“I was just on the Farne Islands, off the northeast coast of England, near where I live, and at this time of the year they are covered with Atlantic gray seals that have come to birth their pups,” environmental sound recorder and musician Chris Watson explains, recounting his latest field trip over a shaky Skype connection. “There are whole communities of female seals that sing and have these beautiful haunting voices. It’s sort of this siren voice. You can imagine sailors being drawn to it from across the waves.” […]

“Joseph Cornell’s cinema remains the central enigma of his work,” Anthology Film Archives founder and Visionary Film author P. Adams Sitney wrote in 1980. That’s a tall order for an artist whose near-crippling sense of doubt about his artistic worth, coupled with his hermetic tendencies, further enhances the enigmatic and curious air that surrounds his vitrine-like assemblages of bric-a-brac, Victorian printed matter, old toys, and star charts — ephemera gently scavenged from the scrap heap of history in New York’s dime stores and junk shops. While Cornell the artist and Cornell the man have become more transparent in the years since Sitney’s essay, the mysteriousness of Cornell’s films — their “roughness” and “insidiousness,” to use Sitney’s delicious phrasing — still holds. […]

When Cruising (1980) finally arrived in Bay Area theaters Feb. 15, 1980, San Francisco’s gay community had long been up in arms. The 1978 murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone were still fresh in many people’s minds. Gay bashing was still a regular occurrence. Word had spread through the gay press about efforts to disrupt the movie’s filming in New York, and the verdict was clear: Hollywood was profiting from gay murder. […]

Is there a more beloved film among critics than Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de … (1953), the penultimate presentation in the Pacific Film Archive’s retrospective “Max Ophüls: Motion and Emotion”? Yes, there are other films (Citizen Kane, L’Avventura, The Seventh Seal) that routinely top critics’ all-time lists. But rarely has a movie so routinely enchanted cineastes as Ophüls’s glittering belle époque love story that swathes its brutal emotional core in sumptuous period finery, mirrors, diamonds, and the dizzying virtuosity of the director’s constantly moving camera. Only Ophüls, in a bit of borrowed Kabuki stagecraft, would have the shreds of unsent letters tossed from the window of a speeding train become a flurry of snowflakes. […]

[Shohei] Imamura’s perspective is more akin to that of a child who, having picked up a rock, becomes fascinated with the squirming, dark world that’s thriving underneath than it is to that of a detached anthropologist, which his extended shots and lack of flashy editing sometimes lead critics to take him for. Social critique, while certainly present in Imamura’s films, is always paired with a certain delectation in watching the tawdry and the grotesque. […]

“When we use magical in a positive sense,” filmmaker Lawrence Jordan explains, parsing an adjective that is frequently brought up in discussions of his work, “it really means my eye is fresh at this moment and what I’m seeing is a discovery.” Jordan’s films — in particular, the animated collages composed of Victorian magazine illustrations, Gustave Doré engravings, and flashing stars and orbs for which he is most famous — are the visual records of such moments of discovery. […]

In his recent book Poor People, William T. Vollmann writes, “For me, poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be richer; poverty is wretchedness. It must then be an experience more than an economic state. It therefore remains somewhat immeasurable.” Despite the enormity of such a disclaimer, Vollmann attempts to calibrate a calculus of misery. Portuguese director Pedro Costa seems motivated by a similarly conflicted impetus. Over the past decade, Costa has made a trilogy of films with the working poor of Fontainhas, a sprawling slum outside Lisbon. Trading Vollmann’s pained self-consciousness for a meticulous formalism that favors rehearsal over reportage, Costa’s remove sets into relief the humanity of his subjects, rather than objectifying or patronizing them. […]

Where to start with the work of Ennio Morricone? The composer and musician has scored more than 400 films, so the task for the curious listener, let alone for the intrepid film curator, can be daunting. His most famous soundtracks have become a kind of enduring synecdoche, capable of summoning not just a particular title but an entire genre — think of the evocative power of the ocarina flourish in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Countless others, unearthed from the vaults every few years, are often the only artifacts we have of titles — mostly sexy thrillers and low-budget police procedurals — long since forgotten (see Dagored’s impressive reissue catalog of Morricone’s more obscure Italian scores). The Castro Theater has assembled a decent pocket guide — Il Maestro for Dummies, if you will — which includes chestnuts such as 1986’s The Mission (his biggest Oscar snub and crossover success) and the more rarely screened and heard, such as Sam Fuller’s 1982 tale of a racist canine, White Dog. […]

“Even though it’s difficult to be human, let’s not turn into monsters.” This is said as a reprimand to Gyung-soo (Kim Sang-kyung), a mildly successful stage actor, by one of his colleagues early in South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Turning Gate (2002). Gyung-soo repeats the words twice more in the film — first to make amends with his old friend Sung-woo after a liquor-soaked spat and then over the phone in a failed attempt to shame the woman, Myung-sook (Ye Ji-won), who eventually leaves him for Sung-woo. […]

It has been noted in the mostly laudatory press surrounding their collection of 10-inch EPs, Transparent Things (Tirk/Word and Sound), that Fujiya & Miyagi aren’t Japanese. Nor are they a duo. They are in fact three white friends from Brighton, England, whose openly acknowledged obsession with Neu’s motornik pulse and Can’s subdued funk has resulted in some very infectious, kraut-tinged electronic pop songs as well as gentle speculation about whether Fujiya & Miyagi are simply derivative or being cheekily open about their influences. […]