Experience

"The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" visits the PFA

The now-beloved film noir genre of Hollywood’s 1940s and 1950s didn’t have a name until the French gave it one—they were just ordinary "crime mellers" or "gangster movies" to American audiences and critics who didn’t think twice about any artistic merit they might have until much later. Likewise, the "hardboiled" novels and short stories of the era (going back to the 1930s) was mostly considered disposable pulp fiction. A few authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were (and are) more highly regarded, but the majority—even relatively successful ones—hardly attracted much attention at the time. If lucky, they found some degree of real appreciation later on, most often posthumously. People like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford are considered legends now, but that would scarcely have seemed a logical outcome to them while alive.

David Goodis was one of the fairly-successful-then-forgotten ones. (As one internet "noir" bookseller’s biography succinctly puts it, "The lives of Goodis’ protagonists tend to mirror his own: Early promise, squandered.")

topics: authors, genre films, noir, pacific film archive

The List

SFIAAFF's winners

Boys will be boys, or b-boys, if you look at the winners of the 2008 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, announced last night, the final SF night for the annual SFIAAFF. Winners of the Narrative Feature Jury Prize (a tie with Santa Mesa), as well as Best Documentary, were b-boy movies, Always Be Boys and Planet B-Boy, respectively. While breakdancing in the U.S. has certainly seen better days (a U.S. team has not won the international “Battle of the Year” since 1998), the art has been taken up with a vengeance by Asians, with Korean teams a particularly dominant force. Last night, they came up on top again. The complete list of awardees, in case you missed it live, is here at SF360. The Festival moves to San Jose March 21-23.

topics: asian american cinema, asian cinema, awards, bay area, directors, documentary, pacific film archive, sundance kabuki

Tomo Uchida at the PFA

It is interesting to track the online conversation formed by blog posts, program notes, and wrap reports that have followed each prior screening (first in Tokyo’s 2004 FILMeX, Festival, the at the International Film Festival Rotterdam) of the Tomu Uchida (1898-1970) retrospective that enters the homestretch of its run at the Pacific Film Archive this week.

That conversation tends to focus on whether or not Uchida’s films — as varied in subject matter as they are in style, tone and execution — merit the same sort of reverent revival treatment that has been given many times over to other Japanese filmmakers of his generation, namely, the canonically revered "holy trinity" of Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse.

The PFA has titled their series Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master, and Uchida’s "finger in every pot" approach to genre is what seems to cause critics to scratch their heads the most.

The breadth of Uchida’s filmmography includes silent police procedurals such as "Policeman" (1933), florid jidai geki period pieces like "The Mad Fox" (1962) or "Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka" (1959), his better-known swordplay films like "The Drunken Spearman" (1960), and post-war social dramas such as "A Hole of My Own Making" (1955) that gently, rather than spitefully, commented on a changed Japan. As website Midnight Eye noted in their report on FILMeX, Japanese film scholar Donald Richie wrote in the festival catalog that "it is precisely this disparate scattering of styles and subject matter that has kept Uchida’s name from auteurist-obsessed film historians in the past."

On the other hand, Uchida’s case is not that unique. Cinema Scope contributor Quintin’s underwhelming characterization of the Uchida films screened at Rotterdam ("visually skilled but not brilliant, sometimes heavy-handed and naïve [

topics: asian cinema, pacific film archive

"From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema"

If ever an empire benefited from keeping its citizens eyes glued hopefully on the horizon, it was the USSR. What with the post-Revolution exodus of aristocratic wealth, famines, Stalin, Stalingrad, and so on and so forth, life was never all that easy — unless you were a Party official, perhaps — in the erstwhile Soviet Union. (Of course, one could also argue that it’s gotten worse for many ordinary Russians since glorious glasnost came calling — the transition to not-exactly-democracy dismantling prior social welfare norms, creating an ever-widening gap between newly poor and often criminally corrupt nouveau riche.)

Soviet participation in the space race against leading anti-Commie Western power America made sense during the Cold War.

And for a while there, danged if them Russkies didn’t look like they were winning the race. Sputnik thrilled the Yankee sense of adventure at the same time it terrorized our sense of being dominated — in the cosmos yet! — by soulless Socialists. No wonder NASA got a massive infusion of cash, leading to the astonishing peak of that first moon landing: An event that so stretched the popular imagination some conspiracy theorists still think it was faked.

