PFA Coming Attractions

I’ve had the new September/October Pacific Film Archive schedule for a few days now. I’m finally getting around to telling you about it.

From my point of view, the most interesting series on the schedule is Shakespeare on Screen, running for the entire two months. It contains some obvious choices (Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Olivier’s Henry V, Throne of Blood), and some oddball ones like Hamlet Goes Business and the very strange, Max Reinhardt version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I tend to think of the 1990’s (specifically 1989 through 1999) as the golden age of Shakespeare on film. Curiously, the only title they’re showing from that period is Baz Luhrmann’s gimmicky Romeo + Juliet—a casebook example of how not to set Shakespearean verse in a modern setting. Not being screened is Richard Loncraine’s Richard III—a perfect example of how to do it right.

Also coming up is Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints. You can think of this as the flip side of the Castro’s current series, Blonde Bombshells. Here you can gaze at Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, William Holden in Picnic, Jean-Paul Belmondo in the original (and recently restored) Breathless, and the triple treat: Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity.

For Drawn from Life: The Graphic Novel on Film, the PFA screens movies based on comic books, graphic novels, and the people who create them. Not surprisingly, a lot of these movies were designed for large audiences, although they didn’t always find them. In addition to recent hits Hellboy and Sin City, and older hits like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, they’ve got the 1980 campy remake of Flash Gordon and Robert Altman’s bizarre flop Popeye, as well as the amazing biopic American Splendor.

If that sounds too commercial, they’ve also got Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism, playing all the classics and a few obscurities (and running through December), Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro. A two-night series, Behind the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema will screen Akeelah and the Bee and Hud with filmmakers present. Special events include Yang Bang Xi: The Eight Model Works, Home Movie Day Screening, Safety Last, and the East Bay premiere of the new Metropolis restoration.