Platform

Michael House's translation of Tati debuts at YBCA

Riding the crest of the Tati tsunami hitting our shores—two retrospectives, one at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the other at Pacific Film Archive this month, along with arthouse screenings of M. Hulot’s Holiday — is an outstanding documentary, The Magnificent Tati. It’s by Michael House, who lived in San Francisco for 12 years before moving to Paris, where he and his wife, Julie, have lived for the past decade. House still considers himself a San Franciscan, however, and returned to San Francisco to complete the final stages of The Magnificent Tati in collaboration with Kim Aubry’s ZAP Zoetrope. (Aubry used to be the Head of Post Production at Zoetrope Studios and is a long-time collaborator with Francis Ford Coppola.) House phoned me from Paris to converse on the upcoming premiere. The Magnificent Tati has its U.S. premiere in San Francisco at YBCA on Sunday, January 24, 2010, 2 p.m., with the director in attendance.

topics: actors, composers, critics, directors, documentary, french cinema, genre films, hollywood, photography, q&a, world cinema

Take Two

Soulful "35 Shots of Rum" is gently intoxicating

Few directors remain as restless and unpredictable in their choices as Claire Denis has over the last 20 years—qualities rarer still for someone now past 60 who didn’t direct her first feature until age 40. (Before then she was assistant director to a starry range including Wenders, Jarmusch, Costa-Gavras and Dusan Makavejev.)

Her 1988 writing-directing debut first feature Chocolat (no relation to the 2000 Johnny Depp movie) drew on her growing up as a French civil servant’s child in colonial Africa. Immigration and multiculturalism in French-speaking societies has remained one consistent thread.

topics: cinephiles, directors, french cinema, women filmmakers

Experience

Welcoming French Cinema Now—and then

The year 2009 marks the golden anniversary of a watershed event in international cinema: The launching of the Nouvelle Vague, that agitating generation of young filmmakers (many former critics) who laid siege to the perceived creative atrophy of the French film industry, in the process having a huge influence on movies everywhere.

You can argue exactly what the first “New Wave” feature was, but in terms of popular impact, the one that first resonated around the world was undeniably François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. That 1959 classic is being revived as part of San Francisco Film Society’s second annual French Cinema Now festival, which runs the week of October 29 through November 4 at the city’s Clay Theatre.

topics: comedy, critics, dramatic films, film festivals, french cinema, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, reviews, world cinema

Experience

William Klein's restless mind on view at the PFA

William Klein is best known as a photographer and expat New Yorker who moved to Paris in 1948 and never looked back—well, with the notable exception of New York (life is good and good for you in New York…), a mid-1950s exhibition and photobook. It was a much-debated sensation at the time for both its unconventional technique (Klein played liberally with focus, overexposure and wide angles) and rather shocking, vivid, un-pretty view of the Big Apple’s denizens. Today, it’s considered a game-changing landmark in the medium. His subsequent fashion photography (notably for Vogue) was also strikingly innovative. His images have been shown at leading museums around the world, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art not long ago.

But in 1965 Klein got interested in filmmaking—initially abandoning still photography entirely for it.

topics: activism, art, art film, film history, filmmakers, french cinema, pacific film archive, photography, world cinema

Platform

Mountain high: Telluride's Bay Area behind-the-scenes staff

The Telluride Film Festival is world renowned for the unique and selective quality of its program and for the filmmakers who make the arduous trek to the southwest corner of Colorado each year. But some of the most interesting people are behind the scenes—and many of them live in the Bay Area. SF360 had the opportunity to interview 15 of the 50 Bay Area staffers in the week leading up to opening night, as they arrived by plane, train and automobile to prepare for the 36th TFF. Each year the Telluride staff is reminded that “you’re not paid enough to have a bad time,” so we wanted to find an explanation for the high recidivism of the Telluride family for the festival that this year’s Guest Director, Alexander Payne, calls the “older, non-druggy Burning Man.”

topics: activism, actors, festivals, film festivals, french cinema, genre films, hollywood, international film, world cinema

Take Two

“The Beautiful Person” uncorks the high drama of high school

In their recent introduction to a teen-themed edition of the online film journal Rouge, co-authors Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald begin by distinguishing between coming-of-age films which defang adolescence of its dangerous vitality by narrating from the perspective of adulthood and those which revel in what they call “teenage wildlife”: “The story of teenagers living in an eternal present moment, like a savage, roaming pack of animals.” The Beautiful Person is too mannered to qualify for the “brutal poetry” concerning the Rouge crew, but “teenage wildlife” seems an extremely apt phrase for the way French writer-director Christophe Honoré films the adolescents starring in his own high school musical. In the movie’s early scenes, when Honoré throws us into the noisy ecology of a tony Paris high school without orientation—we’re following Junie (Léa Seydoux), the damsel of the title, on her first day as a transfer student—he does so with indiscriminate immersion of an ethnographer. Later, when the characters settle into place, there are frequent cutaways to teens draping themselves over furniture and each other: public displays of affection are merely expressive of a natural order of heartbreak.

topics: french cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

Experience

Telluride reveals titles in its 36th edition

The Telluride Film Festival announced its full lineup for its 36th festival, which opens Friday, Sept. 4, and runs through Labor Day Weekend. Founded in 1974 by James Card, Tom Luddy and Bill and Stella Pence, the festival takes place in a mountain village in Colorado, and is currently programmed by directors Luddy and Gary Meyer and managing director Julie Huntsinger out of offices in Berkeley, California. The festival had already announced its Guest Director for 2009, Alexander Payne, and its special celebration of legendary film critic Manny Farber. Further tributes go to Margarethe von Trotta, Viggo Mortensen and Anouk Aimée. The festival offers 24 new features in its main program alongside its always strong revivals, as well as 29 shorts and 10 documentaries in its Backlot program, which focuses on filmmakers and other artists.

topics: actors, art film, audiences, authors, awards, bay area, film festivals, french cinema, genre films, world cinema