Russia’s Cosmonauts and scientists didn’t ultimately “conquer space” as fast or as thoroughly. But in retrospect there’s a certain poignancy to their attempt. The USSR was a failed experiment like pretty much every such exercise, one that betrayed Marxist theology thanks to that eternal bete noir, Power-Grabbing Leadership. But it promised so much. As the promise failed to connect with most citizens’ everyday reality, their attentions were not unpurposefully directed toward a better life that might come from the stars themselves.

Hence, Soviet sci-fi was a popular genre in all media. The Pacific Film Archive’s “From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema” offers a wonderful three-week sampling of its cinematic aspect (Russian sci-fi lit is a whole other area worth scrutiny), stretching from the silent era to the end of Communism.

Some of these movies have kitschily dated aspects, occasionally because they resemble similar, familiar Hollywood flick-reflected through a cultural funhouse mirror. Many remain fascinating and delightful because they are just so profoundly different from the vast majority of such adventures made anywhere else, certainly in the West.

The most obvious reason for that difference: Since all movies made in the USSR were directly approved, funded and controlled (if sometimes banned as well) by the State, they enjoyed considerable resources. They expressed ideas (and/or ideologies, often propagandic) more complex or “improving” than films made for purely commercial purposes elsewhere. There are no Z-grade giant tarantula or Martian-invasion movies here. Of course, I don’t think the Soviets had drive-ins to fill with necking teenagers during the Cold War.

While the series itself isn’t programmed in chronological order, let’s approach it that way. First up is a 1924 classic that’s become something of a cult favorite here in recent years. Jakov Protazanov’s “Aelita, Queen of Mars” is a marvel of Russian Constructivist/Futurist design whose story is sort of a Martian invasion in reverse. Three Russkies land on Mars just in time to experience its proletariat rising up against their sexpot Queen (Julia Solntseva, who later became collaborator-wife to great Soviet director Dovzhenko). The costume designs alone are worth the price of admission.

The PFA then jumps forward to well into the Cold War, when sci-fi had ceased to seem idle fantasy and was now credible speculation. With impressive-for-their-time production design and FX, these movies were desirable abroad-sorta. The “King of the B’s” himself Roger Corman bought Stateside rights to several. His drastically recut, badly dubbed U.S. versions inserted new cheesy new footage, arriving at unrecognizable fresh permutations of Soviet material for an oblivious American drive-in market.

Thus far more Yanks have seen seen its three (!) Corman paste-up jobs (including 1968’s “Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women,” psuedononymously assembled by the young Peter Bogdanovich) than Pavel Klushantsev’s original 1961 “Planet of Storms,” which kicks off the PFA series. It’s a serious, often gorgeously designed interplanetary adventure in which cosmonauts (and their robots) exploring Venus confront earthquakes, lava flow, flooding and a Venus Flytrap-like creature with grabby tentacles. When the lone female crewmember makes an against-orders judgment call to save lives, a male ‘naut chortles “Robot can think it through-but a woman cannot!” OK, so misogyny wasn’t yet purged from the Soviet ranks.

1961 was evidently a big year for USSR fantasy film. Huge local hit “The Amphibian Man” is an eccentric and delightful proto-“Splash”cum“Waterworld” in which the gilled-mutant son of a scientist discovers romance and other life-on-land pleasures. Ostensibly set in Cuba, the film is (like the famous “I Am Cuba”) a very Soviet take on “Latin” culture. The same annum’s “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” is not sci-fi but a lavish Gogol-based parable that sets its protagonist on a fanciful journey involving the Devil himself. In the latter vein, the PFA will screen Pushkin-inspired “Ruslan and Ludmila,” Aleksandr Ptushko’s final (1972), reportedly spectacular masterpiece of surrealism and set design.

Later Soviet fantasy films became more philosophical, led by Andrei Tarkovsky’s inner-space explorations “Solaris” (1972) and “Stalker” (1979). Still thoughtful if sillier, Richard Viktorov’s 1982 “To the Stars by Hard Ways” has a big-eyed Annie Lennox lookalike rescued from an abandoned spaceship leading her new Earth pals back to save a contaminated planet. Aspects are campy now (dubbed into English as “Humanoid Woman,” the film even got a “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” roasting), but it’s still kinda cool.

