Found

Guy Maddin talks about movies, writing, his writing about movies, and the allure of Ann Savage and the Osmonds

SF360.org editor’s note: On the occasion of the opening of My Winnipeg this Friday in Bay Area theaters, we’re re-running an entertaining interview Johnny Ray Huston, arts editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, conducted for us with Maddin two years ago, when Maddin was the recipient of a major award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. He also appeared at the Festival this past spring with My Winnipeg, and was back in town this month doing a live presentation for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Due to brilliant works such as his 2001 short ‘The Heart of the World,’ GuyMaddin is a more-than-worthy choice for the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, but I’d like to suggest that he also deserves praise for his writings about film. For example, ‘Death in Winnipeg,’ his account of time spent on the set of a recent TV movie about the Osmond family, is one of the best and funniest pieces of journalism my bloodshot eyes and addled brain have beheld in the past decade. That article and other scribblings by Maddin can be found in ‘From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings,’ a beautifully-designed tome featuring hyper-compressed descriptive wit that is signature Maddin. In conjunction with Maddin’s SF visit, I recently spoke to him about his second career as a film writer, as well as other topics.

topics: authors, cult cinema, directors, san francisco international film festival, screenwriting, silent film

Platform

Alex Gibney, going "Gonzo"

[Editor’s note: This interview first appeared in SF360.org during the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson played on closing night.]

It’s a good time to be Alex Gibney.

We met this year over egg rolls at a small upstairs bistro on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival, where Gibney’s bio-doc Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson premiered. It was Tuesday, in late-January. That morning Gibney, whose Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (SFIFF 2005) earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary in 2006, had learned that Taxi to the Darkside, his documentary murder mystery that examines the death of an Afghan taxi driver at Bagram Air Base, had been nominated for an Academy Award. (It eventually won.) Another documentary he’d executive produced, No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, had also been nominated for Best Doc.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, q&a

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

Diary

Capelle on Composers: Back to Back

Back to music.

I have some friends that were in a Sub Pop band that pre-dated Nirvana. They were known as the Dwarves. Their music is and was a snotty suburban unholy mixture of the Sonics, the Orlons, the Stooges and a vat of amphetamines. Their record covers usually featured midgets and half-naked woman covered in either blood or some sort of Nestle syrup of some sort. Here is one of their lines.

[Editor’s note: For the San Francisco International’s 51st edition, SF360.org has asked Bay Area musician/composer/cineaste Marc Capelle to blog his thoughts on movies, music, and the films showing in the Festival. This is the third of three installments.]

topics: authors, awards, bay area, cult cinema, genre films, music, san francisco international film festival

Q&A

Gibney going "Gonzo," part two

Editor’s note: This is the 2nd of two installments of Cathleen Rountree’s interview with Alex Gibney about Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which closes the San Francisco International Film Festival Thursday.

SF360.org: Do you think Thompson has a lasting legacy? I mean in the sense that there aren’t many people practicing his art form now.

Gibney: The thing for any writer is that you have to find your own voice. So people imitate Hunter Thompson at their peril, because that was Hunter’s voice, not Writer X’s voice. You know, there’s a little bit of Hunter Thompson in someone like Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. But there’s a legacy to Hunter Thompson, or to me the legacy should be: what’s wrong with breaking the rules? We need a few more people who break the rules, but to break them carefully. What did Bob Dylan say: "To live outside the law you must be honest." Because sometimes the people in power don’t play within the rules and, worse, they manipulate the rules against those who are trying to speak truth to power.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, directors, san francisco international film festival

Experience

Andrea Kreuzhage & Someguy riffle through "1000 Journals"

In 2000, a San Francisco graphic designer with the humble pseudonym of Someguy had a wildly ambitious brainstorm. He put a thousand blank journals out into the world in stages, opening the spigot on a torrent of contributions encompassing everything from knocked-off diary entries to poignant confessions to obsessively crafted art. Nonetheless, after three years, only a single completed book of 220 pages had made its way back to Someguy. The 1000 Journals project has mushroomed in the intervening years, inspiring both a book drawn from journal entries and a documentary, 1000 Journals, that tracks down participants around the globe and raises a host of fascinating questions about creativity, collaboration, community and communication. We sat down with Someguy and first-time director Andrea Kreuzhage, a German producer who’s lived in Los Angeles since the mid-‘90s, during the first of three screenings of 1000 Journals in the S.F. International Film Festival. (Editor’s note: At one SFIFF screening, another journal was returned to Someguy by Erin Gardner. The film screens again Thursday, May 1, at 3:15 p.m. at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.)

topics: art, authors, bay area, directors, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: Eddie Muller's muses

A self-described "cultural archeologist," Alameda’s Eddie Muller is renowned as an expert on all things noir. As founder of the Noir City, the annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival—which packs crowds into the Castro Theater to watch rarities like Edge of Doom and The Velvet Touch and pay tribute to forgotten stars like Joan Leslie—Mueller has earned a reputation for breathing new life into lost classics. At this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, Muller showcases a new talent: film directing. His debut short film, The Grand Inquisitor, pays homage to the Dashiel Hammet-style detective story, but with a twist—the investigator is a dame.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, directors, noir, san francisco international film festival