Tag Archives: Pacific Film Archive
Book explores impact of Berkeley Art Museum’s Peter Selz
When Peter Selz arrived in Berkeley in 1965, the university only had a small art gallery to display its modest collection of art. Selz had been recruited from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to oversee the construction of a new, contemporary museum, the Berkeley Art Museum on Bancroft Way.
He did that and more. With Selz at the helm, the Berkeley Art Museum redefined many aspects of modern art and brought overdue attention to California artists.
Selz was already “something of a star,” when he arrived in Berkeley, according to Paul J. Karlstrom, whose new book, Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life, has just been released by UC Press. He had been one of the first curators to trumpet the work of Mark Rothko. His star grew even brighter in Berkeley after he put on groundbreaking shows such as “Directions in Kinetic Sculpture,” an exhibition of the Surrealist René Magritte, and Funk!, which showcased ceramicist Peter Voulkos, Bruce Conner, and other California artists. Selz, who had fled Germany during the Nazi regime, also created the Pacific Film Archive. … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: Baby Doll
The utterance of the words ‘virgin’, ‘mistress’, and ‘seduce’ were enough to get Otto Preminger’s film The Moon is Blue banned in Boston in 1953. Three years later, however, things went from bad to worse for the Legion of Decency upon the release of director Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll, which — while avoiding its predecessor’s intemperate language — went far beyond The Moon is Blue by actually depicting the seduction of a virgin.
That was more than enough for Cardinal Spellman to condemn Baby Doll as “sinful”, and the film was ultimately banned both inside and outside the United States, including (oddly) in ostensibly liberal Sweden.
Screening at Pacific Film Archive at 9:00 pm on Saturday, December 3rd as part of the Archive’s current series, “Southern (Dis)comfort: The American South in Cinema”, Baby Doll may no longer have the power to shock, but is still likely to provide some surprises for first-time viewers. We generally don’t expect frank discussions about sex and race in films of this vintage; though Baby Doll’s story is somewhat undercut by its Tennessee Williams’-inspired histrionics, it delivers on both counts. … Continue reading »
“Native Land” at PFA and a Berkeley film festival turns 20
What’s more patriotic than hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet? Why, 1942’s left-wing documentary Native Land, of course. Produced by independent outfit Frontier Films and narrated by Paul Robeson, this remarkable piece of agit-prop comes to Pacific Film Archive at 7:00pm on Sunday, October 2nd as part of UCLA’s Festival of Preservation.
Directed by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand (who had cut their cinematic teeth together on Pare Lorentz’s agrarian documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains in … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: Dusty and Sweets McGee
For many years, director Floyd Mutrux’s 1971 feature Dusty and Sweets McGee was as good as lost. Buried beneath a mountain of lawsuits revolving around music clearance issues (and hardly a good commercial proposition to begin with), it spent most of its days resting comfortably in a climate-controlled studio vault. It was a film few expected to see again outside the confines of a Warner Brothers’ screening room.
Then it stirred: an expurgated print of Dusty and Sweets McGee aired … Continue reading »
Out in Berkeley: Phillip Greenlief’s Lost Trio, and more
Few bands in jazz find musical pay dirt as consistently as Phillip Greenlief’s Lost Trio.
Launched about 17 years ago with bassist Dan Seamans and drummer Tom Hassett, the group brings the same gruff, unfussy eloquence to tunes by Hank Williams and Herbie Nichols, Billy Strayhorn and Nino Rota, Irving Berlin and Joni Mitchell, Beck and Bjork.
While focusing more on original material these days, Greenlief launched the stripped-down ensemble as a vehicle to investigate material outside the standard jazz repertoire, whether the source was Tin Pan Alley, Nashville, or Iceland. It’s a loose-limbed combo marked by an off-the-cuff poetic sensibility, full of earthy humor and soaring lyricism.
“The challenge is how can we arrange these tunes in a way that’s interesting,” Greenlief says. “That’s what we’ve really been trying to work on the last couple of years, to get past convention of head, sax solo, bass solo, out. It seems like because of our repertoire we’ve somehow developed a sound that’s unique, if that’s possible in this music.”
Performing Friday night as part of the Berkeley Arts Festival, the Lost Trio celebrates the release of the group’s fifth album, “Mysterious Toboggan,” on Greenlief’s invaluable label Evander Music. A stellar cast of improvisers will be joining the trio throughout the evening, including Santa Cruz-raised, Brooklyn-based vocalist Sasha Dobson, Nice Guy Trio trumpeter Darren Johnston, Berkeley guitar explorer John Schott, invaluable reed expert Cory Wright, and electronics wizard Tim Perkis. … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: The Face of Another
Sometimes I think there might just be something to the theory of synchronicity (defined by Wikipedia as “the experience of two or more events, that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance”). What else can account for my penning consecutive reviews of films featuring prosthetic fingers?
If not synchronicity, it’s a downright spooky coincidence.
