Coming Attractions

Sorry I’ve been ignoring all of you lately. A few interesting items:
We all know that Bullitt, Harold and Maude, and Vertigo were shot in the Bay Area. So were a lot of silent films. On Tuesday, September 9, Silent Film Festival Artistic Director Stephen Salmons will discuss locally-shot silent pictures in an event hosted by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society and entitled The Celluloid Era: Early Filmmaking in San Francisco. He’ll start with Eadweard Muybridge’s early experiments and work his way through the Essanay Film Company, Chaplin’s Niles’ year, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, and other pictures from the classic to the deservedly forgotten (but still of historical interest).
There will, of course, be clips, with Bruce Loeb providing piano accompaniment. David Kiehn, manager of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, also will speak.
The event starts at 7:30 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco’s Kanbar Hall.
Farther on and with less details, the CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival will at the Brava Theater Center Oct. 15-17. The schedule is yet to be announced.
Have you seen the new Red Vic schedule? No, don’t bother checking it online. As I write this it’s not up yet (which is kind of weird because I suspect it exists on a computer before it’s printed). The one really cool rarity is The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, the only Dr. Seuss feature film made during his lifetime, and as creative, visually daring, and funny as any kid’s fantasy ever to come out of Hollywood. It’s playing October 4.
The new Pacific Film Archive schedule is both in print and online, and I should have written about it earlier. This is an auteurist schedule, with series focusing on the early films of Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, and David Lean. Three less well-known filmmakers also get their own series: Jia Zhangke, Jean Eustache, and Ning Ying. If you’re in no mood to worship masters, there’s Campus Connections, and Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking. That last one promises “Classics by masters from Eisenstein to Tarkovsky; little-seen genre gems; fabulously kitschy relics of the Soviet era…” One-shot events include Home Movie Day, a screening of Ghost World, and something called An Election Year Halloween: The Werewolf of Washington.