Noir City 9 shines spotlight on cinematic darkness

The American roots of film noir begin with the crime fiction that emerged during the 1930s from the pens of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and multitudes of lesser-known talents. In the wake of the Great Depression, these pulp authors reshaped the literary landscape with dark, cynical, morally ambivalent tales of crime, sex and vice — stories steeped in shadowy imagery, tough talk, and a hardscrabble hyper-realism that portrayed a brutal, hostile world. There were no heroes, only anti-heroes — self-preserving pragmatists whose cynicism was born of dashed hopes and faded ideals.

It was only a matter of time before these stories infiltrated Hollywood, merging with the stark, shadowy imagery of German Expressionism, which crossed the Atlantic along with the refugees who left Germany just ahead of Hitler's advancing stormtroopers. And thus a bold and distinctly downbeat genre was born, a German-American hybrid that introduced a stock of melodramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, tormented, world-weary anti-hero to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped.

Noir City, the annual film festival that celebrates these dark cinematic gems and presents them on the big screen in all their tawdry glory, returns to San Francisco's Castro Theater this Friday with another 10-day program of dames, destruction and depravity. The festival is full of rarities; in fact, most of films in this year's program are not available on DVD.

The festival features 24 films, from A-list masterpieces to B-movie programmers, and kicks off at 7:30 p.m. Friday with Robert Taylor and Audrey Totter in Curtis Bernhardt's High Wall (1947), presented in a new 35-mm print preserved by the Film Noir Foundation. The double feature continues with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a Peter Lorre film that some consider the first American noir.

Highlights include two classics from George Cukor: Gaslight (1944), starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and A Double Life, with Ronald Colman's Oscar-winning performance as a Broadway actor slipping into madness; Strangers in the Night (1944), just one of director Anthony Mann's many great films; Marilyn Monroe as a mentally unstable babysitter who seduces Richard Widmark in Don't Bother to Knock (1952); Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), playing the role created by Agnes Moorhead in the original radio production that was one of the most famous broadcasts from that medium's golden age; and what noir festival would be complete without at least one Humphrey Bogart film? This year, it's The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), in which Bogart plays a mentally unhinged painter with murderous designs on his wife — Stanwyck again.

But the festival's best shows are often the lesser-known gems, pictures large and small that have, for one reason or another, slipped into semi-obscurity over the years.

Olivia de Havilland turns in two strong performances The Dark Mirror (1946), portraying identical twins caught up in a murder investigation. A psychologist aids in unravelling the crime by subjecting the sisters to the usual round of Rorschach tests, and though de Havilland ably delineates the sweet, kindly sister from the jealous and possibly dangerous one, director Robert Siodmak takes pity on the audience by giving the girls personalized necklaces that spell out their names in bold letters — it's as though Siodmak was taking advice from a bad editorial cartoonist.

Woman on the Beach (1947) was directed by the great Jean Renoir, yet the film was drastically cut before its release. Still, it's a strong enough little film, with Robert Ryan as the lovestruck innocent caught in the grip of seductress Joan Bennet. Like an apparition, she appears on the beach and before long Ryan has stepped into the role of savior, trying to free the distressed damsel from the clutches of her husband, an aging painter who has lost his sight, his muse, and, we're left to assume, his virility.

Joan Bennett appears again in a film by another festival regular, director Fritz Lang, whose German films exerted a strong influence on noir. In America, Lang's vision was curtailed, sometimes for the better, but oftentimes for the worse. With Secret Beyond the Door (1948), Lang had simply lost his mojo, spinning a nonsense tale of psychoanalytic babble while hoping his visual flair would carry the day. It didn't, but it's still an entertaining affair, with Bennet struggling to unravel the mysteries of Michael Redgrave's tormented psyche. The film will be presented in a new print restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, a project funded by Martin Scorcese's Film Foundation.

Noir City 9. Through Jan 30 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. For more information see www.noircity.com or www.thecastrotheatre.com.

Photo: Olivia de Havilland portrays identical twins caught in a murder investigation in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror (1946).

Noir City Brings Cinema’s Dark Side to the Castro

An “eternal juvenile” no more, Dick Powell finally broke free of the battery of baby-faced roles he endured in a seemingly endless series of bright-eyed 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. With middle age fast approaching, Powell struggled to carve out a new identity for himself, jumping ship from one studio to another in search of a new career path.

Eventually he succeeded. Two examples of Dick Powell born again will screen this weekend as part of Noir City, the annual film noir festival at San Francisco’s Castro Theater. This year’s theme is “Lust and Larceny” and there is plenty of both throughout the 10-day series, which kicks off Friday with Pitfall, featuring Powell and Lizabeth Scott, and continues through Jan. 31. Powell appears again in Cry Danger, showing Saturday, Jan. 23.

In an effort to shed his boyish Warner Bros. image, Powell bought out his contract and signed with Paramount, only to bolt again when the studio denied him the lead in Double Indemnity. Soon enough Powell signed with RKO, and landed the plum role of shamus Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet.

This breakthrough role was followed by more in the same vein: dark, hard-bitten dramas with a world-weary edge, a distinctly American genre to which French critics would ultimately give the name. Powell parlayed his second wave of cinematic success into a couple of radio gigs as well, including one of his signature characters, the private detective Richard Diamond. Powell was even secure enough by this point to include a nod to his earlier persona, finishing each episode by crooning a tune to his paramour.

It was at this time that Powell made one of his best, but least-known films, Cry Danger. Powell plays a sardonic, embittered ex-con, determined after five years in the pen to set a few things straight. Dry, drunken, down-on-his-luck Richard Erdman is along for the ride as a battle-scarred ex-Marine angling for a payday as reward for getting Powell out of prison.

