Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

It’s been many years since I’ve called myself a Woody Allen fan. By the early 80s—when I began my hardcore cinephiliac tour of duty—the critical darling of the late 70s had begun churning out such lighter and slighter fare that I was tempted to write him off entirely. By the time he’d entered a run of serious mid-career revitalization with such major works as Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Husbands and Wives, I routinely appraised his works sight-unseen with the assured jaundiced eye so characteristic of the post-adolescent. Unfortunately, the ensuing years have provided scant cause to knock me off my high horse, and now even Allen’s supposedly great works of the 70s have, for me, deflated to bagatelles, their former importance seemingly an effect of mass-hallucination. Yes, there’s much charm in Annie Hall, say, but the movie’s largely strung together by the most brazen ziggurat of intellectual referencing and name-dropping ever erected. I gotta admit I took mental notes watching these films which informed my reading and aesthetic explorations for quite a while, but now, almost at the end of the 00’s—the most nonintellectual era yet known to modern man—they can be seen for what they are: products of a largely anti-visual sensibility with a talent rooted in a brilliant display of absurdist verbal pyrotechnics better suited to the satirical mock-essay. “Look how much I know, how much I’ve read!“, they seem to scream. “Nebbish jokester that I am, I still must be taken seriously! I’m not just a funnyman! I’ve read Proust, Kafka, Freud, and Flaubert, my favorite director is Jean Renoir, and how ’bout that Sol LeWitt!” Etc, etc.

The financial success of this approach is a testament to the social basis of comedy—surely there weren’t hoards of graduate students making these films hits. Those who got the references laughed to inform everybody they were in the know, and those who didn’t laughed to disguise their ignorance. All this semi/pseudo-erudition set to laughter made audiences happy to plunk down the cash, but also for unfortunate aesthetic results. Love and Death applied the formula strictly to 19th Century Russian literature (plus a healthy dollop of Seventh Seal references thrown in for good measure), while the much-lauded Manhattan combined Annie Hall with coffee table photography book to produce one of the oddest amalgams in cinema history: it’s both a gorgeous orgy of widescreen black-and-white cinematography informed by a deep knowledge of still photography art, and an astoundingly non-visual dramatic romantic-comedy: while it’s true that much of its emotional palette is expressed by images, most of its dramaturgical and comedic highlights can be gleaned solely by listening to its soundtrack.

Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

The gods overfilled Woody’s cup-o’-talent, however, and there are exceptions to the rule—works which find their home squarely within the Temple of True Cinema. Sleeper is one such film. Blending slapstick—a genre ever-threatening to petit-bourgeois inclinations towards decorum and social stability, and hence looked down upon by newspaper critics – with science-fiction and romantic comedy, and laden with references more topical than arch-intellectual, Allen evokes in Sleeper something close to the anarchic spirit of his beloved Marx Brothers. Brimming with visual inventiveness—whether in terms of its jaunty art direction, physical comedy, or the certain but unfussy manner in which Allen creates shots and puts them together—Sleeper is cinematically alive.

Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

Interiors is another exception, albeit of a variant variety. Allen’s first “serious” film—I’m talkin’ DEADLY—and his first in which he didn’t appear as an actor, Interiors was greeted with collective shock by audiences and critics. Studio executives no doubt had the same response when they first got a gander at the script. To this day, no Hollywood studio has ever financed anything as remotely austere—funereal, in fact—at least by an American director. But what could the bigwigs do? Allen’s films didn’t cost that much, and he’d just won a mitt-full of Oscars for Annie Hall. Many critics pronounced it a masterpiece, while others scratched their heads. Audiences quickly got the word, and skipped it. Over the last thirty-one years, collective amnesia has taken hold, and it’s almost as if Interiors never existed. Stunningly photographed by the legendary Gordon Willis (The Godfather films, and all of Woody Allen’s from 1977 through 1985), Interiors plunges Allen’s audience into an alien universe signaled by the virtual absence of music—only two of Allen’s signature classic Dixieland jazz numbers find their way into the film—and relatively late, at that. The aliens are a family of doom-laden wealthy WASPs who rotate around a mother, Eve, possessed of a black hole-esque gravitational pull. Eve has had a brilliant career as an interior decorator for several decades, but at some point things snapped, and the severity of her minimalist vision seeped into every nook and cranny of her family’s psychic life. A period of institutionalization complete with shock therapy was followed by a return to the family’s center, and her bumpy ride ever since has left the whole clan emotional wrecks. Towards the beginning of the film, the father’s decided to take a powder, and it’s hard not to sympathize—his three daughters have spent their whole lives in a world of trying to make sense of it all, and he doesn’t have much time left. The middle daughter, Flyn (Kristin Griffith) has found anxious success as an actress in “terrible” TV movies. The youngest, Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), flits from job to job, art to art, in an attempt to capture her mother’s power. The eldest, Renata (Diane Keaton), is the only one of the three to reach artistic expression—as a poet—at a level equivalent to her mother’s, but she’s coming apart at the seams: “My impotence set in a year ago,” she tells her therapist, “…my paralysis. I suddenly found I couldn’t bring myself to write anymore… Increasing thoughts about death just seemed to come over me.” These lines, which Allen would previously have delivered himself, played for comedy, are spoken here in dead earnest. Just as it would appear impossible for things to get worse, father returns with a new fiancee, and all hell breaks loose…

Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

Since its release, Interiors has been described as being in the manner of Allen’s idol, Ingmar Bergman. While this is true on the face of it, Allen has interiorised many of Bergman’s own influences: Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg, and has added a couple of his own—Eugene O’Neil  and Tennessee Williams. All this haute-powered theater culture background might make Interiors a little pretentious, but I’m not one to say. My own childhood experience of 70’s Manhattan white-walled minimalism and memories of a few matriarchal figures in my own family, which, if combined, would, I’m certain, prove a dead-ringer to Eve, render my response to this film too viscerally personal for me to lay down some pat judgment. I believe, however, compared to other Allen films of this period, Interiors’ script is stillborn. Every situation, every line is so damn on-the-money. Like the world it portrays, this script is airless. So how can I be clearly on the road to rating the film made from it highly?  Modern American film is based on the tyranny of the script. Most film productions (including most of Allen’s) attempt to resuscitate the inspiration that went into their writing, then freeze-dry the results on celluloid. Allen’s filmmaking in Interiors, however, is highly disciplined, yet organic. His camera is precise, but he allows performances to come alive and take shape before it. If I’d space and time I could write a page or two on the superlative performances which populate this film, not least by its men—Richard Jordan, and a fairly young Sam Watterston as two of the sisters’ husbands, and E.G. Marshall, in his most sensitive screen performance as the father, Arthur. Geraldine Page, often cited as the major stage actress of her generation, delivers a portrayal as Eve as subtle, complex, and mysteriously involving as any I’ve ever encountered, but astonishingly, when Arthur returns with her replacement, Pearl, Maureen Stapleton’s appearance in this role immediately evokes a life force so vital that it’s instantly clear Eve’s match has been met. Similar to his treatment of his performers, Allen allows decor, land and sea-scape to become palpably alive in front of his camera. His use of symbols and human and natural archetypes—such as the sea—will be uncomfortably obvious for some, but what is lost in nuance is more than made up in raw force.

The print of Interiors SFMOMA will be showing Thursday night is a studio archival print—one of the few, or possibly THE ONLY, known to exist—and procured for this screening by the intrepid and diligent efforts of Public Programs Associate Gina Basso. Those of us in attendance will likely be simultaneously horrified and enthralled—these are the sorts of responses impelled by Allen’s best film.

[Interiors screens Thursday October 29th, as part of Vincent Fecteau selects..., with George Kuchar's Temple of Torment (2006). Vincent Fecteau and George Kuchar in person. 7pm, Wattis Theater.]

Pat Spurgeon and I have been good friends for more than a decade and we both come from Indiana. Pat is from Michigan City, up near Chicago, and I grew up much further south in the college town of Bloomington; we didn’t meet and become friends until landing in San Francisco in the mid-late 90’s, just a few months apart. But I’d known of Pat years before: he was a popular drummer playing in various bands around Bloomington. Like many kids from the midwest, Pat came down to attend Indiana University or to hang out and take part in the vibrant music scene happening there. For a small town that nearly doubled in population when school was in session, we were living in an oasis. IU has one of the biggest music schools in the world and on nearly every weekend lots of talented musicians would fill the clubs and basements, doing shows and turning us on to different sounds. I used to see Pat play, beating the skins with the likes of Steve Kowalski’s Army and Antenna. The energy was always a buzz all by itself (especially SK Army, who were like a hopped up Jam, only twice as fast) and the shows were always intimate. Nobody stood around with their arms folded either. Everybody was cool, always dancing, and the bands were good most of the time.

I left my hometown, spent some time in Colorado and in NYC, ending up in SF years later. One night down at the Kilowatt bar in the Mission (back when the Kilowatt had live music) a friend of mine, also from Indiana, recognized Pat in the crowd. We met, acknowledged our mutual friends back in Bloomington and became fast friends ourselves. I was starting to make films more seriously and Pat became my collaborator, scoring soundtracks for some of my films. He was also coming into more of his own as a musician, writing his own songs, recording himself singing, playing guitar, bass, and getting into all sorts of cheap keyboards, toys, junk– anything that made an interesting sound. This started a regular pawnshop/thriftstore hound routine: we went out 2-3 time a week for a couple of years, obsessed with finding musical gear for him, and movie gear for me at bargain prices. During one of these visits I was testing a Bolex 16mm camera I was hoping to buy, and shot a couple of rolls of film right there in the store. I wanted to see if the camera was working properly and asked Pat to act natural and wander the store as usual. I didn’t buy the camera, but the film looked great, and I was happy to have a document of our weekly habit. Little did I know back then that I would eventually dig these rolls out and incorporate this little scene into D tour, exemplifying Pat’s perseverance pursuing music.

Before I started the film, I knew a little about Pat’s history. I knew he had a kidney transplant in 1994 and that it was a huge undertaking, especially for a 25-year-old college student and aspiring musician. Transplanted kidneys don’t last forever. The body is constantly trying to reject the organ and it’s inevitable that recipients will go through another transplant at some point down the road. But, Pat, like many other organ recipients, never really talked about it. He carried on with his life, pursuing his goals like the rest of us. I never considered that Pat would have to go through that again or that even after the next transplant, he’ll have to go through it again… and again… for the rest of his life.

Pat found out in early 2006 that it was time to go down that road again. His 1994 kidney still had some function left but it was inevitable he’d need a new one. This time he more than just talked about it; he felt the urge to share his story with others. Pat called me just before starting dialysis and asked if I wanted to make “a video” about his experience. The “hook” was that he was to going stay with Rogue Wave, by now the most serious and promising band he had been in, and continue touring and performing, while on dialysis! Pat wanted to show others in the same predicament that you can go through this, and still live your life the way you want to. Our original idea was to do a ten-minute piece showing Pat going through dialysis, finding a donor, and finally, getting the transplant. What started out with some simple interviews or demos on peritoneal dialysis ballooned into scenes from a risky and restless tour, an epic quest for a potential living donor and a memorable benefit concert for Pat. Almost three years later, I’ve ended up with about 80 hours of footage.

With the driving force of music behind him, Pat strives to share his exclusive outlook and experiences with an audience that may not have had the opportunity to think about the importance of organ donation, or about what one person goes through in dealing with a rigid health care system. I certainly learned a lot along the way.

