Feelings series.
Color 8 min.
After she downs a fistful of downers, Sharon's drama teacher convinces her to join a group where she can rap about her feelings with fellow travelers on despair's grim highway. Intimate camerawork frames the raw emotion on the faces of these teen actors. The improvisatory performances, "based on actual case histories", are almost too good: as anguish is born of the seemingly mundane iniquities of teenagehood, you may find yourself reaching for your shaving implements. Also featuring interpretive dance and mime performances, for good measure.
Color 21 min.
Attendees: Please RSVP to (415) 558-8117 or info@oddballfilm.com to ensure sufficient seating.
8:30pm
Admission: $10
Bay Area residents have the highest level of passport ownership in the U.S., but too often inertia and finances conspire to keep us home. There could be worse places to have a staycation--let this 16mm film program serve as an informal guide so you can come up with your own ways of enjoying home this summer. We'll start with an exploration of our coastline, greet that occasional visitor the Sun, and then venture yet closer to home with a backyard safari and a couple home-safety films. Next we'll follow some currency on its intra-city perambulations, and conclude with a look back at a couple of our hometown's previous incarnations: the punk scene of the '70's and, in a rare Technicolor glimpse of noir-era Frisco, the square '40's.
Fetch your water wings, ye dwellers on the threshold of the Pacific! This Technicolor tour of the California coastline and its flora and fauna will have you scuttling off to the beach. Featuring an upgraded soundtrack!
Color 10 min.
It's in the sky every day even if you can't see it. Another stellar, warm-hued effort from Stelios and the Learning to Read series--come celebrate the sun in all its heliac glory.
Color 7 min.
The kids are alright... with bugs! Science cheerfully takes a back seat to hands-on curiosity as the neighborhood gang gets touchy-feely with creepy-crawlies. Entomology--it's what happens between piggyback rides.
Color 11 min.
Home is where the heart is, as well as the household cleansers and the medicine cabinet. Who better to warn us of potential poisons than a family of marionette ants, touchingly over-concerned with the well-being of the people who try to kill them. Delightfully wrong-headed, borderline offensive, and in Technicolor!
Color 10 min.
Wayward pot-handles, greasy patches, knives lurking under suds--a person could really mess herself up but good in the average kitchen. That is, unless she hurts herself just enough to get out of housework for a week or two. Cautionary tale or how-to guide--you decide. From the University of Kansas Home Economics Department.
B+W 8.5 min.
A day-tripping greenback circulates through the wallets and cash registers of a typical small town, while a supporting cast of humans makes darn sure we get a simplistic civics and economics lesson. Directed like a live-action Gumby cartoon, with obvious delight taken in close-ups and insert shots.
Color 11 min.
The Pistols' San Francisco show wasn't just the last date on a tour that pointedly avoided New York and Los Angeles, it was the only show in a city with a thriving punk scene (sorry, San Antonio). Some of the Cash For Chaos is captured here but not the smells, the humidity, or the sounds. This silent home-movie footage will be accompanied by an appropriate non-Sex Pistols selection.
Color 4 min. Silent
How did our city by the Bay present itself to the world in 1943? San Francisco reveals its square underbelly in this quaintly sanitized Technicolor promotional film that predates hippies, homelessness, and homosexuality. From the Standard Oil Company of California.
Color 31 min.
Attendees: Please RSVP to info@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117 to ensure sufficient seating.
Free with admission: FOFF's notorious home-baked treats with a Golden State theme! (While supplies last.)
3pm (kid-friendly matinee) & 8pm
Admission: $10 kids: $5
Finally Oddball Archives, that veritable Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory of Film, opens its fuzzy door to budding cineastes of tomorrow! In their third collaboration, Film on Film Foundation and Oddball present a selection of kid-centric films with ageless appeal. Classic cartoons feature Betty Boop, Woody Woodpecker, Gumby, and Joshua (who?), while live-action films pay homage to the toy train, the pencil, the Japanese snow monkey, and that much-maligned meteorological phenomenon, rain. Come rediscover an era when simplicity could be beautiful instead of insipid and family entertainment really did entertain the entire family.
Woody Woodpecker rides into a deserted Western town in search of buried treasure--only the town isn't quite deserted. Logic, physics, nor continuity will stand in the way of a rollicking dose of good old-fashioned cartoon violence.
Color 6.5 min.
A gentle study of the city, the countryside, and children in the rain, brought to you by the words "wet", "water", and "rain". A beautiful precipitation-positive film from the Starting to Read series.
Color 6 min.
The sensitive, whimsically conceived Joshua, in his second outing, finds himself put upon by a mysterious and clingy globule. In dealing with this sticky predicament, he runs the emotional gamut from anger and frustration to... love? Yet another delightful animated character awaiting rediscovery (you won't find him in IMDb).
Color 6 min.
The pencil in all its variety and ordinariness is celebrated in this colorful mini-documentary. Ever wonder how they get the lead in there? This and other mysteries are revealed during the energetic factory sequences while a time warp synthesizer score delights.
Color 7.5 min.
Inept signpainters Koko the Clown and Bimbo crash jazz-age flapper holdout Betty Boop's dancing school. A menagerie of animal strutters proceeds to bring down the house in this anarchic Depression-era delight from Fleischer Bros., the best studio of the cartoon's golden age.
B+W 7.5 min.
"Extinct is forever" admonishes the opening epigraph of this film about a small population of remarkable and adorable primates in Japan. These little furry humanoids frolic, tussle, bathe, groom, and are guaranteed to win the audience's hearts. Superlative photography, with many languorously lyrical moments.
Color 7.5 min.
Gumby and Professor Kapp invent a size-changing spray, and when Pokey, Prickle, and Boo "borrow" it (to make their problems smaller!) chaos breaks out at the zoo. An Alice in Wonderland-inspired claymation cautionary tale.
Color 5.5 min.
Before Mary Poppins and Pixar, mid-century designers Ray and Charles Eames brought toy trains and travelers vividly to life in a fully-realized micro-village. Elmer "The Magnificent 7" Bernstein supplies the toccata.
Color 14 min.
All films will be presented in 16mm.
Attendees: Please RSVP to info@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117 to ensure sufficient seating.
Complimentary wholesome treats and cookies... and pencils, with admission! (While supplies last.)
8pm Saturday, May 15
Admission: $10
