To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are.

But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy.

That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.”

Press goes about filming Cunningham the way the photographer claims to capture his own subjects: “discreetly, quietly, invisibly.” Press, along with producer Philip Gefter and cinematographer Tony Cenicola (also a Times staff photographer), followed Cunningham for two years with no crew (after Press spent eight attempting to get Cunningham’s consent), tailing the photographer from uptown soirees to the runways of Paris fashion week.

Interspersed with Cunningham’s own sharp insights and footage of the photographer biking around Manhattan and throwing himself into oncoming traffic to get the perfect shot, are interviews with old friends and frequent subjects: Upper West Side grandes dames, fashion powerhouses, former editors, neighbors, and strutting peacocks. The loving accounts they share of encounters with Cunningham sing his artistic praises and unwavering kindness but stop short of revealing much about the man himself, save for his monasticism.

Cunningham famously lived for decades in a tiny studio apartment above Carnegie Hall filled almost exclusively with negative-stuffed file cabinets and an Army cot. His uniform is the cheap blue jacket worn by French street sweepers, augmented by a duct-tapped poncho in inclement weather. He rarely stops to schmooze, let alone sleep or eat. When a real estate agent shows Cunningham, who over the course of filming was evicted from his Carnegie Hall cell, the kitchen of the new apartment he will be relocated to, he genially scoffs, “What would I do with that?”

Cunningham’s disdain for the material and emotional comforts most of us take for granted might seem at odds with the worlds he documents (perhaps the film’s most shocking moment comes when Cunningham casually reveals he has never been in a romantic relationship). Fashion has become a hydra-headed beast of which street style, and the myriad bloggers who document it, have been completely swallowed by.

What Bill Cunningham New York makes clear, however, is that for this man, sustained by indefatigable reserves of passion and the ability to see what others can’t, the pursuit of beauty is not merely his chosen vocation; it has always been and always will be a calling.

[Originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian]

A few years ago, much was being made of the “new wave” of Asian horror films. Western audiences were being introduced to the long-haired, vengeful spirits and women on the verge of murderous rampages that had been scaring moviegoers in Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia for much of the late 1990s and early aughts. Companies such as Tartan and Lionsgate rushed to make the latest bloodbaths from directors such as Takashi Miike and Kim Ji-woon available on DVD, and Hollywood began to voraciously buy up story rights and churn out English-language remakes. Then Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) came along.

But while the new wave of Asian horror may have crested as a Western phenomena, SFIAAFF’s retrospective “After Death: Horror Cinema from South East Asia” proves that using regional ghost stories as a springboard for Romero-worthy blood feasts is still a winning formula for many Southeast Asian directors. Nang Nak (1999), the oldest of the three films in the series, reenvisions the Thai folktale of a wife whose love for her family chains her to the earthly realm long after death. Histeria (2008) loosely bases its six-girls-tormented-by-an-evil-spirit variation on the classic slasher narrative on actual cases of mass hysteria among Malaysian schoolgirls. And 2008’s Affliction (the only film unavailable for preview) pits a father against his daughter as he fights to prevent her transformation into an Aswang, a blood-sucking monster of Filipino legend.

To be honest, there might be a reason these titles have received less attention abroad than the output of the Pang brothers (2002’s The Eye), for example. For all its flashy cinematography and folkloric source material, Nang Nak drags for most of its 100 minutes (when we already know long before the protagonist does that his dutiful dearest is not all she appears to be, waiting for him to finally catch on feels like an eternity). Histeria has more fun at least with its set-up, sketching out the hierarchy at work in its clique of schoolgirls sentenced to a long weekend of janitorial labor at their rural boarding school before dispatching them in unsavory ways one by one. The film even features what’s touted to be Malaysian cinema’s first same-sex onscreen kiss; although a “half-peck” might be more accurate. Still, the film’s special effects are imaginative — especially its creature design — and its scares are genuine even if the twist ending doesn’t pack much surprise. Indeed, the films in “After Death” are perhaps SFIAAFF’s most familiar offerings, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable for, say, date night.

[Originally published in the SF Bay Guardian]

Who wants to die for art? That question, immortally screamed by Divine at the climax of John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974), has most recently been taken up by Darren Aronofsky’s campy psychological thriller Black Swan (2010), in which Natalie Portman’s fragile ballerina discovers that giving her all as the good and evil leads in an edgy production of Swan Lake requires giving up her sanity, and eventually, her life.

The somewhat romantic notion that an overinvestment in one’s art can lead to a psychotic break with reality also underlies Ronald Colman’s far more gripping, Oscar-winning performance in George Cukor’s 1947 backstage noir A Double Life, a film Black Swan perhaps owes as much a debt to as it does to its other cinematic antecedents such as The Red Shoes (1948) or All About Eve (1950) (2007’s I Know Who Killed Me also deserves a lesser place on that list).

In the film — which screens at the Castro Theatre in a new archival print as part of Noir City 9 — Colman stars as Anthony John, a celebrated stage actor with a nasty temper who winds up playing the title role in a production of Othello opposite his ex-wife Brita (Signe Hasso), who has been cast as Desdemona. As John gets deeper into his character, his own lingering frustrations over his failed marriage become cross-wired with Othello’s jealous rage resulting in a fatal instance of life imitating art. “What seems a fairly safe profession, acting,” wrote New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther in his review of the film, “is as dangerous as they come.”

Cowritten by husband-and-wife team Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin (who themselves were no strangers to the stage) and photographed with Expressionistic verve by Milton R. Krasner, A Double Life is — true to its title — filled with mirror imagery, split frames, and opposites locked in conflict. It also sets the stage, if you will, for the other titles in this year’s Noir City program, many of which turn on a character struggling to keep from splitting in two.

So often in film noir, the burden of proof is so great as to drive our hero or heroine mad as they try to convince those around them that they’re innocent, in danger, or more often than not, both. Such is the case with Pat O’Brien’s museum curator in Crack-Up (1947), who survives a horrible accident only to be told it never happened, or Barbara Stanwyck’s imperiled, bed-ridden rich girl in 1948’s Sorry, Wrong Number (Stanwyck, it should be noted, is all over this year’s festival, including a blistering starring turn as the titular addict in 1949’s The Lady Gambles).

In some cases, as with two of this year’s many not-on-DVD rarities, the protagonists actually do have evil twins. Olivia de Havilland beat Hayley Mills to the punch playing both sisters in Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror (1946), in which the evil de Havilland uses her physical resemblance to frame her sweet sister (also de Havilland) for murder. Meanwhile, in Among the Living (1941), Albert Dekker goes up against himself as a brain-damaged psychopath who terrorizes a small town and the fraternal twin who must take him out.

This year’s nuttiest film by far is Fritz Lang’s Freudian roller-coaster ride The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). Faster than you can say Rebecca (1940), Joan Bennett’s naïve newlywed has been whisked off to her new husband’s big, dark house full of repressed secrets and a spinsterish head housekeeper. As gorgeous to look at is its plot is difficult to follow, The Secret Beyond the Door is a film you’d have to be nuts not to see.

[Originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian]