LECH MAJEWSKI ON THE MILL & THE CROSS

I've been recently fascinated with what would be considered "painterly" in cinema. It has, in fact, become one of my stock questions whenever I converse with a film historian or someone who has a deep embedded knowledge of film. Thomas Elsasesser distinguished between filmic projects where the director and art director collaborate to achieve either a historical drama (via the verisimilitude of historical paintings) and those films that express separate qualities about painting that are "more difficult to locate but [which] may actually have a deeper resonance."

"If we're talking about 'painterly', you really have to make a distinction," Elsaesser qualified. "Are you talking about 'painterly' in the 19th Century sense? Or are you talking about Modern art or painting? So I would make a big difference there. Both you can find in film."

When I posed the same question to Jonathan Rosenbaum for our published conversation in Film International (Vol. 9, No. 3), he responded: "It has an awful lot to do with the way certain people conceptualize and think about film. An obvious example of a painterly filmmaker is Chantal Akerman. She thinks in terms of painters. When I've talked to her before about her films, she'll talk about some of the Belgian Surrealists. Where I would say how much I liked Paul Delvaux, she would say, 'Yes, but his lighting is better than mine.' I remember she said that, which I thought was interesting. Of course, the painterly in film happens especially in experimental forms of cinema, such as the films of Michael Snow. In his own way, Snow is painterly though obviously he's also related to sculpture. Probably even more to sculpture than to painting."

Lech Majewski's sumptuous The Mill and the Cross probably falls within the historical grouping outlined by Elsaesser as it springs directly from Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting "The Way to Calvary"; yet, in its cinematic devices, The Mill and the Cross achieves the quality of beauty delineated by Elsaesser that is effected by the dialogue a viewer establishes with a painting (or, in this case, a film). "The beauty is not something that your eye slides off after a couple of seconds because you think you recognize it," Elsaesser proposed, "but more the fact that the longer you look, the more the painting becomes something else. You know?" This quality of a painting "becoming something else" by way of cinema is undeniably evident in Majewski's The Mill and the Cross.

After a lauded tour on the festival circuit—including an appearance at the 54th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF54) in their World Cinema Spotlight "Painting with Light" (which highlighted the cinematic contemplation of painting)—Majewski's The Mill and the Cross opens theatrically this weekend.

As Graham Leggat wrote in his SFIFF54 program notes for the film: "A miracle of technology in the service of the artistic imagination, Lech Majewski's brilliant film transports its viewers into the living, breathing world of Pieter Bruegel's dense frieze of Christ's passion, 'The Way to Calvary'. And live and breathe it does. Though carefully organized along symbolic axes, Bruegel's 1564 painting sets the drama of the crucifixion within a rustic Flanders scene teeming with everyday life. ('About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters,' wrote W.H. Auden. 'How well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.') Likewise Majewski—using computer-generated blue-screen compositing, new 3-D technology, just-so location shooting in Poland, Austria and New Zealand and a massive backdrop he painted by hand—tells the story of the painting largely through closely observed secular rituals of 16th-century Flemish daily life, in all its earth-toned grubbiness, with occasional scenes revealing Bruegel's artistic choices and the politics of the day. Windmilling, calf-hauling, bread-peddling, villagers dancing and children horsing around take up the better part of the narrative, while cameos by Rutger Hauer (as Bruegel), Michael York (as his patron and friend) and Charlotte Rampling (as a limpid Virgin Mary) give historical context and symbolic depth. But the narrative is not the point—the extraordinary imagery is. The painting literally comes to life in this spellbinding film, its wondrous scenes entering the viewer like a dream enters a sleeping body."

The Bay Area critical response during SFIFF54 was likewise affirming. At SF360, Max Goldberg noted that Majewski managed the problem of plotting a painting in time by organizing his scenes cyclically. Goldberg offered: "In regularly returning to the same actions—young children roughhousing, a man making heavy advances on a woman, a fool playing his flute—Majewski cleverly replicates the way our attention circulates looking at such a dense canvas. This enveloping aspect is further developed with the high-tech imagining systems that allow Majewski to situate his actors within Brueghel's own visual field. Meanwhile, the subversive aspects of the painting—the positioning of the mill grinder at a perch usually reserved for God; the placement of everyday bawdiness just next door to the Crucifixion, here imagined as taking place at the hands of Spanish inquisitors—come into focus through the narrative's slow build. By the time the camera tracks out from Brueghel's framed masterpiece, we're nearly surprised to find all that adventure emanating from a single canvas—only one of many in the gallery at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna."

At the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Matt Sussman observed: "Majeswki both re-stages Bruegel's painting—which draws parallels between its depiction of Christ en route to his crucifixion and the persecution of Flemish citizens by the Spanish inquisition's militia—in stunning tableaux vivant that combine bluescreen technology and stage backdrops, and gives back stories to a dozen or so of its 500 figures. Periodically, Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) addresses the camera mid-sketch to dolefully explain the allegorical nature of his work, but these pedantic asides speak less forcefully than Majeswki's beautifully lighted vignettes of the small joys and many hardships that comprised everyday life in the 16th century. Beguiling yet wholly absorbing, this portrait of a portrait is like nothing else at the festival."

At Vinyl Is Heavy, Ryland Walker Knight—though finding The Mill and The Cross "somewhat confounding, especially from the 2nd row"—nonetheless appreciated its wide and deep palette and noted that the film's "ideas, though rooted in the narrative structure of the painting, feel yet more modern in how arrayed (not inter-related) they are."

And at Variety, San Francisco's own Dennis Harvey raved: "Neither conventional costume drama nor abstract objet d'art, this visually ravishing, surprisingly beguiling gamble won't fit any standard arthouse niche. Still it could prove the Polish helmer's belated international breakthrough, especially if marketed as a unique, immersive museum-meets-cinema experience a la Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark."

At MUBI, Dave Hudson has gathered the critical commentary outside of the Bay Area.