In this program we explore how we construct our urban milieu... and how it constructs us. It is said necessity is the mother of invention and the converse is just as true. We are shaped by and made dependent on the environment we build around us. First Lewis Mumford sets the tone with his as-relevant-as-ever views on urbanism. Then we examine methods of construction from the ultra-primitive to the super-modern. After a personal and poetic detour into lyrical city-history by future Oscar-winner István Szabó, we conclude with a couple of films delving (somewhat ham-fistedly) into the psychological fallout of our urban obsession.
Lewis Mumford, one of the 20th century's canniest and most well-spoken intellectuals, shares his thoughts on livable, human-scale cities in this outstanding National Film Board production. With brilliant narration and some of the most stunning urban photography from around the world you're ever likely to see, evoking the best of classic European art cinema.
B+W 28 min.
Bozo tribesmen of Mali build a simple house with the tools and materials at hand: namely hands, and spindly tree limbs and rushes. This beautifully simple ethnographic film features no voiceover, just the images and sounds of men at work, adapting their environment to their needs.
Color 7 min.
We move on from the sparse African hinterland to a dense metropolis and that modern symbol of urbanism: the skyscraper. Pitched at gradeschoolers, this film takes us on a whirlwind tour of all the various trades involved in this massive construction project. The lively jazz/funk score will set your toes tapping.
Color 11 min.
Part of Szabó's trilogy Budapest, Why I Love It, this bizarro poetic paean to his birth city starts out with a fish-eye travelogue of classic edifices before happening upon a strangely choreographed street scene. Time and space are compressed and the distinction between indoors and outdoors eradicated as assorted personages eat, sleep, marry, die, and chop wood, all out in the open. The camera pans and zooms fluidly to follow various figures, who not infrequently turn to wave back at us.
Color 21 min.
After a brief history of walls ("they keep undesirables out, or they keep undesirables in"), the concept is abstracted and extended to the social and ideological walls we build. Metaphors and psychoanalyses are stretched to an absurd degree until it seems pretty much everything is some sort of wall. All this is made quite palatable by an inventive and entertaining presentation, including a charmingly precious interpretive dance sequence.
Color 10 min.
From the people who brought you Duck and Cover comes this classic scare-propaganda piece that trades on our addiction to urbanism. Thinking of heading for the hills when the bomb drops? Think again. That's tantamount to treason, and in the Army you'd be court-martialed! This film aims to guilt and shame you into sticking around to help defend your hometown and rebuild its infrastructure. And after all, nuclear contamination will dissipate after a day or two. "Have you got the guts?"
B+W 9 min.
Attendees: Please RSVP to info@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117 to ensure sufficient seating.
Complimentary home-baked gingerbread with admission! (While supplies last.)
8pm Saturday, March 13
Admission: $10
Founded in 1939 under the aegis of Scotsman John Grierson, pioneering theorist and practitioner of the documentary form, the National Film Board was initially put in the service of war propaganda. Two years later, the addition to its ranks of Grierson's countryman Norman McLaren would instigate the NFB's second elemental thrust: technically adventurous, audaciously whimsical animation. These two interwoven threads have permeated the Film Board's productions ever since, giving us formally innovative works that nonetheless edify. NFB films are fun, entertaining, and favor the dramatic over the didactic.
We present, drawn from the shelves of Oddball Archives, what can only pretend at a cross-section of NFB's voluminous output: explorations from the subatomic to the outer reaches of space, with a dose of human-scale drama and sheer flights of fancy.
Set against a black ground, two graceful dancers become pure embodiments of light. Using optical superimposition, McLaren multiplies the figures, transforming live action into his own brand of kinetics. Beautifully choreographed and shot, hauntingly scored (featuring the United Folk Orchestra of Romania), hypnotic and unforgettable.
B+W 13 min.
A fantastic, "continuous" voyage from a rowboat on the Ottawa river, upward and outward to a grand view of galactic flotsam, then back inwards through a rivulet of blood in the tip of a mosquito's proboscis, to examine an atomic nucleus. Remade a decade later by Charles and Ray Eames (Powers of Ten) with narration (and its jumping-off point moved to Chicago), then again as an Imax movie (Cosmic Voyage) with Morgan Freeman, Cosmic Zoom is where it all began.
Color 8 min.
Assorted lines, blobs, hearts, and squiggles frolic and make whoopee in a mad dance of abstraction. Set to boogie music by Albert Ammons.
Color 3 min.
The suburban sunshine evoked by the title is a bright counterpoint to the reality of a 9-year old's chaotic family life. Its understated, cinematic approach to the subject of domestic dysfunction has an arthouse coming-of-age film feel, giving the underlying message heartbreaking immediacy. The naturalistic performance by the lead moppet, a Canadian distaff Antoine Doinel, bolsters the documentary tone.
Color 29 min.
McLaren takes a step back from figuration and says "Hello, abstract expressionism!" The Oscar Peterson Trio provides the musical substrate according to whose moods McLaren and Lambart paint and scratch onto film a roiling display of corpuscular emotion. May dull care ne'er return.
Color 8 min.
The science may be rudimentary and out-of-date in spots, but the expressionistic style makes this "Astro-Noir" a timeless ride through the solar system. With its exuberantly portentous narration, one can only imagine what '60's third graders thought of the invitation to imagine themselves as Gods. The breathtaking cosmic vistas, simulated by NFB B-unit visionary Colin Low a year before man even set foot in space, would prove a major influence on the visuals of Stanley Kubrick's 2001.
B+W 29 min.
Attendees: Please RSVP to info@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117 to ensure sufficient seating.
Complimentary home-baked pie with admission! (While supplies last.)
Parisian ciné-club Objectif 49 held a festival in Biarritz in 1949 dedicated to "Film Maudit", or "Accursed Cinema". With the express mission of reevaluating and redefining cinematic art, Jean Cocteau's jury held up a slate of ignored, unfairly maligned, and/or transgressive works as representative of a new filmic vanguard. Films now long accepted as major works of world cinema such as Vigo's Zéro de conduite and L'Atalante, Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and Visconti's Ossessione were for the first time given their due. Cinematic and sexual radicalism were endorsed by Cocteau awarding the Poetic Film Prize to Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, the first serious acknowledgment of a budding genius.
Many great works of cinema spent years languishing in this uncherished category: Welles's The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, Hawks's Bringing Up Baby, and Ophuls's Lola Montes were greeted with scorn upon release. The reputations of Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point have undergone radical revision in recent years. In this series we revive the anti-conformist approach initiated by Objectif 49's Festival du Film Maudit, and propose for your reconsideration works we believe to be unfairly maligned and/or forgotten.
