Platform

"Standard Operating Procedure:" Questions and answers with Errol Morris

Transcription by Eve O’Neill.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris reaches into the murkiest of waters and somehow manages to extract clarity. His fishing expeditions have taken him from the lonely highways of Texas to the torture chambers of Iraq. What he pulls up is never the expected answer; often enough, it’s a revelation. With Standard Operating Procedure, which opened in the Bay Area last Friday, Morris forces audiences into a new understanding of the infamous torture photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib, and our complicity in their making. His investigative zeal traces back to the Bay Area, he said in a recent onstage conversation during the San Francisco International Film Festival. What follows is the transcript of the interview with B. Ruby Rich during his SFIFF Persistence of Vision award screening at the Sundance Kabuki April 29.

topics: bay area, critics, directors, documentary, san francisco international film festival

Critic's Notebook

Mike Leigh directs a topsy-turvy world

If any one thing unites the 22 winners so far of the SF Film Society’s Founder’s Directing Award, it’s that they’re all unique cinematic voices whose signature viewpoints and styles could never be mistaken for another’s. Akira Kurosawa (for whom the award was originally named), Michael Powell, Robert Bresson, Jiri Menzel, Francesco Rosi, Im Kwon-Taek, Arturo Ripstein, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Altman, Werner Herzog, Spike Lee—these are the kinds of talents that term "auteur" fits like a glove, as their directorial personalities are manifest in every frame, in every film. (The list’s only partial exceptions are, curiously, a few other Americans including Eastwood, Penn, Mankiewicz and Donen—superb craftsmen who’ve often subsumed a personal touch in service to the subject at hand.)

Over four decades as a writer-director whose film, TV and stage work have created a distinctive ongoing insider’s portrait of working-to-middle class English life, Mike Leigh now seems a natural 23rd addition to that lofty roll call. His each new movie or play is a cultural event—OK, not a pop-culture event, but one exported to arthouses and theatres around the world. His initial rise during the late 1980s must have galled Thatcherites who’d have preferred British cinema to be represented by Merchant-Ivory-style sumptuous nostalgia—not Leigh’s grotty, funny, barbed extensions of the "Angry Young Man" anti-nostalgic tradition.

topics: british cinema, critics, directors, san francisco international film festival

Take Two

Review: "Boarding Gate"

Olivier Assayas made his name from the late 1980s via a series of “typical” intimate French arthouse dramas done with bracing freshness and verve. He felt like a leading light in that country’s cinematic next wave, even arriving at the job as so many New Wave greats had a generation before—by first working at famed critical journal Cahiers du Cinema.

From early youth studies Disorder and Cold Water to 1998’s Late August, Early September, he seemed the latest in a line of Gallic filmmakers who made low-key, casual observation stealthily add up to something powerful. Even his rather large-scale, starry “Les destinees sentimentale” (2000) felt cut from the same cloth.

topics: critics, filmmakers, french cinema, reviews

Platform

Thomas Beard exposes "Live Cinema"

For decades, experimental filmmakers have actively rejected the conventions of story-driven cinema for a poetic, experiential aesthetic. It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that a few avant-garde visionaries would eventually challenge the codified, calcified nature of the moviegoing experience itself, where audiences passively sit through an identical fixed presentation from Tampa to Tucson, Tehachapi to Tonapah. Their goal is to turn each screening into an act of creation, with its attendant unpredictability and excitement. Some artists, like Zoe Beloff, bring rickety, old-fashioned projectors into the room to resurrect film’s mechanical and tactile characteristics. Animal Charm does a live mix of found footage. This exciting genre of experimental filmmaking is the focus of San Francisco Cinematheque’s brand-new collection of essays and artifacts, “Cinematograph 7—Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader.” Edited by New York programmer and critic Thomas Beard, the book launches with a party and screening this Thursday, April 10, at Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia (at 21st St.) featuring the aforementioned Animal Charm, SUE.C and Refraction. We caught up with Beard, whose latest venture is the weekly Brooklyn-based experimental film series Light Industry, via email.

topics: critics, experimental film

Take Two

Q&A: Brillante Mendoza

It is clear from the very first interaction with Brillante Mendoza that he is an extremely gracious man. This, even after the substantial acclaim he had been garnering for three feature films he unveiled this past year. In the most obvious ways, the two of his films playing at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Foster Child and Slingshot, couldn’t be more different. The first of these films centers on the adoption day of Jon-Jon, a darling 3-year old, from a loving foster family. The latter examines the criminal underworld and its corrupt government counterpart in a dark and labyrinthine Manila. Still, as Mendoza makes clear, these films share a basic approach to the world, one that engenders respectful understanding through a desire to depict and see things as they really are. In part, because of filmmakers like him, Filipino independent cinema has enjoyed a renaissance in this first decade of the 2000s. Mendoza was in San Francisco for the first time recently for his screenings, when he took time to speak with SF360.org.

topics: asian cinema, critics, directors, documentary, film festivals, q&a

Platform

Daniel Wu

Last year, when Daniel Wu came back to his native Bay Area with his directorial debut, “The Heavenly Kings,” which screened at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival, SF360.org contributor Jennifer Young reminded us of the joke that had been circulating online—that a Chinese law exists requiring Daniel Wu to be featured in every Hong Kong film. Still one of Hong Kong’s most prolific actors, Wu is visiting the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival this week with Alexi Tan’s “Blood Brothers.” Young got a chance to visit again with the actor when the film screened at the Castro this past Friday.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, bay area, castro theatre, center for asian american media, critics, cult cinema, film festivals

The List

Judy Stone's San Francisco Int'l Asian American Film Festival picks

A name familiar to longtime readers of the San Francisco Chronicle, where she once worked, Judy Stone came out with Not Quite a Memoir two years back, offering audiences conversations on film from around the world. This week, she offers SF360.org readers her top picks for the SFIAAFF’s collection of films from around the world—films screening at the Sundance Kabuki as you read this. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Ramparts, for over 40 years, and Stone has two other books out as well, Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers and The Mystery of B. Traven.

topics: asian cinema, authors, critics, film festivals, filmmakers