Cry Danger showed at Noir City a couple of years ago, and though it was a murky 16-millimeter print—the only print available at the time—it was a crowd-pleaser. The evening was made all the more entertaining by the presence of Richard Erdman, who proved himself every bit the charismatic wisecracker even in his 80s. This year, the film screens in a brand-new 35-millimeter print, a rare opportunity to see this acerbic crime classic in peak condition.

In addition to Powell, this year’s program pays tribute to festival favorite Richard Widmark with a Jan. 29 double feature. Slattery’s Hurricane shows Widmark in one of his early leading roles, firmly

establishing the persona that would sustain him through several classics of the genre: tough, jaded, maybe a bit sleazy, but with a kind of weary decency waiting to shine through. Second on the bill is the Samuel Fuller noir masterpiece Pickup On South Street, with Widmark as an underworld conman, a pick-pocket who lives by his wits. Widmark seduces Jean Peters and plays the commies and the feds against each other while knocking back beers chilled in the icy waters beneath his shabby dockside shack.

The festival is full of rarities, films not available on DVD, many not available even on VHS. Another seldom-seen gem is Human Desire, one of director Fritz Lang’s better American films. Adapted from Emile Zola’s novel La Bete Humaine, Human Desire is a melodrama of love, lust and betrayal amid the freightyards of Philadelphia. Glen Ford plays a soldier just back from the Korean War who wants nothing more than to settle back into his life as a railroad engineer, with time to fish, catch a movie, or even step out with a nice girl, if he can find one. What he finds however is Vicky, played by perennial film noir femme fatale Gloria Grahame, whose marriage to Broderick Crawford is teetering on the edge of a spectacular collapse.

Lang had a checkered career in Hollywood, with neither the resources nor the autonomy he enjoyed in his pre-war German career. But Human Desire shows him in fine form, employing the intelligence and artistry that characterized his silent and early sound-era masterpieces. Long stretches pass artfully without dialogue, and the sights and sounds of trains, railroad tracks and freightyards are used to excellent effect, keeping the drama taut while filling the screen with compelling imagery.

Other highlights of the festival include Larceny, a dizzying melodrama of twists and turns centering around greed, corruption, and of course, dangerous dames; Marilyn Monroe in Niagara and Asphalt Jungle; A Place in the Sun, an adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; Escape in the Fog, in which a nurse is haunted by a dream of a murder committed on the Golden Gate Bridge; and an evening entitled “Bad Girls of Film Noir,” featuring “poor man’s Marilyn Monroe” Cleo Moore in a double bill of One Girl’s Confession and Women’s Prison.

Noir City

Friday, Jan 22 through Sunday, Jan 31 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

2009 Berkeley Video and Film Festival

The annual Berkeley Video and Film Festival returns this year with yet another eclectic program of independent cinema.

The 18th annual festival, put on by Berkeley's East Bay Media Center, starts at 7:30 p.m. Friday night at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley and continues from noon to midnight Saturday with more than two dozen screenings.

Though this year’s program emphasizes documentaries, the festival features its usual eclectic blend of wide-ranging fare, from student films to experimental short subjects to feature-length films—all of them truly independent and all of them unlike anything showing at your local megaplex. More than a dozen of this year's entries come from local filmmakers, and the rest from across the country and around the world.

Below are are few highlights; the complete schedule can be found at www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org.

The Sunfisher

By Cecil Hirvi aka George Aguilar

George Aguilar continues his series of virtual films, unleashing his avatar alter ego Cecil Hirvi in Second Life for another installment of “Machinima Poetry.” This episode finds Hirvi finding himself as he gazes into the media mirror, watching old Hollywood footage of a young soldier’s uncertain return from the battlefield to the open fields of Wyoming.

15 minutes. Screens Friday at 8:10 p.m.

Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs On the Road

By Lars Movin and Steen M. Rasmussen

A documentary showing influential experimental artist and writer William Burroughs as few have seen him. Burroughs toured often in his final decades, reading from his work in theaters and clubs, bringing his unique diction and wily humor to bear on his wildly original prose. The prickly aloofness of his image is belied by his bashful charm as he meets and greets his fans, but when the lights dim and the microphone swings into place, the fierce, fiery satirist, sage and starry-eyed dreamer is unleashed, revealing a performer of great wit, drama and strength.

74 minutes. Screens Saturday at 8:10 p.m.

You Don't Know Jack: The Jack Soo Story

By Jeff Adachi

Jeff Adachi, director of the documentary The Slanted Screen, which examined the history of Asian-Americans in Hollywood, takes on the life story of singer and comedic actor Jack Soo. From his childhood in Oakland to his young adulthood in Japanese internment camps during World War II, and finally to his breakthrough roles in the play and film Flower Drum Song and television sitcoms "Valentine’s Day" and "Barney Miller," the erstwhile Goro Suzuki’s brave refusal to comply with America’s “oriental” stereotypes almost single-handedly broke the mold, recasting Asian Americans in a new light in our popular entertainment.

69 minutes. Screens Saturday at 1:15 p.m.

Oh My God! It's Harrod Blank!

By David Silberberg

Harrod Blank’s life is every bit as much a peripatetic work of art as the eccentric, eclectic art cars to which he has devoted his life. Silverberg’s film tracks the farm boy-turned-artist as he passes through UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley in his single-minded—some would say obsessive—pursuit of self-expression, enlisting a series of girlfriends as sidekicks on a rambling journey that is at times maddening but never less than fascinating and endearing.

75 minutes. Screens Saturday at 5:18 p.m.