The second program in this on-going series:
4:00pm Sunday, August 22
Admission: $8
After almost thirty years, Endless Love has all but been forgotten. In the interim, the film Melodrama has been reassessed by critics, and come to be seen as a key cinema genre, most famously displayed by the celebration of the 50's films of Douglas Sirk. Could enough time have passed for Melodramas of the 70's and 80's to receive their due? Is Endless Love the last major work of the classical Hollywood cycle? On August 22nd, YOU have the chance to participate in the rediscovery and reevaluation of an important work of cinema!
Based on Scott Spencer's National Book Award-nominated novel!
1981 35mm Color 116 min. Not on DVD!
Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.
7:30pm Sunday, December 6
Admission: $8
A born provocateur, his films broke through barriers of race (Carmen Jones) and sexuality (Advise and Consent). They dared to challenge contemporary mores with their frank treatments of sex (The Moon is Blue) and drugs (The Man with the Golden Arm), and he relished the controversy and attendant publicity they would generate. Numerous times he battled the Production Code Administration head on, and with each victory lessened its reactionary grip on Hollywood. And he was the first to break the blacklist in 1960 by crediting writer Dalton Trumbo for his work on Exodus.
The bravura sophistication of Preminger's mise-en-scène derived from a theatrical background in Vienna and on Broadway. He favored the mounting tension of a performance-heightening long take, but cultivated performances appropriate for the big screen: understated and subtly emotive. Expert use of the moving camera counterbalanced his restrained but effective montage. Manifest already in his early masterpiece Laura, these qualities would come to full fruition with Preminger's embrace of the new widescreen processes of the 1950's, which allowed him to realize his compositions and movements on a grand scale. This mature period spawned a remarkable string of epic-scale works, among them Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, Advise and Consent, and The Cardinal.
Though his family had narrowly escaped the holocaust, Preminger would moonlight as a Nazi in several films during his career--he had the look, the accent, and above all the temperament. Just ask any actor on a Preminger shoot who failed to ignite, before the rolling camera, the spark that had landed him the role. Ask Tom Tryon, star of The Cardinal, who absorbed the brunt of Preminger's vitriol on this difficult production: "To go on that set was like getting into the tumbrel and going to the scaffold.... Day after day after day."
The Cardinal portrays the ascension through the priestly ranks of one Stephen Fermoyle (Tryon), but Preminger's fascination with the workings of movements and institutions ensures that the film is as much about the Catholic Church itself, its internal politics laid bare, and its interaction with the world around it. Indeed, over the course of its 30-or-so year storyline, the film is a veritable compendium of the major problems of the 20th century, some of which Preminger faced firsthand: religious bigotry, fascism, and racism, addressed earnestly and intelligently.
Above all, The Cardinal is beautiful, epic entertainment. With its cultural and historical sweep, the film is by turns refined and earthy, depicting everything from stately Vatican ritual to tawdry dance-hall spectacle, while locations in Boston, Rome, and Vienna lend their picturesque color to Leon Shamroy's fluid photography. There is something for everyone in The Cardinal.
1963 35mm Cinemascope
Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.
7pm Sunday, June 28
With her Redgrave pedigree, Natasha Richardson was destined to act. She would eventually marry fellow actor Liam Neeson and earn the respect and friendship of many others in her profession. In the years before her recent death she devoted much time and energy to humanitarian efforts.
In this early breakout role, perhaps the best of her career, as the titular newspaper-heiress-turned-urban-guerrilla, Richardson must carry a narrative centered almost entirely on Patty Hearst's subjectivity. With a carefully measured performance, she maintains throughout the compelling enigma of her character's psychology and allows us to see humanity in the face of the cruel circus of her captivity.
In the SLA cell, strong performances are also turned in by William Forsythe, Dana Delany, and especially Ving Rhames who, as leader Cinque, shows the psychotic charisma that he would later perfect as Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.
Schrader's explorations of the claustrophobic spaces of the mind are paralleled by the movements of his camera as it roves around dark, confined interiors: those of the terrorists' safehouses and of the courtrooms and institutions of the "bourgeois pigs" they hope to bring down. And if the hermetic quality of Hearst's subjectivity ever threatens to overwhelm, he augments it with poetic inserts from her imagination--paranoid fantasies and memories colored by the present ordeal.
But ultimately it is Richardson who captures our gaze and forms the pivot around which all the film's ironic juxtapositions revolve.
1988 Color 35mm 103 min.
Fear and Desire and The Delinquents
Roxie Cinema
Admission: $7
From the start of his career, Kubrick had high-art aspirations, and these are evident even in his first feature-length work. Fear and Desire, perhaps the first independently-made American art film, is an allegorical war picture that explicitly locates its conflict, and its primal motivators, in the province of the mind. Kubrick acted as producer, director, and editor, and though his mise-en-scène was limited by available locations and props and a mostly static camera, he nonetheless evinced a flair for evoking moods with eye-catching compositions and subtle nuances of light, and an analytical, poetic approach to montage.
At 7pm: Fear and Desire (1953 B+W 35mm 61 min.)
Juvenile delinquency, by various names a long-time staple of exploitation films, became the subject of Altman's first feature, 1957's The Delinquents. Tom Laughlin (to become famous for his Billy Jack movies) channels the late James Dean (much admired by Altman) in his first starring role as a teen driven from the arms of his girl and into the clutches of a vicious gang which includes Richard Bakalyan in his debut.
Altman has always used certain conventions of what we now call vérité style, applying his own poetics to the multifarious scrappiness of real life. If the party scene in The Delinquents seems to have the dynamics of an actual party, it's because it is one. Though Kubrickian perfectionism was never one of Altman's hallmarks, he nevertheless came later to dismiss this early work as "meaningless". But he could never deny that it's fabulously entertaining.
At 8:45pm: The Delinquents (1957 B+W 35mm 72 min.)
8:30pm
$7
From the beginning of his British years, Losey attracted collaborators of equally high ambition, such as stars Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker, whose acting talents weren't fully understood until their work with the American director. Frustrated by interference from producers and the constraints endemic to the British film industry, which mirrored the overt commercial orientation of Hollywood on a smaller scale, Losey watched enviously as European Art Cinema began to fully flower on the continent. Finally everything came together in his first British masterpiece, The Servant, starring Bogarde, James Fox, and Sarah Miles, in a taboo-traversing exploration of oblique power games between classes, sexes, and sexualities. The Servant would mark Losey's first collaboration with the young Harold Pinter, only five-or-so years into his legendary career as the world's most important post-Beckett playwright, and garnered a nomination for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Losey's career as International Superstar art-film director was off and running....
Adopting Resnais-influenced oblique editing strategies for the first time, Losey creates from the future Nobel-Prize-winning Pinter's script a superbly-crafted corrosive vision of sexual and social anomie, one of the high-water marks from the classic period of European Art Cinema. Accident is proof-positive that Joseph Losey was the most brilliant filmmaking victim of the Hollywood Blacklist, and that an American was the greatest director of the British Cinema of the 1960's.
1967 Color 35mm 105 min.
Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.
Forgotten '70's masterpiece Puzzle of a Downfall Child
In the late 1960's, Hollywood--mirror to the nation--found itself creaking and cracking from the strain of the uncontrollable social revolution ripping through the country. The old formulas weren't working anymore, especially in the light of the on-going tragedy and melodrama broadcast nightly: Vietnam war carnage, assassinations, protests, riots. With the simultaneous end of the Production Code (a restrictive form of self-policing which allowed the film industry to evade government censorship), a new generation came of age determined to explore through cinema a rapidly changing world, and with a radically new sensibility. The breakthrough smash-success of Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch forced open the studio floodgates to the energies of this new generation, Jerry Schatzberg among them.
Schatzberg recruited Carole Eastman (writer of Five Easy Pieces and uncredited contributor to the script of Petulia) to write Puzzle's script. He spent years in search of backing until finally, in 1970, he found patron saints in Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who were able to set up the production under their aegis at Universal.
Now in his eighties and still working, Schatzberg has recently emerged from years of critical neglect within his home country, has been honored with retrospectives, and is receiving his due as one of America's great iconoclasts of film and photography.
Not on video!
Preceded by a selection of classic trailers!
Much of mainstream criticism since the 1950's has considered the director as the auteur of a film work. However, certain actors, by the consistency and force of their personalities across many films, may be regarded as the authors of their performances. In this series, we examine what happens when these celluloid heroes assume the role of director and leave their full imprint on a film. Of the resulting works, some have been hailed as masterpieces, while others have been overlooked. In all cases, they shine a distinct light on the artistic process.
The third program in this on-going series:
Lupino-Noir: A Double Feature from Hollywood's Toughest Cookie
Sunday, March 8
Admission: $7
Tough as a leather purse-strap, hard as nail polish, Ida Lupino broke new ground in mid-century Hollywood. It was no place for a woman...
In the 1930's, Ida Lupino earned her bread as the innocent girl in a string of mostly forgotten pictures. But the beautiful bottle-blonde was as world-wise as the characters she was destined to play, and soon tired of this rut. She knew what she wanted and she knew how to get it. Minus the bleach and the baby fat, she barged into William Wellman's office armed only with determination and a stolen script. Thus captivated by her audition for The Light That Failed, Wellman cast her as her first prostitute. This is the Ida Lupino we know and love.
In the '40's, Lupino specialized in hard-luck noir dames in such movies as They Drive by Night, High Sierra, and Road House. A born malcontent, she grew frustrated working in the shadow of the likes of Bette Davis, being offered parts they turned down. Warners suspended her for rejecting these table-scrap roles, and in her free time she studied the workings on the other side of the camera. After her contract was up, she turned freelance, and soon formed a production company with her husband: Filmakers.
Lupino produced, wrote, and acted, and when the director of Not Wanted took ill three days into shooting, she took up directing as well. Low-budget issue pictures, the savage forebears of today's TV movies, were Filmakers' specialty. They did pure social melodrama (Hard, Fast and Beautiful) and straight noir (Private Hell 36), but most of their output was a volatile mixture of the two, cemented by a woman's touch. In this program, we dive headfirst into these murky waters.
At 7:30pm: The Bigamist
When Harry and Eve (Joan Fontaine) decide to adopt a baby, the man at the agency senses something amiss and looks into Harry's background. Instead of murder or armed robbery he finds... another woman. Similar in structure to Double Indemnity, The Bigamist musters compassion for its tragic characters while chipping away at the myth of the ideal post-war family.
1953 B+W 35mm 80 min.
On her way home from work, soon-to-be-married Mala Powers is attacked and.... The staging of the crime is a masterpiece of expressionism, but the true horror is revealed in the aftermath, in the social and psychological fallout. Lupino's treatment of this ultimate taboo transcends exploitation, showing real understanding and sympathy.
1950 B+W 16mm 75 min.
Classic trailers before both films!
A Double Feature of Maverick, Go-for-broke, Meta-cinematic Hell-raising--
Wednesday, June 4
Admission: $7 for both films
At 7pm: The Last Movie
Here was Hopper's opportunity to develop an idea he had hatched on a Mexico location shoot several years prior: when the film crew departs, leaving the sets behind, is this not a form of cultural imperialism? This is the point of departure of The Last Movie.
When an ill-fated Samuel Fuller-helmed western pulls out of a small Peruvian village, stuntman Kansas (Hopper) stays behind, shacking up with a local whore and pursuing a crass expatriate version of the American Dream. While Kansas goes native on his own terms, the natives, fascinated by the novelty of cinema, resurrect the aborted film shoot in tribal fashion, enacting rituals of real violence before jerry-built prop cameras.
True to its thematic conflation of the processes and products of cinema, The Last Movie's chaos was mirrored in the conditions of its filming--a confused, sex-, drug-, and paranoia-fueled bacchanal. Hopper kept this up the 18 or so months he spent cloistered at home in Taos editing his opus, under the influence of Bruce Conner and Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo).