-Jim Granato
Director & Producer, D tour

Have SFMOMA’s gatekeepers taken leave of their senses? Inviting subversion into any institution portends a slippery slope. Filmmaker Paul Clipson, head projectionist/AV tech of the museum’s Wattis Theater, might seem an innocuous figure in which to place our trust. It is always such types who lure us to our destruction. What harm, you ask, could there be in charging this manifestly benign cinephile with curatorial powers to assemble a brief survey of mid-century European documentary shorts? It’s true these are arguably the finest flowers in this corner of cinema: Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread is the master’s claim to fame in this realm, while Georges Franju’s Hôtel des Invalides and Alain Resnais’s Le chant du Styrène are the crowning achievements of two of the great names in French documentary of the 1950’s.  Many of us who have worked with Clipson have long suspected a lurking danger beneath his affable exterior. This trio of seditious works reveals an alien intelligence, poised, like the masked Fantômas looming over Paris, dagger elegantly clutched to his side, to strike terror in the heart of San Francisco. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But prudence would urge a proper sifting through the evidence to hand…

Luis Buñuel, Las Hurdes aka The Land Without Bread (still), 1932.

Land without Bread is last, but not least, of Buñuel’s triumvirate of early Surrealist masterpieces. The first two of this cycle, Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or, are easily amongst the most sensational and scandalous in the history of the celluloid medium. Land without Bread, the first film Buñuel made in his native Spain, documents a mountainous region so impoverished that the folkloric tradition has been lost, the inhabitants have forgotten how to sing, children lie in the streets dying of malaria, and yes, bread and all other wheat products are unknown. These are lives in which absurdity reigns supreme. The villagers eat one of their precious goats only when it takes an accidental tumble off a cliff, while schoolchildren are taught to write at a chalkboard by means of such exhortations as “Respect the property of others.” Buñuel brings the full corrosive force of his Surrealist vision into documentary terrain, subtly lampooning the conventions of a genre then only in its nascency. Financed by anarchists, this work’s potential contribution to Spain’s on-going turmoil was recognized, and was very much not appreciated. Banned for two years by the Republican government, it earned Buñuel a warrant by the right-wing Nationalists (fortunately never served) for him to be immediately escorted to Generalissimo Franco were he to be captured.

George Franju, Hotel des Invalides (still), 1951

The Hôtel des Invalides is a vast complex in Paris containing a hospital and retirement home for veterans, as well as a military museum. It also serves as the resting place for many French military/political figures, including Napoleon. Before Georges Franju’s compassionate expressionist vision of a sadomasochist universe made its way to features like Eyes Without a Face, it had already found full expression in such works as this eponymously titled documentary portrait. Likely his most scathing work, Hôtel des Invalides draws all basic humanist tenets into question. Its opening shots capture a flock of birds swooping in and out of formation amongst the complex’s buildings, suggesting human militarism springs from a similar herd instinct. Menace lurks behind the most lustrous evidence of human innocence: from a close-up of a beautiful museum visitor’s summery laughter, Franju cuts to an atomic explosion’s mushroom cloud. This filmmaker’s perspective is anything but simplistic, however. A gallery of armor comes to life with the ghostly evocation of the battlefield’s fallen, a scene which includes a brief meditation on the armored suit made for a small child. At a later point, a hideously deformed veteran partakes of services in the chapel, his identity proudly, anxiously displayed on a chest swathed by a brace of gaudy medals.

Alain Resnais, Le Chant du Styrène (still), 1958.

Unquestionably the greatest “industrial” film ever created, Le chant du Styrène was the last short made by Alain Resnais before embarking on a career in features beginning with the immediately legendary Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Styrène’s opening images are stunning. In abstract space, strange, unearthly flowers suddenly bloom. Brightly hued alien beings spring instantaneously to life. Never before or since have shots of such plastic beauty been devoted to the documentation of—well, plastic. Styrene demonstrates itself an astoundingly versatile material, capable of being molded into toy cars, badminton-rackets, record players, babies’ sippy cups. Urged on by a stridently declaimed mock-heroic verse narration, we are ushered through all phases of these product’s spawning, from finished consumer item back through to its source material’s origins. Counterpointed by a dissonance-inflected modernist score, Styrène presents us with a jaw-dropping, gorgeous vision of industrial/consumerist visual culture rivaled only by Red Desert and Zabriskie Point. In a contemporary world given over to unlimited valorization of consumerism, Resnais’s film may be, via its detournment of each and every item spied by its camera away from commercial purposes, the most incendiary film currently possible.

By journey’s end, it’s clear what Clipson’s up to. This program of rare European documentaries is of a piece with his own formidable aesthetic project, as revealed by his work in Super-8. From the depths of his hidden lair, this latter-day Fantômas seeks to convert audiences to a cult of orgasmic beauty, in which mind, eyes, body, and soul are united in ecstatic trance. Thoroughly subversive, Clipson is guilty as charged. He has produced a show easily amongst the most exciting of the season.

———– Paul Clipson presents subversive documentatries at noon on September 1st, as the free tuesday program. Museum and program admission are free.

“I started out that evening with hatred, and there was part of me that was out to do him in, get back at him, kill him,” Shirley Clarke said in 1983.   In 1967, when Clarke’s documentary Portrait of Jason hit the theaters, it was undoubtedly a shock. While gay films of the exuberantly campy, fantastical variety had been bubbling up from the 16mm Underground, Jason was the first of these to “get serious”. Adopting the mantle of cinéma-vérité (truth film), and appearing in art houses blown up to 35mm, Jason confronted adventurous viewers with a wholly new cinematic experience: 100 minutes on the silver screen of a talented, tortured, yet unabashed black queen more than ready for her close-up in the one-woman show of a lifetime. The film’s proceedings have lost none of their power to enthrall and disturb.

