Q&A

Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema at SF MoMA

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

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

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

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

Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, screenwriting

Report

The greatest finds of my generation

The harsh glare of the spotlight that brought Howl mixed reviews from critics on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival had melted into a warm glow by Saturday, when the Bay Area-made nonfiction feature played to an adoring audience at Park City’s Library venue. Programmer David Courier’s slip of the tongue as he celebrated "two of the most venerated documentary filmmakers of our time, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman" (Oscar winners for Common Threads and The Times of Harvey Milk), by praising how the two were "making their first fourway—I mean FORAY—into dramatic films" offered an appropriately irreverent frame for a film about Allen Ginsberg’s development as a poet and the fate of his epic "Howl" in a 1957 San Francisco courtroom.

[Editor’s note: Continue reading entries on the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, including interviews with Bay Area makers Sam Green and the Butcher Brothers Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores, critical takes on films and events of the festival, behind-the-scenes photos, as well as exclusive interviews with Bay Area Sundance staffers in SF360 Blogs.]

topics: activism, actors, authors, awards, bay area, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki

Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in film

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, screenwriting