Thrust upon a public expecting Easy Rider-style hippie quaintness, this confounding masterpiece ensured Hopper would not work again in Hollywood for nearly a decade.
"No other studio-released film of the period is quite so formally audacious." -Jonathan Rosenbaum
Grand Prize winner, Venice Film Festival, 1971
At 9:15pm: Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?
At the end of the 60's, after the success of his stage musical Stop the World--I Want to Get Off and a prominent role in Doctor Dolittle, Anthony Newley was at the height of his career as an actor, singer, and composer. What better time to try his hand at directing, and what better inspiration than his own fabulous life?
Seeking neither to apologize for nor distance himself from the salacious and sordid details of his past, Newley invites us all to share in his solipsistic revelry. His candor about his somewhat Nabokovian appetite for women is especially notable as the film features his then-wife, Joan Collins, and their two young children. Milton Berle also appears as the devil in the guise of a drug-pushing svengali.
Audiences and critics were not kind to this deliriously indulgent ego-driven undertaking. Newley's career hit the skids, as did his marriage. With hindsight, however, we can appreciate its cockeyed charm. Such a film would be inconceivable today.
"A must-see for counterculture-masochists" -Steven Puchalski
1969 Color 16mm 117 min. Rare X-rated version!
Classic trailers before both films!
Advance tickets may be bought online at the Roxie webpage, or just show up at the box office before the show like normal folk!
Timothy Carey's 1962 psychotronic masterpiece The World's Greatest Sinner
He was just an average, happily married family man. He should never have listened to that snake!
One day the devil, in the form of a snake, manifests himself to insurance
salesman Clarence Hilliard (Timothy Carey). In short order Hilliard drops out,
re-christens himself God, recruits a skid row following, and becomes an
atheistic, silver lamé-clad rockabilly evangelist. With his mantra, "There is only one God, and that's Man!" and his wide-ranging sexual deviancy and deranged demagoguery, Carey's blaspheming anti-deity stakes out a position somewhere between Nietzsche and Charles Manson. Falling for his own opportunistically populist rhetoric, he goes mad with power-lust, abusing and destroying his acolytes with shockingly escalating excesses. Nothing is sacred in this scathing, still-topical indictment of religion, politics, and society!
In its giddy, sensationalistic treatment of themes eschewed in polite discourse
even now, The World's Greatest Sinner achieves a rough-hewn radicalism
unthinkable in a studio picture. It is the archetypal underground film, made
outside the establishment and to this day denied a proper release. Nonetheless,
this pioneering portrayal of out-of-control youth rebellion presaged the uproar
of the '60's and paved the way for emblematic films like Wild in the
Streets.
"I thought I was a great actor; I'm the only one who did."
During this checkered career, Carey worked with some of the greatest actors and
directors of his time: Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, James
Dean, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick. He
would always do his best to upstage or upset the star, to impress or frustrate
the director with his unhinged improvisations. Wherever Carey trod, chaos soon
followed. At times he would earn grudging respect; more often he would come to
blows with the crew. Films that he had to pull out of, for one reason or
another, include Bonnie and Clyde and the first two
Godfathers.
"I was probably fired more than any other actor in Hollywood."
Off-screen, Carey's raw primitivism was equally evident. In auditions, media
appearances, and in person, he flouted the patience and sensibilities of his
audiences, telling crude jokes and breaking into song, or, in keeping with a
late-life obsession, into wind. On several occasions, he pulled out a gun
loaded with blanks and staged a mock murder-suicide before horrified onlookers.
With his unruly talent, Carey made a mark in all his performances. In a bad
movie, his presence in a scene could elevate it to the sublime. Even in great
films, his off-kilter characterizations would stand out. Anyone who has seen
The Killing remembers the quietly sociopathic sharpshooter, an
understated role by his standards. In the 1970's John Cassavetes
recognized Carey's mad brilliance, giving him free reign in a key role in his
film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, as well as Minnie and
Moskowitz.
Carey embarked on The World's Greatest Sinner, his most personal project,
in 1958. He spent three years filming this epic monument to his own genius, as
money and circumstances allowed, like a stateside Orson Welles. Among
its claims to fame, this production launched the careers of rocker Frank
Zappa, who composed the soundtrack, and gonzo auteur Ray Dennis
Steckler. True to form, at the notorious premiere Carey instigated a riot
and fired a gun into the theater's ceiling. This time, the bullets were real!
"Oh you're Tim Carey, you made The World's Greatest Sinner! I want to see that picture!" -Elvis Presley
"Carey has the emotional brilliance of an Eisenstein!" -John Cassavetes
Not available on DVD!
Preceded by: Timothy Carey in Cinema Justice (35mm 6 min.),
With an introduction and Q&A by the son of God himself, Romeo Carey!
Gunfire in the theater will not be tolerated!
In It for the Money: Short Films You Can Take to the Bank
Saturday, January 8
Oddball Films
275 Capp St., San Francisco
(2 blocks from 16th & Mission BART; enter under the "Sutter Furniture MFG" sign)
Previously shown in this series:
An Oddball double feature: Oddball for Everyone and Dystopia, Heavy Petting & Mimes
Oddball Films
275 Capp St., San Francisco
(2 blocks from 16th & Mission BART; enter under the "Sutter Furniture MFG" sign)
Oddball for Everyone: An All-Ages Evening at San Francisco's Treasure Trove of Cinema
at 8:00pm:
Dystopia, Heavy Petting & Mimes: An Almost Random Sampling of the Oddball Archive
The Sensitive '70's: Empathetic Self-Help and Social-Problem films from the Disco Decade
Saturday, October 9
Oddball Films
275 Capp St., San Francisco
(2 blocks from 16th & Mission BART; enter under the "Sutter Furniture MFG" sign)
Adventures Close to Home: A Celebration of the Staycation
Saturday, July 31
Oddball Films
275 Capp St., San Francisco
(2 blocks from 16th & Mission BART; enter under the "Sutter Furniture MFG" sign)
Oddball Wants Children: Accidental Edutainment for Kids and Their Adults
Saturday, June 19
Oddball Films
275 Capp St., San Francisco
(2 blocks from 16th & Mission BART; enter under the "Sutter Furniture MFG" sign)
Bricks in the Wall: Humans and Their Built Environment
Oddball Films
275 Capp St., San Francisco
(2 blocks from 16th & Mission BART; enter under the "Sutter Furniture MFG" sign)
Beyond Edification: Shorts from the National Film Board of Canada
Oddball Films
275 Capp St., San Francisco
(2 blocks from 16th & Mission BART; enter under the "Sutter Furniture MFG" sign)
Film Series: Film Maudit/Accursed Films
Franco Zeffirelli's operatic melodrama Endless Love (1981)
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley

In their view, Zeffirelli's Queer, Italianate sensibilities brought a startlingly fresh and deep perspective to unhinged Family Romance and teenage American love, and provided a transgressively sympathetic portrait of male heterosexual passion pursued into the jaws of despair and madness. For this minority it was a major work of that despised and dying genre, the unrepentant Melodrama. Zeffirelli's collaborators were also noticed--his cast was a mix of fresh faces (including Tom Cruise in his first screen appearance), and a superb roster of stage and screen veterans. Endless Love's lush, glowing cinematography was arguably the best in the career of the brilliant, future Academy Award-winner David Watkin.
Previously shown in this series:
Otto Preminger's roadshow epic The Cardinal
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley



Dye Transfer Technicolor
175 min. + intermission
In memory of Natasha Richardson, we invite you to a FREE screening of Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst.
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley


First Stabs: Formative Works by Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman
Sunday, May 10
3117 16th St.
San Francisco
Click here to purchase advance tickets



Preceded by:
Day of the Fight (1951 B+W 16mm 16 min.)
Flying Padre (1951 B+W 16mm 9 min.)

Film Series: Radical Strategies
As part of its mission, the Film on Film Foundation seeks to showcase exciting and unusual celluloid motion-picture film works which have rarely been screened locally, unleashing some for the very first time. Our debut series, 'Radical Strategies', represents the opening salvo in this part of our undertaking. Each film in this series of experimental narratives questions the nature of cinema itself, and in its realization, each proffers potential answers to the questions of what cinema is, can, or should be.
A concurrent thematic: the 100-plus years of film's existence have been aligned with dramatic international political upheaval. Experimenters in form have often seen their work as connected to a fundamental recreation of the social/political world, and this adds an additional, sometimes explosive, resonance to the ideas of 'Radical Strategies.'
The fifth program in this on-going series: Joseph Losey's supreme masterpiece of European Art Cinema: Accident.

Sunday, April 5
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley



Previously shown in this series:
Starring Faye Dunaway
8pm
Sunday, September 28
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley

In the 1960's, Jerry Schatzberg was already a legend in the New York scene. A highly sought-after photographer who crossed the boundaries of Fashion, Street, and Portrait, his work would contribute to the developing icon-status of, among many others, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski, Edie Sedgwick, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and a baby-faced Fidel Castro. Photos by Schatzberg graced the covers of some of the most important pop-music albums of the era, including Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. He owned some of Manhattan's hippest discotheques and threw many of the island's wildest parties. But despite sporting the credentials of an affluent scenester, Schatzberg's artistic sensibilities weren't rooted in the realms of fashion and wealth but rather were attuned to the pain and whimsy found in the private worlds of society's misfits, outcasts, and cast-offs. Although photography allowed him to touch upon this motif, the 1970's would offer him the opportunity to explore his themes in far greater depth, and in a new medium.


Color 35mm 105 min.

Guns of the Trees and The Brig
Easter Sunday, March 23
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
Berkeley
(Please note: Since this screening is not a presentation of the Pacific Film Archive, it does not appear in their calendar or in any of their publicity. Nevertheless, the show will go on!)
Tickets go on sale at 5pm Sunday in the PFA Theater Lobby.
Admission: $7
"We don't want false, polished, slick films. We prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don't want rosy films - we want them the color of blood." -Jonas Mekas, 1961
"What I want to achieve - ideally - with my film: is overthrow the government." -Jonas Mekas, Diaries, 11 August 1960
At 7pm: Guns of the Trees
In 1960, Jonas Mekas stood at a crossroads. An acclaimed Lithuanian poet in his youth, who fought and suffered at the hands of both Nazis and Soviets, he had emigrated to the US in 1949 and swiftly established himself at the center of New York's film scene. As founder of what was arguably America's first serious cinema publication, Film Culture, as organizer of various screenings of independent film all over Manhattan, and as champion of the movement he would proclaim the New American Cinema in the pages of the soon-to-be legendary Village Voice, his intellectual influence was omnipresent. He and his brother Adolfas had been "practicing" with their Bolex for some time, and now the challenge of films such as Cassavetes' Shadows and his increasing alignment with a radical Beat ethos in the face of the Bomb, the rapidly evolving civil-rights movement, and regular police incursions into Greenwich Village coffeehouse bohemia forced his hand at inventing by-any-means-necessary feature filmmaking. Although Guns of the Trees was scripted, the hallmark of his efforts would be a commitment to spontaneity, both in form and content, in the service of creating a "New Man" who would radically transform society.
Stolen equipment was secured. Money for film was begged and borrowed. The rag-tag crew (including a young Peter Bogdanovich) roamed all over the New York environs, shooting off-the-cuff, shoplifting food, being chased from locations by over-zealous cops. By the end of their journey, they had created a portrait of an America on the brink of apocalypse, by means of intertwining stories of two couples, one white, one black, who try to make sense of it all. Featuring the Brando-esque Ben Carruthers, acclaimed for his role in Shadows, and voice-over poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Guns would prove daring enough to earn Mekas a visit from the FBI.