Last week’s film, Rapt, told the tale of a kidnapped man who loses a middle digit to kidnappers. That finger, of course, was not ‘real’ — a stunt digit stood in for the genuine item. In The Face of Another (Tanin no kai), a 1966 psychodrama screening at 8:35 pm on Saturday July 30th as part of Pacific Film Archive’s “Japanese Divas” series, a ‘real’ prosthesis appears, albeit in a much smaller and less significant role.
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara — one of the few Japanese filmmakers to work outside the studio system — The Face of Another stars Kurosawa regular Tatsuya Nakadai as Okuyama, a Japanese salary-man whose face has been horribly disfigured in an industrial accident. The film begins as he pours out his troubles to psychiatrist Hori (Mikijiro Hira), a shrink who dabbles in prostheses as a hobby. How handy! (Cue rimshot.) … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: The Missouri Breaks
By the 1970s, the western was no longer the happy hunting ground William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Roy Rogers had populated during the genre’s first half century. Black and white tales of good guys and bad guys were out, and filmmakers began to turn the genre on its head: now the baddies were frequently the characters the audience empathized with. The white man’s injustice towards Native Americans became a popular theme, and spaghetti westerns even introduced the idea that—gasp!—there might be a place for Marxist dialectics in the Old West.
Arthur Penn’s 1976 feature The Missouri Breaks (screening at Pacific Film Archive at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, June 26th) is a typical example of the American revisionist style. The film stars two of Hollywood’s biggest names—Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando—but neither of their characters are men you’d invite home to meet mother. (Unless, of course, your mother was Joan Crawford.) … Continue reading »
Big Screen Berkeley: Dragnet Girl
Talking pictures came relatively late to Japan: it would be 1930 before a feature-length Japanese talkie was released, and silent films continued to be produced throughout the decade. Yasujiro Ozu’s 1933 drama Dragnet Girl (Hijosen no onna, screening at Pacific Film Archive at 7:00pm on Friday, June 24 as part of the Archive’s Japanese Divas series) is no exception: in fact, it doesn’t even feature a musical score.
For those who can’t abide absolute quiet, silent film accompanist Judith Rosenberg will be tickling the ivories during the screening of this rare title. Dragnet Girl’s power, however, derives from its consistently stunning imagery and distinctive mise-en-scène. Music and dialogue are definitely surplus to requirements.
The story revolves around Joji (Joji Oka, who — at least according to The Internet Movie Database —is still with us at the ripe old age of 107), a washed-up boxer turned hoodlum. Joji’s former glory and current infamy has won him an admirer in the form of impressionable young ‘Lefty’ Hiroshi (Koji Mitsui), who has abandoned his studies and taken up smoking and snooker in order to emulate and ingratiate himself with his hero.
Hiroshi’s foolish lifestyle choices have upset sister Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo, only 16 at the time), a record store employee who opts for traditional kimonos and get-a instead of pencil skirts and high heels. Kazuko appeals to Joji, asking for his help in convincing her brother to straighten up and fly right. … Continue reading »
Berkeley picks from 54th San Francisco Int’l Film Festival
The 1950s may be known as ‘The Golden Age of Television’, but my personal golden age of boob tubery came a little bit later. At the age of eight I was transported from a country with three television channels (all of which seemed to spend as much time broadcasting the test card as anything else) to the outskirts of a major American metropolis blessed with more than twenty stations.
In this land of milk and honey the phrase ‘Movies Till … Continue reading »
Berkeley picks from 54th San Francisco Int’l Film Festival
The clouds never seem to part and the puddles never seem to dry in Foreign Parts, a damp slice of life documentary screening at Pacific Film Archive at 2:15 pm this coming Saturday, April 23, as part of the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival. (The Festival begins on Thursday, April 21 at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre with — appropriately — Beginners, the new film from Thumbsucker director Mike ‘Not the Guy In R.E.M.’ Mills.)
Shot over a two-year period by directors Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, Foreign Parts is a Frederick Wiseman-style slice of life centered on a rough and tumble corner of New York City known as Willets Point. Slated repeatedly for redevelopment, Willets Point is adjacent to Citifield, the recently opened ballpark that serves as home for the New York Mets. Some of the film’s most memorable moments come via stunning long distance shots of the stadium, the opulence and magnificence of which contrast startlingly with the auto shops and junkyards of Willets Point.
Are the locals envious? Not at all: in fact, they’re opposed, or at best indifferent, to Mayor Bloomberg’s plans for the ‘hood, which they consider gifts from the Mayor to his developer buddies. The Point’s tight-knit working-class community (which consists of a potpourri of transients, ex-cons, drug addicts, down and outers, immigrants, and one — count him, one — permanent resident who’s lived there for 76 years) is unimpressed by the glitter of Citifield or Bloombo’s promises of new apartments and amenities. Foreign Parts is an elegiac salute to the stubborn spirit of backwoods urban America, and a reminder that you can still get great deals on windshield repair if you only know where to look. … Continue reading »
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