Lech Majewski was born August 30, 1953 in Katowice, Poland, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and is a film and theater director, writer, poet, and painter. In the 1970s he studied at the National Film School in Łódź, notably as a student of Wojciech Has, who taught Majewski directing. In the early '80s, after completing The Knight and as martial law was declared in Poland, Majewski emigrated to England and then to the United States, where he lived for most of the late Communist era. Today, Majewski is a dual U.S. / Polish citizen. He is a member of the American and European film academies and the Polish International PEN. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted a complete retrospective of Majewski's work. This was their first ever full retrospective of a Polish filmmaker, and one of their only ever mid-career retrospectives. For that program, Majewski created the film eventually called Glass Lips, though initially it was known as Blood of a Poet.

The following comments are taken from his public introduction and subsequent Q&A to the film's SFIFF54 screening. Photos courtesy of Kino-Lorber.

Introduction

A few words before the film. First of all, I would like to say that this is a work that took us three years to complete because we introduced some unbelievable and difficult tasks, technically speaking. I very much wanted to enter Pieter Bruegel's world. I respect him. I love his paintings. He was a great teacher for me in terms of his philosophy and the way he narrates his paintings.

Therefore, we did a lot of preparatory work. We started with costumes first of all. There are no textiles today like the textiles he painted in his paintings so basically we had to make these costumes, and then check the textures in front of the camera to determine which textiles would behave in a similar way as in the Bruegel painting. We had to hand-paint those costumes and hire seamstresses to hem them for us. The costumes alone took nine months of pre-production.

Then, obviously, when we started to look for the landscape that would be most appropriate to shoot the entire movie, we realized that there is no landscape like that; it doesn't exist at all. So we got a very good reproduction from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that houses this painting "The Way to Calvary" by Pieter Bruegel. There are 500 figures in this painting. With the computer we started to analyze the perspective in the painting and found there were seven different perspectives in this singular painting. Obviously, Bruegel was foreseeing cubism 400 years before.

We were completely lost as to how we were going to shoot the nature because in his paintings he uses at the same time a point of view that is coming from the left, from the right, above and from below. We realized we couldn't have a landscape like that, but what we could do was to cut these multiple perspective into single ones and look around for similarities in the real landscape. Then in post-production we could piece it together.

There were also various things that were helping us. For example, an article was published in a Polish newspaper about a little village whose citizens were ancestors of Flemish immigrants from the 16th century. They speak a fossilized Flemish. This language that they speak doesn't exist anymore. Linguists have recorded them and the majority of them are 80+. So when you hear the sing-songs and the voices, keep in mind it is a non-existent language, a medieval French.

I went to New Zealand at one point during post-production and discovered that over the southern island there was a fantastic cloud formation. In fact, the Maori call this southern island the "Island of the Long Clouds". I quickly hired a DP and we shot these clouds because they were so reminiscent of Bruegel's clouds.

The film was assembled by weaving a digital tapestry. We had a lot of young people sitting in front of their computers spending their whole lives, like abbots in a monastery painting illuminated manuscripts.

The author of the original art essay that analyzes this film is the fantastic and brilliant writer Michael Francis Gibson, an American living in Paris and art historian who writes for the Herald Tribune. He wrote the original analysis of the painting in a 300-page essay entitled "The Mill and the Cross, Peter Bruegels 'Way to Calvary' ", [in French, Noêsis, 1996 and in English, Acatos, Lausanne, 2001], hence the title of my film. Michael Gibson researched vanished customs (for example, you see the treatment of the bread, how the people touch the bread to their forehead or the young woman who puts a loaf of bread on her naked belly. It has some symbolic meaning. Pregnancy = the bread, which is the flesh.

On the Hidden Language of Symbols

Michael Francis Gibson gave me his book because he thought I had a "Bruegelian soul", as he wrote in his review of my other movie Angelus (2000). The movie was showing in Paris and he saw it. He wrote a very good review and sent me his book.

I felt his book would make a great film because of his writing. The book was lucid and beautifully written. It's a brilliant guide through the labyrinth of allegories and symbols. The way he writes, it's a masterpiece. I'm a painter so the history of art is one of my favorite subjects. I read a lot of books about it. Also, I am a great lover of old masters, particularly the proto-Renaissance and the Renaissance. So I have read such subjects in other books and rarely have I encountered this kind of fantastic, beautiful and lucid analysis. It's very difficult to write about paintings. Michael Francis Gibson was born to do that.

When we met for lunch in Paris, it surprised him when I suggested making a feature film from his analysis. He thought I was mad. He thought a documentary would be the most we could get out of it. He imagined standing in front of the painting and pointing to various symbols, explaining them. But then he scratched his head and said, "Well, the impossible is the realm of gentlemen. Let's do it."

We selected a few characters from the painting and proceeded to discuss these people, as if they were alive. Where were they going? What were they doing? There were various interesting idiosyncrasies about the behavior of people in those times because it was quite different to our's. Symbols were very important to these people. Today I think we are losing a lot of this hidden language of symbols. We have become inundated with shallow images gliding by. Maybe it's because we're moving too fast? Maybe it's because the images we look at are moving fast in front of our eyes? We rarely focus on anything. In those times they didn't have television and cars.

I remind you that when you listen to music from the past, you will always discover the rhythm of a horse ride in the music. It's a rhythm given by the horse-drawn carriage. The screeching and banging of today's music is more like a train crashing or cars roaring by. It's natural that we digest the sounds and the images that are in our lives. In those times people spent a lot of time looking at paintings. They had the time and they could read the hidden language of symbols.

For example, if Titian is painting a woman dressed in blue and she leans against a tree and in front of her is a basket filled with grapes and an apple, for a contemporary viewer that's a sense that she's picnicking, reclining, and resting on a beautiful day; but, for the observer of those times, they realized that this image was the shortest metaphor for Christianity. The apple represents original sin and the grapes produce the wine—the blood of Christ—which washed away original sin. The tree she's leaning against becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as well as the tree upon which the fruit of her life will hang, crucified.