Kaziah, the Goat Woman

By Amy Janes and Kathleen Dolan

Kaziah Hancock, armed with oils and brushes, celebrates the lives of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq by painting gift portraits for their families. On her remote ranch in Utah, she also raises goats. Born into a polygamist sect, she knows the meaning of freedom, as she’s had to fight for hers. Liberation and discovery of self is joyfully celebrated in her art and in this cinematic document.

25 minutes. Screens Saturday at 4:25 p.m.

Behind the Wheel

By Tao Ruspoli and LAFCO

Director Tao Ruspoli and his band of Los Angeles filmmaker cohorts outfitted an old school bus as a fully equipped portable production studio and set off across the United States in search of art and artists. The journey takes them across the country’s southern states in a quixotic examination of the intersection of the personal and the political.

84 minutes. Screens Saturday at 9:25 p.m.

Ciuada del Futuro

By Damian Carnero and Karin Losert

The critical history of a former socialist model town in the outskirts of Havana, told by the adult children of its first inhabitants.

20 minutes. Screens Saturday at 3:02 p.m.

Basketball Guru

By Doug Harris

An affectionate biography of the legendary basketball coach who started at the University of San Francisco and went on to coach for Cal and the U.S. Olympic team.

13 minutes. Screens Saturday at 2:25 p.m.

Wall Taps

By Carol Jacobsen

Carol Jacobsen’s short documentary roams the perimeter of a women’s prison in what amounts to a sustained traveling shot of fences, gates and barbed wire. Superimposed periodically are the faces of former inmates as they relate their experiences of fear, humiliation, degradation and shame while intermittent glimpses flicker by of life inside the prison gates.

10 minutes. Screens Saturday at 2:39 p.m.

Karma Calling

By Sarba Das

“A fable about hope and love for a family of Hindus from Hoboken,” as the narrator describes it, Sarba Das’s feature takes place at the intersection of two strands of western-influenced easterners. An Indian family living in New Jersey finds itself stretched thin under the cultural and financial strains of American life. Meanwhile, in India, a young man employed as a call-center info peddler for an American corporation also hears the call to go west in the form of an unexpected long-distance romance.

90 minutes. Screens Friday at 9:35 p.m.

Under My Garden (Sotto Il Mio Giardino)

By Andrea Lodovichetti

In Lodovichetti’s evocative and ominous short film, a boy’s interest in the behavior of ants, paired with the disappearance of a neighbor’s wife and his new affair with a young, nearly naked companion, leads the boy to suspect that a body is buried in the yard in a sort of miniature Rear Window told from a child’s perspective. The film won a Golden Globe, the Spike Lee Award and has been an official selection at more than 30 international film festivals.

19 minutes. Screens Friday at 9:15 p.m.

Curses and Sermons

By Nic Saunders

Nic Saunders’ short film is a mystic reimagining of a Michael McClure poem, “Rainbows Reflected on Sheer Black,” that is both expressionistic and eclectic, ranging from rugged Western to Technicolor dream/nightmare.

15 minutes. Screens Friday at 8:40 p.m.

Scissu

By Tom Bowilogua and Alex Beier

A bevy of buzzing lights, visceral electronic noise, pulsing heartbeats and a sort of breathy claustrophobia suffuse this unsettling film of sex, guns, violence and depravity. It is a story told in reverse, constantly stepping backward to fill in the gaps, gradually piecing together a plot consisting of desperate people resorting to desperate means in pursuit of cheap thrills, fleeting pleasures and sensual violence. In German with English subtitles.

27 minutes. Screens Saturday at 10:50 p.m.

Escape From Oakland

By Dan K. Harvest

Dan K Harvest’s guerilla-style music video follows a local rapper’s attempt to escape—by car, by bike, by any means necessary—his evil record company’s plan to cast him in a reality show. The clip takes us on a madcap journey through Berkeley and Oakland as the beleaguered hip-hopper tries to buck the corporate hacks and keep it real in the East Bay’s urban jungle. 7 minutes. Screens Saturday at 6:35 p.m.

Berkeley Video and Film Festival

Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26

Shattuck Cinemas

2230 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.

Festival passes cost just $13 ($10 for students and seniors).

Festival info: www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org or (510) 843-3699

East Bay Media Center

www.eastbaymediacenter.com

1939 Addison St., Berkeley

(510) 843-3699

maketv@aol.com

Newspaper Noir: San Francisco's Noir City 7

The struggle of World War II and the triumph of its conclusion brought to the silver screen a vision of a nation bold and patriotic, wholesome and optimistic. From propaganda films to brassy celebratory musicals, Hollywood’s program of A-list releases rolled out a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked presentation of Norman Rockwell’s America.

But there was another side to the story.

Not everyone could forget the horrors of war, could ignore the blood and mud stains of battle, could wipe away the imagery of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Many found it impossible to simply lay down their weapons and retire to the suburbs; for them the terror of the war lingered, and in Hollywood that creeping malaise manifested itself in the form of an anxious, fearful and pessimistic cinema—the stuff of B movies.

More than a decade later the French would give a name to it: film noir. But in America, during the genre’s heyday of the 1940s and ’50s, it had no name. Crime dramas, they were simply called, but it went deeper than that. The urban angst that was allowed no expression in the can-do spirit of mainstream film gave rise to a genre that went beyond mere crime in the depiction of a pervasive moral corruption and a spiraling spiritual decay. Living in the shadow of the Holocaust and under the cloud of imminent nuclear annihilation, there were, as William Faulkner once said, no longer problems of the spirit but only the question: When will I be blown up?

Noir City, the San Francisco film festival that celebrates this era of cinematic darkness, perversity and mayhem, presents its annual 10-day orgy of angst beginning this Friday at the Castro Theater. The festival screens a double bill every day through Feb. 1.

