SF360: Features

NEWS

AP: "Slow Food US debut: San Francisco, Aug. 29-Sept. 1"

"Labor Day weekend marks the first major stateside event for the Italian-born group that trumpets sustainable, local and artisanal foods as the best antidote to the world’s increasingly industrialized (and... more

SEEN

The real Angelas stand up

Along with a panel discussion and screening of Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, the Oakland Museum hosted artist Mark Tribe, along with the two actresses portraying Angela Davis (Aleta Hayes, left,... more

BLOGS

Interview. Olivia Thirlby.
"When Juno exploded into the pop culture in 2007, it catapulted a young actress named Olivia Thirlby from the indie world's best kept secret into an overnight success," notes Sean Axmaker, introducing his interview. "...
[From The Latest from GreenCine Daily]

"Manoel de Oliveira: Talking Pictures"--Aug. 9-Sept. 28"

A director who’s completed half his lifetime film output after the age of 80, Manoel de Oliveira more than deserves this centennial appreciation, which opens this week with Voyage to... more

Happy anniversary, "Vertigo:" Said Novak at the time, "I don’t like to fly--not in planes anyway."

Found

Vertigo Celebrates 50 Years of Acrophobia, Fear of Flying and San Francisco

By Miguel Pendás

Not many movies call for a celebration of their anniversaries (did anyone celebrate the 50th anniversary of Citizen Kane?), but Vertigo is an exception, especially in this self-absorbed, any-excuse-for-a-party town, for what many have called “the ultimate San Francisco film.” Celebrations have already occurred in the way of screenings, and more are planned, notably a renovation of one of the movie’s key locations.

The actual birthday of Alfred Hitchcock’s magnum opus can be traced to Friday, May 9, 1958, the day of the world premiere, which took place at the Stage Door theater On May 8, the day began, typically, overcast and gray. A train from Los Angeles pulled into the station at Third and Townsend, and off stepped Kim Novak. A crowd of fans and reporters was waiting for the film’s star, who, at the age of 26 had already been featured on the cover of Time. The overcast light only highlighted the fact that her blond hair had a hint of lavender that day.

topics: bay area, film history, genre films

Full moon: Bay Area programmer Elliot Lavine introduces "Moon in the Gutter" during the PFA's David Goodis series. (Photo courtesy Pacific Film Archive)

Experience

"The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" visits the PFA

By Dennis Harvey

The now-beloved film noir genre of Hollywood’s 1940s and 1950s didn’t have a name until the French gave it one—they were just ordinary "crime mellers" or "gangster movies" to American audiences and critics who didn’t think twice about any artistic merit they might have until much later. Likewise, the "hardboiled" novels and short stories of the era (going back to the 1930s) was mostly considered disposable pulp fiction. A few authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were (and are) more highly regarded, but the majority—even relatively successful ones—hardly attracted much attention at the time. If lucky, they found some degree of real appreciation later on, most often posthumously. People like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford are considered legends now, but that would scarcely have seemed a logical outcome to them while alive.

David Goodis was one of the fairly-successful-then-forgotten ones. (As one internet "noir" bookseller’s biography succinctly puts it, "The lives of Goodis’ protagonists tend to mirror his own: Early promise, squandered.")

topics: authors, genre films, noir, pacific film archive

In the papers: Daniel Ellsberg surrenders to Federal authorities, with wife Patricia, in Boston, June 28, 1971 in this 1971 photo by Cary Wolinsky, from Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers." (Photo courtesy Rick Goldsmith)

In Production

Ellsberg and the Empress

By Michael Fox

When Prince Charles and Camilla visited San Francisco in 2005, one of their most publicized outings was an hour-long stop at the Empress Hotel. The building had been converted just a year earlier into a residence hotel for homeless people, and was the pride of the city’s Direct Access to Housing program. As soon as the royals and the TV crews left the Tenderloin, of course, the spotlight drifted off the Empress. So much the better for esteemed S.F. documentary makers Allie Light and Irving Saraf, who subsequently began filming a portion of the hotel’s 90 residents.

“We went into it with a lot of naivete,” Light recalls, a surprising admission for veteran filmmakers whose subjects have included mental illness (Dialogues with Madwomen) and convicted killers (Blind Spot: Murder by Women). “I believed entirely what we were told,” by the residents, Light says, “how happy they were to have a place to live, and how much they were trying to get their life together. [One tenant named] Jeffrey is very verbal and clear about who he is and was. And then we see him out on the street selling a voucher from his therapist. They reveal themselves.”

topics: bay area, documentary film institute, independent film, political film

Flame-in: "Flicker" plays YBCA's "Stoned Apocalypse" series. (Photo by Nik Sheehan)

Take Two

Dreamachines: "FliCKer" stares into the light

By Matt Sussman

In our popular imagination—and especially in film— the request to “stare into the light” is often an invitation to let our waking life fall into submission. The words— often spoken by hypnotists, anesthesiologists, and mystics— also describe the act of watching movies, and speak to film’s implicit promise of taking us to some other scene accessed through the flickers on the screen.

The transportive and conscious altering qualities of light were not lost on William S. Burroughs and his compatriot and frequent collaborator Brian Gysin. "We must storm the citadels of enlightenment,” Burroughs wrote to Gysin, “the means are at hand.” The means at hand were Gysin’s revelation about the hallucinatory qualities of flickering light and the device he invented in 1957 to harness its potential: the dreamachine. Nik Sheenan’s hypnotic documentary FlicKer— which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts-- looks into the dreamachine’s pulsating brilliance while also sketching a portrait of its troubled and brilliant creator.

topics: art film, yerba buena center for the arts

Camera ready: Canyon Cinema Exec Director Dominic Angerame brings experimental and avant-garde film to the world from its San Francisco base. (Photo courtesy Dominic Angerame)

Platform

Canyon Cinema's Dominic Angerame

By Erika Young

Filmmaker Dominic Angerame, the executive director of experimental/avant-garde film distribution company Canyon Cinema, seems that rarest of artists: someone who can level-headedly run a business and keep it profitable, as well as create highly personal, dynamic art. It’d be hard to find anyone willing to take on the everyday labor of film inspection, office work and filmmaker politics for as little compensation as he does: When he joined in 1980, "everyone was getting paid about $3 an hour," while in 2006, he had to battle to renegotiate his salary to an amount barely in line with San Francisco’s cost of living. But his commitment to the company, and the experimental art form, is 27 years strong and still going.

Originally from Albany, New York, Angerame lives in North Beach (the subject of two of his upcoming films, "two short comedies about coffee-shop living") and is a visiting faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute. His film Anaconda Targets (2004), footage of a 2002 military operation recorded aboard a United States gunship helicopter, screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006 as part of the Whitney Biennial. He participated in an email exchange with SF360.org this past winter.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, documentary, experimental film, features, gay lesbian cinema

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