Report

Recession sidesteps theaters, up to a point

The economic downturn is hurting everyone, right? Yet Hollywood is on pace to break the box-office record it set last year. Likewise, the arthouses are doing steady business. Even concession sales at smaller theaters are generally level. So what’s going on out there?

Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff reports that in 18 of the first 19 weeks of 2009, the arthouse chain’s ticket sales were up from last year. Nonetheless, he says, "I don’t believe the industry is recession-proof. It’s all about the films. If there were 20 films in the marketplace no one wanted to see, they wouldn’t come to the movies. If we had great movies and we were priced out of the marketplace, people wouldn’t go either."

topics: art film, bay area, distribution, exhibition, independent film, international film, landmark theatres, red vic movie house, roxie

Experience

William Kentridge, synthesizing, at SFMOMA

The films of William Kentridge make up a significant and absorbing part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s enthralling survey of recent work by the acclaimed South African artist, which opened March 14 and continues through May before embarking on a multi-city international tour. In fact, his animated narrative drawings are what originally drew international attention to Kentridge in the 1990s. A central part of the breadth of invention and media on display in William Kentridge: Five Themes, these film works (in four groupings, all featuring at least some animated dimension) represent culminating elements and interests along the path of a highly productive career, based (and, to a fair extent, rooted) in his home city of Johannesburg. Bridging the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, the films form a particularly dramatic gateway into the themes and concerns of an unrepentantly political artist, a white South African of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, on the move from the local to the universal.

As will be immediately apparent to any visitor to the exhibition, Kentridge is a supremely successful interdisciplinarian and synthesizer, versed in the graphic arts, theater and sculpture as well as film.

topics: actors, animation, art, art film, avant-garde, bay area, directors, san francisco museum of modern art

In Production

In a handheld world, Ellen Lake's miniatures fit right in

The distribution of films over the Internet, a.k.a. digital delivery, is the hot topic du jour. When the day arrives that we’re all watching movies on the most expedient of platforms—our mobile phone—Ellen Lake will be at the head of the parade.

The Oakland filmmaker has completed some 30 pieces since 2000 ranging in length from 30 seconds to eight minutes. As you’d imagine, she has a number of works in progress at any one time, including the latest additions to "Collectible," a collection of films about collectors and their collections. "I tend to work in series," Lake says. "It’s always hard to know when it’s done because I keep on going. I hate to stop."

topics: art, art film, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary film, independent film

Found

Factory refreshed: Warhol's Screen Tests get Dean & Britta treatment

We live in Andy Warhol’s world now. His pronouncement that, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” was catchy and outrageous in 1968. Now, we’ve evolved into a culture in which Brangelina or Paris routinely knock Iraq or White House criminality way off the front page of public caring, while a sizable population joneses for that dazzling hit of total media exposure—even if it’s humiliating. The desire to be known, to be seen, overwhelms the specificities of “good” or “bad.”

Andy would have loved reality TV as ultimate (so far) proof of his notion that everybody is a star. All is takes to make one is the camera’s intoxicating gaze.

One of the purest expressions of Warhol’s aesthetic and (if such a lofty term applies) philosophy are his early Screen Tests.

topics: actors, art, art film, avant-garde, directors, experimental film, independent film, san francisco film society

Platform

David Thomson rounds up 1,000 unusual suspects

The publication of a new book by David Thomson, the British-born film historian and essayist who’s called San Francisco home for many years, is always cause for celebration, and not just because of the hours of illumination and provocation that await the movie-mad reader. The author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and daring studies of Warren Beatty, David O. Selznick, Orson Welles and Nicole Kidman blends a breadth of knowledge with an abiding admiration for talent that has the magical side benefit of reviving our faith that a young filmmaker is on the verge of emerging with a masterpiece. Have You Seen? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Random House), which hit bookstores a couple of weeks ago, devotes one wondrously irreverent page apiece to an iconoclastic array of movies beginning with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and concluding with Zabriskie Point. A new Thomson book also provides an excuse to sit down for an expansive conversation about the auteur Sylvester Stallone, the great Cavalcanti film—well, the many great films—he didn’t include and why he eschews being called a critic.

topics: actors, art film, authors, bay area, hollywood, world cinema

In Production

Epstein and Friedman bring "Howl" to the screen, while a South Bay director goes Russian

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman would tell you the most nerve-wracking part of the filmmaking process takes place far from the set or the preview room, well out of range of agents and cameras and audiences and critics. That would be the daunting task of lining up the financing.

"Every stage is hair-raising," Friedman says with a wry chuckle. "But this is the particular roller-coaster we’re on at the moment."

The Oscar-winning duo is moving down the road with Howl, an unflinching drama that revisits Allen Ginsberg’s seminal mid-‘50s poem and subsequent obscenity trial. "Howl," of course, is the epic take-no-prisoners verse that begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." Ginsberg first performed it in San Francisco, it’s worth remembering.

topics: actors, art film, awards, bay area, documentary, film festivals, funding, independent film

Report

Toronto 2008: Slow food, fast festival

Every year, people grumble. Every year, someone points out how much worse it is than before. And every year, there are films that pull everyone out of the doldrums and guarantee it all continues. Welcome to the world of film festivals, and to this season’s Toronto International Film Festival in particular: bigger, brighter, more overwhelming, less intimate, and in the end, exactly as satisfying as the films each audience member happens to stumble into.

topics: art film, film festivals, film history, genre films, independent film, international film, world cinema