Q&A

Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema at SF MoMA

By Max Goldberg

As part of its 75th Anniversary celebrations, SF MoMA has commissioned three trios of programs surveying different eras of the museum’s history of film exhibition. The first of these considers the years of 1937-1960, though really we’re interested in 1945-1954, when Frank Stauffacher’s seminal Art in Cinema series hatched a Bay Area avant-garde. Filmmakers and critics are easily overlooked, but the programmer’s work is particularly subject to forgetting. In Stauffacher’s case this is most unfortunate, as his catalyzing work not only demonstrated the radical possibility of film as (local) art, but planted the seeds for a new, promiscuous way of seeing called cinephilia. When today’s enthusiasts dart between a Michael Mann blockbuster and a Ken Jacobs shoestring revolution, they are in Stauffacher’s republic. Art in Cinema took too much of Stauffacher—the series effectively ended when he died from a brain tumor in 1955—but his garden flourished well beyond those nine years.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, san francisco museum of modern art

Take Two

Mostly British and Very Entertaining

By Dennis Harvey

Tragically underrepresented in the Bay Area’s densely packed world of globally oriented film festivals is: the land(s) of our erstwhile colonial rulers! Being English-language, films from the UK and its former colonies do have a leg-up in terms of crashing the U.S. foreign-film market. (Although Canada is the exception. . . . ) And those that don’t make it are frequently programmed in the larger festivals like the San Francisco International, Mill Valley and Cinequest.

Still, there’s a fair amount of good work that’s underseen Stateside. Ergo the San Francisco Neighborhood Theatre Foundation and California Film Institute’s second annual Mostly British Film Festival, which unfolds February 4-11 at S.F.’s Vogue Theatre and Feb. 7-10 at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

topics: bay area, british cinema

Experience

SF Indiefest at Twelve

By Matt Sussman

It may be a strange time for independent film, with scaled back "indie" divisions of Hollywood studios and filmmakers self-distributing online, but SF Indiefest, now in its 12th year, is holding steady as a great aggregator and champion of the unsung, underdog, and un-buzzable. Like a wizened video store clerk, this year’s fest offers up an "if you like x, you should check out y" for just about every ‘x’ you could throw out there. Whether you’re jonesin’ for something experimental, a gritty domestic drama, or Shakespearean vampires (more on them later), Indiefest has your fix.

topics: bay area, digital distribution, distribution, diy, independent film

Found

Pacific Film Archive Hosts Young Filmmakers on the Big Screen

By Jane Riccobono

In the YouTube-Facebook-viral video era, it’s hard to remember the time when youth-made media was rare. Now in its 10th year, “Screenagers,” playing at the Pacific Film Archive this weekend, is a film series that began before the eyes of the world turned to under-21s and before that demographic’s camera phones became the eyes of the world.

topics: activism, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, youth

The 6th Screen

Chat It Up: Livestream, UStream and Justin.tv

By Hannah Eaves

Just over a year ago we witnessed an historic event when President Barack Obama took office. But in the virtual world another—albeit less monumental—breakthrough was happening. CNN took the event live online, alongside a Facebook Live Stream Box, allowing viewers to chat with friends and strangers, their conversation appearing next to the video. CNN reported 21.3 million streams by mid-afternoon, breaking all records. To Facebook, 600,000 updates were posted, with 4,000 updates per minute during the broadcast. Several months later the Jonas brothers came along and utterly shattered that record: 23,000 posts per minute. Long ago we dismissed chat rooms as dark holes filled with unpleasant people and noise. But with live steaming services surviving and event-based communication growing, has this become a case of, The Chat Room is Dead, Long Live the Chat Room?

topics: digital filmmaking, diy, internet