The last films (chronologically speaking) in the PFA series address the USSR’s encroaching collapse almost directly. “Stalker,” arguably Tarkovsky’s most visually enveloping and least pretentious movie, could be read as a requiem for the death of genuine intellectualism and ideological belief. Karen Shakhnazarov’s 1988 “Zero City” is balder still. Its arresting, Kafka-esque nightmare ends when lights are systematically shut out on a creepy museum’s dioramas of Soviet historical triumphs. Meanwhile our hitherto trapped hero paddles rowboat to freedom — or possible oblivion — on the open sea. Two decades later, that seems as good a metaphor for Russia’s post-glasnost saga as any.

The one post-Communist feature programmed here is an apt choice. Alexei Fedorchenko’s 2005 “First on the Moon” is a wonderful “Zelig”-like co-mingling of archival and fictive footage that purports to chronicle a failed USSR stab at space conquest in the 1930s. Sending up old-school Stalinist propaganda with superb technical mimicry as well as a certain affectionate melancholy “First” exudes a game-over-already resignment. Would State censors have allowed its exposure even a year or two earlier?

These days, Russia is both invading our screen marketplace — notably via the sci-fi trilogy commenced by “Night Watch” — and repulsing our bullish World Superpower supremacy. Is a second Cold War ahead? Who knows. But whether it is or not, expect a new wave of futuristic fantasy from those erstwhile Reds. After all, the present might be politically or ideologically disruptive, but the future is something we all agree we need — and are worried about

topics: pacific film archive

Saul Bass, "Phase IV"

How many people not employed as directors, producers, cinematographers, costume or production designers have had as much impact on the “look” of movies as Saul Bass? His was a unique position: He virtually introduced graphic design (which he had helped to greatly innovate in the advertising world) to the movies from the mid-‘50s onward.

Before, credits sequences had been as uniform and boring as a theater playbill — necessary acknowledgement of personnel to be got through before the movie really began. In his influential work for some of the major films and directors of the 1955-1965 era (Preminger, Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Kubrick, Frankenheimer), Bass totally changed the game. His dynamic, bold, abstract credit designs set the tone for the movie — and were even sometimes its imaginative highlight. From that point on, if a flick’s first few minutes were little more than a scroll of names, audiences felt cheated.

Yet Bass grew tired of this limited role. Before his 1996 death he returned to design some title sequences (notably several for Scorsese), but otherwise abandoned the craft for over two decades, focusing instead on other creative endeavors. One of them was his only feature as a director: 1974’s “Phase IV,” one of those movies that has “cult object” and “no commercial value” written all over it from birth. Indeed, Paramount did little to promote this too idiosyncratic exercise in the otherwise marketable cautionary sci-fi-horror genre. Among other films of the era that got similarly overlooked were George Lucas’ “THX-1138” and Mike Hodge’s still-underappreciated “The Terminal Man.”

Like them, “Phase IV” has flaws on the levels of narrative and emotional engagement. But it’s so striking to look at, so unique in tone that it’s a memorable experience despite not being an entirely “good” movie. When a species of superintelligent (but not giant-sized in the usual sci-fi mode) ants is detected in the Arizona desert, mad-bad scientist Nigel Davenport plus assistants Michael Murphy and Lynne Frederick construct an experimental dome there to study them. The ants have destroyed all their natural enemies, and are now interested in conquering the last: Man. Facing an onslaught, the characters experience the mystical, rather inscrutable dawn of a new evolutionary era.

With its frequently arresting imagery (much of it extreme-closeup insect footage shot by documentarian Ken Middleton) and dislocating atmospherics, “Phase IV” is classic Arty Horror. It’s certainly among the more enduring, less campy of ’70s genre films that saw Nature striking back at disrespectful mankind.

There are a number of them in the PFA’s current http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/ecoamok“>“Eco-Amock! An Inconvenient Film Fest” series, which each Wednesday through Aug. 29 showcases mainstream (if sometimes mainstream-drive-in) takes on what pollution ‘n’ such might wreak on us — before Global Warming hit anyone’s consciousness. Next Wed. (Aug. 1) there will be a doozy — John Frankenheimer’s 1979 “Prophecy,” a gory bad-cinema classic in which Talia Shire and others are menaced by mutant bears.

topics: exhibitions, pacific film archive