There is a painting in Washington D.C. by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch of a woman reading a letter. Her back is turned to the viewer who cannot see what is written on the letter. Only a corner of the letter is visible above her shoulder. There is a painting on the wall next to her. The painting is partially obscured because in those times people hung curtains over paintings so that they wouldn't become too familiar. When you become too familiar with something, you stop seeing it. So you would have to slide the curtain to take a look at the painting and, when done, you would close the curtain. In this painting the curtain is open a little bit and you can see a big storm, a huge wave. Thus, you imagine that the letter is very traumatic for the woman. You get the emotion from the image of the sea. There's a playing card on the ground and it's the ace of hearts.

If in a painting you see a chandelier and it has a candle in it, people from that time knew that the chandelier represented the Virgin Mary and the candle Jesus Christ. Whether the candle is lit or not determines which period we're talking about. If it's lit, it expresses the transmutation of matter into spirit; the wax into the fire.

There are various meanings to the symbols. If the dog is next to his master's legs, it means he's faithful. If a subject is holding something in his left hand, it means he's higher up in the social hierarchy. Basically everything is a symbol. If there is an uneaten fruit on the windowsill, it means that the woman in the painting is not pregnant yet, despite the fact that her dress is bulging as if she is pregnant.

In The Mill and the Cross, for example, women of Flanders used to wash the threshold of the house. It was a common thing to do. Several times they washed the threshold and smeared it with different herbs for different seasons and for different times of the day. Oddly enough, those thresholds were worn out not by people stepping on them—that was forbidden—they were worn out from being washed.

On the Symbolism of the Mill

There are various symbols of the mill. Number one, Bruegel's placement of the mill on a rock is completely surrealistic and unlike anything you would imagine from a painter who realistically paints his observations. For starters, this is Flanders and Flanders is flat. It doesn't have any rock outcroppings, not even hills. But Bruegel, like any respected painter of the time, traveled to Italy and he crossed the Alps. When he saw the Alps, he knelt down and his sketchbook filled up with hundreds of sketches. When he came back to Flanders, the rocks began popping up in his paintings. Apart from everything, the rocks and the nature at that time had an anthropomorphic character, which meant that nature served as a metaphor for the human body. So the rock on which the mill rests is the body, usually the body of Jesus Christ. The cracks in the rock represent the wounds of the crucified Christ. So if you have Leonardo's painting of the Madonna among the rocks, that's what it means. Putting the rock in the painting was Biblical. It's in the gospels. You have St. Peter, Pétros, "the rock", who builds the church upon the rock. Basically, that's what Bruegel is showing.

The shape of the mill and the fact that it has the cross in its blades or sails, the wings of the mill, obviously represents the Church. Therefore, the miller and his mill is completely surreal; it makes no financial sense. It's nonsense. How will he get the grain in there? How will he sell his flour? Perched on that rock, he will obviously get good wind; but, that's about it. Thus, the miller is not meant to be real; the miller is the Creator.

On Going Inside the World of the Painting,
Into the Mill

The painting invites you into the terrain of the imagination. Once we received the fantastic reproduction from the Kunsthistorisches Museum—which was very accurate—we could show it on a big screen and zoom into the details. One of the things that I noticed were the two windows carved in the face of the rock. I instantly saw shafts of light penetrating these windows and illuminating this enormous kind of cathedral inside this mountain. For that reason, we needed machinery that was pre-modern. This miller is the Creator, right? He cranks up the mechanism that allows the sky to move.

Obviously, we wanted to relay the size of the mill's interior; but, most of it was done through sound. Visually, there's a little bit of trickery. We managed to shoot several interiors of existing mills—one in the Czech Republic, the other in Poland, and one in Austria—as well as the big machinery in the salt mines in Poland close to Krakow. The salt mines are from the mid 1400s. Salt used to be more expensive than gold. Whoever had salt had money and power, unbelievably so. Now we can buy a kilo of salt for one buck and you cannot buy the same amount of gold for one buck. So the interior of the mill is a combination. Most of it exists in the reality of the salt mines and the rest of it—like the extension of the staircases—was engineered patiently in 3-D by the minute work of many young people. Throughout the film, 99% of what you see is a combination or reality, pieces of Bruegel and nature, and the construction through 3-D.

All of the images you see were built up by layers upon layers upon layers. People were shot separately against the blue screen. The landscape was shot separately. For example, when Rutger Hauer touches the spider web, it was a situation where at first we shot Rutger with a stick and he asked, "Where do I look?" I told him, "Well, look at the end of the stick." He said, "Then I'll be cross-eyed." I told him, "We'll fix it in post. Don't worry."

Then we had three young gentlemen working on the spider web. One was working on the construction of the spider web. The computer had produced a perfect spider web and we looked at it and thought, "This is not a spider web. This is some German construction. Spiders don't behave like that." We Googled images of hundreds of spider webs and tried to get into the mind of the spider; but, we got nowhere because those spiders are high on drugs or something. They start to do a perfect web and soon thereafter they destroy it by going into various zigzagging ways as if they were thinking about something else, as if they were thinking, "I'm not going to do this spider web. I'm going to do its opposite." We had to figure out what would be the spider's algorithm of mistake; but, we couldn't find it. So we had to destroy the spider web by hand.

Then the other guy was doing the dew drops on the spider web, which was easy because the dew drops behaved politely with gravity. Gravity determined the size of the drop. Then we had the problem of the spider itself. The third young man was creating the spider. He asked me, "With which leg should the spider take its first step?" I couldn't figure that out. So he and I caught several spiders, filmed them, and in slow motion it turned out that spiders of the same species move differently. On one hand we had this top technology and on the other hand it felt like we were in the Middle Ages weirdly rediscovering the world and how it would translate into this 3-D creation. In order to create a tree moving, we had to go out and watch a tree and figure out how it moves. During this process, these young people grew to respect the Creator. That's a perfect animation, really.

On the Tension Between Stillness and Movement

Contrary to the popular idea about cinema, and life, I believe that the most important action is not that which moves but that which stands still. I think that people who are caught in the most important moments of their lives, in dramatic moments or moments of bliss, don't move. They stand still. Initially, I thought that throughout the entire movie I would have the people standing still for one hour and a half and just have the camera move around them. That was the initial idea. But then, you know, as with all good ideas, I had to give in and add movement. Sorry for that.

