Insider

SFFS Screen: Jacques Nolot and "Before I Forget"

The single, disgruntled, been-there-done-that gay man pushing well into middle-age or beyond has a long cinematic history—albeit most of it in the closet and unflattering. Sophisticated urban audiences might have recognized that such classic character actors in Hollywood’s "Golden Age" as Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton were playing stereotype "queers," but to most audiences they were just comic-relief eccentrics too fussy or silly to have gotten married. Later on, as movies became more "frank" in the 1960s and beyond, such figures came out of the closet only to be more harshly ridiculed, painted as bitter, misogynist, untrustworthy, even homicidal. What about today? With rare exceptions, in mainstream movies he’s still on the margins, if less despisedly so, as the heroine’s nonthreatening best friend or the funny neighbor or something.

So there’s something modestly daring about the movies made so far by Jacques Nolot, a longtime French stage, TV and film actor who didn’t make his feature directorial bow until a decade ago. His latest, Before I Forget, plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting this Friday.

topics: directors, french cinema, san francisco film society, sundance kabuki

Experience

"The Exiles," a return engagement

Despite a handful of more sympathetic portrayals (as in Anthony Mann’s 1950 The Devil’s Doorway), Hollywood’s record on Native American imagery before the late 1960s was one of condescension when not outright "savage" caricature. And that’s just counting the thousands of period-set Westerns—in movies about modern life, American Indians simply didn’t exist.

Ergo there was a startling sense of discovery for viewers when Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles premiered in 1961 at the Venice and San Francisco International film festivals, then other such showcases over the next couple years. This long-in-making naturalistic drama was an unvarnished look at "twelve hours in the lives of a group of Indians who have come to Los Angeles, California."

topics: american indian film, directors, filmmakers

Experience

Andrea Kreuzhage & Someguy riffle through "1000 Journals"

[SF360.org editor’s note: This interview first appeared during the San Francisco International Film Festival, where 1000 Journals played this past spring. It opens this Friday, Aug. 1, at the Roxie.]

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.

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

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

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

Kibitzing with S.F. Jewish Film Festival's Stein and Fishman

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has never, in its 28 years, taken the path of least resistance. To cite the most obvious example, a hallmark of the annual program is the inclusion of several films critical of Israel. (That these movies are almost always produced by Israeli filmmakers, and financed by government grants, is irrelevant to the fest’s critics.) This year’s contrarian act is increasing the number of films and screenings in the face of a spiraling economy. The expanded lineup includes spotlights on Italian Jews During Fascism and Diversity In Israel (a multicultural, gay-straight portrait of Israel on its 60h anniversary), along with salutes to doc-making brothers Barak and Tomer Heymann and home-movie excavator par excellence Péter Forgács. The SFJFF opens Thursday with Strangers, Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv’s lusty, improvised tale of an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman hooking up in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup, and continues through Aug. 11 at the Castro Theatre. The lineup, including the Berkeley, Palo Alto and San Rafael schedules, is at SFJFF’s website. Executive director Peter Stein and program director Nancy Fishman spilled the beans in their office in the Ninth Street Independent Film Center.

topics: directors, documentary, film festivals, filmmakers, independent film, jewish cinema

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