The 6th Screen

To French Polynesia and back with Seesmic

By Hannah Eaves

As my ship cuts a sweet line through the South Pacific, it seems that nothing could be further from this distant spot, where there is no land in sight, than the intricacies of the Bay Area Internet industry. When you look at a globe, French Polynesia falls exactly at the point where all other land masses disappear around the curve, and, if you squint your eyes, there is exactly nothing but ocean around it, with maybe a hint of the Americas or Australia.

Experience

Room for thought at SFMOMA

By Michael Fox

A film in a darkened theater commands our undivided attention, but a video installation in a museum doesn’t have the same effect. Living so long with the insidious remote control, plus the steady erosion of attention spans, has made us impatient and intolerant of any program that isn’t entertaining us NOW! Frankly, we’re so allergic to boredom that a mere instant of stasis or confusion is enough to send us hopping to another channel, or fleeing to another room. The adjacent installations of computer-generated video by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer currently on display at SFMOMA require more time than most to reveal themselves, and it’s the rare visitor who sticks around that long. Are the peripatetic hordes missing out on some fantastic secret of the universe? I daresay no. Yet I consider it my public duty to encourage anyone who checks out the show in its last month to slow down their meter and get on its rhythm.

topics: art, exhibitions, sfmoma

In Production

The elusive woodpecker and troubled children of divorce

By Michael Fox

There may be some disagreement whether an Oscar-winning social-issue tearjerker rates higher on the documentary food chain than a multimillion-dollar-grossing political satire. But there’s little question that so-called educational films with specific social-welfare goals don’t get much respect, as examples of craft or art. So what happens when a gifted filmmaker steps into the educational arena? We’ll find out when Ellen Bruno (Samsara) finishes Split, a half-hour film aimed at 6-12-year-olds with separated or divorced parents and the first piece in a planned trilogy, with the second targeted to teenagers and the third to parents.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, film festivals, sundance film festival

Take Two

Chris Marker comes home, at last

By Michael Fox

I confess that for a long while I had the misperception, based on almost no exposure to his work, that French essayist Chris Marker made dense, dry films steeped in political theory and inaccessible to anyone but a narrow strata of irrelevant European intellectuals. This delusion persisted because Marker’s films truly were inaccessible; outside of the infrequent one-shot local premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival or the Pacific Film Archive, they never played. The exception is his tour de force short fiction La Jetée, which pops up with some regularity at venues like The Other Cinema and S.F. Cinematheque. (And even its army of admirers will concede that it’s less a pleasure trip about time and space travel than a pointed examination of the nature and meaning of images.) Marker’s unavailability wasn’t remedied by DVD, where one could only find La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Until today, that is, when Icarus Films releases The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), The Last Bolshevik (1993), Remembrance of Things to Come (2001) and The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004). A gust of fresh air, they’re guaranteed to whisk away your boredom (it’s OK, you can admit it) with story-driven American documentaries with quirky characters.

I should point out that these are individual releases, not a box set, though it hardly minimizes the echoes that ricochet across the films and the decades.

topics: dvd, experimental film, french cinema, reviews

Insider

Inside the Telluride Film Festival

By Hilary Hart

The Telluride Film Festival thrives on trust: Film lovers and filmmakers travel to this remote corner of Colorado from great distances and at considerable expense on blind faith—because the TFF program is a closely guarded secret until the day that the festival opens. For 35 years, the extended festival family of pass holders, filmmakers, staffers and supporters has convened on Labor Day weekend knowing that their expectations of seeing a well-curated selection of world cinema, past and present, from Hollywood to Romania to Senegal to South Korea, will be exceeded. (Surely no one arrived in town dreaming that this year’s tributees would be actress Jean Simmons and directors David Fincher and Jan Troell.)

This is my 20th TFF; I was here three times as a pass holder, and, for the past 17 years, I’ve come here as a volunteer staffer. I’m one of many: The festival staff of nearly 750 includes 54 Bay Areas residents, amongst them filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose first feature, Medicine for Melancholy, won the Audience Award at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival last spring. For six years, Jenkins has worked in the trenches at TFF as a “schlepper," most recently overseeing the set up and operations of the concessions. This week, he’s stocking popcorn, hot dogs and soda, and next week his film plays at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the top ten film festivals in the world. In the last year he’s acquired an agent, received numerous awards and signed a distribution agreement with IFC Films, who will release Medicine for Melancholy nationwide in February. But as he said in the Telluride Daily Planet, “There was no way I wasn’t gong to Telluride. I love working (here).”

[Editor’s note: What follows is the TFF lineup, which was announced yesterday and posted in "News" on SF360.org.]

topics: animation, directors, documentary, exhibitions, features, international film, telluride film festival