On the Business Side of the Production

Our Swedish co-producer hired an English production manager who measured what it would cost to make this film in England. It came to £33,000,000. But we did it in Poland for a fraction of that amount.

Initially, I thought that the movie would only be shown in five museums. The Louvre subscribed to this movie, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., MoMA in New York (because I had a big retrospective there three years ago), the Prado in Madrid, Spain, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (because they house the painting); but, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and there it was sold to 32 countries for theatrical distribution. I was totally surprised that people would want to see this film in theaters. Kino-Lorber is distributing the film in the United States and Canada.

FRAMELINE34 2010—QUOTE OF THE WEEK

When I grow up, I want to write like Dennis Harvey. His recent Frameline preview for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and its attendant focus on gay body image issues is a thoroughly enjoyable read and I loved this quip: "Frameline34—so old! who'd sleep with that?!"

Dennis likewise profiles the Warhol sidebar in a piece for SF360.

SFIFF53 2010: Michael Hawley Wraps Up the Special Events

The 53rd edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) came to a close on May 6, having sold out 92 screenings during its successful 15-day run. While I'm still mulling over the three dozen films I saw during those two weeks—all of which I hope to write about—here's a look back at five of this year's special events.

I've been coming to the SFIFF for a few decades now, and 2010 was only the second time I've attended the opening night festivities. Someday I might grow to feel blasé about the event, but for now I still get caught up in the glamour of it all. My suit came out of the closet for the first time since last year's opening night, and despite a major MUNI snafu I was second in line and able to secure myself a choice, unreserved aisle seat in the Castro Theater. After perusing the contents of my goodie bag—which I placed under my seat and regrettably forgot at evening's end—I spent 90 minutes chatting with friends who were equally amped up for two weeks of movies, movies, movies.

The program started 20 minutes late, presumably to accommodate late arrivals from the aforementioned MUNI delay. Late that afternoon, a man either jumped or fell onto the Castro St. Station subway tracks and was killed, effectively terminating all train service until mid-evening. Finally at 7:20PM, SF Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat took the stage and welcomed everyone, reminding us that this was his fifth year at the festival's helm—"the best five years of my life." The resounding applause and cheers hopefully told Leggat that the feeling is mutual.

This year's opening night film was Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, which the director assured us had nothing to do with Big Macs, and everything to do with his new favorite English word, shenanigans. I've enjoyed all of Jeunet's films, except the one everybody adores (yes, Amelie, I'm talking about you). Reviews for Micmacs have been mixed, but it turned out to be a perfect opening night film—inventive, fast-paced, comical, crowd pleasing. I couldn't remember much about it the next day, but I did recall how much fun I had while watching it. After the screening, the festival's new Director of Programming Rachel Rosen interviewed Jeunet and conducted an audience Q&A. We learned that the director "wanted to put everything I love in this film," which ranged from animator Tex Avery to Mission Impossible, and that he's "not interested in realism." When asked if he might ever work again with Marc Caro (co-director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children), Jeunet diplomatically replied, "it's so good to work alone." With the final question, Jeunet got off the best line of the evening in regards to Micmacs poor reception on his home front: "In France they love to hate what they loved before." With that, the ebullient crowd adjourned to the Regency Center for a swinging after-party. The nibbly things I sampled there were delicious, and I washed them down with the beer everyone who frequents Landmark Theaters loves to hate.

I hadn't attended the festival's Founder's Directing Award program since it was given to Arturo Ripstein in 1999 (when it was still known as the Akira Kurosawa Award). In the interim years I've skipped honorees both deserving (Coppola, Leigh, Lee, Herzog, Forman, Altman, Kiarostami) and, imho, questionable (Eastwood, Beatty, Hackford). When I unexpectedly found myself with a free night on April 28, I high-tailed it over to the Sundance Kabuki Cinema for this year's tribute to Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries).

Firstly, I wish someone had clued me in on how handsome this guy is so I could have ogled him from the front row. But from my seat in the Kabuki's large House One it was easy to perceive the man's warmth and self-effacing intelligence. The evening began with introductory remarks by Leggat, followed by a clips reel of career highlights. Then came the on-stage conversation with Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who started things off by saying, "Let's put the guns down before we start, and talk about the sex life of Mr. Walter Salles." Hear, hear! I loved hearing about Salles' early life as a diplomat's son living atop a Parisian arthouse theater. Twelve-year-old Walter frequented that cinema so often, the ticket seller began letting him in for free. But he longed for Brazil: "I hated the drizzle, the cold, the croissants." During the talk it was also revealed that Salles spent a full year casting the boy in Central Station, that Latin Americans do not make good genre films (i.e., his own remake of Hideo Nakata's Dark Water), and that Argentina currently has the strongest cinema in Latin America (little to argue about there). He also acknowledged that "Antonioni is the director who brought me to cinema," specifically 1975's The Passenger.

Before getting to the evening's main event, Salles shared a short film that had been screened only once before—for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. In it, he addresses his six-month-old son, saying, "If I could choose just one film for you to see before any other, it would be this one." Then we saw an infant entranced by Chaplin dancing with the globe balloon in The Great Dictator. Salles remarked that they screened a DVD projection for the first take, and his son just wasn't interested. For the second take they projected it in 35mm and this time he became fully engaged by Chaplin's antics. What a smart, discerning kid!

As a special treat made exclusively for the SFIFF, Salles next showed us a one-hour work-in-progress documentary about his efforts to film Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was edited in just one week from 100 hours of mini-DV and super-8 interview and location footage. Salles, who first read the book as a 15-year-old, feared that showing an incomplete film about The Beats in San Francisco might be a "suicidal act," but the festival audience ate it up. In its current state, the film gives an impressionistic overview of Kerouac's work and the times from which it sprang. An off-camera Matt Dillon intermittently reads passages from the book, and contemporary figures ranging from Laurie Anderson to Johnny Depp to David Byrne reflect on its influence. There are terrific interviews with key players who are still with us (Michael McClure, Carolyn Cassady), as well as vintage screen tests by Brendan Fraser, Ashley Judd, Mathew McConaughey and others made for a previous attempt at filming the book. Directors as diverse as D.A. Pennebaker and Jean-Luc Godard have been interested in the project, but based on the evidence presented that night, Salles is clearly the man for the job. Indeed just one week after this event, it was announced that shooting for Salles' On the Road (the narrative feature) will begin in August. The next day at the festival, Salles would conduct a master class, as well as introduce a screening of his 2008 film, Linha de Passe.