Jason Holliday, née Aaron Payne, in Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason

Jason Holliday has no sooner introduced himself, than he immediately drops the sketched-in veneer of glamor to announce his handle is a nom-de-plume: hidden behind this jaunty persona is the all-too-revealing birth name Aaron Payne.   Shields of swish and jive cover over the deal he’s made to worship the golden calf to distract himself from inner torment. This isn’t a difficult task for Jason Holliday, for he is one very beguiling personality. A self-described “hustler”, whose métier may or may not involve prostitution and thievery, he claims to do anything necessary to support himself with ease: “I’ll come on as a maid, or a butler, or a flunky—anything to keep from punching the clock.” His shady brand of lazy is hard to trust, however, for he’s riddled with self-repressed ambition: “What I really wanna do is what I’m doing now, (that) is: perform.” The drama of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait concerns the nature of Jason’s performance(s) and an attempt to tear off the masks behind which this “real swingin’ hip cat” hides.

Jason has been promising for years to anyone who’ll listen he’s on the verge of developing a night-club act. But it’ll be necessary to engage musicians, and so on. This’ll take money, of course, and money gets taken. Things must be done in the style to which he’s accustomed. With his observations of the bizarre antics of rich employers serving as models, Jason has built a complex inner labyrinth by which to escape forty-something years of racism and queer-hating, and from which he justifies countless attempts to get his own back. After many charming yet disquieting tales of revenge and rough trade, of confinement in the “nut-house” and “ballin’ from Maine to Mexico” (with San Francisco, of course, not left out), the viewer might be forgiven for wondering if this “male bitch” has got the goods. But from the moment he effortlessly slides into dead-on impressions of Mae West, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, Vivien Leigh and Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind, the cast of Carmen Jones, and the aristocrat Katherine Hepburn plays in Stage Door,  it’s clear Jason’s stories and the complex pantheon of personae he assumes brilliantly serve to force into the public arena a psychodrama which for his sanity must be shown and seen.

Carl Lee and Shirley Clarke

Towards the beginning of Portrait, Jason is comfortable. Lounging in Clarke’s Chelsea Hotel apartment, supplied from a bottomless well of booze, and toking from a joint the size of a small cigar, Jason is performing for friends. Aside from the three-member film crew, Jason and Clarke are joined by  black actor Carl Lee (friend of Jason’s and her long-time lover, who had appeared in her earlier landmark productions, The Connection and The Cool World and worked as her main collaborator on the latter), and another member of their circle, Robert Fiore. Jason’s ready to roll: “This is my chance to really feel myself, and say: ‘I’m the bitch’… This is a picture I can save forever…I will have one beautiful thing that’s my own.” From off-camera Lee and Clarke cue him to launch into routines familiar to them from a well-rehearsed repertoire. Jason responds ebulliently, punctuating his tales with “finger-poppin’ ” and the ironic refrain “I’ll never tell.” As the remnants of the twelve-hour shoot roll on, however, it becomes evident his interlocutors very much mean for him to tell, prodding him to reveal the sordid details of his upbringing by a muscle-bound gambler, his bootlegger father, Brother Tuff. None of this goading pierces Jason’s armor until things get personal, when in film’s last minutes Lee unloads a series of hateful accusations, causing tears to stream down Jason’s face.

I haven’t as yet been able to discover the source of Clarke’s professed hatred of her subject; and indeed, while editing the film,  she “grew to love” him. Perhaps it was Jason’s open lust for her partner of the previous half-dozen years, or an irritation natural for a filmmaker craving male privilege at Jason’s casual misogyny (which in turn betrays an envy of female power), or collective fatigue for Jason’s incessant jive amongst their set. At any rate, the “love” is easy to get—Clarke had a strong affinity for outsiders. “I always felt alone and on the outside of the culture I was in… I identified with black people because I couldn’t deal with the woman question and I transposed it.” The product of a wealthy Jewish family, she married after college to escape the yoke of an abusive father. After a serious foray into the world of modern dance, Clarke switched over to film, to which she brought a dancer and choreographer’s rhythm, dynamism, and self-conscious orientation to performance. Subsequent to becoming a major figure in the American experimental film movement with such films as the brilliant (and fantastically beautiful) Bridges-Go-Round, Clarke, under the influence of Rossellini, became fascinated with issues of “truth” and “reality” as related to cinema. The three feature films she made in the 60’s openly sparred with the tenets of the simultaneously-developing cinéma-vérité movement, especially her friend Ricky Leacock’s contention that truth in front of the camera could only be recorded, never created.

Portrait of Jason was Clarke’s major contribution to the cinéma-vérité canon. Given the Promethean nature of this artist, a wholly new conceptualization of the form was to be expected—by forcing the audience to negotiate the self-conscious insertion of the behind-the-camera reality into cinéma-vérité, Clarke injected drama into the form, bringing it closer to originator Jean Rouch’s concept: “the truth of cinema, not the cinema of truth.” Doing this aligned documentary to Sam Fuller’s famous dictum “a film is like a battleground. There’s love…hate…action…violence…death. In one word: emotions.” The results were very much of a piece with the nature of filmgoing in the 60’s, for the cinema was arguably THE place people congregated in search of catharsis in those most tumultuous times. Portrait of Jason (like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls of the previous year, whose “beauty and power” Clarke claimed to be “haunted by”) is a key artifact of the 60’s psycho-dynamics of stardom-lust, self-exposure and ego-breakdown which have come down to us in the devolved versions of Jerry Springer, reality TV, and American Idol. “People love to see you suffer”, Jason delightedly observes early in his Portrait. Even though Clarke regularly defocuses Jason’s image to remind the viewer of her camera’s mediation, his infectious personality in all its dimensions dominates her film. Though Shirley Clarke was often designated the “Queen of the Chelsea”, on that winter night in 1967 Jason shared her throne, and does so again every time her portrait of him hits the silver screen.

