In Production

Hiler and Brown's ‘Music’ Salutes Symphonic Visionary

The so-called culture war is over, and the reactionaries have won. I recall with nostalgia Jesse Helms’ condemnation of the NEA for funding Marlon Riggs’ queer-centric Tongues Untied, and the late East Bay filmmaker’s blisteringly eloquent response. Such public right-wing remonstrations are no longer necessary, for the simple reason that 30 years of overt and covert pressure have cast a permanent chill on Federal and state arts organizations. I daresay the anti-intellectual denigration of culture and higher education, a cornerstone of the Reagan-Bush-Bush Era, is an unacknowledged factor in the current decimation of the public university system (which is conveniently blamed on the Great Recession). In this climate, Jerome Hiler and Owsley Brown III’s Music Makes a City is nothing short of a revelation. Now in its finishing stages, the documentary revisits the remarkable mid-century revival of Louisville, Kentucky, in the wake of the Great Flood of 1937.

topics: activism, composers, directors, documentary, music

Experience

Getting Behind the Music at Noise Pop Film Festival

Jimi Hendrix is not playing San Francisco’s 18th annual Noise Pop festival this year, but—along with Drive-By Truckers, George Clinton, Lou Barlow and Tool—he is making an appearance in the event’s Film Festival component, which runs February 24-28 at a variety of S.F. venues. It’s a disparate program ranging from portraits-of-an-artist to historical flashbacks, philosophical musings on music itself—and a couple items only tangentially about the auditory art form.

topics: cult cinema, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, music

Experience

"Freak" Flag Flying at YBCA

Because it’s a place where contemporary visual art, pop culture themes, live performance of myriad disciplines and recorded media comingle, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has sustained a major place in San Francisco’s cultural landscape since 1993—yet perhaps without quite receiving the due it would have had its mission been narrower and more easily defined.

That resistance to precise classification is, actually, much of what we like about YBCA. In the film/video department alone, longtime curator Joel Shepard has carved out a unique Bay Area programmatic niche that can encompass retrospectives of important but little-seen current international fiction and documentary directors alongside shows that reflect a distinct fondness for for vintage exploitation, subcultural artifacts and cinematic “outsider art.”

All three of the latter are on display in the venue’s new series “Freaks, Punks, Skanks and Cranks."

topics: actors, bay area, music, women filmmakers, yerba buena center for the arts, youth

In Production

Wendy Slick’s ‘Virtuoso’ Turn

Olga Samaroff, the path-breaking 20th-century concert pianist, critic and teacher with the exotic Russian name, was born Lucy Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas. You guessed it—she reinvented herself, out of necessity as much as ambition. “Olga was raised in a musical family, but at that time it was very difficult for a woman to be a musician,” says Wendy Slick, co-director with Donna S. Kline of Virtuoso: The Olga Samaroff Story. “And there was anti-Americanism. To be a classical musician you had to be European, and usually a male. [Women] could be teachers, but it wasn’t happening as much then that a woman would be a major concert artist. It was frowned upon.” The imposition of constraints on women was also a central theme in Slick’s last film (made with Emiko Omori), Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm, about the history of the vibrator. Now do we have your attention?

topics: audiences, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, music, women filmmakers

Review

Can't stop the musical: PFA revels in classics of the form

As soon as the silent era hit sound circa 1927, musicals became a leading film genre worldwide. How could their appeal possibly die out?

Yet it gradually did—starting in the 1950s (despite marvels from Singin’ in the Rain to Gigi), escalating in the late ’60s (when myriad big-budget musicals thirsting after The Sound of Music’s success flopped). Nails were thumped into the coffin by later duds like Lost Horizon (1973), Xanadu and Can’t Stop the Music (both 1980).

topics: comedy, directors, drama, music, musicals, pacific film archive

Report

Stephen Talbot tunes in to world music

Should Stephen Talbot be worried? He left PBS’s Frontline World, where he was a series editor and senior producer, to form Talbot Players and create and develop original media properties, including a new globe-trotting television series about world music dubbed Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders. For Talbot, it’s the kind of fantasy project he has been wanting to do for a long time. When we sat down in North Beach’s Cafe Zoetrope recently to discuss the project, Talbot had a pilot just about wrapped up and was getting ready to submit it to the heads at PBS.

topics: bay area, documentary, music, public television, tv, world cinema

Steven Severin on his silent spring

It’s been roughly a decade and a half since the breakup of Siouxsie and the Banshees, the influential and audacious punk band that Steven Severin founded with the iconic Siouxsie Sioux in 1976. Once known primarily as a bassist, Severin now follows his muse in many directions. His most recent work has consisted largely of film scores, including several for silent cinema. In a rare San Francisco appearance, Severin will perform his scores live to screenings of rarely seen silent shorts, including Germaine Dulac’s avant-garde work The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) at SF360 Film+Club Tuesday, January 12. Dulac’s surrealist classic—a lunatic tale of the delusions of a priest—was met by antipathy on its original release by the British Board of Film Censors, which wrote that it is “apparently meaningless. . . . But, if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”

topics: composers, music, san francisco film society, silent film, world cinema