In Production

Putting flash to mustache, plus: Swenson's Salton Sea adventures

SF360.org editor’s note: This is the first edition of Michael Fox’s "In Production" column on Bay Area filmmaking, which will be appearing every other week in SF360.org.

Director’s Manual, Lesson 1: The idea for a film can literally strike anywhere. Laura Lukitsch was chilling at a rest stop in Arizona in 2003, en route to her sister’s wedding in New Mexico, when a busload of men on their way to the World Beard and Mustache Championships pulled in. She took out her new camera—which she was still learning to use—and discovered it had magical magnetic properties. "They came up to me and gave me an interview because it was the biggest camera there," the San Francisco filmmaker said with a chuckle the other day on the phone. When Lukitsch showed the sequence to family and friends, she got an unexpectedly passionate response. "Guys wanted to buy the footage," she recalled. "There was more to this than meets the eye. It seemed to bring up issues of family, of tradition, of religion, even male bonding."

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, documentary

Report

Flaherty diary: A week in the Age of Migration

Curating the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is, in a lot of ways, a film programmer’s dream—an invitation to spend a year building a week-long documentary and experimental film program with complete creative freedom, for a venerable institution, backed by an impossibly supportive staff and board. The Seminar is also a kind of social Petri dish that annually brings together a different programmer, a captive and engaged audience, and filmmakers to present and talk about their works, all in a secluded upstate New York setting where, for that week, everyone eats, lives, talks and breaths cinema. What happens during this period is the stuff of legend and lore and never what one expects.

The Flaherty is a place to explore—and explode—ideas, which is exactly what took place June 21-27, 2008, at Colgate College when I unveiled 40 films and videos to a ready, trusting, but critical audience. The theme: The Age of Migration.

topics: bay area, documentary, experimental film, features, film festivals, q&a

Report

"Full Grown Men" road trip reaches theaters

Not so long ago, theatrical distribution was the Holy Grail for independent filmmakers. But if you’ve been to an art house in the last six months or longer, or semi-regularly peruse the arts section of any newspaper or magazine (let alone the trades), you’re well aware that the box-office returns for foreign films, indies and documentaries are at a dangerously low ebb. So the winners who do score distribution in the current environment, like local filmmakers David Munro and Xandra Castleton’s Full Grown Men, which opens July 25 at the Lumiere, SF, experience something more akin to tempered enthusiasm than unadulterated joy. A theatrical run isn’t quite a hollow victory, but (with apologies to David Mamet) it increasingly feels less like a Cadillac El Dorado than a set of steak knives.

topics: bay area, comedy, directors, independent film

Found

You, the Man, and "CSNY: Deja Vu"

"Shut up and sing!" has been the historied catcall—sometimes less politely worded—for audiences who are fans of a particular artist’s music but take umbrage when their onstage patter gets a little "too political." It was even used as the title of a documentary about the Dixie Chicks, whose mouthing off about our current President famously got them kicked off conservative-leaning country radio.

It’s just possible, however, that no one has yet hurled that epithet at Neil Young, country-, bluegrass- and heavy-rock-influenced as his music has often been. I mean, what could they be surprised by? From "Ohio" (about the Kent State killings of student protestors) to "This Note’s For You" (a catchy riposte to rock’s product-endorsing, corporate-concert-sponsoring nature) and beyond, Neil has always aimed a cranky finger at The Man.

topics: bay area, documentary, music, political film, sundance kabuki

Take Two

Arghya Basu evokes the mystical and everyday in "A Listener's Tale"

If the Castro Theatre is the church of San Francisco cinephilia, then the Yerba Buena screening room is surely its laboratory—it’s only too fitting that leading curator Joel Shepard is spotlighting the idiosyncratic programming voices of five San Francisco independents for the museum’s upcoming Bay Area Now exhibition. Besides rounding up important international features (e.g. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) and oddball retrospectives (e.g. Phil Chambliss: Arkansas Auteur), Shepard also has a penchant for screening otherwise unhyped films which do not hew to typical genre norms. A case in point is A Listener’s Tale, a lovely if unclassifiable mixture of ethnography and poetic reverie which screened at last winter’s Rotterdam Film Festival.

In spite of the earnest attempts of academic critics to problematize both the conception and consumption of filmed representations of indigenous "others," filmmakers have been drawn to exotic cultures and landscapes since the Lumière Brothers first introduced lightweight cameras.

topics: bay area, documentary, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Insider

Bruce Conner, remembered

Editor’s note: In response to Bruce Conner’s death Monday, SF360.org asked those who knew him and cared about his work to reflect on the artist/filmmaker. Responding, below, are filmmakers Craig Baldwin and Lynne Sachs, curator/CalArts dean Steve Anker and New York curator/archivist Mark McElhatten.

"I was saddened by the news of Bruce Conner’s death, but not surprised, as he had been suffering for years. Of course he was an inestimably large influence on my own work, but, so much more, an intense, brilliant beacon for both the art and cinema worlds internationally—in fact, and importantly—a West Coast agent who did a whole lot to bring those two realms together. Across media, that rail-thin beatnik exercised a marvelous mastery of both concept and execution, driven by an obsessive and contrarian mind. But beyond his creative output, for me it was his subcultural sensibility that was cause for wonder—that within this cracker-white Kansas-comes-to-the-City could roil such dark and dangerous and anti-authoritarian impulses….As I think Greil Marcus said, he was the flip-side of American Gothic—had seen the Holy Ghost in the midnight sky above the stark prairie, and that terror was ever celebrated in the apocalypses of his Art."

Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema, filmmaker, Mock Up on Mu, among others

topics: art, avant-garde, bay area

Experience

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Back at the Castro this weekend for the 13th year, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents a variety of titillating titles, showing 12 feature films over 2 1/2 days. I’ve attended each SFSFF since its start in 1996, and can always feel the sincere passion for these classic films exhibited by everyone involved. The perfect marriage of form and content, the Festival makes sure to get the best 35mm prints of films both famous and bizarre, as well as world-class musicians to accompany all the films, which are shown in a bona fide film palace built in 1922.

This year’s lineup includes such silent icons as Lon Chaney, Harold Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies and flapper Colleen Moore, but also lesser-known characters such as Chief Buffalo Long Lance, the supposed Blackfoot chief who, well, wasn’t. This year’s film directors famous as well as infamous include Tod Browning, René Clair, Carl Dreyer, King Vidor and William Desmond Taylor (yes, the victim of the never-solved murder with suspects including three film actresses, one stage mother and the GM of Paramount Pictures).

topics: bay area, film festivals, silent film