Help Filmbalaya’s Tom Ellis make his short film, Adrift!

Hi all!

I’m putting the theory and criticism into practice and making a short film of my own.  Any help will go far, from pennies to that extra thousand you have gathering dust under your loveseat next to your no-longer-working fireplace (you know who you are).

Check out the following link to our Indiegogo video in which I, producer Kwame, and actor Brett prostrate ourselves, begging for dinars: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/adrift-a-short-film-by-tom-ellis#home

Thank you in advance!

San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2014: Days 2 and 3 – Germans, Swedes, Japanese, Russians and Keaton

And so once again the Silent Film Festival came and went.  And with it the privilege and pleasure of watching the best versions of carefully selected films from this bygone era at the fantastic Castro Theatre, a place I often refer to as my church.

The selection was great, as always.  If you missed it this year, stay tuned for next year.  But following are some thoughts I had on a selection of the films that played:

Under The Lantern

Gerhard Lamprecht‘s 1928 film is something of a marriage of German Expressionism and German Realism, and thus a fine reflex of the age. 

Paweł Pawlikovski’s “Ida” – Review and Trailer

Paweł Pawlikovski is no stranger to challenging subjects, if his documentaries are any account (Serbian Epics is still remarkable). So the topic of the dark history of Poland in relation to the dark history of Europe’s relationship with the Jews is one that is best investigated by one like him.

The film is essentially about a nun in the 1960’s in an identity crisis when she learns that she is Jewish and her parents were killed in the Holocaust. In the process she meets her aunt, a jaded ex-Communist crusader still haunted by these things that she has not revisited until her niece re-enters her life.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2014 – Day 1, “Song of the Fisherman” and Dreyer’s “The Parson’s Widow”

Song of the Fisherman

Being the first Chinese silent film I have seen, I couldn’t resist the urge to check this one out. It was certainly an interesting film. Immensely tragic, it is a downward spiral of poverty multiplied by misfortune and capitalized by more poverty. At times it seems as though pieces of the film are missing which lead from one point to another, but after some reflection I was not certain if these pieces were another part of the wide use of the ellipsis that this film makes. If so, it shows a level of faith in the visual understanding of the Chinese audiences, at a time when the average American and German counterparts would very likely use strong-armed visual queues or verbose intertitles explaining what was happening. In this, on the other hand, suddenly the father is gone, then suddenly the mother is blind; later on they are suddenly on a boat with the wealthy child they group up with. And so forth. It makes sense, and there were only a few points in which I felt lost, but these were due to some jarring cuts which very likely were precious frames lost in its 80 plus year life. Also notable are some pretty fantastic moments of juxtaposition, such as when a young bourgeois couple has fun smearing each other with makeup, while below them the poor children are smearing each other with filth so they fit in more with the scavengers.

The musical accompaniment was by Donald Sosin, who played an original score which blended well with the use of the actual Chinese “Song of the Fisherman” superimposed into the score.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2014: Opening Night: “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

And so thus it is with the patterns of the moon and, alongside the Earth’s shift upon its axis in which, verily, as the dawn doth shine… Ah, excuse me; neo-Romantic and Griffith-esque phrasing in intertitles are addictive. Their poetry is epic in scope and therefore  quite fitting with the epic nature of the opening night film, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”.

The film centers around, to put it offensively simple, a family of Argentines mixed with French and Germans who end up going back to their respective mother/fatherlands and eventually fight against each other in World War I. In the process, many themes are discussed – fidelity, infidelity, the apocalypse (hence the title), murder, rape, the pointlessness of war, and so on.

Introducing the San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2014

Well, folks, it’s that time of year.  In San Francisco, the film festival season is pushing on with gusto following the close of the San Francisco International Film Festival and just before the Documentary Film Festival, Green Film Festival, and Frameline. But the festival that has always shone for me as the most unique is approaching in one week – the Silent Film Festival.

If you have not been to one of the Silent Film Festivals in the past, you are in for a treat. The model of the festival, like that of a few others around the world, is to include live accompaniment with the best prints or digital restorations. Here in San Francisco, we have the privilege and pleasure of having all this in the historic Castro Theatre.

If you are wondering why this experience is unique and what you should see and don’t have the time or fortitude to stay through the whole event, I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with the Silent Film Festival’s artistic director, Anita Monga, to talk to her about the festival and what she is most looking forward to.

Gia Coppola’s “Palo Alto” – Review and Trailer

“Palo Alto” is a compassionate, non-judgemental glimpse into the often dark world of teenagers, based on the short stories by James Franco. It’s a very new glance into their discovery of sex, the escapist use of drugs and partying, and how overall lost people are at this age.

I say “new” knowing full well that this is a topic covered countless times in the past.  What makes the approach taken here so novel is that much of what could be focused on (and often is in films of the topic) is not. The stereotypical elements of this age are incorporated, but diluted – in other words, the truth which is contained within these stereotypical groupings so often exploited by filmmakers is extracted and thereby retracted from them. The way teenagers behave is shown with sympathetic eyes; there are no apparent explanations, but the irrational and erratic ways in which the young trying to come to a sense of self in the world act is shown.

SFIFF 57 Report: Chris Messina’s “Alex of Venice”, Zaza Urushadze’s “Tangerines” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Night Moves”

Alex of Venice

Chris Messina‘s directorial debut, and the Closing Night film at the San Francisco International Film Festival, is a very warm, honest portrayal of a… how do you say… late young adulthood-life crisis.  It involves two young parents, one, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a very busy and career-focused woman; her husband, played by Messina, who is growing tired of an adolescence lost, and her father and sister (Don Johnson and the writer of the film, Katie Nehra).  It is a warm, often funny, but uncompromisingly honest film; often, for instance, when plot offerings appear which most filmmakers would seize and milk every bit of drama out of, this film will brush over them and move on to more truly important elements, though to be fair it can get a bit sentimental.

With fantastic acting, especially by Winstead, who seems to be able to express a full range of emotion and expression almost without moving, and Johnson’s aging thespian father, it is certainly worth a watch.  As a post script, the inclusion of The Cherry Orchard as a contrapuntal underlying element was very poignant.

SFIFF57 Report: Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”

 

Richard Linklater has a penchant for playing with time. From the “Sunrise” series we saw this embracing of time and life, as each film was made six or seven years apart when the main two actors had grown physically seven years older and their characters had followed suit. This playing with time is not, however, a manipulation of time, or a “sculpting in time” as has been discussed in the past; rather, it is more of an embracing of the human potential that time offers. It is letting time occur, and working within time’s passing.

Boyhood is exactly that – it is constructed through the passing of time. If each film in the “Sunrise” series is a moment in time, “Boyhood” is a collage of consecutive moments in time. The result is a resounding success.