Not on video!
Winner of First Prize at Porretta Terme, Italy, 1962
1961 B+W 16mm 85 mins.
At 8:45pm: The Brig
By 1964, post-JFK assassination, the American atmosphere was considerably grimmer. In a year in which he spent time in jail for exhibiting Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Jean Genet's Un Chant d'amour, Mekas attended the original production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, a proto-Guantanamo hallucinatory vision of a play set in a Marine base in Japan. Simultaneously electrified and horrified by the all-too-real events transpiring before his eyes, he immediately resolved to film it in a cinema-verite manner, and shortly thereafter completed what is possibly the shortest schedule in the history of fiction feature-film production: The Brig, photographed with the camera hand-held by Mekas himself, took no more than three hours to shoot. The film proved a major success of the New American Cinema, and was a further salvo in the direction of what would become Mekas' modus operandi of a completely spontaneous and responsive filmmaking form. Although it could be called "scripted", the shooting itself was almost entirely improvised--this dichotomy mirroring what Mekas increasingly found to be the paradigm of the modern world: the fixed "establishment" reality vs. that of the free, the open, the brave. He was well on his way towards becoming the self-described "raving maniac of cinema"....
"The Mekas brothers are no longer the gentle poets that we thought they were:
they are two wild Indians drying scalps." -Cahiers du cinema
Not on video!
Winner of Prize for Best Fictional Film at the 15th
International Documentary Festival of Venice, 1964.
1964 B+W 16mm 68 mins.
Eros Plus Massacre
Sunday, September 16
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
Berkeley
Tickets will be on sale starting at 3:30 Sunday in the theater lobby. Admission is $7, cash only.
In 1959 two cinematic movements, twin colossi of 20th century artistic reinvention, were born across the world from each other.
While the exploits of the French New Wave are widely known in the U.S., the simultaneous adventures of the Japanese New
Wave have only begun to be revealed on these shores. Oshima, Masumura, Hani, Imamura, Suzuki and others dealt with issues
of contemporary alienation, youth rebellion, the post-war legacy, sexual freedom, the role of women, the plight of the Japanese
individual caught between the attractions of left and right-wing collectivized factions, etc. Perhaps no group of filmmakers has
ever so rigorously confronted the issues of their society in such a head-on manner. Given that this was occurring in the midst of
1960's political tumult and media explosion, it was inevitable that the results would take the form of convulsive frenzy, culminating
in Yoshishige Yoshida's 1970 masterpiece, "Eros plus Massacre", until now all but unseen in the U.S.
In a radically Brechtian style, "Eros" relates the "true" story of 1910's and 20's legendary anarchist Sakae Osugi, the most
famous radical agitator of his time, as well as the founder of Japan's first school dedicated to teaching Esperanto, the language
invented in the cause of Utopian world reconciliation. This wildly popular firebrand (described as "a kind of politicized Mick
Jagger-in-his-prime") was the mastermind behind the Rice Riots, which brought approximately 10 million Japanese to the edge of
rebellion in what's been called "the greatest uprising in modern Japanese history". His services to humanity were rewarded with
the #1 slot on the military police (the Kempeitai)'s death-list. After a May Day speech in Paris proved so rousing it led to his
arrest and deportation back to Japan, the Kempeitai had their chance. Following the Great Kanto Earthquake, under the pretext of
quelling potential anarchist uprisings, Osugi, his lover Noe Ito, and his six-year-old nephew were arrested and murdered. This
became known as the "Amakasu Incident" (the later exploits of Lieutenant Amakasu, the officer in charge of these activities, were
portrayed by Riyuchi Sakamoto in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor").
Rather than focussing on the grand stage of politics, however, Yoshida's stylistically playful work centers on the intimate politics
between Osugi, his wife, and his two lovers. Refusing to respect conventional narrative constraints, the film charges across
barriers of time and genre, interweaving Osugi's story with one of latter-day students embarked on a research project into the
anarchist's ideas regarding free love. Through these colliding quests of self-discovery, "Eros" humorously delves into the
question of whether unlimited passion can be the source of ultimate human liberation....
A film of epic proportions, "Eros" features some of the most famously beautiful black-and-white cinematography in the history of
cinema.
"Masterpiece... The finest cinematic reflection I've seen on histrionic death." -Noel Burch
"Masterpiece." -Tadao Sato
Not on video!
B+W 35mm cinemascope 167 min.
Japanese w/ English subtitles
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation

Since this screening is not a presentation of the Pacific Film Archive, it does not appear in their calendar or in any of their publicity. Nevertheless, the show will go on!
Venom and Eternity and The End
Wednesday May 23rd
7:00 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street
San Francisco
click here for flyer
Jean-Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity
"I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It's reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this pig filled with grease will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, rupture, of this corpulent and balloon organization which is called film." -Jean-Isidore Isou

"Venom and Eternity" features the smoldering, searing presence of Isou himself, playing a young film aesthete who rewrites all conventions of filmmaking, morality, and propriety before our very eyes. Multiple fractured narratives are introduced, then discarded as they lose their charm. In an Oedipal revenge against the patriarchal image, Isou allows the soundtrack to dominate, assaulting the audience with haughty, ironic rants, and howled primal chants. Not satisfied by this means of attack, Isou introduces the most willfully disjointed cutting style up to this point in film history, then paints on, scratches, and gouges the filmstock itself.
"Venom and Eternity"'s premiere at Cannes was greeted by riots quelled only by the use of firehoses. Jean Cocteau, who appears in the film, nevertheless prevailed upon the authorities to invent a prize for a work so groundbreaking, the "Prix spectateurs d'avant garde 1951". Chaos ensued as "Venom" made its way around the world, including a riot at its San Francisco premiere!
Isou's activities spurred not only the aesthetic innovation of American filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the French New Wave (and hence the whole modern visual world), but the social and political radicalism of the international youth rebellion movement, and the pranksterism of the Situationist International, directly inspiring the fury spilling onto streets around the world starting in May '68!
"Is 'Venom' a springboard or is it a void? In fifty years we'll know the answer. After all, remember how Wagner was received. Today, no one objects to his outbursts. The day will come, perhaps, when Isou's style will be the fashion. Who can tell?" -Jean Cocteau, 1951
A "masterpiece... often breathtaking"! -Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2005
Not on video!
B+W 16mm 77 min.
Immediately following Venom and Eternity, Christopher Maclaine's The End
While the French cultural response to the nuclear age was aesthetic and political, American Beats came at the problem from spiritual and sexual angles. In 1953, San Francisco's own Christopher Maclaine (the "Antonin Artaud of North Beach") created what has often been described as the ultimate expression of the Beat sensibility on film. "The End" offers us the chance for apocalyptic ruminations as we explore the twisted tales of five characters as they make their way through their last day on earth. No film could be more relevant to the insanity of the last five years. Like "Venom and Eternity," "The End" was greeted with a riot upon its San Francisco premiere! A blast!
Not on video!
Color/ B+W 16mm 34-3/4 min.
Two complete shows: 7:00 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.
Film Series: Film Gods Shoot Back
The Bigamist and Outrage
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley
(Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.)
Tickets on sale in the PFA lobby one hour before showtime.





Print Source: UCLA Film & Television Archive
Preservation funded by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association

Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie and Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th St.
San Francisco


1971 Color 35mm 108 min.

Previously shown in this series:
The World's Greatest Sinner
Saturday, December 15
7:00 pm and 9:15 pm
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street
San Francisco

1962 B+W/Color 35mm 82 min.
and classic Timothy Carey trailers!