The stark, gloomy, high-contrast imagery of noir came from overseas, carried across the Atlantic by filmmakers who left Germany just ahead of Hitler’s stormtroopers. The expressionism of 1920s and ’30s German cinema, replete with its shadows, darkness, and undercurrents of psychic decay, infiltrated the Hollywood studio system and merged with the American gangster genre of tough-talking wise guys inspired by the pulp fiction of the 1930s. This hybrid genre introduced a stock of dramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, world-weary anti-hero—think Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep—to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped—think Richard Widmark in Night and the City.

Eventually the netherworld of noir infiltrated the A list, its blackness spreading like spilled ink on porous newsprint. Billy Wilder, one of the many European refugees who worked in the genre, perfected it with the star-studded Double Indemnity (1944), and the style became so prevalent and nearly respectable that only a few years later, in 1950, Wilder saw fit to take it down a peg, satirizing noir and Hollywood itself with impish glee in Sunset Boulevard.

Noir City impresario Eddie Muller has crafted another program of classics and rarities, cleverly centered for maximum publicity on a theme guaranteed to bring him plenty of ink: “Newspaper Noir.” For with newspapers themselves currently immersed in their own noirish melodrama—jobs on the line and the fate of the medium in doubt—what film critic could resist a chance to wallow in that uncertainty by delving into Muller’s festival of fear and loathing?

For beleaguered journalists, the pleasures are many, beginning with the temptation to indulge in the nostalgic fantasy of the old-school newspaperman, a gumshoe reporter gazing skeptically from beneath the brim of a jaunty fedora, coldly examining the facts through the drifting smoke of an angled cigarette. No white-collar J-school grad, he; his sleepless nights are spent roaming rain-soaked streets and decadent nightclubs, trash-strewn alleys and cut-rate motels—places where anything can happen, and often has, just before he arrives. But enough of romance; the flip side of this coin is a dose of hard-boiled reality served with a dash of existentialist nightmare, as the modern-day journalist is more akin to Widmark than Bogart—cowering, doomed and anxiety-ridden, forever on the run from controlling forces poised to dispense a fate worse than a pink slip.

The festival begins with the former. Deadline USA (1952) is a bold and elegiac story of old-school journalistic integrity. Editor Bogart battles the avarice and ignorance that leads two spoiled and spiteful heiresses to put his paper on the block, and worse still, to sell it to an unworthy, scandal-mongering competitor who doubtless intends to bolster his own tawdry tabloid by closing down the competition. It’s a familiar story here in the Bay Area as the MediaNews chain has gobbled up a string of once-proud papers, large and small, to encircle the metropolis with a newspaper empire that consolidates its profits in Denver by cutting local staff and starving its newspapers of news. As rumors circulate about an impending MediaNews takeover of the only remaining Bay Area prize, the ailing San Francisco Chronicle, and as publicly traded corporations continue to run the nation's smaller independents out of business, Deadline USA only gains in relevance.

The festival closes with a look at the underbelly of the news world with the classic Clifford Odets-penned Sweet Smell of Success (1957), in which Burt Lancaster, as gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, toys with Tony Curtis in a demonstration of the heady abuse of power acquired through the pen. And between there are several more classics—including The Killers (1946), another Lancaster vehicle—but many more rarities, most not available on DVD, including Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and While the City Sleeps (both 1956), two wrongly neglected noirs by another towering figure of German cinema, Fritz Lang, whose early work was instrumental in shaping the genre.

Occasionally the selections veer slightly from newspapers into other media. The Unsuspected (1947), for example, stars Claude Rains as a radio personality who manages to maintain his celebrity as those around him begin to mysteriously die off. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian director best known today for Casablanca (1942), and scored by German émigré Franz Waxman, the film is produced with a deft touch, including a lovely expressionist motif in which the killer’s reflection, upside down and ominous, always appears just as he commits his crime, drifting into focus in the glass top of a table or in the black wax of a record—a succinct visual cue that the world is out of kilter.

Desperate (1947), a quick and dirty thriller, features the always suave and menacing Raymond Burr tracking innocent Steve Brodie to exact revenge over the execution of Burr’s hoodlum brother. Director Anthony Mann sets the tone in the first few minutes with a classic mise en scene that shows a darkened gangster hideout illuminated only by a swinging lamp, set into motion by the flailing arms of man sent flying with a right hook from Burr’s ruthless gangster.

Noir City 7. Friday, Jan. 23, through Sunday, Feb. 1 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

2008 Berkeley Video and Film Festival Showcases the Indie Spirit

Time and time again we’ve seen the word “independent” co-opted by the very corporate forces the independents claim independence from: “indie” record labels engulfed by a corporate parent; “indie” film festivals that draw Hollywood’s A-List roster to remote Western boomtowns. 

Well, there’s at least one independent film festival that has not only retained its true indie character, but prides itself on a “celebrity-free” environment. 

East Bay Media Center’s 17th annual Berkeley Video and Film Festival starts Saturday at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley, running Friday through Sunday and screening more than 50 films. Shows start at 7:30 p.m. Friday and at 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and continue to nearly midnight each night. 

This year’s program features the usual eclectic blend of wide-ranging fare, from student films to experimental short subjects to feature-length films with a high-gloss sheen—all of them truly independent and all of them unlike anything showing at your local megaplex. 

Things get off to an offbeat start Friday with Emma Strebel’s 45-second Self Portrait, an art project she says developed from “a radical intervention to remedy my head lice.” Get your popcorn early. 

