DENIS DANCES

Now that PFA's lustrous retrospective "Under the Skin: The Films of Claire Denis" has wrapped, my memory invites select scenes out onto the dance floor.

U.S. Go Home (1994)



Nénette & Boni (1996)



Beau Travail (1999)



Vers Mathilde (2005)



35 Shots of Rum (2008)

DENIS BY THE BAY

This time of year is always tantalizing as the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) begins to release its press announcements regarding their upcoming "jewel of the crown": the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), assured and stately in its 54th edition. Their first announcement honors the creative collaboration between renowned French filmmaker Claire Denis and composer Stuart Staples—best known as the primary singer and songwriter for the groundbreaking British chamber rock band Tindersticks—and is an exciting reason to circle May 2, 8:30PM at the Castro Theatre with a big red circle. I know I am. What are you waiting for?

In what will be an unforgettable live performance, Tindersticks will accompany "a meticulously prepared montage of scenes from six Denis films scored by Staples and his band mates. Technicians have scoured archives to collect the original elements and assemble strikingly sensual and alternately meditative and shocking clips from Nénette et Boni, Trouble Every Day, Friday Night, The Intruder, 35 Shots of Rum and White Material."

"Working with Claire makes us shift our vision," Staples has said. "We come out the other end of it and we always feel kind of changed."

And how much more will this spectacular SFIFF event be appreciated for having earlier indulged the opportunity to watch the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) retrospective "Under the Skin: The Films of Claire Denis", currently running through April 16?

As Juliet Clark has noted for the PFA website: "The work of Claire Denis begins with what she calls 'tactile intuition'. Her films feel their way through charged situations and complex relationships—cultural, familial, sexual—by attending to the textures and rhythms of the physical world and to the ways that people move through it. This is a corporeal cinema: Denis once asserted, 'capturing bodies on film is the only thing that interests me.'

"Born in Paris in 1948, Denis spent her childhood in various African nations where her father was a French colonial functionary. Several of her most acclaimed films, from her debut feature Chocolat to Beau travail and the recent White Material, are set in Africa, and a concern with colonialism and its aftereffects runs through much of her work. But her approach to this and other subjects is less political or even psychological than emotional and experiential; exposition is pared away, leaving impressions whose full meaning emerges only with the passage of time.

"Denis served a long apprenticeship before directing her own films, beginning as an assistant on Dušan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974) and later working as an assistant director to Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. This retrospective includes her films with those two directors, as well as the fruits of her long collaborations with cinematographer Agnès Godard, writer Jean-Pol Fargeau, and actor Alex Descas (whom she has described as her 'muse'). Here is a chance to experience a body of work that both exerts and rewards alert observation."

For ease of reference, I replicate PFA's schedule.

Friday, March 4
7:00 White Material
Claire Denis (France, 2009)

9:00 Chocolat
Claire Denis (France/W. Germany, 1988)

Saturday, March 5
7:15 Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders (Claire Denis, assistant director) (W. Germany/France, 1984)

Sunday, March 6
3:00 I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil)
Claire Denis (France/Switzerland, 1994)

Sunday, March 20
3:00 No Fear, No Die (S'en fout la mort)
Claire Denis (France, 1990)

Friday, March 25
7:00 Nénette and Boni (Nénette et Boni)
Claire Denis (France, 1996)

9:00 Good Work (Beau travail)
Claire Denis (France, 1999)

Beau travail is repeated on Friday, April 1.

Saturday, March 26
8:30 Down by Law
Jim Jarmusch (Claire Denis, assistant director, U.S., 1986)

Friday, April 1
7:00 Good Work (Beau travail)
Claire Denis (France, 1999)

8:50 Trouble Every Day
Claire Denis (France, 2001)

Saturday, April 2
8:30 Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin)
Wim Wenders (Claire Denis, assistant director, W. Germany, 1988)

Wings of Desire is repeated on April 20 as part of the Film 50: History of Cinema series.

Friday, April 8
6:30 The Intruder (L'intrus)
Claire Denis (France/S. Korea, 2004)

The Intruder is repeated on Saturday, April 9.

