Quote: Thomas Jefferson

"A society that trades liberty for order will have neither, nor will it deserve them."

McClure's Beach

Quote: Albert Einstein

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

MVFF33: 'Black Field'

This striking image by DP Marcus Waterloo from Vardis Marinakis's film Black Field is as good an introduction to the film's merits as anything I could say. Speaking in strictly visual terms, the film is a pure delight. The first third of the movie is so loaded with potent symbols that viewers might sense the coming of something miraculous - but, radiant cinematography aside, the whole does not really live up to expectations. It is still a beautiful film, with a confident, assured pace and masterful touch, but its themes are smaller than we are led to expect after witnessing the fantastic chiascuro images of the early scenes. It is a period drama set in Ottoman-ruled Greece in 1654; an escaped janissary (a Christian forced into service in the Ottoman army) washes up on the doorstep of a convent, where he is nursed (in chains) back to health and escapes with one of the nuns, who turns out to have been a boy all along. Their path takes them through some enchanted country, green and delicate, with rocks and pools glittering in patches of filtered sun or looming out of coils of mist. It all looks so much grander than the human story unfolding within it, which is essentially one of sexual awakening or gender liberation - no insignificant thing, to be sure, but not epic enough for this stage. I was wanting The Seventh Seal, or Macbeth, or something of that order. Early scenes, like that of the nun lying like a statue of carved stone in her stone-colored shroud, of an iron key in a slice of sunlight, the beautiful naked body of the man in chains attended by silent, black-clad women, the cremation and burial of the horse, the fog and flames and lightning, not to mention the liturgical atmosphere of the entire set, all combine to stir up the grandest possibilities imaginable. The film wants more gravitas to fulfill its promise, more complexity, perhaps simply more death, which would balance the life-affirming principle at work in the human theme and embody the shadows of its visual register. As it is, we are left with the curious feeling of having watched two films spliced together, and the loss of the one we want spoils the one we get.

SF Docfest: 'May I Be Frank'

There is an avalanche of festival films in the Bay Area right now, what with the Mill Valley, the Docfest, Berlin and Beyond, the Arab Film Festival and French Cinema Now presenting back to back throughout the month of October, but one film you absolutely must not miss is local documentary May I Be Frank. It's a wonderful story, funny and profound, inspiring, even miraculous. It documents the transformation of middle-aged, overweight, prediabetic, depressed, somewhat drug- and alcohol-addicted Brooklyn transplant Frank Ferrante as he submits to a 42-day diet and holistic health regimen organized by servers at San Francisco raw-food temple Cafe Gratitude. We expect to see some pounds shed, some improved body function and perhaps even a little attitude adjustment, but Frank's transformation is far more radical than that. He takes everything on, the failed relationships, the anger, the myriad complex patterns that keep him locked into a life of drug abuse, lethargy, and disintegration. The film becomes ever deeper and more astonishing as layer upon layer of Frank's entrenched habits peel away. It is the most far-reaching detoxification experiment I have ever witnessed, enlightening in so many ways - we learn about the physical dimensions of negative thinking, the spiritual dimensions of nutritional well-being - and there can be no doubt after watching this film that the path to total physical health is a spiritual one. It is also a difficult and painful experience. As Frank himself remarks in his ongoing blog, "what started out as a film about raw food evolved into a film about drug and alcohol addiction, broken families, frayed relationships, intention, commitment, healing, redemption, and the power of love." This statement really says it all, except for one thing - Frank is a very funny guy, and his humor makes this journey of high colonics, mucoid plaque and wheatgrass shots a truly delightful one. On another level it is a west versus east coast story, pitting affirmation against refusal, but it's not really a battle because we root for Frank the whole way, in all his incarnations. Let's just say, you can't fail to notice the stereotypes at work and play - they make things funnier and more exciting. People all over are going to love this movie, but west coast and especially SF residents might, like me, feel vindicated as well. For Frank Ferrante and folks like him, as well as all the rest of us, the place to be is definitely here.

Plays 10/22 and 10/25 at The Roxie.

Fort Funston

The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, Nick Zedd,1985

...

The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade.

We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centres and geriatic cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.

We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema.

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.


The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto was written in 1985 by Nick Zedd, under the name Orion Jeriko, and first appeared in his fanzine, The Underground Film Bulletin.

MVFF33: 'Katalin Varga'

British sound artist and director Peter Strickland's beautiful first feature Katalin Varga is an impressionist film that resonates as much on the aural plane as on any other, so visual cues and plot development get behind what is often simply a powerful mood or feeling-tone signified by sophisticated effects in sound design and musical composition. It is a reversal in the usual order of things which haunts the mind in advance of events, and that implicates viewers in a weird way, weaving images which are spontaneously imagined together with those onscreen. In an interview with The Guardian Peter Strickland speaks frankly of his influences, and there are as many that have traveled through the ear as through the eye, including albums by The Cure and Suicide and the soundtrack (by Popol Vu) for Herzog's Nosferatu as well as films like Night of the Hunter and Paradjanov's Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors.

He speaks at some length as well of how the film came to be made. After suddenly inheriting 25,000 pounds from an uncle, and wondering briefly whether he should use the money to buy a flat, he set out instead for the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to make his first feature film with a crew of 11; the entire script is in Magyar translation, which Strickland doesn't speak but the actors do, so there was a lot of room for improvisation; without real access to the language, his ear was as tuned to the ambient sounds of "goat bells, crickets, and wind" as to human voices. The result is a film that situates human speech and action inside a broader natural context, so that the environment, which is after all the classic vampiric locale, begins to assume agency of its own. Landscape in this film is an obscure and fatalistic protaganist, deeply supernatural.

Hilda Peters plays the title character Katalin, who traverses the country with her young son in search of the men who raped her. Her performance is astonishingly protean, as she morphs from loving mother to trauma victim to seducer to avenger and back in the course of her quest. Her face alone is worth the price of admission. And the incredible face of her nemesis Antal, played by Tibor Palffy, completes the picture. They are profiles carved into opposite sides of the same magical coin. As soon as we see Antal we know - exactly what it is impossible to say - but we are charged with a sense of knowing, of significance, and his role thereafter fulfills this expectation in surprising ways. Pasolini was the great champion of 'real' faces such as these, and Strickland's casting illustrates his point to perfection. The right face carries the full weight of the story, its larger meaning as well as its specific human one.

With its haunting score (by Geoffrey Cox and Steven Stapleton), gorgeous photography (Mark Gyori), lean, intense dramatic arc, and forays into magical thinking and dark, folk-inflected myth, this film is a must-see for lovers of art, of music, and of the supernatural. Plays Smith Rafael 10/8 and 10/15. Also check out Strickland's sound world at http://www.soniccatering.com/. Here's the trailer;