Next up is Eli Akira Kaufman’s California King, a surprisingly moving tale of a mattress salesman who uses his lofty position to bed his more attractive female customers. That is, until he meets one that stirs more than his libido. Like a minimalist short story, the 22-minute California King manages to convey much about its characters with little or no background information; we know their states of mind without needing to know the details. It’s a pared-down love story, with no frills and really no surprises; it simply tells a simple story well. 

Another short subject, Attila Szasz’s Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (30 minutes), takes us in another direction entirely with a story that employs a touch of science fiction in a sort of dark parable of marriage and parenthood. When a work-a-holic scientist uses a formula to make his son invisible, he widens the rift between father and mother and child with tragic results. 

Screening between those two short films are two even shorter films, together adding up to just five minutes, but which open up a brand new world of filmmaking. George Aguilar, who created one of the best films in last year’s festival (The Diary of Niclas Gheiler), returns with two examples from his series of virtual films. Aguilar has immersed himself in the online world of Second Life and has used his avatar, an artist-borg by the name of Cecil Hirvi, to create a series of cinematic poems. The first film, Virtual Starry Night, shows Hirvi stepping into a 3-D world constructed by Second Life users based on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. The second film, First Love of a Borg, consists of camera movements that sensually trace the contours of a metallic sculpture of a ballerina on display in a virtual museum. 

Festival director Mel Vapour may have to put an asterisk behind his “celebrity-free” claim this year when poet Michael McClure makes an appearance Friday night. McClure will be on hand to answer questions following a screening of Rebel Roar: The Sound of Michael McClure, a 34-minute film that features that Beat Generation poet reading his own work and offering perspectives on his contemporaries. 

The festival’s opening night concludes with Fix (93 minutes), a feature by Tao Ruspoli. Shawn Andrews carries the film with a charismatic performance and a devilish grin that conveys love and arrogance and dissipation all at once. The film’s conceit—a cinephile films every aspect of his life, even as he ventures to Los Angeles to bail his drug-addict brother out of jail and get him into rehab—wears thin after a while, as the device of the first-person camera requires that much screen time be spent defending and justifying it. And the technique lends far less sympathy to the characterizations than Ruspoli probably hoped for. But when it works it strikes an almost voyeuristic tone that makes some scenes come to life. 

Saturday’s screenings include two documentaries. The first, Road to Bonneville (60 minutes), follows two hot-rod builders as they trek across the country in their homemade vintage race cars to the salt flats of Utah, spouting homespun, geeked-out hot rod jargon all the way. Documentaries can bring us into close contact with subcultures we might never otherwise encounter, and Road to Bonneville does just that, giving us a glimpse of a unique and highly specialized world. 

Stop the Presses (80 minutes) is another kind of documentary, giving us an extensive cataloging of a vexing societal problem, in this case the slow-motion death spiral of the newspaper industry. Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza traveled the country and conducted more than 100 interviews to produce this examination of the shifting American media landscape and what it portends for the future, for an informed citizenry, and for the First Amendment. It’s hardly news to news industry insiders of course, but it elucidates for the uninformed the ramifications for democracy once the watchdogs have been put down. 

Tate Taylor’s feature Pretty Ugly People (100 minutes) closes out the festival’s second night. An animated prologue introduces us to Lucy, an overweight woman who undergoes gastric bypass surgery and stages a dramatic reunion to surprise her friends with her new body. But while attempting to enjoy the good and svelte life with them on an extended camping trip, a series of encounters with each friend’s dark side shows her that life isn’t necessarily all that better for the trim and fit. 

Also included in this year’s program are two Chilean features. Just to make things confusing, Sabado screens on Domingo, depicting a real-time drama of a marriage that falls apart just as it is about to begin. The film, with the exception of a single edit, appears to be shot in real time, using its 63 minutes to follow a would-be bride as she discovers her fiancé’s secret, confronts him with it, and then concocts a plan for moving forward, documenting it all with the help of a student cameraman. As with Fix, the first-person camera can be trying at times, and again the script and actors are called upon to continually justify its presence, but it adds up to a fun little experiment in cinema verite. 

The best feature film of the festival is also the strangest. Malta con Huevo is another Chilean entry and it’s quirky from the start as Vladimir, a sketchy cad-about-town, wakes up to find that he has somehow jumped ahead in time a few weeks. Yet when he sleeps and wakes again, he’s back where he began, and no one seems to know what he’s blathering about. We suspect early enough that his signature beverage of malt beer and raw eggs is playing tricks on his mind, but soon enough the film takes a stark left turn as a more nefarious and absurd comic-horror plot reveals itself. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival. One-day passes ($13, $10 for students and seniors) are available starting Friday at the Shattuck Cinemas box office, 2230 Shattuck Ave. 464-5980. One-day and three-day passes ($30) are available in advance at East Bay Media Center, 1939 Addison St. 843-3699. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org.

Noir City 6: The Dark Side of American Film

There is no shortage of great film festivals in the Bay Area, celebrating the cinematic heritage of every corner of the globe.

However, there is just one San Francisco festival that focuses purely on American film, or at least on a purely American film genre. For despite the Frenchified name, film noir is uniquely American in origin and in tone.

The annual Noir City festival begins today (Friday) at the Castro theater in San Francisco, screening double features every day—20 films in all—through Sunday, Feb. 3.

Film noir was not a self-conscious movement. Indeed, it was only defined in retrospect, and by outsiders, hence the French term. And yet, nearly 70 years since its genesis, it is still not easily defined.

The genre stems from the crime fiction that emerged during the 1930s, when the Great Depression rocked the foundations of the devil-may-care America of the Roaring ’20s. Writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and multitudes of lesser-known pulp authors reshaped the literary landscape with dark, cynical, morally ambivalent tales of crime, sex and vice, stories steeped in shadowy imagery, tough talk, and a hardscrabble hyper-realism that portrayed a brutal, hostile world. There were no heroes, only anti-heroes, self-preserving pragmatists whose cynicism was born of dashed hopes and faded ideals.