9:00 U.S. Go Home
Claire Denis/Cédric Kahn (France, 1994)

Followed by:

Claire Denis: The Wanderer (Claire Denis: La vagabonde)
Sébastien Lifshitz (France, 1996)

Saturday, April 9
8:30 The Intruder (L'intrus)
Claire Denis (France/S. Korea, 2004)

Friday, April 15
7:00 Friday Night (Vendredi soir)
Claire Denis (France, 2002)

8:50 Vers Mathilde
Claire Denis (France, 2005)

Preceded by short:
Pour Ushari Ahmed Mahmoud (Claire Denis, France, 1991).

Saturday, April 16
8:40 35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums)
Claire Denis (France, 2008)

Pacific Film Archive
2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley
For information please call 510-642-1412

Cross-published on Twitch.

SFIFF53 2010—Michael Hawley's Line-Up Preview, Pt. One

The full line-up for the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) was announced at an unusually subdued press conference last week. With Executive Director Graham Leggat taking an uncustomary silent role in the proceedings, it was left for new Director of Programming Rachel Rosen and her staff to guide attendant journalists and Bay Area film community members through this year's impressive roster of 177 films from 46 countries. Rosen admitted that while the festival doesn't program according to "themes", certain ones inevitably emerge. 2010's program is characterized by "a return to basics and beauty in filmmaking," films that could be deemed "unclassifiable," films with an "intense interest in the creative process" and the beginnings of an "era of co-auteur theory" (15 of this year's selections have two or more directors). Rosen also joked that she has indulged her taste for "nuns, old men and farm animals."

In a previous entry I covered the films and events announced prior to the press conference. I won't be revisiting them here, except for these few addendums. Joining the list of on-stage "friends" at the Roger Ebert tribute will be writer/director Philip Kaufman and documentarian Errol Morris. At the world premiere of All About Evil, director Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ) is expected to duet with actress Mink Stole on the theme song from John Waters' Female Trouble. Animator Don Hertzfeldt will be the youngest person to ever receive the fest's Persistance of Vision Award. The documentary Presumed Guilty so wowed the programming staff that they've already declared it winner of the Golden Gate Awards competition for Best Bay Area Doc, leaving one less decision for the jury.

Each year when the SFIFF line-up is revealed—and I've attended every single fest since 1976—I experience a mixture of elation and disappointment. This 53rd edition is no exception. Only six of the 20 films I most hoped for are in evidence, and several dozen more are MIA. That said, there are fully 25 films I'm very excited about seeing, with another dozen of possible interest. So here's my very subjective wander through what's in store from April 22 to May 6.

I'll begin, as I'm wont to do, with the French language selections. And right off, here's a big Evening Class kiss to whoever programmed Joann Sfar's Gainsbourg (Je t'aime…moi non plus). I'm a monster fan of musical iconoclast Serge Gainsbourg, but know very little about his life apart from the scandals (which include making the only pop record ever condemned by a Pope). This biopic only opened in French theaters three months ago, so once again, bravo. Somewhat relatedly, SFIFF has also programmed visionary Hong Kong director Johnnie To's Vengeance, which stars grizzled veteran rock 'n' roller Johnny Hallyday, aka the French Elvis Presley, as a chef avenging the Hong Kong slaughter of his daughter's family.

SFIFF has always done a fine job of keeping tabs on the work of France's l-o-n-g established auteurs. This year brings us Alain Resnais' Wild Grass, which won a special jury prize last year at Cannes, and Jacques Rivette's circus-set Around a Small Mountain. I sheepishly confess to not being a particular fan of the latter director's work, but I adored 2007's The Duchess of Langeais and this new one stars favorites Sergio Castellitto and Jane Birkin (ex-wife of Serge and mother of Charlotte Gainsbourg).