Portrait of Jason screens this Thursday (7pm) and Saturday (3pm) in the Wattis theater, as part of the Richard Avedon: Notes on “Nothing Personal” film series.

I am the last among my contributor-cohort to post, I must sheepishly confess. Suzanne gave us the simple remit of San Francisco in the present, which remit has nevertheless been singularly difficult for me to fulfill. I don’t live today, as they say. As the Spring semester at CCA has wound down, my teaching and writing has located me decisively in multiple pasts: 1993, 1983, 1978, 1975, 1974, 1969, 1930, 1928, 1924, 1921, 1919, 1917, 1905, 1872, 1849. These are times I can say something about.  Ask me about Vitebsk, Dublin, Bern, Odessa, Dresden, Vancouver, Detroit. N’importe où hors du monde.

This is what it is to be an art historian sometimes. San Francisco is not on my mind. But perhaps this is one version of this city: periods of privacy and labor, thinking, writing, watching movies and dreaming of other places. Wallace Berman was never more himself than when he was making work and listening to “Baby Love” thirty times in a row. These introversions are then punctuated by spells of sociability and coalescence, when everything seems to be charged and happening. Presence is differential if it is anything. It is invisible and unspeakable if it is constant.

My best conversations of late, both in class and among friends, have been about cinema. And so I find myself wanting to talk here about movies. Not so much the movies on view in theaters – less and less is that how I see anything, there just isn’t the time – but films passed along to me by friends, watched on planes or in hotel rooms.

I was advising this semester a masters’ thesis on the subject of modernization, documentary and realism in contemporary China. The writer, Xiaoyu Weng, discussed paintings by Liu Xiaodong and the film Dong (2006) by the director Jia Zhang Ke, to argue that the concept of reality has become seriously troubled in a spectacle-obsessed Chinese culture. Intrigued by her ideas I have been making my own way through Jia’s filmography, with The World (2004) – the director’s mordant survey of the World Park in Beijing – being of particular fascination. Listless attendants kill time in the wings of the gesamtkunstwerk; time moves with a wonderfully deranged slowness. “In China we have a saying,” Jia told Senses of Cinema, “‘A day is as long as a year.’ In fact a day might well be longer than a year, or a day could actually be a year.”

In New York in April, the artist Fia Backström described a project she’d done for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, called Studies in Leadership (a family affair) (2009), which was partly inspired by the film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968). The director, William Greaves – whose position Backström adopted in Saint Louis – set up a confounding improvisatory system of multiple cameras and crews, with himself as a kind of absent presence at the center of things.

From Greaves’ personal notes, reproduced in Criterion’s booklet: “Refuse to give a total explanation of the film! After all, it is impossible anyway, due to its complexity.” “Rumors of unrest and revolution in the crew should develop,” he continues, “should lead to encounters with the director.”  The resulting film is a hilarious and touching poem about misbehavior and social organization, in a situation where authority refuses its own conditions. It’s certainly instructive for anyone who works as a teacher or curator, or anyone whose quixotic job is getting anyone else to do anything.

Robert Frank, Pull My Daisy (still), 1958; photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Robert Frank

The first program of the extensive Robert Frank retrospective has arrived—prepare yourself for a turbulent voyage. The Americans evinced an underlying interest in narrative, and before it had been released in book form, Frank had made the leap into filmmaking, in the process helping to launch the spectacular era of “Underground Movies”. This movement, rising from the intensely passionate world of New York cinephilia in what might be termed its “alternative” forms, would swell to become one of the dominant fixtures of the New York scene for more than a decade, before long making its influence felt around the world. Made at a time when it still seemed possible to propose a self-sustaining “counter-cinema” to the established genre forms of Hollywood features, Frank’s beginning forays were short, but were nonetheless major salvos towards the creation of a renewed cinematic culture.

Pull My Daisy, written and narrated by Jack Kerouac (whose voice-over commentary includes all the cast’s dialogue), and featuring Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, and Delphine Seyrig, among others, is easily the most famous and celebrated of Beat films. Based on an incident from Kerouac’s relationship with Neal and Carolyn Cassady, Frank and co-director Alfred Leslie create the illusion of spontaneity and improvisation in their depiction of the clash between the free and easy Beats and those encumbered by petit-bourgeois convention. While form and content seem fused, Daisy followed its script, and was rehearsed and photographed via conventional means. The results, unveiled in a double-premiere withJohn Cassavetes’ Shadows in November 1959, were hailed by Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice as the “most alive and the most truthful of films”.

The Sin of Jesus, based on a story by Isaac Babel, is the tale of a pregnant farm wife whose man abandons her for the army. With no other apparent desire, aside from her child, but companionship, she is rendered disconsolate. Taking pity on this simple soul, Jesus informs her he will lend her one of his angels to keep her company, but with whom she mustn’t reproduce. After a “wedding party” celebrated with her new companion’s brethren, she is left alone with a creature more beautiful than any she’s ever encountered, and in the darkened house the warnings of Jesus are forgotten… Through low-budget, but flamboyantly expressive cinematic means, Sin brilliantly evokes a private dreamscape, made the more convincing by contrast with its indigent setting. Featuring the first film performance by “Telli” Savalas, this film confronts the duplicity at the heart of Judeo-Christianity when its newly-emboldened protagonist turns the tables on Jesus and His laws, demanding to know “Who”, after all, “made me this way?!”