The genre didn’t spread to film until the 1940s, where it took on the darker undercurrents of the American psyche during and following the horrors of World War II. And while there is still some debate over which film deserves the mantle of the first noir, the most influential of the early efforts was John Huston’s 1941 adaptation of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, in which Humphrey Bogart captured the cynicism and weariness of San Francisco private eye Sam Spade as he fell into and then delicately extricated himself from a web of deceit spun by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), though not itself a noir, had a strong influence on the visual side of the genre, with its shadowy sets, striking German Expressionism-derived camera angles and somber tone. And Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder’s 1944 thriller starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, is frequently cited as the film that essentially codified the genre and its dominant characteristics, including the ruthless femme fatale as personified by Stanwyck’s icy Phyllis Dietrichson.

Noir City, the festival and the foundation, were founded by Eddie Muller and Alan Rode to present and preserve this cinematic legacy. And it is a legacy greatly in need of preservation, for although noir has enjoyed a great resurgence in recent years, many of these films were B pictures, cheap studio products created simply to fill out a double bill, and then forgotten days after they closed. The Film Noir Foundation helps to rediscover, preserve, and strike new theatrical prints of these neglected classics so that they can be presented in all their tawdry glory.

The festival starts Friday with a two-film tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who will be interviewed on stage during the intermission. Repeat Performance (1947) is the first of the festival’s many rare films, none available on DVD, many not available even on VHS, and some which have not screened in decades. Leslie stars as a young woman given the opportunity to relive the past year of her life, and the chance to opt this time not to kill her husband in what the festival program describes as a noir version of It’s a Wonderful Life. The Hard Way (1943), directed by Vincent Sherman and photographed by the great James Wong Howe, is what the festival has termed an “honorary noir,” for though it doesn’t quite qualify, it is certainly one of Leslie’s darker films.

Other highlights include Saturday’s tribute to screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, featuring The Prowler (1951), presented in a brand-new 35-millimeter print, and Gun Crazy (1950); Hangover Square (1945), a quintessential noir featuring a melodramatic plot of madness and murder, beautiful but dangerous dames, Wellesian camera angles, and an ominous and evocative score by the great Bernard Herrmann; a double feature by director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton (Jan. 30); D.O.A. (1950), set in San Francisco (Jan. 31); and Conflict (Feb. 1), one of Bogart’s lesser-known noirs.

Saturday Feb. 2 will feature three films, including the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), the most recent production on this year’s program, along with (schedule permitting) an onstage interview with actor Billy Bob Thornton. And the festival will close Feb. 3 with a screening of Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), one of the darkest films in the genre.

Noir City 6. Through Feb. 3 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. For more information see www.noircity.com or www.thecastrotheatre.com. 

Berkeley, San Francisco Host 2007 Arab Film Festival

The 11th annual Arab First Festival continues this weekend at the California Theater in downtown Berkeley.

This year the festival has turned its focus to issues of youth and urban life, with a range of films on these topics showing at venues in San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley.

The festival’s mission is to explore the depth and diversity of filmmaking in the Arab world with an array of documentaries and feature-length and short narrative films.

Hisham Zaman’s Winterland makes its American debut at 7 p.m. Sunday. The film examines the relationship between Renas, a middle-aged Kurdish immigrant from Iraq who has made his home in the snow-covered hills of rural Norway. Renas has been looking forward to the arrival of his bride-to-be from Iraq. It is an arranged marriage with a woman he has never met, except by way of a few letters and phone calls. He has pictures of Fermesk, however, that depict a young woman, perhaps still a teenager, gently smiling and wearing a flowing dress.

Upon her arrival, however, Renas is perturbed to find a larger and older woman. She is still young, but it is clear that the photos are quite outdated. And Fermesk too faces disillusionment, for Renas too sent photos of his younger self, dashing and svelte in military garb, and also managed to greatly inflate his status and income from his humble job in Norway. And each has still more surprises for the other along the way.

What follows is a tense drama of disillusionment and reconciliation, of hopes dashed on the snowy banks of cold reality. Renas and Fermesk must deal simultaneously with their estrangement from one another and from their home country, from family, friends and culture. The stunning photography of the wide-open fields and snow-blanketed hillsides of rural Norway presents a beautiful but alienating environment, pristine and harrowing at the same time. Zaman’s camera transforms the landscape into a vast white desert, where the two protagonists have no reference points other than each other.

Nasser Bakhti’s Night Shadows examines similar themes of Arab displacement but in a dark, urban environment. His film follows the interlocking lives of five characters, each adrift in the darkness and decadence of Geneva nightlife.

A jaded cop, nearing retirement, faces another night on the beat with his obnoxious brute of a partner. Hans’ dedication to his job has cost him his health and his marriage, and those losses have in turn cost him his passion for his job. His partner, a brash, insensitive thug, cares nothing for the immigrants he is tasked with tracking down, and his cruelty and ignorance are only brought to his attention when his wife threatens to pack up the kid and leave him. Claire is a down-and-out junkie with no friends or family, forced to consider prostitution to sustain her habit. Adé is an illegal Malian immigrant who dreams of a professional soccer career while working as a waiter. And Mohammed, a Moroccan immigrant, has been forced to abandon his medical studies just to get by while supporting his family back home.

Each, whether a native or an immigrant, faces the same hostile environment, one that undermines their common humanity and puts them at each other’s throats much of the time in a thoughtful parable of ignorance and xenophobia.