A number of mid-career French auteurs also pop up this year, starting with the Opening Night screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, his first film since 2004's A Very Long Engagement. Bruno Dumont returns to SFIFF with his latest provocation, a tale of religious extremism called Hadejwich. Although it's received tepid reviews, everyone I know is dying to see White Material because a) it stars Isabelle Huppert and b) it's directed by Claire Denis. This is Huppert's second film in as many years playing a white colonialist, the other being Rithy Panh's mysteriously as-yet-unseen in the Bay Area The Sea Wall. Director Jan Kounen, whom Variety once called "the Carlos Castañeda of hipster helmers," gets a crack at the Coco Chanel legend in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. The story takes place at a time when reviled and penniless Igor (due to "The Rite of Spring" and the Russian Revolution respectively) moves his wife and four kids into Coco's sprawling estate. The film stars Anna Mouglalis (who also plays chanteuse Juliette Gréco in Gainsbourg) and Danish dreamboat Mads Mikkelsen. Then in Christophe Honoré's Making Plans for Lena, put-upon wife and mother Chiara Mastroianni gets to spend a disastrous weekend at her parent's home in Bretagne. And yes, there's a part in it for Louis Garrel. SFIFF53 will also be showing a special sneak preview of a new-ish film by François Ozon.

Four other French language films I'm anticipating are by directors at or near the beginning of their careers. I was thrilled to find Patric Chiha's debut film Domain in the line-up because it stars the world's scariest actress and a personal favorite of mine, Béatrice Dalle. Who can believe it's been almost 25 years since Betty Blue? Here she plays an increasingly unhinged, alcoholic mathematician who has a special relationship with her gay, teenage nephew. The lead actress is also my reason for wanting to see Dutch director Dorothée van den Berghe's My Queen Karo. Déborah François (The Child, The Page Turner) stars in this story of a squatting family in 1970s Amsterdam, as seen through the eyes of a young girl, Karo. Making her second appearance at SFIFF is director Mia Hansen-Løve with Father of My Children. I wasn't as taken by 2008's All is Forgiven as many were, but I've heard nothing but great things about this true story of a French film producer's suicide and its effect on those he leaves behind. In her third feature, Lourdes, Austrian director Jessica Hausner enlists the help of yet another incomparable French actress. Sylvie Testud plays a wheelchair-bound, quasi non-believer who nonetheless makes a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

Finally, there are three French documentaries I've got my eye on. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno attempts to reconstruct a lost masterpiece by the director of Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, while recounting the story of its troubled production. Documentarian Nicolas Philibert had a 2003 arthouse hit with To Be and To Have, about a contemporary one-room schoolhouse in rural France. His latest film Nénette looks at a 40-year-old orangutan who lives the caged life in Paris' Jardin des Plantes. Jean-François Delassus's 14-18: The Noise and the Fury is a WWI doc that programmer Rosen especially singled out as being "unclassifiable." Using a mix of newsreel footage, movie clips and the voice of an unseen soldier narrator, the film attempts to fathom a reason for the "war to end all wars" 10 million dead.

While the above titles represent a formidable effort at bringing the latest French cinema to the Bay Area, there are a number of curious omissions. Will the latest works by such notable directors as Robert Guédiguian (The Army of Crime), Lucas Belvaux (Rapt), Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void), Tony Gatlif (Korkoro), Costa Gavras (Eden is West), Patrice Chereau (Persecution) and Sebastien Lifshitz (Going South), as well as Isabelle Adjani's Cesar-winning performance in Skirt Day pop up at the SF Film Society's autumn French Cinema Now festival? Or will they already be considered old hat and forgotten by then?

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.

TIFF09—MASTERS

With the full list of films officially announced for the 34th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), it's now time to muse, stew, brew and brood. For starters—as Dave Hudson phrased it at The Auteurs Daily—all of the organizational heavy lifting has been done by Darren Hughes at 1st Thursday. I'd also like to shout out to the fine work and incredibly helpful search engines of TOfilmfest-ca. and the anticipatory announcements from my Twitch teammates. Now with the sidebars and their programs in place comes the Byzantine craft of selecting approximately 30-40 movies from hundreds of attractive titles; is anything more nervewracking? Out of sheer deference, I always start out with the Masters.