OK End Here amalgamates the stylistics of Antonioni and cinéma vérité to portray a day in the life of a New York couple on the verge of middle-age. It’s clear the time of carefree dreaming is over. As they lie in bed one morning, the woman asks: “Deus ex machina… what does that mean?” “It means”, the man says, “it’s time to get up”. Through fluidly floating movement by a seemingly “independent camera”, and fragmented editing, Frank conveys in a nonpareil manner the disassociation and disconnect experienced by the woman, and through her, by the man. By turns heavy and whimsical, OK is graced by several superlative performances, Martin La Salle as the man not least among them. For those familiar with La Salle only through his immortalizing, but deliberately uninflected appearance as star of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, the sensitivity and lightness of his performance in OK will come as a frisson-laden shock. A gorgeously crafted work, OK End Here is a major entry in the cycle of films dealing with female ennui and alienation which would play out over the next decade, whose highlights include Godard’s Vivre sa vie, Antonioni’s Red Desert, and Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence.

The strength of these three works augurs well for this retrospective. Though Frank’s interest in narrative payoff is tenuous, as with The Americans it was immediately clear to those of vision that his films were imbued with an emigre’s acute sense of a country in an on-going and tormented process of evolution. Keep alert to the developments of this series—those familiar with Frank’s work solely via his still photography only know part of this wide terrain.

The Robert Frank Retrospective is showing in conjunction with Looking in: Robert Frank’s America. These three films comprise Program 1, showing tonight.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (still), 1979. Courtesy of Kino International

“What was it? A meteorite that fell to earth? Or a visitation from outer space? Whatever it was, there appeared in our small land a miracle of miracles: the ZONE. We sent in troops. None returned. Then we surrounded the ZONEwith police cordons… We did right… Although I’m not sure…” –From an interview with Prof. Wallace, Nobel Prize winner, on RAI.  (epigraph to Stalker)

With every passing year the legend of Andrei Tarkovsky grows more intense and intoxicating. In a career spanning a quarter-century, Tarkovsky fought a heroic struggle to make his seven feature films — the first five in his native Russia, the remaining two as an exile in the west.The Russian films are largely accepted as canonical masterpieces of modern cinema, with Stalker (1979) last, but far from least, among them.

For all of Tarkovsky’s life, Russia was the central power of a Soviet Union which discouraged and at times punished with exile, thus inevitable death under the most brutal conditions, overt displays of religiosity or explorations of the “Russian soul.” Somehow — probably through a mixture of personal charm, obvious talent, and an incredible force of will — Tarkovsky managed every several years to persuade the powers of the Soviet film industry to grant him a contract to make yet another film, despite little chance of positive payback for its sponsors. His cinema was possessed of a bracing lure: similar to the final image of his penultimate work, Nostalghia, each film was analogous to a dacha, the Russian family summer-cottage which for Tarkovsky served as symbolic repository of the Russian soul, surrounded by the hovering technocratic Soviet superstructure. Tarkovsky’s films, possible only in the post-Stalin era, served as beacons to the spiritually and mystically inclined, standard-bearers of a realm of no small interest and importance within Russian history and culture.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (still), 1979

Rather than the rigorously sparse means of expression Paul Schrader has identified as intrinsic to the “transcendental style” of the films of Ozu and Bresson, Tarkovsky plunges us into a Russian-inflected shamanic realm of over-abundant visionary experience. Via a surfeit of lyrical, dream-toned imagery photographed in alternating color and black and white; soundtracks suffused with allusive (and sometimes eerie) effects and music; shapeshifting narratives; and tortured, Dostoyevskian characters whose traumas mirror the confusion of an audience’s attempt to puzzle out the promise of meaning lurking around every corner, Tarkovsky transports those viewers so-inclined into instant spiritual ecstasy. Though experience of the numinous is the point of Tarkovsky’s work, the evocation of the ecstatic dimension wouldn’t be possible without the tension of contradictory social themes: the weight of Russian history in Andrei Rublev and in Mirror, or the perils of technocratic man confronted with imperatives of soul and psyche in Solaris and Stalker.

Stalker is often considered Tarkovsky’s most profound exploration of the spiritual alienation endemic to modern man. Although its characters and milieu couldn’t be more Russian, there’s enough internal evidence to indicate we’re in an abstract pan-European territory (La Marseillaise emanating from a passing train at the film’s opening, or the clues provided by the epigraph above with which the film begins), representing more a state of mind than concrete nation-state. This territory is beneficiary and victim of a phenomenon known as the ZONE: a region taken over by a mysterious force which upends the laws of physics, conveying those who dare enter it into a dreamscape of magic and terror. Most who enter are never heard from or seen again. In the center of the ZONE is reputed to be the Room, in which anyone who enters is granted the deepest desire at the core of his or her psyche. Those who have made their way through its doors and returned home have had immediate worldly success, gone insane, or committed suicide.

Suffering the anomie appropriate to their respective professions, a “Writer” and “Scientist” are guided into the ZONE by the eponymous “Stalker” in an apparent search for much-needed rejuvenation. To accomplish this, the group must first detach themselves from the Stalker’s long-suffering wife, who desperately wants her husband to give up his dangerous profession, and then make it through a no-man’s-land patrolled by machine-gun wielding troops serving a gargoyle-like, “abandon all hope ye who enter here” function. Having penetrated the ZONE, the trio find themselves in an area that at first seems like the one from which they’ve just traveled, and Writer and Scientist set to bickering, revealing themselves jaded cynics who have come to the ZONE merely to disprove its powers. The Stalker, a figure with analogs to Christ and Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, Prince Myshkin, is brought to the brink of despair by their acrimonious antics, but soldiers on: it is his vocation, his life’s purpose, to bring those who seek his guidance to the portals of the Room. As their trek proves ever more precarious and hallucinatory, Stalker leads Writer and Scientist deep into the labyrinth, to a confrontation with their secret hopes, demons, and the infinite…

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (still), 1979. Courtesy of the Ronald Grant Archive

Details of Stalker’s narrative and the ZONE are as allusive and obdurately mysterious as the novels of Kafka, and the film is similar to them in tone and structure. The ZONE has been interpreted variously as a metaphor for the soul, the subconscious depths of the psyche, or the private inner realm divorced from outer social reality — all domains in relation to which contemporary consciousness has lost its bearings. The Stalker is a would-be shaman who denies himself full access to the potentialities of his talents by allowing his fear to prevent him from entering the Room himself. Because of the ZONE’s influence, however, by Stalker’s end we are witnesses to the evolution of a “new man” possessing powers capable of transcending the Stalker’s limitations.