2007 Arab Film Festival. Through Sunday, Oct. 28 at the California Theater in Berkeley and at the Castro Theater and Roxie Film Center in San Francisco.

Berkeley Video and Film Festival 2007

The Berkeley Film and Video Festivals marks its 16th year this weekend with another vast and varied program of independent productions. If there’s a theme to the annual festival, the theme is that there is no theme; it simply showcases independent film in all its unruly diversity, from the brilliant to the silly, from mainstream to left field, from documentaries and drama to comedy and cutting-edge avant garde.

The festival, put on annually by the East Bay Media Center, runs today (Friday) through Sunday at Landmark’s California Theater in downtown Berkeley.

Festival Director Mel Vapour takes pride in one participant’s description of the festival as a bastion of artistic integrity among film festivals, and one that remains blissfully celebrity-free. This year’s program is no exception, providing a feast of cinematic pleasures untouched by commercial considerations.

One of the most extraordinary films on this year’s program is George Aguilar’s Diary of Niclas Gheiler. Aguilar has created what he terms a “documentary mashup,” consisting of old family photographs and found footage combined with words from his grandfather’s diary. The result is a stirring poetic reverie on his grandfather’s life in Germany from World War I, when he served alongside a young Adolf Hitler, and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. It’s a 32-minute tour de force that approaches history from a deeply personal perspective.

The Big Game, by L A Wood, presents a sympathetic view of the Memorial Stadium oak grove tree-sit. Regardless of where you come down on the myriad issues surrounding the UC Berkeley’s plan to build an athletic performance facility along the stadium’s western wall, this entertaining 30-minute film is sure to provide grist for your political mill. Though university officials declined Wood’s invitation to comment on camera, he does little to fill that gap in the narrative, at no point providing the viewer with an account of the university’s reasoning behind its plans or its responses to the protest. The result is a film which may be endearing to the like-minded, but which will only fuel the ire of those on the other side of the debate, encouraging rather than tempering the tendencies of each side to paint the other in broad strokes. Familiar faces abound; in fact, the film is a veritable who’s who of Berkeley Daily Planet opinion page contributors.

Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf’s Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place provides a compassionate portrait of the larger-than-life poet—his work, his humanity and his influence—using archival footage and audio along with testimonials from friends and colleagues. The central narrative concerns Olson’s quest to preserve the unique qualities of his hometown, a quest one fellow poet likens to a Superbowl match-up between the Minnesota Vikings and the Miami Dolphins, in which the Dolphins abandoned their game plan in favor of tactical improvisation that reached the level of poetry. It’s an analogy many tree-sitters would be loathe to accept, but in the context of Olson’s all-encompassing, all-embracing, big-picture view of life and community, such supposed polarities as football vs. poetry are exposed as meaningless.

Other films from this weekend’s program:

• Orit Schwartz’s The Frank Anderson, a sharp comedic short (featuring several familiar faces from larger-budget Hollywood productions), tells the story of an insurance agent who pays a price when he denies coverage for a man’s breast reduction surgery while enthusiastically offering to pay for enhancement surgery for a woman he hopes to bed.

• Flaming Chicken, Gerald Varney’s 20-minute impressionistic musing on San Francisco, is comprised largely of hitherto unseen footage Varney shot while working as a Bay Area journalist in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

• Silhouettes, a seven-minute short by Acalanes High School (Lafayette) students Patrick Ouziel and Kevin Walker, details the plight of a teen whose shadow, which takes the form of a rabbit, leads to bullying from his peers.

• Chronicles of Impeccable Sportsmanship, Erika Tasini’s excellent silent short that depicts curious dynamics among a rooftop-dwelling family.

• The Homecoming, a solemn and mysterious 10-minute film, consists of evocative scenes that almost play like trailers from longer films.

• Tile M for Murder, an absurd, almost cartoonish comedy, features a hostile couple squaring off over a game of Scrabble on a sweltering summer day. “It’s a hot day and I hate my wife,” says the husband, and off we go on a bile-fueled ride in which the words spelled out on the board dictate the course of events.

• Mark Hammond’s feature film Johnny Was boasts an excellent performance by Vinnie Jones as a former Irish Republican Army fighter hiding out in London. The film also features the screen debuts of boxer Lennox Lewis and former Who frontman Roger Daltrey.

But this sampling just scratches the surface. There are simply too many films on the program to do justice to them in the space allotted here. Suffice it to say, this is a film lover’s film festival, one that eschews the predictable fare that so often passes for independent film these days in an effort to present an engaging and wide-ranging program of cinema artistry.

Berkeley Video and Film Festival 2006

The Berkeley Video and Film Festival makes its annual appearance this weekend, starting today (Friday) and running through Sunday evening at the Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. This year’s program features more than 50 works, from brief clips by budding filmmakers, running just a few minutes in length, to full-length features by established directors. 

Festival Director Mel Vapour says this is their best and biggest yet. The festival has expanded over the years to include films from beyond the East Bay, and perhaps the most notable national product in this year’s program is The Big Buy, directed by Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck and produced by Robert Greenwald, who also produced last year’s Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost. The Big Buy tracks the spectacular rise and fall of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, from his early days as an apparent no-count in the Texas legislature to his ascent to national power as Newt Gingrich’s right-hand man, to his successful—and illegal—battle to gerrymander the Texas redistricting process, a move which helped send George W. Bush to the White House. 

If you’ve been following the news, you know the rest of the story. But what The Big Buy adds to the tale is the behind-the-scenes machinations of the investigation into DeLay’s organization. Along the way, we hear from the usual suspects when it comes to commentary on all things Texas: Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, etc., names sure to find a welcoming audience in Berkeley. The Saturday evening screening will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Birnbaum. 