Air Doll / Kûki ningyô (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan). Official website (Japanese). This compelling tale of a blow-up doll that becomes a real person and abandons her status of mere sex object comes to life with the superb performance of Korean actress Bae Doo-na.

Cannes synopsis: Hideo, who lives alone, owns a life-size "air doll", which suddenly finds herself with a heart. Everything is new to her in the world outside Hideo's house. She meets all kinds of people. The world is filled with so many beautiful things, but everyone seems to have some kind of hollowness, just as she has. In the morning, she pumps herself up, and takes a walk. One afternoon, she meets Junichi who works at a rental video store, and instantly falls in love with him. A first date. New words she learns from him. She starts working with him at the store, enjoys talking and being with him. Everything seems to be going perfect, until something unexpected happens to the doll. A sad yet happy fantasy. This is a story about a new form of love.

At The Daily @ IFC, David Hudson gathered the reviews from Cannes, where Air Doll had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard competition. Not included in Dave's illustrious aggregate is James Quandt's Cannes dispatch to The Japan Times, wherein Quandt assesses straight off that Air Doll is "vastly inferior" to Still Walking, which was shut out of Cannes last year. Quandt opines that Kore-eda has departed "into territory seemingly unsuited to [his] fine, poetic sensibility." Leave it to James: Where others compare Air Doll to Pinnochio, he summons up the ballet Coppelia and the opera Rusalka. And in one particularly lovely passage, he observes: "The words 'heart' (kokoro) and 'substitute' play against each other throughout the film, reflecting Kore-eda's concern with humanity's preference for artificial, undemanding, and surrogate experience: DVDs instead of cinemas, video games instead of poetry, sex dolls instead of a real-life mate." In gist, Quandt finds Air Doll "overlong and sententious."

Guest critic Moko reviewed the film for Twitch: "Nozomi comes across a cavalcade of shattered people, doing their best to pretend like nothing is wrong—people who are 'empty' emotionally in the same way that Nozomi is empty physically." Which is pretty much how Kore-eda responded to my sole question at The Evening Class about the film's theme. At Midnight Eye, Tom Mes' informed review situates Air Doll in the context of contemporary Japan, not only in its freeform adaptation of a popular manga, but resemblances to the work of literary great Junichiro Tanizaki, and the film's Tokyo-specific shitamachi setpieces. Wikipedia. IMDb. YouTube trailer. North American Premiere.

Antichrist (Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/ France/Italy). Official website. This is a groundbreaking, deeply disturbing and graphic nightmare vision about gender relations from one of the most important and influential directors of the last 30 years. The film is a break from von Trier's previous work in terms of aesthetics, resembling a Japanese horror movie reimagined by Andrei Tarkovsky. Antichrist features unforgettable and courageous performances by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe. Gainsbourg won Canne's Best Actress award for her performance. Dave Hudson monitored the critical wake from Cannes at The Daily @ IFC. In his Cannes dispatch to The Japan Times, James Quandt wrote: "Danish director Lars von Trier, ever the provocateur, worked his way out of personal depression by making Antichrist, an intense and ultimately preposterous account of a marriage strained by the death of a child. The troubled couple retreat to an isolated cabin, none too subtly called Eden, to work out their problems, which soon escalate into macabre, and then gruesome, violence, the impaling and self-maiming enough to make fans of the Saw franchise flinch." At Film Comment, Amy Taubin complained that von Trier's "trick of putting the audience in a vise and then ridiculing it for wriggling has worn thin, and since Antichrist is an 'intimate' two-hander, the frayed seams are all too evident. Which may be the desired effect, or may not be, ad infinitum, but frankly, it just bored me." Wikipedia. IMDb. North American Premiere.

Carmel (Amos Gitaï, Israel/France/Italy). History in the Middle East is a complex mix of the present and the past. Then, there is also the personal and Gitaï is uniquely placed to reflect on his own past as a soldier and as the father of a young man caught up in the present conflicts that engulf the region. IMDb. World Premiere.