Tarkovsky approached his work on Stalker with a fanatical devotion perhaps even leading to his death at age 54, felled by the same form of cancer which also took his wife (who acted as assistant director on Stalker) as well as Anatoli Solonitsyn, who plays the Writer. They are said to have been exposed to toxic chemicals in the evocative landscapes serving as Stalker’s exteriors, an unfortunate legacy of the injudicious Soviet treatment of the environment. Despite whatever hardships (including unnatural death as an exile) Tarkovsky endured as an artist from the Soviet Union, however, it’s difficult to imagine what other country or political system would have financed such abstruse work at such high budgets. The Andrei Rublev budget, to my eye, looks almost unlimited, and he was allowed to make Stalker twice — after a year spent on location, it was discovered the lab had ruined the negative. Western studios probably would have junked the disastrous production as a tax write-off, but Tarkovsky was allowed to reshoot his film in its entirety.

Tarkovsky decried the corrupt commercialism he found in the West. Such a figure’s spiritual thematic would be seen as naïve, even primitive, by contemporary standards. The transformative gravity he ascribed to the means and purpose of art might now seem quaint. To be part of a group slowly becoming enthralled by such a film as Stalker, however, is an intoxicating experience. The members of Tarkovsky’s audience, if only subconsciously, are brought to awareness of their own hidden depths, of the calling of the soul, of the imperative quest for the sacred. To see his films is to experience the process the Russian filmmaker described as “scales falling from the eyes”.

Stalker screens in the Wattis Theater TONIGHT (April 9th) and SATURDAY (April 11th), as part of our Utopia/Dystopia film series. Russian with English subtitles. For a fantastic teaser: see this dream sequence on YouTube.

A few months ago Frank Smigiel, associate curator of Public Programs, and I discussed creating a film series loosely connected to Patterns of Speculation: J. Mayer H. Frank proposed a utopian theme, centered on 1970s films such as Logan’s Run. With that I was off and running…and compiling this list of titles was like a dream fulfilled! I remember many of these films from a childhood spent watching countless hours of television (unsupervised!), encountering these films first either as the late-night movie, on cable TV, or on VHS.  So it’s certainly a thrill for me to see them now on the big screen at SFMOMA.

François Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451 (still), 1966; photo courtesy Photofest NYC

As the program began to take shape and I became more engaged with ways the plots, places, structures and characters of these films might serve my theme, the utopian fantasies soon revealed themselves to be just the opposite: dystopic realities. In these visions of possible futures, the systems ostensibly set in place to uphold pleasurable worlds of harmony and desire fulfilled are soon called into question. And as the systems break down, assumptions about their beneficial or well-intentioned functions also begin to break down: metaphorically, psychologically, socially, technologically. For example, in Westworld (which opens the series this afternoon) a completely manufactured world operates as a place for people to live out their innermost desires without consequence. At the $1000-a-day resort called “Delos” vacationers can safely immerse themselves in historical times and places — the Roman Empire, for example, or medieval England–and the resort is populated with androids programmed to react and respond appropriately to the whims and desires of the paying human visitors who, being far removed from their everyday social and moral restrictions, take advantage of an anything-goes mentality:  sex and murder without regret, moral conflict, or fear of punishment.  The “Westworld” of the film’s title  is the lawless American ‘old west’ visited by two pleasure seekers, played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, who give in to the allure of this supposed freedom and are seduced by saloon girls and get in to a shoot-out with the black-clad Gunslinger (played by Yul Brynner in a conscious nod to his character Chris in the Magnificent Seven). However, the technological system supporting the Delos resort begins to fail, and the androids get hostile, refusing sex and fighting back, and the promise of utopia without consequence is shattered in a technological meltdown.

René Laloux, Fantastic Planet (still), 1973 photo courtesy Photofest NYC

And that’s just the series beginning! Shady totalitarian regimes wielding unchecked power; constant surveillance; thought control (love is a big no-no in these worlds!); and social conformity are the salient themes of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Alphaville. Logan’s Run investigates troubling solutions to overpopulation, while Soylent Green grapples with a global food shortage with a gruesome plan to resolve the crisis. A Clockwork Orange examines the role of behavior control through the eyes of a teenage criminal in a world without law. Woody Allen’s Sleeper adds comic relief to what is otherwise a series full of dire messages! And, the otherworldly Fantastic Planet, the only animation we’ve included, reveals life on both sides of the divide, suggesting that what may be utopia for one group, is dystopia for the other.

The Future of the Past series spans three decades of beautifully crafted works that portray the range of the human condition caught up in the paradox of moral, social and political extremes, played out in highly constructed terrain. The series could have gone on and on, too: for example, I would have loved to also include Shivers (dir: David Cronenberg, 1975), The Stepford Wives (dir: Bryan Forbes, 1975), La Vie est un Roman (dir: Alain Resnais, 1983), or Archigram and Superstudio films. Many of my colleagues here also had great suggestions for extending the series! and I encourage everyone to chime in with thoughts on films you would have liked to see so that perhaps the series can continue remotely…

We will, of course, still screen the new 35mm print of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at 1pm.  B. Ruby Rich will introduce the film, and we’ve also added a small post-screening reception to celebrate the conclusion of the Akerman series. Hope you can join us for both.

