Experience

San Francisco Cinematheque Springing into Action

The spring edition of the San Francisco Cinematheque calendar is making the rounds, and my copy is already dog-eared with wishful thinking. Beyond the usual bounty of local premiers and filmmaker spotlights, it’s exciting to see Cinematheque continue to cultivate unusual collaborations, programming formats and venues—even the most seasoned Bay Area filmgoer may need to consult the key to decipher some of this calendar’s site abbreviations (Quick, what’s PTUSF? NNC?). So grab your datebook and get ready for a rundown.

topics: audiences, avant-garde, curators, diy, documentary, exhibition, experimental film, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

PFA revisits Val Lewton's brooding mood, chilling themes

The horror genre has only grown stronger in recent years—not just commercially, but also in terms of creativity (albeit the latter mostly in the genre’s non-mainstream efforts). Throughout cinema’s first decades, however, horror movies were dismissed by most grownups (and nearly all critics) as juvenile, silly, even offensive.

We can look today at the peak work by 1920s horrormeister Todd Browning (director of Lon Chaney’s greatest hits) and his 1930s successor James Whale (of the first Boris Karloff Frankensteins, plus The Invisible Man) and realize they made some of the finest films of their Hollywood era. But at the time, theirs and all other horror films were considered basically stupid—as was anything that hinged on superstition.

topics: actors, cult cinema, curators, directors, pacific film archive

Report

Top 10s of the 2000s

It’s no surprise that we—a group of critics, fans, exhibitors and filmmakers in the Bay Area responding to survey questions on the best films of the decade—did not arrive at a consensus. It would be a terrible sign of the aggregation era if we had. Indeed, the eclectic nature of this list proves that the long tail may continue to wag, happily, into the next decade, bringing diversity, perhaps even democracy, to a screen near you. The lists below are published in the order they were received, with director/country of origin on first mention of a film, with comments offered in a few cases. Please, offer us lists of your own in the "comments" box below.

topics: audiences, authors, awards, bay area, critics, critics year end, cult cinema, curators, directors

Report

Top 10s of 2009: Critics, filmmakers, exhibitors, distributors and fans speak

It was a big year for 3D, but critics and film-industry folk in the Bay Area found many other dimensions in the cinema of 2009. Included in these lists we solicited from the community are not just films released this year locally, but occasionally films that have had festival-only screenings elsewhere or films made in ’08 that had local releases in ’09. We gave wide berth to our well-traveled respondents, a few of whom offered comments on films, or limited their selections to moments within films. Directors and countries of origin on films are listed on first mention; lists appear in the order they were received. And please: Join the fray. Share your own lists in the "comments" box, below.

topics: audiences, authors, awards, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, cult cinema, curators, directors

Experience

After Sept. 11, 2001, a decade found its way

On September 13, 2001, I stood in a small park in downtown Toronto, shocked but confident, and spoke to Canadian television: From now on, movies would not be the same, Hollywood and indie films would change completely. Everything would be different. It had to be, didn’t it?

Well, no, as it turned out.

I was wrong.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is devoting this and the following week to coverage of the year and decade in film.]

topics: activism, argentine cinema, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, critics year end polls, curators, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, dvd, exhibitio, tv, web, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

Platform

David Sherman brings desert exposé to S.F. oasis

For a decade and a half, multi-hypenate David Sherman was a major figure in San Francisco’s vigorous experimental film scene. A probing artist, Sherman’s numerous films included the 1997 Whitney Biennial selection Tuning the Sleeping Machine. A tireless curator, the Tucson native and his future wife Rebecca Barten founded the 30-seat Total Mobile Home microCINEMA in the mid-‘90s, presenting more than 120 shows during its five-year run. Sherman was also the administrative director of venerable Canyon Cinema and—yes, there’s more—taught at California College for the Arts. Marking his first trip to town with a new film since he and Barten moved to Bisbee, Arizona (80 miles southeast of Tucson) shortly after the millennium, Other Cinema unspools the underground premiere of Wasteland Utopias in a rare Sunday show on Dec. 6. He gave us the scoop on Wilhelm Reich and other shadowy figures on the phone and via email.

topics: bay area, curators, directors, diy, exhibition, experimental film, world cinema

Experience

SFFS's first annual Cinema by the Bay festival spotlights local talent

A film festival that’s long overdue arrives tonight with San Francisco Film Society’s first annual Cinema by the Bay. A wide-ranging showcase of local filmmaking, as well as a forum for the region’s influence as subject and setting in the work of filmmakers beyond the Bay, it runs through Sunday, October 25, and encompasses the straight-ahead to the avant-garde to the tantalizingly difficult to categorize (I’m thinking Etienne!) in a four-day program of features, shorts, docs and multimedia live performance from established and emerging artists.

topics: actors, audiences, avant-garde, bay area, curators, digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, dramatic films, exhibitions, experimental film, film arts foundation, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco film society