Frako Loden's 2018 Eyes

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2018. An index of participants can be found here. 

Five-time IOHTE contributor Frako Loden is an educator and writer, at www.documentary.org, Eat Drink Films and elsewhere.

1. The year-long Ingmar Bergman centenary program at Pacific Film Archive. I barely attended it—concentrating mostly on the remarkable 1940s films—but it spurred me to watch all the Bergman DVDs I've collected and never watched. I was astonished by my virgin viewings of Winter Light and the long-form version of Fanny and Alexander.

Le Trou screen capture from Cohen Media DVD of My Journey Through French Cinema

2. The Jacques Becker retrospective, also at Pacific Film Archive. I did a completely inadequate writeup for it—I've still only touched the surface of this French master's genius and look forward to repeat screenings. I'm grateful for the 20-minute analysis of Becker's work in Bertrand Tavernier's My Journey Through French Cinema, a masterwork in its own right.

3. The "Documenting Vietnam" series at PFA. The brief Whitesburg Epic (Appalshop, 1971) questions the citizens of a small Appalachian town, suggesting that young people with nothing to do go to war, especially when the town thinks that it's a good idea. The grueling Interviewswith My Lai Veterans (Joseph Strick, 1970) lays bare the toll on five young soldiers forbidden to talk about their experience of this pivotal civilian massacre. Frederick Wiseman's 1971 Basic Training shows how individual personalities and independent thinking are erased during the prelude to sending these boys off to war. Other documentaries were even more brutal and timely: Peter Gessner's 1966 Time of the Locust and the Winterfilm Collective's 1972 Winter Soldier. The latter documents a speak-in organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit, as one bearded and longhaired veteran after another, GIs and officers alike, testify to the cruelty and dehumanization of their fellow soldiers.

Saga of Gösta Berling image from San Francisco Silent Film Festival

4. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which for over 20 years has stayed at the pinnacle of the local film-festival pantheon with its attention to the best prints and brilliant live musical accompaniment. After its five-day run this summer, scenes from the French Lighthouse Keepers (Jean Grémillon, 1929) and the Swedish Saga of Gösta Berling (Mauritz Stiller, 1924) still play in my head. Even more recently, the December Day of Silents continued to astonish with Jean Epstein's 1923 Coeur Fidèle and my introduction to the young Beatrice Lillie in Sam Taylor's 1926 farce Exit Smiling.

5. Wendell B. Harris, Jr.'s 1989 Chameleon Street at SFMOMA's "Modern Cinema: Black Powers" series. What an amazing film! It really hasn't dated in its themes, techniques or cultural references. There are mentions of "black Barbie," obsession with Marvel Comics ("my Thor voice"), Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and Edith Piaf. It ends with a re-telling of the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which is no different from the lyrics of the song "The Snake" that Donald Trump likes to repeat in speeches to his base. The film is based on the true story of Detroiter William Douglas Street, Jr. (played by Harris himself), a con man and impersonator who over the years pretended to be a Time magazine reporter, surgeon and civil rights attorney. At the beginning of the film, a psychiatrist notes Street's "complementarity": the ability to inhabit whatever persona someone else wants him to be. He knows all the tricks of being something that he isn't. It's a way of getting back at, or simply surviving in, the white world that won't let him do things legitimately. He has to be a trickster, a con artist. It's a major form of code switching. He doesn't just use his "white voice" (like in Sorry to Bother You)—he uses a kind of "white self," or at least a black self that doesn't threaten the white powers that be and that gives him entrée into their circles of privilege.

Personal Problems screen capture from Kino DVD

6. Bill Gunn's 1980 Personal Problems at the Alamo Drafthouse, adapted from an idea by writer Ishmael Reed (who at the Q&A established himself as the most righteously curmudgeonly guy in the world, even managing to slag James Baldwin). This film, by the director of Ganja and Hess, was considered lost because it was never aired on public TV as planned. Now restored and starring culinary anthropologist and writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who in a later career celebrated Gullah food and culture, we can see Gunn's influence on Spike Lee's films in its inspired improvisations and confrontations between aggrieved and angry people. Perhaps more than that, it's a rare, deeply humane look at the private lives of black people.