La Donation / The Legacy (Bernard Émond, Canada). Official website (French). Dr. Rainville, an aging country doctor with a deep attachment to his patients, is about to retire and is looking for a successor. Jeanne Dion, an emergency room doctor from Montreal, agrees to go to Normétal to replace him for a few weeks, with no plans for an extended stay. When Dr. Rainville suddenly dies, Jeanne must decide if she'll take over the job, and its inherent responsibilities, for the long-term. The main themes of the film are faith and dehumanization of the public health care system. The Legacy received the Special Grand Prize of Youth Jury and the Don Quixote Award of the Locarno International Film Festival. IMDb. YouTube trailer. North American Premiere.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl / Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loira (Manoel de Oliveira, France/Portugal/Spain). Famed filmmaker Oliveira, who celebrates his 101st birthday this year, tells the tale of Macario's obsession with the enticing blond he spies from his window. Little does he know that she will end up stealing much more than his heart. Daniel Kasman reviewed the film for The Auteurs when it screened at this year's Berlinale ("Adapted from a short story by Eça de Queirós—whose caricature is humorously honored when Trêpa visits an exclusive literary club—Oliveira's Blond Hair Girl is a simple and precise 64 minutes, as pure as rain water and just as lacking in pretension. …The simplicity on display is a relief, and the mastery effortless."); Jay Weissberg for Variety ("Those familiar with the master's airtight tableaux and controlled line-delivery won't find much has changed in the switch to Zola-like territory, updated to the present and told as a flashback by an earnest man discovering his love didn't deserve his adulation."); Damon Smith for The Hands of Bresson ("[C]ertainly the best feature I caught in Berlin, and the leanest, clocking in at a mere 64 minutes. …Terse and forlorn, but etched with wry humor, the film presents characters who exist in a world of fusty Edwardian decorum where the possibility of love is constrained by one's financial means and class position, or in the case of Macario, the consent of an uncle."). To be shown with Working on the Douro River. IMDb. YouTube trailer. North American Premiere.

Les Herbes Folles / Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, France). From modernist master Alain Resnais comes a romantic adventure based around the simple act of losing a wallet. Based on French writer Christian Gailly's 1996 novel L'incident, Resnais' first adaptation of a novel into film is about a lost wallet and how it changes the lives of its principal characters. As IMDb synopsizes: "A wallet lost and found opens the door to romantic adventure for Georges and Marguerite. After examining the ID papers of its owner, it is not a simple matter for Georges to turn the red wallet he found in to the police. Nor is it that Marguerite can recuperate her wallet without being piqued with curiosity about whom it was who found it. As they navigate the social protocols of giving and acknowledging thanks, turbulence enters their otherwise quotidian lives."

Cannes awarded Resnais a lifetime achievement award for his work and exceptional contribution to the history of cinema. David Hudson has gathered the Cannes reviews at The Daily @ IFC. I might add Amy Taubin's evaluation for Film Comment: "The film is at once buoyant and melancholy, heady and erotic—a delirium of contradictory desires. Eric Gautier's crane-mounted camera performs remarkable aerial twists and turns. Resnais, a master choreographer of camera movement, has never been this inventive or this free. Wild Grass seems both precision-wound and made up on the spot. It might be his greatest film since Muriel." Wild Grass has likewise been tagged to open this year's upcoming New York Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics has acquired the film. At The Auteurs, Adrian Curry encourages Sony to retain the film's original theatrical poster. Wikipedia. IMDb. YouTube excerpt. North American Premiere.

Honeymoons / Medeni Mesec (Goran Paskaljevic, Serbia/Albania/Italy). Two young married couples take off and travel abroad to the promised lands of better opportunities, but hope collapses when their expectations disappear into thin air and their dreams turn into nightmares. As Dimitri Eipides details in his program capsule: "Veteran director Goran Paskaljevic, who fled Serbia for France during the rule of late president Slobodan Miloševic, is not just interested in knocking on heaven's door. He wants to reach those pearly gates hand in hand with his neighbor—hence the first Albanian-Serbian co-production in cinema history. Despite undiminished tensions over breakaway Kosovo, Honeymoons beautifully reconciles the two nations by pointing out their similarities rather than their differences. Though Paskaljevic insists he wasn't trying to make any political point with this work, before he even started filming, Serbian nationalists had already accused him of being a traitor, while Albanians in Tirana and Kosovo didn't exactly warm to the idea. If a simple love story has such powerful repercussions, imagine what would happen if this film was really about politics! Then again, maybe it is." IMDb. North American Premiere.

