“What do they want from an old dinosaur like me?” quips John Hurt, reprising his career-making role as Quentin Crisp, in response to an invitation to regale a much younger audience about his life. By this point in An Englishman in New York, Richard Laxton’s sequel to The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and this year’s opening night film at Frameline33, Crisp has been branded a black sheep for refusing to retract flip comments made on the then-emerging AIDS crisis and is still adjusting to the slights that come with being perceived as some living relic of the past. To a large degree, the image of Crisp as a stoic holdover from an earlier age of faeries and rough trade who survived on wit and sheer force of will was one of his own making, and it is certainly a reputation that Claxton’s film helps secure. […]
The wind is always blowing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films. Like the torrential rain of so many horror films that is only a road-sign for the creepy old house up ahead, the gusts that whip and toss Kurosawa’s characters are the sighs of a world in flux. Though his dizzyingly prolific filmography includes a wide cross section of genres—police procedural, family melodrama, yakuza revenge tale, supernatural thriller—the central drama of most Kurosawa films can be boiled down this: the world is changing—or has changed—and the measure of each character is how successfully or unsuccessfully they can adjust to the new parameters unfolding before them. […]
“Sadism demands a story,” remarked Laura Mulvey in her landmark piece of feminist film criticism, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” In Max Ophüls’ opulent swan song, Lola Montès (1955), sadism also demands a spectacle. Ophüls’ Technicolor rhapsody— newly restored by Rialto Picture to match the director’s original vision— opens in a three-ring circus worthy of DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Costumed dwarves, swinging chandeliers, horse-riding acrobats and tiers of audience members kaleidoscopically divide the frame, as the Ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) invites the audience to ask questions for 25 cents a piece to the star attraction, the scandalous adventuress Lola (the beautiful Martine Carol). […]
It has been seven years since Dubya launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in that time enough documentaries about the war have been made to warrant a Wikipedia page on what has become an established subgenre. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s engrossing film Full Battle Rattle has to be the first such documentary to so candidly explore “the ground truth” of Iraq without ever setting foot in the country. Although its explosive opening sequence, in which an Iraqi village endures a surprise attack from insurgents, sets it up as another verite-style portrait of daily life within the war zone, it’s only when the smoke clears and an ice cream truck pulls up that we realize something’s amiss. This isn’t Iraq, but Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, and what we’ve just seen is part of an intensive simulation meant to prepare U.S soldiers for the conditions they’ll experience overseas. […]
If John Waters is “the Pope of Trash” (according to the gospel of William S. Burroughs) then freelance curator and film fanatic Jack Stevenson is a shoe-in for Cardinal. The last time Stevenson rolled into town in 2006, he arrived with a stack of film canisters that were a veritable Pandora’s box filled with drug scare propaganda, witchcraft and Scandinavian skin flicks. This time he comes bearing amateur blue movies, a gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, and grainy reels documenting live, nude girls — all shot in San Francisco — for the series “The Superstars Next Door” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I checked in with Stevenson via email before he boarded his transatlantic flight. Here’s what he had to say about his hatred of television, why film preservationists have it wrong, and the most depraved flick ever made in Denmark. […]
In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s great backstage drama, The Red Shoes (1948), Boris Lermontov, the controlling impresario behind a famous ballet company, asks the up-and-coming dancer Victoria Page why she wants to dance. She snaps back with the question, “Why do you want to live?” I imagine that director Ted V. Mikels would give the same response were he asked why he makes movies. “It takes your guts and your entrails and your soul to make a film,” Mikels proclaimed in an interview in RE/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films. “It takes everything you possess within you!” […]
What do women want to watch? With Diane English’s recent unfunny and product placement-filled re-make of The Women hitting theaters last week, Hollywood’s answer, predictably, is more of the same. Thankfully there are curators like Ariella Ben-Dov, whose Madcat Women’s International Film Festival has long provided a platform for fiercely independent and experimental women filmmakers, whose work often refuses to be defined by the label “women filmmaker.” Ben-Dov’s curatorial practice has also made a point of expanding Madcat’s audience beyond already faithful cinephiles. On the eve of the 12th anniversary of Madcat, the only avant-garde women’s film festival in the United States, I spoke with Ben-Dov over the phone from New York, where she’s adjusting to her new position as director of the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History, about expanding the San Francisco-weaned Madcat Festival, the power of watching a film in an audience and the uncanny return of Beverly Hills 90210. […]
In our popular imagination — and especially in film — the request to “stare into the light” is often an invitation to let our waking life fall into submission. The words so often spoken by hypnotists, anesthesiologists, and mystics also describe the act of watching movies, and speak to film’s implicit promise of taking us to some other scene accessed through the flickers on the screen.
The transportive and conscious altering qualities of light were not lost on William S. Burroughs and his compatriot and frequent collaborator Brian Gysin. “We must storm the citadels of enlightenment,” Burroughs wrote to Gysin, “the means are at hand.” The means at hand were Gysin’s revelation about the hallucinatory qualities of flickering light and the device he invented in 1957 to harness its potential: the dreamachine. Nik Sheenan’s hypnotic documentary FlicKer — which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — looks into the dreamachine’s pulsating brilliance while also sketching a portrait of its troubled and brilliant creator. […]
“Under the mask is another mask, I will never finish lifting all these faces,” wrote French Surrealist artist, lesbian, author and political agitator Claude Cahun. Masks appear frequently in the startling portraits she and her half-sister and lover Marcel Moore took of themselves and each other dressed in a variety of personas, costumes and genders.
Veteran lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer (Nitrate Kisses) knows better than to try and look behind the mask to find some “real” Cahun. […]
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Capping off a whirlwind year of charming audiences from Hawaii to New York on the festival circuit (and walking away with a handful of awards in the process), director Richard Wong and composer/writer/actor H.P. Mendoza’s suburban high school musical dramady Colma: The Musical was finally scooped up for national release by Roadside Pictures. A sort of anti-High School Musical, Colma follows three friends in the flush of their new post-high school freedom, who are also caught in the headlights of their as-yet-uncertain-yet-fast-approaching-futures. Set in the San Francisco suburb of Colma — a suburban necropolis, literally and existentially — Wong and Mendoza’s film refreshingly portrays the limbo of young adulthood without recourse to patronizing sentimentality, while managing to score its vicissitudes to ridiculously catchy indie pop-inflected musical numbers. Longtime friends themselves, Wong and Mendoza diffuse our conversation with same buoyant energy that courses through their film. Whether explaining their shared love of West Side Story, hating on irony or impersonating Norma Desmond, these guys are more than ready for their close ups. […]
