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

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

SFIFF52: Chris Felver's "Ferlinghetti" captures an icon

Chris Felver has kept up a friendship with doyen of local poets and founder of City Lights Books Lawrence Ferlinghetti for almost 30 years, and his new film Ferlinghetti is the product of that friendship. Combining footage that Felver has collected over the years with a few archival gems, Felver traces the life of his antiauthoritarian subject from his days as a Navy serviceman in World War II, through the landmark First Amendment trial sparked by his publishing of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, to the more recent use of City Lights’ upstairs windows as billboards protesting the Bush Administration’s wars. Interviews with writers like Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg and Dave Eggers testify to Ferlinghetti’s wide-ranging and continued influence.

Best known for his work as a photographer, Chris Felver’s enduring project has been a documentation of the creative life through a wide-ranging series of portraits of poets, musicians, artists, writers and filmmakers. His subjects smile back from the page in the warm poses that fill books like Beat and The Importance of Being, and he has also published tomes devoted to Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. As he states below, he sees his photography and filmmaking as pieces of the same process, and his newest work on Ferlinghetti appears as the natural continuation of a decades-long project circled around the poet. Ferlinghetti screens at the San Francisco International Film Festival (Tue., April 28, 6 p.m. and Thurs., April 30, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki, Wed., May 6, 6:30 p.m., PFA). I spoke with Felver on the phone as he walked through Union Square in Manhattan, a day after Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 90th birthday.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is the last in a series of Q&A interviews with select Bay Area filmmakers featured in the San Francisco International Film Festival.]

topics: authors, avant-garde, awards, bay area, diy, documentary, photography, poetry, q&a, san francisco international film festival