Hotel Atlântico (Suzana Amaral, Brazil). Official Website. Enigmatic and perturbing, Suzana Amaral's Hotel Atlântico takes us on a mysterious journey through Brazil's southern landscapes. The film follows an unnamed actor as he wanders into new experiences, living life in the moment. IMDb. YouTube trailer. World Premiere.

Melody for a Street Organ / Melodiya dlya sharmanki (Kira Muratova, Ukraine). Two young orphan siblings travel to Moscow in search of their missing father. Scared of being separated and sent to orphanages, they hope to reunite with the last link of their shattered family. As Dimitri Eipides evokes in his program capsule: "Kira Muratova spins her majestic web slowly and purposefully, weaving together alternating vignettes of her beloved duo. This fairy-tale world is not conjured out of thin air, but rather gives us a different take on what's already there: a train station haunted with the memory of a long-lost father; a department store doubling as Ali Baba's cave and the nine circles of hell; a clandestine street that refuses to be found." IMDb. North American Premiere.

Le Refuge (François Ozon, France). The French master returns with this unsettling tale of a rich, beautiful young woman who finds herself pregnant after her boyfriend dies of an overdose. Retreating to a seaside home, she is joined by his brother. As Cameron Bailey offers in his program capsule: "A character study that builds its tension in measured scenes, Le Refuge carries the stamp of its auteur in its pursuit of uneasy situations and its focus on the absolute enigma of the protagonist." World Premiere.

Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, Italy). Official website (Italian). This fictionalized portrait of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini concentrates on his youthful years before he rose to power in Italy. It uncovers the details of his first marriage and the child he had with a passionate woman whom he later totally disowned and abandoned. In his program capsule, Piers Handling crowns Vincere "serious, intelligent filmmaking of the highest order" and states: "Mussolini's early life provides the grist for a major examination of the dictator in Marco Bellocchio's tough-edged but brilliantly directed film. With decades of cinematic experience behind him, as well as a filmography that includes some of the most important post-war Italian films ever made, Bellocchio is well prepared for this challenge. Vincere stands as a model for anyone setting out to capture the flavor and essence of a famed historical figure." Dave Hudson monitored the critical wake from Cannes at The Daily @ IFC. Wikipedia. IMDb. YouTube trailer. North American Premiere.

Vision / Vision—Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (Margarethe von Trotta, Germany). One of the major auteurs to emerge from the New German Cinema, Margarethe von Trotta returns to the Festival with Vision, a study of the remarkable Hildegard von Bingen, the Benedictine nun who emerged as a Renaissance woman before there was a Renaissance. IMDb. YouTube trailer. Canadian Premiere.

White Material / Matériel Blanc (Claire Denis, France). A family of French expatriates living in an African country where they own a coffee plantation find that their livelihood is threatened by the outbreak of civil war. They struggle to keep their lives together in the face of rival factions fighting for power and gun-toting child soldiers who have no sympathy for their plight. Piers Handling synopsizes: "Denis, always the visual magician, creates a world of beautiful but troubling images. In her hands, the camera is an expressive force that she employs to intervene, reveal and interpret. She immerses the viewer in her chosen reality, making us feel, see and hear everything she puts in front of us, opening our senses to what she is showing. As their way of life disintegrates around them, each character makes choices, none of which is predictable. With White Material, Denis explores the highly charged, divided and intensely emotional post-colonial world that is Africa." White Material was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice International. IMDb. North American Premiere.