On Saturday, May 1st, I must have changed my mind a dozen times. Should I spend the early evening at the Kabuki watching a French orangutan documentary (Nenette) and a Brazilian movie (The Famous and the Dead) before heading over to the Castro for the late-night world premiere of All About Evil? Or should I catch Roger Ebert receiving this year's Mel Novikoff Award at the Castro? I chose the latter and it turned out to be a smart move. The combination of Roger Ebert and Peaches Christ made for one of the most fabulous evenings I've experienced in 35 years of attending this festival.

Ebert and his wife Chaz were brought onstage and seated while four directors delivered heartfelt and hilarious tributes to the man they call "The Thumb." Terry Zwigoff recalled Ebert being the first person in line for a 1985 Telluride screening of Louis Bluie, and later sold him a soundtrack LP in the theater lobby. He also told a great story about a Crumb test screening. The audience survey cards were overwhelming negative—they thought the storyline about brother Charles should be dropped—so Zwigoff "fixed" the cards with the help of Wite-Out and a late-night trip to Kinko's. Ebert would become a steadfast champion of the film, going so far as to record a commentary track for the DVD release (much of which would be used for the text-to-speech software that allows the now "speechless" Ebert to speak through a computer). Next, documentarian Errol Morris called Ebert, "not just a film critic, but a cultural icon." He was followed by Jason Reitman who, commenting upon Ebert's social networking prowess, declared "I know teenage girls who tweet less than Robert Ebert." Reitman would also add that, "It's hard to put Roger Ebert's work into context when it's him who puts us into context."

Last up was Philip Kaufman, who took a seat next to Ebert and Chaz and read a mayoral proclamation declaring May 1, 2010 "Roger Ebert Day" in San Francisco. Then the man himself fired up his laptop and brought the house down with his first sentence, "My little man is standing on his chair and applauding." The rest of Ebert's speech railed against Hollywood's current output of sequels and so-called blockbusters ("The studios are running like lemmings to 3-D") while films like Erick Zonka's Julia, featuring a tour de force performance by Tilda Swinton, gross a measly $65,000 in U.S. release. (Locally, the film ran for one week last summer on the SF Film Society's Kabuki Screen before moving over to the Roxie). The tribute audience then got to see and judge Julia for itself, having been specifically chosen by Ebert to accompany his appearance at the festival. A letter of regret from Swinton was read to the crowd—she had hoped to attend the screening but was stuck filming on the East coast. I was thrilled to watch it a second time, especially on the Castro's big screen. It's a tough little film and there were a few walkouts, but the applause at the end was booming.

I darted out of the Castro and was greeted by the sight of blood-splattered klieg lights clawing the night sky. Then I noticed a dead body flopped across the base of the lights and a ticketholders line already around the block a full two hours before showtime. This could only mean one thing—the world premiere of Peaches Christ's All About Evil! From my vantage point in the press line, I was able to watch the red carpet parade of outlandish costumes and mile-high hairdos, praying that none of those 'dos ended up sitting in front of me. (This was a movie theater, after all, and not a planetarium.) As Peaches would remark at some point in the evening ("Peaches" being the beloved late-night movie hostess alter-ego of one Joshua Grannell), a movie only gets one world premiere. And boy did he/she pull out the stops to ensure All About Evil's would be momentous.

The All About Evil preshow consisted of no less than four musical production numbers, the first one featuring Peaches and a dozen pom-pom shaking monstrosities performing, "I'm a Gore-Gore Girl." Afterwards, she threatened the audience with a three-hour preshow in which she would single-handedly act out the entire movie onstage. Next she brought out All About Evil cast member Mink Stole and the duo croaked out the theme song from John Water's film, Female Trouble. Peaches and Mink go way back, the latter having been the first "celebrity" to appear at Peaches' Midnight Mass film series at San Francisco's Bridge Theater. Waters was also in the house that night and stood for a round of applause. Teen heartthrob and All About Evil co-star Thomas Dekker was next on board, performing the movie's rocking theme song, "Welcome to the Horror Show." Then Natasha Lyonne, who stars as mousy theater-owner turned murderous film director Deborah Tennis (pronounced De-BOR-ah Ten-NIS) wrapped things up with a final number.

After all that hullabaloo, one almost expected the film itself to be anti-climactic. But no, All About Evil delivered the sicko thrills and chills. Two scenes in particular had all 1400 audience members screaming their collective heads off in disbelief, and neither was the film-within-the-film, A Tale of Two Severed Titties. By the time the Q&A wrapped up—with Peaches now out of drag and onstage as plain old Joshua Grannell—it was two in the morning. Everyone was handed a commemorative All About Evil world premiere poster upon exiting the theater, which I'll surely treasure for the rest of my days. It was Saturday night and the Castro Street bars were emptying out—a phenomenon I hadn't witnessed in many years. I was satisfied and spent and had no hope of making it to the next morning's surprise SF Film Society members screening.

If you weren't there that night, here's good news. Come October, Peaches will be presenting the film, complete with a preshow, at San Francisco's Victoria Theater (where All About Evil was actually filmed). She promises a full-on William Castle-like experience—I think her exact words were "we're gonna stab you and chainsaw you." Meanwhile, check out Dennis Harvey's recollection of the evening at SF360, and don't miss The Evening Class' Michael Guillén and his interviews with Grannell, special effects artist Aurora Bergere and five cast members. Now for a special treat, the evening's complete opening number.



I spent the next few days singing, "I'm a gore, I'm a whore, I'm a gore-gore girl" and desperately needed a new earworm. One came in the form of the rousing and repetitive chorus that greeted each new chapter of Stuart Paton's 1916 silent screen adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This May 4 Castro Theater screening was also the world premiere of a new score composed and performed by The Magnetic Fields' frontman Stephin Merritt, with help from Daniel Handler on accordion, David Hegarty on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer and a gentleman playing tuba and trumpet.

Merritt was clearly having a goof with it, blending his customary old-timey vibe with injections of electronic bleeping and screechy freakouts. Speaking and singing through megaphones, Handler gave voice to the female roles in an abrasive Olive Oyl-y falsetto while Merritt handled the male parts in a low register that was mostly inaudible. The film itself is kind of unremarkable—a flatly directed mash-up of Verne's 20,000 Leagues and The Mysterious Island, with underwater photography that was stunning for its time but is now merely quaint. Merritt exploited the film's campier aspects, such as a sarong-clad "child of nature" who sings a ditty about not wanting to wear pants and who turns out to be Captain Nemo's long lost daughter. I thought it was all good-natured fun and Merritt's legion of fans seemed satisfied, but I know some likened the performance to a bad episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I was glad I went, but it paled compared to last year when Dengue Fever blew the dome off the Castro with their score for the stop-motion dinosaur epic, The Lost World.

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch. Photos by Pamela Gentile and Pat Mazzera courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society and SF360.

PSIFF10: VORTEX (DUBURYS, 2009)—The Evening Class Interview With Gytis Luksas

The US premiere of Vortex (2009)—Lithuania's official submission to the Foreign Language category at the Academy Awards® and winner of three Sidabrinė gervė ("Silver Crane") awards for the outstanding performances of its talented trio of actors: Oksana Borbat (Best Actress); Vladimiras Jefremovas (Best Supporting Actor); and Jūratė Onaitytė (Best Supporting Actress)—was introduced by director Gytis Luksas, who wanted his Palm Springs audience to understand that Vortex was a film about his generation. He recounted that—despite his youth, falling in love, marrying, and raising a family—life in Lithuania at that time was "difficult and black." This played into his decision to film the narrative in black and white because he "didn't need the color" for his story.

"Between the black and white," he offered, "there are numberless nuances of grey." He found it interesting to craft his film with his DP Viktoras Radzevicius using rules of vintage photography, such as its stern turn-of-the-century portraiture. The characters of his film speak both Lithuanian and Russian, which was normal for the time, and Luksas employed this bilingual practice as a temporal marker to situate the narrative in its historical context. At heart, however, the film can be easily understood as a love story free from the tethers of historical circumstance and a timeless study of the relationship between men and women; a theme important to Luksas, and one which he hoped would be of importance to his audience. It's not enough for him to make an interesting movie, he stated, it must reflect genuine emotions, whether love or hate.

An adaptation of the 2003 novel Duburys by Romualdas Granauskas—winner of the Lithuanian National Cultural and Art Prize—Vortex recounts the history of the generation that lived through Lithuania's gloomy Soviet period as inflected through the life story of its main character: good-hearted country boy Juzik (Giedrius Kiela). As synopsized by Dennis Harvey at Variety, though Juzik's father is killed returning from WWI, and his teenage best friend drowned in another accident, Juzik "nonetheless reaches adulthood with his country innocence and good faith intact. After military service, he works in a corrupt quarry where he becomes involved with two self-destructive women: boozing, promiscuous Klara (Jevgenija Varencia); and insecure, much-victimized Maska (Oksana Borbat). Periodically, Juzik returns home to visit his lonely, aging mother (Jūratė Onaitytė). Structured in chapters, the tale eventually plods a bit, but sports a gentle gravity that's winning, not least in Viktoras Radzevicius' luminous lensing."

Harvey likewise suggests that—as much of a compliment as it is to say that Vortex "might be mistaken for a Soviet-bloc feature of 40-50 years ago—its austere black-and-white beauty, deliberate pace and tender solemnity are of a piece with works from a great period in world cinema"—the "difference is that during the 1960s, such exercises stood some chance of offshore theatrical exposure, while now they're strictly fest fare—and not even fashionably so." That demarcates a sad fate for an otherwise lustrous film.

After the PSIFF10 screening, Gytis Luksas and I talked briefly in the lobby of the Camelot Theatre.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Let's start with the film's title Vortex, which brought to my mind the whorling whirlpool in which Juzik's friend is drowned. Did you mean that deathly whirlpool to be equated with the idea of the vortex? [I later learned that Duburys means "waterhole".]

Gytis Luksas: It's similar, yes. The whirlpool, yes, of course. The vortex, like the whirlpool, is something very dangerous; but, not only in the water—in life too.

Guillén: You're saying there's a vortex in life—a way of looking at life?—that a person can get sucked into?

Luksas: Yes, it's a metaphor.

Guillén: I was intrigued by the film's false ending. You think that Juzik is going to die and that the film will end on that somber note; but, he doesn't die, and—as a consequence—the film expands out into hopefulness.

Luksas: You know, the novel by Romualdas Granauskas—on which my film is based—ends with Juzik drowning. I changed that especially because I felt that—to live for somebody, to do something for someone else—was thematically more important, even if more difficult. I didn't want the ending to be so simplistic. Suicide is the shortest way to end all problems; but, I felt it would be better to end the film with an image of hope: Maska, the two children, and the dog. For me they were a picture of happiness within a future life, something that could be.

Guillén: I read it that—rather than succumb to the vortex of despair—Juzik for the first time became aware of the potential for happiness in life.

Luksas: Yes, it's an image that's about the fullness of life, the wholeness of life. Maybe, after all, Juzik will decide to adopt Klara's children from the orphanage? Maybe he'll return to Maska and begin life again?

Guillén: Tell me about the novelist Romualdas Granauskas.

Luksas: He's a famous Lithuanian writer and this novel was written five years ago.

Guillén: Is he still alive?

Luksas: Yes.

Guillén: What did he think of your changing his ending?

Luksas: I was afraid when he came to see the movie; but, afterwards, we had a conversation and he told me, "You know, maybe you did better, because the film has more depth; it's more serious." I structured the film as a circle. At the beginning Juzik loses his friend to the whirlpool and—as the film's hero—he lives with a sense of sin; a sin that he has made in his own mind.