Other films in the festival have roots a little closer to home. Festival Director Vapour has watched director Hoku Uchiyama grow up, from a young, talented kid who took part in youth programs at Vapour’s East Bay Media Center to a film school graduate and accomplished filmmaker. Uchiyama’s 34-minute film Rose is an engaging short subject with a compelling story and evocative photography. In the film’s first few minutes, Uchiyama clearly and effectively delineates his characters with a series of shots of the young protagonist and just a few lines of dialogue, drawing the viewer immediately into young Travis’ world and setting the stage for a tale that seamlessly blends the mystic with the mundane. The compositions, camera movements and polished style demonstrate the young director’s confidence and control over his craft. 

Two other films concern Berkeley itself. Double-Spaced: A Berkeley Comedy has that “Hey everybody, let’s make a movie!” feel to it. The movie is about students and feels like it was made by students as well, almost as a lark. It features plenty of shots of the city, from downtown to Telegraph Avenue, and of course plenty of shots of the UC campus. It even contains a brief shot of the student protagonist reading this very newspaper, but before you have a second to ponder this stark breach of realism, a close-up reveals that he is fact reading the comics page. 

It’s an amateurish film that wears on its sleeve its aspirations toward Wes Anderson-style preciousness, with a wayward protagonist caught up in a loony bit of intrigue, a soundtrack consisting of light, catchy pop songs, and an optimistic ending meant to reinforce the humanity of all involved. It has an awkward feel to it, and most of its punchlines are oversold. But then there’s Meghan Kane, an actress who, in just two scenes totaling probably just 60 seconds of screen time, steals the show with a hilarious and uncanny depiction of a student many will recognize: the glib, patronizing, utterly self-satisfied graduate student, so taken with her own fabulousness that she must focus her every word and gesture on the never-ending effort to make all around her aware of their comparative lack of fabulousness. It’s just a few seconds, but it’s worth the price of admission. 

Another film takes on the Berkeley theme as well, this one with slightly higher aspirations and budget. Berkeley concerns a young man who comes to town as a freshman in the late ’60s and has his life transformed by what he finds. The film stars Nick Roth as the student and Henry Winkler as his father. The film attempts to capture the experience of Berkeley during the Vietnam War era, but doesn’t quite pull it off. For many viewers the film will probably be a moving evocation of the experience; for others, it may seem to merely trivialize it. The Saturday night screening will be followed by a question-and-answer session with director Bobby Roth. 

These examples only hint at the breadth of the festival’s offerings. For a complete schedule see www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org. Day passes for the festival are just $12. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival. Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Oaks Theater, 1875 Solano Ave., Berkeley. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org. 

Occupation: Dreamland Documents Rising Tensions in Falluja

Early on in the documentary Occupation: Dreamland, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne are seen patrolling the streets of Falluja, talking with the city’s residents along the way. At one point an Iraqi man stands before a soldier and tells him that the Iraqi people simply cannot accept colonialism, that resistance is an innate part of the Iraqi identity. “Bear with me,” he says to the soldier. “This is something that is pent up inside our hearts … know it, record it, transmit it.” 

That line informs the film and the filmmakers, for directors Garrett Scott and Ian Olds do just that, removing themselves from the action and allowing the soldiers and Iraqi people to tell the story. 

The documentary follows members of the 82nd Airborne’s Alpha Company in Falluja in early 2004, before the city became a major battleground. Pacific Film Archive is screening the film at 7 p.m. Saturday as part of the traveling exhibition of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Occupation: Dreamland received much critical praise upon its release in 2005, including numerous awards, and is now available on DVD at www.occupationdreamland.com. 

We get to know the soldiers along the way; we learn their backgrounds, their politics, their plans for the future. There is no censorship here; the soldiers clearly have no reservations about expressing their opinions of their mission and of the war itself. 

On the homefront, the Left declares the war unwinnable and calls for these young men to be brought home, out of harm’s way. The Right tries to stifle criticism of the war by claiming that it undermines the morale of the soldiers on the front lines. But these young men hardly exist in a jingoistic vacuum. 

What Occupation: Dreamland makes clear is that it is not the opinions of the Cindy Sheehans and Bill O’Reillys that make them doubt the value of their mission; it is the murky justifications for and logistics of the mission itself. Whether they agree with the politics or not—and both sides are represented in Alpha Company—it is the danger and futility of their work that chips away at their resolve. 

As in Vietnam, the soldiers must fight an unseen enemy. Every day they roam the streets in search of a shadowy insurgency that is inflamed by the sight of soldiers roaming the streets. It is part of the madness of war, a Catch-22 that Joseph Heller’s Capt. John Yossarian could appreciate: Alpha Company venture forth from their barracks to put down an insurgency that is only provoked by the company’s visibility. 

“What exactly are we securing?” a company commander asks during a debriefing after an insurgency attack. The company had been providing security for a Falluja city council meeting when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) exploded on the road in front of them. “Raise your hand if you think they’re going to RPG the sheiks and all the important people in Falluja. 

“So what are we securing then? We’re securing, essentially, ourselves. So what exactly are we protecting? I don’t know.” 

Occupation: Dreamland provides a first-person glimpse of a city of rising tensions, just before it erupts into widespread violence. It is a harrowing portrait of the uncertainty of war and of the uncertainty of the young men we send to fight it. 

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 

7 p.m., Friday, Feb. 24: Videoletters, Program 1 

8:35 p.m., Friday, Feb. 24: Justice 

5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 25: Winter Soldier 

7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 25: Occupation: Dreamland 

8:40 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 25: State of Fear 

3:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 26: Living Rights 

5:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 26: Videoletters, Program 2