Hell hath no fury like an enraged Klaus Kinski. The late German actor, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as the combusting supernova at the center of the Wernzer Herzog films Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Cobra Verde (1987), was as famous for his coruscating off-camera temper as for his onscreen intensity. With Kinski, there is always the near-unanswerable question of to what extent is his performance acting and to what extent is he just being himself. Are we watching someone who has totally, obsessively (unhealthily?) committed to his craft, or a petulant diva whose overinflated ego perhaps bruises too easily?
Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savoir, a recently rediscovered concert film of a 1971 solo performance, makes a riveting case for all of the above. Filmed a year before he headed to the South American jungle with Herzog, Jesus Christ finds Kinski alone on a spot-lit stage before a packed house delivering a monologue that frames Christ as a persecuted outlaw. “Wanted: Jesus Christ,” he purrs, “charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state.”
Read MoreOn the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called “the shot heard round the world” for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement.
Read MoreFilms about our species’ enduring capacity to be inhumane toward its own are perennials at film festivals (and, one can suppose, they will continue to be so as long as sides are drawn, wars are waged, and violence is sanctioned as the most expedient solution). This is certainly the case with the San Francisco International Film Festival, which offered visceral stopovers at the Sri Lankan civil war (Between Two Worlds); the Rwandan genocides of a decade ago (The Day God Walked Away); the Third Balkan War (Ordinary People); the 2008 Russian-Georgian war (Russian Lessons); and the various battlefronts, past and present, that have gripped the Mid-East (Budrus, Lebanon, Port of Memory), including those which have become outposts in our own government’s “War on Terror” (Restrepo, The Oath). […]
All that is solid melts not into air, but is milled into rebar in Jason Byrne’s mesmerizing, nearly hour-long short film, Scrap Vessel. The centerpiece of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival’s experimental shorts program, “Memory Vessels and Phantom Traces,” Scrap Vessel is Byrne’s documentation of the final voyage of the Hari Funafuti — formerly a Chinese coal freighter called Hupohai that was built in Norway in 1973 to make hauls around northern Europe — as it sails from Singapore to Bangladesh to be gutted and dismantled for scrap. […]