Guillén: Is that the vortex that threatens to pull him under?

Luksas: Yes, it's like a vortex, and then he becomes involved with the two women, which leads to further problems, such that he decides to end his problems by committing suicide; but, he finally understands that perhaps it's more important to live. The writer Granauskas decided this was a better ending than his novel.

Guillén: What can we expect from this film? Does it have a distributor in the US?

Luksas: As you know, it was considered the best film in Lithuania and submitted to the Academy Awards® for Best Foreign Language film; but, it remains difficult to know what will happen with the film. But the fact that Lithuania is represented at this festival with this film is good for Lithuania. We're such a small country.

Cross-published on Twitch.

A Critical Moment at The Auteurs Notebook

Earlier this year the San Francisco International Film Festival screened Gerald Peary's For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, which I wrote up here, and followed it up with a free-to-the-public panel entitled "A Critical Moment", moderated by SF360 editor Susan Gerhard. My thanks to Daniel Kasman and The Auteurs Notebook for generously picking up a partial transcript of that panel. However, waste not want not, as they say. Here are the remaining perspectives.

* * *

For Variety, Dennis Harvey has dispatched from film festivals, often introducing filmmakers to an industry to which, otherwise, they would not have access. One could argue that Harvey's opinion foments opportunity for distribution. But Variety has been cutting back on staff drastically and Gerhard wondered if Harvey could talk about that and what impact it's having on the industry?

Dennis Harvey: Traditionally, the role of Variety—beyond reporting on the mainstream industry and reviewing the mainstream industry—has also been as the industry trade publication of record where everything is covered. When I first started writing for Variety, basically any feature-length film at a film festival that hadn't already been reviewed, was eligible for review and probably would be reviewed. That was before, admittedly, the start of digital technology that has made movies much less [difficult] to make. Even if the economy was doing really well, even if the Internet hadn't happened, there still would be too many movies for Variety to review, as a combination of that proliferation, simple budget cuts and the shrinking of print media.

We all know that the Bay Area has the largest single concentration of film festivals probably anywhere in the world. It has the oldest and largest of every kind of film festival. Even the International Film Festival is the largest in the Western hemisphere. It's a ridiculous embarrassment of riches for a relatively medium-sized metropolitan area. So it was a great place for me to be covering festival films for Variety; even better in some respects than it would have been in L.A. or New York. Until January 1st, when the new budgets were levied and I'm now covering from about 20 annual festivals in the Bay Area—which is still only a fraction of the ones that exist—I'm covering four. It's unfortunate—as a living, for me it's a personal concern—but, Variety had always been a place where filmmakers could potentially get distribution from all the visibility they would get from a Variety review, which would often be the first public review they would get. Now, unfortunately, it's going to be a situation where the films that are reviewed in Variety will only be reviewed because they have distribution. I don't want to say that's an evil, moral choice on Variety's part; it's more reflecting the reality of things.

There is a website and they always run more reviews on the website than they can fit in the publication; but, that doesn't affect the overall numbers. They're still reducing the number of reviews assigned in general. So there will be fewer web reviews as well.

It's luck of the draw. One angry filmmaker whose film I reviewed at Sundance left a message on my home phone—there's always a question how people get my home phone—saying, "Why can't you be like Roger Ebert? He supports young filmmakers." The answer is that Roger Ebert has the luxury if he wants of going to a film festival and only supporting starting filmmakers, and only writing about the young filmmakers that he likes. Whereas, I'm assigned a number of films, some of which I asked for, many of which I didn't.

* * *

As a full-time staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle—which has recently expanded its film coverage, in contrast to so many other dailies—Jonathan Curiel was asked by Gerhard to "report on the ground" to the pressures of working within a daily newspaper.

Jonathan Curiel: Let's look at the bigger picture here. The pressures experienced by film reviewers are the same pressures on other journalisms, as it were. In some ways, cinema and film reviewing are in a good position at The Chronicle because they're devoting more coverage to film reviewing. It's only been in the last several months that movies on Friday now have their own separate section. That's a good thing—there's more space devoted to movies—but the question is why did they devote more space to movies? One could say—and I'm not privy to this, thank God, because I don't work in the upper echelons of the paper—but, one could say it's because of advertising. That's why there's a separate section. Not because there's a dramatic need for a range of film reviewing of foreign films and independent films, etc.; but, because advertising—in a sense—requires this separate section. Again, that's one theory.

Regardless, it's a good thing that's happened at the San Francisco Chronicle, though—at the same time this is happening—they have cut back dramatically in other ways. One of the areas I used to cover a lot of was foreign affairs. Two years ago a top editor of the paper called me in and essentially said, "We are not going to be doing foreign affairs coverage from local staff writers." No way. That was a dagger in my heart, I would have to say. I write about a lot of different subjects—used to write about a lot of different subjects, including foreign affairs—and cinema is one of my subjects. At the same time that movies are being put on a pedestal—in a way—at the Chronicle, other areas are not. The paper's getting thinner.

It goes without saying that journalism has taken a big hit and particularly the San Francisco Chronicle. Those of you who have followed the travails of the paper know that the Hearst Corporation has threatened to pull the rug out from underneath the paper. That threat—as far as I know—still exists. There are rumors. You asked about what it's like to be in the trenches, well, I can tell you what it's like in the trenches. When you have rumors floating over your head that, in effect, say the Chronicle may not exist in five months, what do you think of that? Well, a lot of people are running scared. And it's not just the people who are writing about cinema or the local news or whatever. It's the people in the upper echelons who actually have to make these cuts. They will not admit that they're scared; but, they are scared. People at the bottom are scared. It's a bad time to be a journalist. You could say existentially it's the worst time in the history of the Chronicle.

In some ways, though, the Chronicle is in a good position because—even if the physical paper were to disappear—its website (which is one of the top 10 websites in the country) will be there and film criticism and film reviewing will be a big part of that. That's not going to go away, partly because there's a demand for this. …There's a definite market for a substantial San Francisco Chronicle that does write about foreign affairs and film intelligently. …I'll leave it at this: at the Chronicle, as elsewhere, there's optimism and pessimism and sometimes they're in the same moment.

* * *

Mary Pols took a buy-out from the Contra Costa Times and said that she was leaving film criticism to start a new life as an author. Since then, however, she's been pulled back into film criticism through a gig at Time.com. Gerhard asked Pols to talk about her transition to writing online.

Mary Pols: I did think it was the end of my film criticism career, which made me very sad because that's what I wanted to do since I was a small child basically. Like many other people in this room, I read Pauline Kael because her reviews were the only thing in The New Yorker that were digestible besides the cartoons. I was eight or nine years old. When I took the buyout last March from the Contra Costa Times, I had become the de facto film critic for the Oakland Tribune as well because the person who owned the Oakland Tribune bought the Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News. My reviews were also appearing in the Mercury News and a bunch of other little papers in the Bay Area. This guy has a monopoly in the Bay Area on the alternative weeklies. When I left, I knew I wouldn't be replaced but I also thought, "If I don't go now and take a buyout, I'll get laid off soon." It was clear to me. The amount of space I had for reviews was shrinking and the publisher who clearly loved movies—and clearly loved me—was on his way out too because they were kicking out anybody who had been around for a while and starting "fresh" with God-knows-who.

I spent about six months not even going to movies after the buyout. I tried not to be sad about it. It's a remarkable rhythm to have in your life being a movie critic. It's usually five movies a week at least, a lot of hopping on BART trying to get places on time, strange times: 2:00, 4:00, then again at 7:30. You might see three movies in a day. You might see four. It's an odd rhythm to live with but—once it's taken away from you—it's very strange. You hang out at home in your pajamas pitching to people who don't know who you are, don't care who you are, and I thought I would never get another movie gig again. The way it came to me was sort of surprising. An editor read something I wrote about my scandalous love life—which was about having a one-night stand and having a baby [Accidentally On Purpose]—in the "Modern Love" column that runs on Sundays in the New York Times. Through that, an editor at Time found me. Seriously, she sent me an email the Monday after that ran, asking if I wanted to review for them. I thought, "This is a really cruel hoax being played upon me by those assholes at Gawker who, every Monday, make fun of 'Modern Love', right?" What a great thing to do. Find this poor soul who wrote about her tragic love life and taunt her with the idea of working for Time.

I googled her and she seemed to be legitimate. Anyway, I picked up that gig, usually one review a week, and I started in January and it's really great to be back in that rhythm. I will say that for the most part I have been going to mainstream movies and—as Ruby was talking about—if you're writing for an outlet like that, you can't [indulge] your tastes, and you have to accept the fact that you'll be seeing mainstream movies because most national publications cater to what's coming out on Friday that had a big ad and that people are going to be curious about….

I will say it's very depressing to be a journalist right now; but, I'm just trying to roll with it and remember that for me it was always an incredible gift to get to go to the movies and be paid for it; to spend hours of the day in the dark; and—if anyone will let me do that now for money—I'm going to jump upon it and I'm going to hold on as long as I can. I hope there are people that care to read reviews. That was my introduction to magazines and newspapers and I hope that when I'm 85 I'll be saying, "Bring me the New York Times so I can see what Manohla Dargis has to say." I really hope it's out there. I am heartened by the fact that there are more than 10 people in this theater. That's a good sign, right?

* * *

Noting the historical structure of Gerald Peary's documentary, Gerhard wondered—if Peary could choose an era of film writing to bring back—which would it be? She asked him when was his favorite moment of American film criticism?

Gerald Peary: I don't like to be some boring nostalgic—which is what we all do when we talk about this "golden age"—but there was one chapter entitled "When Criticism Mattered", which was about the '60s and '70s. I meant that truly, but I also meant it with quotation marks around it. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote an interesting attack of the film because he's an up-to-date guy, today's a great period, and I'm being an old fart by talking about that period. I half agree with him. I know the time that I read film criticism with great fervor was definitely the Sarris/Kael period. The Village Voice in the late '60s was the single greatest paper. It had Molly Haskell writing feminist criticism, Sarris writing his auteurist stuff, but it also had the late Stuart Byron who was one of the many film critics who died, an AIDS victim, and he was the first person to write about being gay—maybe even before anything in San Francisco. I remember a column he wrote about a guy who picked his pocket while Byron was giving him a blow job. I remember thinking, "God, what a great critic!"

To repeat a point: there are plenty of really good critics today—there's no problem with that—but, there is the problem of the power and the influence of the critic waning. Film criticism is not just an ego thing. It's not just masturbatory. We actually want people to go see movies that we care about and that clout is mostly dying, I feel. That's what depresses me.

* * *

Addressing the entire panel, Gerhard elicited their commentary regarding 3D technology.

Pols: 3D! Coraline was wonderful. It was one of the first times I enjoyed a 3D move. But Monsters vs. Aliens, which I took my five-year-old to, had him clinging to me the whole time. I'm curious to see what Pixar's going to do with Up. I think they're re-releasing Toy Story in 3D in the autumn and I figure—if anybody can do it well—they can. But, in general, I feel 3D is this awful menace coming off the screen. I hope that not every child's movie that's made in the next five years features 3D because the glasses really give me a headache.

David D'Arcy: But it's the nature of any trend that too many examples of it will be made before the trend dies.

Ruby Rich: 3D, I'm afraid, is going to be not just for kids' movies. Every studio—whatever's left of the mini-majors; I think even Focus has several lined up now—they're all making 3D movies. But you have to remember that—every time there's a technological challenge—the movie studios do this. When television came out, that's probably when they first went to 3D and started going to Cinemascope. When video and DVD came out, that was the rise of film festivals and the rise of special events, the rise of 70mm and all of these kinds of things. I'm sure 3D is a response to download. I'm sure it's, "How do you get people out of their home entertainment systems?" To that extent, I think it's predictable. Hopefully, we'll be happily surprised; but, I doubt it.

Cross-published on Twitch.