The White Ribbon / Das Weisse Band (Michael Haneke, Germany/Austria/ France/Italy). In Protestant Northern Germany on the eve of World War I, strange incidents begin to occur in a village community and increasingly take the form of a ritual of punishment. This latest work from Michael Haneke won the Palme d'Or for best film at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Piers Handling concludes in his program capsule: "Though an analysis of the roots of Nazism can be read into the narrative, the film has a more universal reach. Haneke maintains that the work is as much an investigation of terrorism as it is of fascism. Both provocative and elegantly executed, this is essential viewing—an examination of how violence can perhaps unwittingly take root in a society that ostensibly believes in other values."

Dave Hudson monitored the critical wake from Cannes for The Daily @ IFC. Having already complained about the "gore galore" at this year's Cannes Film Festival, James Quandt wrote in his dispatch to The Japan Times: "It took erstwhile shock-meister Michael Haneke to trump all this horror with a Strindbergian exchange between a bitter doctor and his mistress in The White Ribbon, the verbal sadism far more appalling than any neighboring carnage." At Film Comment, Gavin Smith added: "[T]his story of sinister misdeeds in a hamlet in Northern Germany just before World War I is a horror movie of sorts—the obvious reference point was Village of the Damned—although its true roots are in the postwar German Heimatfilm genre, which it comprehensively subverts. With its slow, deliberate pace, exactingly framed black-and-white compositions, novelistic array of characters, and mounting sense of unease, it's a completely absorbing experience. … Schematic perhaps, but convincing and authoritative." Wikipedia. IMDb. YouTube trailer. North American Premiere.

The Window / Janala (Buddhadeb Dasgupta, India). When Bimal decides to give something back to his alma mater, he chooses to replace the broken window of his favorite classroom. Plans to pay for this gesture go awry and he cannot bear to tell his fiancée. Hailed as "both searing social comment and pure poetry" by Cameron Bailey in his program capsule, Bailey qualifies that the "delicate balance" poised in The Window "transforms the complexities of today's India into a song of many harmonies." IMDb. World Premiere.

Michael Hawley Previews YBCA's Summer 2009 Lineup

Norwegian Black Metal, Graphic Sexual Horror and a Headless Woman. Jeez, is it Halloween already? No, it's just this summer's insouciant film/video line-up at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. But before we dig into what curator Joel Shepard has in store through September, here's exciting news for YBCA filmgoers. Starting July 6, ticket holders will be allowed FREE admittance into YBCA's exhibition galleries, whose days and hours of operation have been adjusted to align with evening film and video screenings.

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us (July 9 & 11) shines a torch on the stygian world of Norwegian Black Metal, a musical subgenre that grabbed headlines for inspiring a wave of murder, suicide and over 50 church burnings in the early '90s. The filmmakers were reluctantly introduced to the music by an insistent employee at San Francisco's Aquarius Records, which subsequently inspired them to spend two years in Norway gathering materials for this film. Moving from extreme music to extreme sexuality, the following weekend at YBCA brings us Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Bell's Graphic Sexual Horror (July 16 & 17). This documentary tells the story of Insex, a now-defunct BDSM website featuring exclusively female submissives that was also an early pioneer of internet video streaming and live feeds.

"Where is The Headless Woman?" That was the big question on the lips of Bay Area cinephiles when the latest from Argentine director Lucrecia Martel failed to make the line-up of this year's SF International Film Festival. We'd been lusting to see this film since its world premiere at Cannes last year. My anticipation became further heightened when it got ranked #1 on Film Comment's list of 20 Best Unreleased Films of 2008. Well, leave it to YBCA to end up bringing us not only the film, but the director as well, in a program titled Holy Girls and Headless Women: The Films of Lucrecia Martel. The ground-breaking director will appear at a screening of her 2001 debut feature La Ciénaga on July 14, followed by The Headless Woman on the following evening. Her second and middle feature, 2004's The Holy Girl will be shown on July 23 without the director in attendance (Martel accompanied the film to the SF International Film Festival in 2005).

