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.”

“You’ve gotta have a gimmick,” goes the line from Gypsy, and a list of some of the subjects featured in the 9th annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival reads like the first round of cuts from an America’s Got Talent audition. There is a sex shaman who testifies to the powers of his libidinal healing workshops (Sex Magic), a rapping cowboy from North Dakota (Roll Out, Cowboy), a mystic who stares into the sun (Eat the Sun), an Oklahoman environmental activist and bike advocate (Biker Fox), and the dueling farmers determined to grow the world’s largest pumpkin (Giants).

That old saw about how the Velvet Underground’s first record may not have sold well but everyone who heard it went on to form their own band could also be said of Austrian composer/producer Christian Fennesz’s 2001 release Endless Summer (Mego).

Like many of its hardboiled antiheros, film noir is a career criminal on the lam. Constantly eluding the clutches of the historically particular and categorically retentive, it’s especially skilled at flying under the radar only to stealthily reappear years down the line. Just look at the number of times it has been sighted (as well as cited) since its initial appearance in postwar France, when critics first identified something particulier about the 1930s and ’40s American films that filled Parisian cinemas.

Noir’s notorious elasticity is on full display in “Not Necessarily Noir,” an extraordinary police lineup of double bills organized by the Roxie’s resident noir programmer Elliot Lavine. Following on the heels of Lavine’s May series “I Still Wake Up Dreaming,” which celebrated the down and dirty world of B pictures, the two-week long “Not Necessarily Noir,” as its title indicates, includes films that scan as noir more in terms of their sensibility than which video store shelf they’d sit on. From Cold War sci-fi (the original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers kicks off the series) to more contemporary dramas such as Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) — and let’s not forget the 1983 WTF remake of Breathless starring Richard Gere — “Noir” plays fast and loose with genre and decade but ensures that at the core of each of its titles gleams a heart of darkness.

I’ve had a bit of a crush on the young Argentine actress Inés Efron since Frameline31, when she played one corner of the teen love triangle in Alexis Dos Santos’ Glue (2006). There was something in the way Efron used her gangly build and heavy-lidded eyes to telegraph her character’s mix of trembling desire and adolescent ungainliness that brought to mind Kids-era Chloë Sevigny. […]

A friend recently opined that movies about hitched couples stumbling through matrimony were far less fun to watch than movies about unmarried couples fumbling toward commitment. There is a kernel of truth here. The question “Will they get together?” is certainly more tension-filled than “when will they finally concede defeat? […]

At last year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, in his State of Cinema address, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly spoke of a media landscape inundated with screens, in which you’re as likely to watch a movie on your PDA, or even a grocery checkout screen, as you are in a theater. The message was clear: the way in which we create and consume films is changing. To some extent, we have been living in this brave new world for some time, so SFIFF’s choice of photographer Mary Ellen Mark to deliver this year’s State of Cinema address carries with it an implicit nostalgia for cinema’s old world. […]

In an online interview, experimental filmmaker and violin drone pioneer Tony Conrad relates a story: one night, underground drag superstar Mario Montez wandered into the apartment Conrad shared with filmmaker Jack Smith, and at Smith’s behest began an impromptu performance. When Smith flicked on a beaten up 16mm projector to serve as a makeshift spotlight, he and Conrad became transfixed by the play of light that reflected off Montez’s sequined outfit. While it would be glib — and certainly fun — to declare that 1960s structural film was born from the glittering gyrations of a drag queen, Conrad’s anecdote is but one development in his longstanding fascination with the excessive sensory effects of shooting light out into the void. […]

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In 1960s Japan, Nikkatsu meant a new kind of action. Promotional materials for the studio even spelled “action” in katakana, the syllabary used for borrowed foreign words. Indeed, the studio’s super-stylized films — only a smattering of which are showcased in this all too brief series presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Outcast Cinema — reflected many of the postwar period’s cultural sea changes. Played by an exclusive line of marquee names including boyish rake Watari Tetsuya and the chipmunk-countenanced Joe Shishido, Nikkatsu’s lone wolves and hit men hang out at rock and jazz clubs, drive hotwired foreign cars, get in brawls with white devil sailors, and possess the kind of smoldering cool that Elmore Leonard thinks he copyrighted. Similarly, directors such as Toshio Masuda, Takashi Nomura, and the better-known Suzuki Seijun developed a kinetic visual style that cribbed from Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and Frank Tashlin in equal measure (Suzuki’s extreme stylistic bravura eventually got him canned). […]