San Francisco Indiefest used to hold its Documentary Film Festival (called DocFest for short) in late spring–just after the San Francisco International Film Festival. Now they have it in late summer/early fall, just before Mill Valley. This year, DocFest occupies the Roxie from September 29 through October 10. I haven’t seen any of the films yet (I couldn’t attend the press conference last week), but it looks like an interesting line-up.
Communism, that great savior of humankind that turned into utter disaster, gets examined from three apparently very different perspectives. Judging from the program description, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil still looks fondly at Fidel Castro as it shows how his country is cutting back on the crude. But Luchando, about Cuba’s gay sex trade, probably takes a less enthusiastic point of view. Cowboys & Communists, on the other hand, looks at an American setting up a burger joint in recently-liberated East
Berlin and an unrepentant Communist determined to put him out of business. I can’t even guess its point of view.
Other docs look at deserting soldiers, TV horror movie hosts (remember Creature Features?), and the rise and fall of a rock band. There’s even an expose of Michael Moore called Manufacturing Dissent. And what can I say about a festival screening of a movie already on sale at my local grocery store? I do much of the family shopping at Berkeley’s Monterey Market, the subject of Eat at Bill’s. They sell the DVD at the counter.
And now for something completely different.
Silent filmmakers had so many ways of adding color to their movies that they used the term natural color to describe hues actually captured by the camera–what we today just call color. One of the most extraordinary formats they had involved hand-cut stencils that allowed them to effectively paint detailed colors onto black-and-white prints. Hollywood rarely used this extremely expensive process, reserving it for individual objects in particular scenes–an ambulance’s red cross in one shot of The Big Parade, for instance.
But the French and Italians used stencil color extensively (and before stencils were invented, actual hand-coloring of every print). To my knowledge, the French 1925 version of Cyrano de Bergerac is the only feature film to use stencil coloring throughout. The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum will screen a color, 35mm print of the film on Saturday, September 29. I haven’t seen it, so I have no opinion on the movie as drama, but I suspect it will be beautiful to look at. David Giovacchini and the Ahl-i Nafs will provide musical accompaniment.
Finally, on the weekend of October 28/29, the Cerrito has its last weekly Cerrito Classic with Sweet Smell of Success. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Burt Lancaster’s Broadway noire for me to trust my memory with a wholehearted recommendation. But not by much. Lancaster risked his career by producing this exploration of the seamy side of fame and by playing a truly despicable character. The result, if I recall correctly, is fantastic. Tony Curtis co-stars, from a script by Ernest (North by Northwest) Lehman.
Bayflicks 