Anyone who missed Chantal Akerman's revolutionary Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when it screened at SF MOMA earlier this year, will get another chance on August 1 and 2. There may even be some repeat viewers—the SFMOMA screenings were marred by a missing second reel—replaced by a DVD at the first screening and 16mm at the second. This hypnotic, long (201-minute) 1975 film is considered one of the most important works in the history of cinema by many, and stars Delphine Seyrig as a middle-class widow and mother whose orderly universe s-l-o-w-l-y cracks apart.

Fewer things interest me less than sports, but I'm intrigued by several programs in Beyond ESPN: An Offbeat Look at the Sports Film. This month-long series, co-curated by Shepard and SF Bay Guardian Arts and Entertainment Editor Johnny Ray Huston, spans the full artsy to trashy gamut. Kicking off the series on August 6 is Rare Films from the Baseball Hall of Fame, followed by Jorgen Leth's A Sunday in Hell on August 9. Said to be the best film ever made about professional bicycle racing, Leth documented the grueling 1976 Paris-Roubaix race across northern France using 20 cameras and a helicopter. Contemporary audiences might know Leth best as the director assigned a series of wily filmmaking challenges by Lars Von Trier in 2003's The Five Obstructions.

Of all the films in the sports series, perhaps the one of most interest to cinephiles will be Claire Denis' 2005 never-seen-in-SF Towards Mathilde (August 13). Made in between L'intrus and 35 Shots of Rum, the film documents modern dance choreographer Mathilde Monnier as she creates a new work. The release of Criterion's Criteron's William Klein boxed-set last year generated renewed interest in the work of this American born and educated director who spent most of his career in France. He's represented in this series by The French (August 16), a documentary about the 1982 French Open tennis tournament in which Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe were participants (the film is not part of the Criterion set and is not available on DVD). Then on August 20 YBCA will screen Veronica Chen's visually striking Agua, an Argentine film set in the world of open water marathon swimming (specifically the 57-km Santa Fe-Cordoba river race.) The film appeared at the 2007 SF International Film Festival, and my review for The Evening Class can be found here.

Midnites for Maniacs—and its ebullient host Jesse Hawthorne Ficks—bring their swell act to YBCA on August 23, with Winning Isn't Everything: A Tribute to 1970s Sports Film. This triple-bill movie-marathon includes 1978 Robbie Benson-starring ice skating tear-jerker Ice Castles, Michael Ritchie's 1976 classic The Bad News Bears with Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal, and last but not least, The Cheerleaders, a 1973 exploitation film that threatens to reveal "everything you ever wanted to know about cheerleaders but were afraid to ask."

The final weekend of YBCA's sports series brings us two more classic, rarely seen documentaries. Visions of Eight (August 28) is an omnibus film centering on the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, with segments directed by Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, Arthur Penn, John Schlesinger and others. Not too long ago, YBCA had a bona fide hit on its hands with numerous sold-out showings of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which followed French soccer star Zinedine Zidane through one complete match. The film which did this first, however, was Hellmuth Costard's 1971 Football as Never Before (August 30). Using eight cameras, soccer legend George Best is trailed though a 1970 Manchester United First Division game. Interestingly, Spike Lee employs the same method in an upcoming documentary on Kobe Bryant.

Although not officially listed on YBCA's website yet, there are two important films I'm anticipating beyond the current calendar. On September 10, 12 and 13, YBCA revives Nicholas Ray's 1956 Bigger Than Life, in which James Mason is transformed from mild-mannered schoolteacher to deluded megalomaniac—courtesy of the modern miracle drug cortisone. Then on September 17, 19 and 20 we get to see another critically acclaimed Latin American film from 2008, Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool. This latest work from the Argentine minimalist director placed 10th on the aforementioned Film Comment list of Top 20 unreleased films, and was another surprise omission from this year's SFIFF. Hopefully YBCA will continue to focus on Latin American cinema, given the fact that we no longer have a Latino Film Festival here in the Bay Area. At the top of my wish list you'll find Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero (#9 on the Film Comment list) and Rodrigo Plá's Desert Within (winner of eight 2008 Mexican Ariel awards).

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.