Very sorry to report this news, as we were quite excited to host Chantal — but we certainly understand the necessity of her cancellation.

You can read more on Chantal Akerman and this film below.

Also, acclaimed film/media theorist Kaja Silverman will screen and discuss some of Akerman’s recent film and installation work Sunday at the PFA.

Chantal Akerman. Photo © JEAN MICHEL TURPIN/GAMMA/Eyedea/Everett Collection

Getting a purchase on Chantal Akerman, the Paris-based film and video artist, who over the last forty years has created a monumental body of work from ignored and abandoned images, and the hidden rhythms of the everyday, is no small or easy task. There are many routes of approach, and almost as many identities and communities to claim her. The daughter of displaced Polish Jews, born and raised in Belgium, Akerman came of age chronologically and artistically in the social and political tumult of the late sixties. Though her work is inherently feminist, and evinces a polyvalent sexuality which has attracted great interest in the Bay Area, it eludes neat categorization, being based in direct experience beyond rational thought or verbalization. Starting as an experimental filmmaker, she quickly ventured into art-cinema features and experimental documentary, and has most recently become a gallery-based video installation artist, beginning in 1995 with the SFMOMA debut of Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est.” Her exposure since has included an exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and a retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2004. Her video installation work Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space is currently touring the US.

Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman. Image courtesy Paradise Films.

Akerman’s work measures the weight of millennia of Jewish and European history like no other: although interacting with a dizzying variety of genres, and pitched in multiple registers, from dark and heavy to evanescently light, it is an oeuvre made coherent by Akerman’s constant awareness of the tragic dimension, leading to a Zen-like appreciation of the depth and gravity of the present moment. Some of these genres and registers include: inner landscapes of solitary compulsion, as in Jeanne Dielman or the voyeuristic, Vertigo-influenced Proust adaptation, La captive (2000); forays into the comic like Toute une nuit (1982), a film poised somewhere between performance art and romantic comedy; or the nonpareil experimental documentaries which might be termed “materialist,” in that they foreground their anti-illusionism, and yet give a profound sense of the physical and psychic totality of the places they portray, such as News from Home (1977), Sud (1999), and D’Est, which captured fleeting images of an “unspoiled” Russia and Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain. D’Est was redeployed as the above-mentioned video installation Bordering on Fiction.

Image courtesy Paradise Films

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the capstone to SFMOMA’s current fourteen-work retrospective, and the object of cult veneration over the decades since its release, is a towering Mater-horn of modern cinema, and without doubt Akerman’s greatest work. Its title informs us precisely what we’ll be experiencing: the film is largely about a woman, her apartment, and, to a lesser extent, the surrounding environs of Brussels in which these are located. Living alone, aside from a sourish, prune-faced high school-age son who sleeps on a sofa-bed in the living room, Jeanne both inhabits and haunts her living quarters: the majority of the film’s shots take in with unprecedented detail and duration the various domestic duties which tie her to her environment, but she exhibits a psychic remove as palpable as all the apartment’s delicately, exquisitely photographed objects. To support this domicile, every afternoon she receives a male client into her bedroom for paid sex. The film takes place over the course of three days, and we are not allowed to see the goings-on in her bedroom until the climax of the third day, after the magic of her obsessive-compulsive household rituals has begun to wear off, and routine and the psychic composure it generates have begun to unravel…

Image courtesy Paradise Films.

Jeanne Dielman’s three days are dealt with leisurely but inevitably over the course of three hours and twenty-one minutes. We are treated to the panoply of her obsessive activities: making coffee, preparing veal early in the day for the night’s supper, bathing, and scouring the bathtub afterwards, writing letters to relatives in Canada, going to the post office, storing her son’s bed away, etc. Each of Jeanne’s precise actions tends to be covered from beginning to end — when she makes coffee, or bathes, she really makes coffee or takes a bath, often in a single shot. This manner of miniature domestic drama, brilliantly rendered by Akerman, has caused Jeanne Dielman to be regarded as the first, greatest, and perhaps only masterpiece of “real-time” cinema, that is, narrative films whose scenes take place over the actual amount of time the actions in them would really take, these scenes being often shot from one camera position as proof of their “reality”:  No cutting = no gimmicks. Descriptions of this technique regularly scare away curious would-be viewers, adding a forbidding element to an otherwise seductive reputation. In discussing her methodology, however, Akerman stresses how she intuitively molded the moments of her film, and I can attest from many viewings that it’s a completely crafted work, simmering with precision, elegance, and narrative vigor. Although its sense of time is informed by Akerman’s early exposure to films by Andy Warhol and Michael Snow, the last time I saw it I was astonished by the amount of Hitchcockian suspense created by its long takes, expressionist use of sound (in fact, one could make a case for the whole film as an expressionist work), and its focus on telling details of Jeanne’s relationship to objects, especially as things go awry.

The centerpiece of Jeanne Dielman is the performance by Delphine Seyrig in the title role. Most famous in the US for Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (though one of her earliest screen roles had been in the New York-set Beat film Pull My Daisy, co-directed by Robert Frank and co-starring Allen Ginsberg), Seyrig was one of the iconic European stars of her generation, embodying a heady mix of mystery, glacial glamor, and an alluring, inwards-directed sensuality. Seyrig lends all of this to Jeanne, whose character was based on Akerman’s observations of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor. Together Seyrig and Akerman collaborate in creating one of the great enigmatic screen apparitions, and a film whose ultimate drama is the slow posing of the unanswerable riddle of Jeanne’s nature both to the audience and herself.

[Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, screens tonight and Saturday. Chantal Akerman will be here on Saturday to introduce the film, and for Q&A post.] [UPDATE: We've just gotten word that, due to unforeseen family circumstance, Ms Akerman will NOT be in San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned for further details and other potential guests--SS]