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.

SFIFF54 2011 Press Conference—Highlights by Michael Hawley

An invigorated Executive Director Graham Leggat welcomed the crowd to the Opening Press Conference for the 54th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF54), then proceeded to justifiably boast about the expansion of San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) programming activities since 2005. "We now provide dynamic, daily year-round programming in the core areas of education, exhibition and filmmaker services. And in so doing we've created an organization unparalleled in scope and vision, by any in the country except those in the much larger markets of New York and Los Angeles." Calling the Bay Area a "great region of film culture and cinematic activity," Leggat placed the SFFS squarely alongside such organizations as the Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance Institute, American Film Institute (AFI) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center (for whom Leggat was Director of Communications before coming to San Francisco).

Before turning the press conference over to the programming team, Leggat thanked numerous sponsors and made mention of three noteworthy milestones associated with this year's SFIFF. "This year marks the 45th year of involvement by George Gund, the festival's chairman of the board. In 1967, he walked into Claude Jarman's office and plunked a check for $1,000 down on the table—unsolicited, unbidden, with no strings attached. That sort of enlightened patronage has marked George's association with the SFFS and the International for 45 years. This year we'll hold a special tribute to him at the Film Society's Awards Night, and we've marked a screening by one of his favorite directors, Otar Iosseliani, as a special tribute to George. I think you'll whole-heartedly agree with me he's a saint, and the Film Society would not be here today if not for his unstinting support over these last five decades."

The other two milestones noted by Leggat were the 20th anniversary of Schools at the Festival, and the fifth anniversary of SF360.org, the Film Society's daily on-line magazine. "It's the only independent, regional film magazine in the country. Funded solely by the Film Society, but categorically not a house organ, SF360 surveys the length and breadth of a vibrant SF/Bay Area filmmaking scene. We would like to think it gives identity, character and strength to that scene, as much as it draws from it."

"There are 189 films in this year's festival from more than 40 countries, with plenty of highlights to mention. In the next hour we'll run through many of them—being comprehensive but not exhausting, enlightening but not highhanded, humorous but not frivolous, informational but not dry, modest but not sanctimonious, and impressive but not boastful." And with that intro, Leggat brought to the stage Director of Programming Rachel Rosen, programmers Sean Uyehara and Rod Armstrong, and Golden Gate Awards Manager Audrey Chang.

Rachel Rosen provided insight into this year's special spotlight on world cinema, which benefits from an annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences grant: "This year our spotlight is called Painting with Light. We found that there were three very unusual films about 'flat art' and it's representation through film. What's interesting is the different ways they bring this flat art into full dimensionality, and also the way they enliven the history of the time in which the art was created. The centerpiece of Painting with Light is Werner Herzog's new documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a wonderful 3-D exploration of French caves that have 30,000-year-old drawings. Mr. Herzog has been entrusted with showing these drawings to the world, and of course he does it in his inimitable way. Also in the spotlight is the Polish film The Mill and the Cross, which brings to life Brueghel's 16th century painting, "The Way to Calvary," and also a wonderful new Indian film called Nainsukh, which is about an 18th century Indian miniaturist."

Before the Q&A portion of the press conference got underway, Rosen presaged and addressed the inevitable question about trends in this year's line-up. (Last year's trend, if you remember, was individual films directed by three or more people). "We don't set out an agenda in order to find a theme or make a point. We're really just looking for the individual films that we love, and try to put them together in a group for San Francisco audiences. But I would say the trend this year is 'films that find their own length'—or the 'correct length' for their stories. So we have five films in the festival that are 75 minutes or shorter, and then we have seven films that are 130 minutes of longer. They run the gamut from A Cat in Paris at a lean 65 minutes to Raoul Ruiz' Mysteries of Lisbon at 257 minutes if you don't include the intermission." Other possible trends noted by Rosen include more films than usual from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and a number of films set in a vague near future, which "create an off-kilter feeling, or a sense of dis-ease—not with special effects, but with the wonder of good filmmaking craft and storytelling."

Cross-published at film-415 (in an expanded version) and Twitch. Photos courtesy of SFFS.

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.

AKIRA KUROSAWA @ 100—SFFS

My thanks to Executive Director Graham Leggat and Creative Director Miguel Pendás of the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) for reminding me just how valuable a resource the SFFS History Project can be. Keyed into the centennial celebration of Akira Kurosawa's birthday, SFFS forwarded an article by Miguel Pendás recounting Kurosawa's October 1980 appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival for the screening of his Palme d'Or winning film Kagemusha. "Eight taiko drummers pounded out a welcome," Pendás recalled, "and Akira Kurosawa stepped up on the stage, tall, slim, elegant and, as always, hidden behind dark glasses. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who had helped him finance his latest film, Kagemusha, joined him on stage. A full house at the Palace of Fine Arts theater rose to its feet and gave the threesome a lengthy standing ovation."

That same edition of the festival boasted an on-stage conversation between Albert Johnson and Kurosawa, assisted by Audie Bock. Bock's Japanese Film Directors was long held as the definitive book on the subject and she leant her translation skills towards Kurosawa's partial autobiography Something Like An Autobiography. That on-stage conversation is available as a 25-minute audio podcast at the History Project's Close-ups sidebar.

In 1986, SFFS inaugurated the Akira Kurosawa Award for excellence in directing. The SFFS History Project offers not only Kurosawa's on-stage appearance receiving the award by way of a 27-minute audio podcast, but also a three-minute video clip of Kurosawa's 1986 press conference where the deputy mayor presented him with a key to San Francisco; specifically, a key to the original Mission Dolores.

Be sure to check out the many riches to be mined at the SFFS History Project, whose database stores information on most of the films shown at the festival: credits, print sources, film stills, notes from the Festival program guide, awards, tributes, out-of-town guests and even some posters and trailers. The festival's oral history is likewise laid out in multiple interviews with key festival personnel.

Cross-published on Twitch.