Insider

Kevin Kelly: State of Cinema address

[Editor’s note: What follows is the State of Cinema address Kevin Kelly offered an audience Sunday, May 4, 2008, at the San Francisco International Film Festival.]

Welcome, welcome, welcome! This lovely theater here got dark and I thought, "Oh, great! It’s a movie! I can just sit back." I completely forgot that I have to give a talk. I would just love to sit here. Thank you to the San Francisco Film Festival for inviting me to speak on speculations on the future of where motion pictures are going. My role, I think, is to describe what I see as a little bit of an outsider. My method for doing this is very simple: to come [at it] as an outsider. We’re sitting here in a fantastic movie theater, but in fact more people see movies in airplanes than watch them in theaters. Airplanes and portable DVDs. But the movies aren’t made, usually, with that in mind. So what I’m trying to do is listen to the technology. Carver Mead, a technologist said, "Listen to the technology; see what it wants to say." And for the next 45 minutes, what I’m going to try to talk about is what I think the technology is telling us. The technology around moving pictures, motion pictures.

topics: authors, bay area, science fiction, technology

Experience

Finding Warren Sonbert

By Max Goldberg

Unlike most experimental filmmakers, Warren Sonbert’s collected works have had the benefit of full retrospectives at major museums (San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, New York’s, Guggenheim) and a strong preservation effort. These garlands were posthumous, coming after the artist died of AIDS in 1995, but accord on this scale is rare for an underground moviemaker, no matter the biographical fillings. An avid traveler, opera buff and cinephile, Sonbert dipped into many cultural niches without subscribing to any particular dogmatism. Beginning as a teenage prodigy amidst Andy Warhol’s Factory, Sonbert brought his Bolex camera to bear on his life, tastes and milieus. He’s sometimes simplistically referred to as a "diarist" filmmaker, though Sonbert developed more over time than the term implies. As his films moved from outsider pop to symphonic polyvalence, their overlaid and often contradictory tones and themes inscribed a uniquely capacious cinema.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film

Found

Q&A: Alex Rivera, "Sleep Dealer"

By Michael Guillen

Alex Rivera’s debut feature Sleep Dealer was developed at the 2000 and 2001 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program labs and won the 2002 Sundance/NHK award and a 2004 Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship. It then moved on to win two major awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Rivera and David Riker won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for outstanding achievement for their screenplay and Sleep Dealer was also the recipient of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The Prize, which carries a $20,000 cash award to the filmmaker provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is presented to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Sleep Dealer was selected "for its visionary and humane tale of a young man grappling with a technological future in which neural implants, telerobotics and ubiquitous computing serve a global economy rife with fundamental challenges and opportunities, and for its powerful and original storytelling and direction."

While screening as part of the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, the U.S. distribution rights for Sleep Dealer were picked up by Maya Releasing, which intends a theatrical distribution in February 2009. This decision was being reached even as the charmingly kinetic Alex Rivera and I sat down to discuss his film.

topics: directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival, science fiction, sundance, sundance film festival

Take Two

Review: "The Living End," remixed and remastered

By Dennis Harvey

What to think about attitudes toward and images of gays in U.S. media these days? It’s a complicated question. On one hand, clearly there have been enormous advances. Not so long ago, who could have imagined shows like The L Word or Will & Grace being long-running mainstream hits? Ellen and Rosie and such are beloved by housewives across America. Brokeback Mountain won Oscars—though not the big one, in what many speculated was a failure of nerve on the part of older Academy voters who simply didn’t want to watch it.

Yet Brokeback did not open the floodgates for gay-themed Hollywood projects as predicted, the studios regarding its success as a fluke. (We’ll see if Ang Lee’s upcoming gay-perspective Woodstock movie or Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk bio changes their minds.)

topics: bay area, dvd, queer cinema

Platform

"Standard Operating Procedure:" Questions and answers with Errol Morris

By Susan Gerhard

Transcription by Eve O’Neill.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris reaches into the murkiest of waters and somehow manages to extract clarity. His fishing expeditions have taken him from the lonely highways of Texas to the torture chambers of Iraq. What he pulls up is never the expected answer; often enough, it’s a revelation. With Standard Operating Procedure, which opened in the Bay Area last Friday, Morris forces audiences into a new understanding of the infamous torture photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib, and our complicity in their making. His investigative zeal traces back to the Bay Area, he said in a recent onstage conversation during the San Francisco International Film Festival. What follows is the transcript of the interview with B. Ruby Rich during his SFIFF Persistence of Vision award screening at the Sundance Kabuki April 29.

topics: bay area, critics, directors, documentary, san francisco international film festival