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

Experience

San Francisco Cinematheque Springing into Action

The spring edition of the San Francisco Cinematheque calendar is making the rounds, and my copy is already dog-eared with wishful thinking. Beyond the usual bounty of local premiers and filmmaker spotlights, it’s exciting to see Cinematheque continue to cultivate unusual collaborations, programming formats and venues—even the most seasoned Bay Area filmgoer may need to consult the key to decipher some of this calendar’s site abbreviations (Quick, what’s PTUSF? NNC?). So grab your datebook and get ready for a rundown.

topics: audiences, avant-garde, curators, diy, documentary, exhibition, experimental film, yerba buena center for the arts

Experience

It's "Playtime" with Jacques Tati in two new series

You could make a case for Jacques Tati as the last great silent comedian—even if he didn’t begin making features until two decades into the sound era. Certainly he had more in common as a filmmaker with the styles of Chaplin and Buster Keaton than any major comic talents of subsequent decades, including primarily slapstick (rather than verbal) ones like Laurel & Hardy.

His contribution remains unique—the closest comparisons being, perhaps, Keaton for his deadpan orchestration of extraordinary physical chaos, and the current cult Swedish director Roy Andersson (You, the Living) for his existential absurdism built through meticulously designed setpieces sans conventional plot or character focus. If Keaton was once a thoroughly mainstream entertainer, and Andersson is something of a rarefied arthouse secret, Tati was a bit of both—a critical favorite who enjoyed his moment of international success, albeit all too briefly.

topics: actors, audiences, cinephiles, comedy, directors, pacific film archive, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

Remembering Chick Strand

This past July 11, filmmaker, teacher and lifelong Californian Chick Strand died at the age of 78. She was, without question, a crucial pioneer of West Coast experimental cinema. Strand is best known as one of the improbable few who helped instigate Canyon Cinema in the early 1960s, the Bay Area organization that has since nurtured several generations of avant-garde filmmakers. She began at Canyon as an enthusiast and community organizer, but by decade’s end was making her own work—films which, in the best experimental tradition, stretched the cinematic medium to realize a dynamic, idiosyncratic understanding of the phenomenal world. It’s only fitting that Cinematheque and Canyon would stage a tribute to Strand’s work (“After Day Comes Night & After That, Day Comes Again: A Tribute to Chick Strand,” in San Francisco Cinematheque’s program in SFFS Cinema by the Bay playing at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 23 and and “Cinematic Tribute: Films of Chick Strand” at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center on October 24); both are direct descendants of the grassroots screenings she helped run nearly 50 years ago.

topics: activism, authors, avant-garde, bay area, canyon cinema, critics, experimental film, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

The turn-off sex cinema of Koji Wakamatsu

Porn isn’t usually a topic of much interest to film buffs, being less an art form than a functional one—bearing the same relationship to cinema as, say, instruction manuals do to literature. In the heyday of the Sexual Revolution, when adult movies were still shot on film and shown in theaters, some makers got ambitious, or at least playful, with narrative and style—two things that rarely factor in today’s enormous, factory-style porn industry.

In Japan, however, hardcore content has been and remains illegal. (You may have seen Japanese-release versions of films in which genitalia are electronically “fogged,” even in merely simulated-sex or entirely nonsexual scenes.) The challenge of titillating without graphic imagery fostered the peculiarities of “pink film,” a still-extant genre unique to Japan that flourished in the mid-1960s through the mid-‘80s, when adult video (though still “fogged”) dealt its popularity a significant if less-than-fatal blow.

topics: directors, japanese cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Take Two

The mystery of Lucrecia Martel and "The Headless Woman"

Newcomers to Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s work might wonder what’s going on as her latest film The Headless Woman begins. In the same vein as her two earlier films, La Ciénega (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), her story plunges viewers instantly into a microcosm without offering any introduction or explanation. We are simply there, immersed in the senses and perceptions of the scene along with the characters. We hear the same natural sounds vying for our attention: snippets of conversation, shrieks from children, car doors slamming, dogs barking, car engines igniting—it’s a kind of madness but at the same time a perfect replica of reality. We hang on, wondering how this all will unravel and make sense. Martel’s extraordinary cinematic gifts amplify the tension she creates by fully immersing viewers in her story, where plot plays a secondary, though pivotal, role. Martel’s camera shots are like the paintings of Rembrandt or Caravaggio; her brilliant and relentless use of chiaroscuro in darkish, sensual interiors arrest the eye and breath, eliciting excitement.

topics: bay area, directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, south american film, women filmmakers, yerba buena center for the arts

Experience

YBCA's "Beyond ESPN" series brings together fans of all stripes

I once got the brush-off when I mentioned to a fellow filmgoer in a theater lobby that the only festival missing from San Francisco’s international film landscape was a sports film festival. (I had just seen Bruce Beresford’s 1976 film The Club and Paul Goodman’s 2002 film Australian Rules—both involving that unique Aussie creation, Australian Rules Football.) Luckily, SF Bay Guardian Arts Editor Johnny Ray Huston did not get the same response when he brought the idea for a sports film series to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Film/Video Curator Joel Shepard. The result, Beyond ESPN: An Offbeat Look at the Sports Film, is a film series that may do for the cinema of sport what the MLS is trying to achieve in the realm of soccer: Build audiences for a beloved pastime by screening/playing them in altogether new territory. Beginning August 6 and running through August 30 at YBCA, Beyond ESPN puts the sporting genre in a new context.

topics: art film, bay area, directors, documentary, genre films, hollywood, sports film, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts