A Tribute to the San Francisco International Film Festival at 50
March 2, 2007 - April 21, 2007
Now that practically every city you can think of has its own film festival, it may be a surprise to realize that fifty years ago, the great festivals in Venice, Cannes, and Berlin had no American counterpart. In the late fifties, Irving "Bud" Levin, founder of the San Francisco International Film Festival, set out to change that. "I took on the job of exposing the people of San Francisco to movies as an art form," he later said, and ever since its debut in December 1957—which included premieres of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and Michelangelo Antonioni's Il grido (featured at PFA this season in our Antonioni retrospective—the festival has helped make San Francisco one of the world's great cities for cinema. Albert Johnson (later a beloved UC Berkeley professor and founder of PFA's long-running Third World Cinema series) became the festival's program director in 1965, hosting many special tributes to filmmakers and performers, a widely imitated format. With the creative leadership of several subsequent programmers, including Peter Scarlet, artistic director during the eighties and nineties, and Linda Blackaby, current director of programming, the festival has continued to bring the best of world film to the Bay Area. PFA has been part of it all as the festival's East Bay venue since 1984. As the festival prepares to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary—the first in the Americas to reach that landmark—we present this selection of past festival films, including gems from the PFA Collection, to highlight the festival's illustrious history and enjoy its discoveries all over again. The Fiftieth San Francisco International Film Festival plays at PFA April 27 through May 10.
Friday, March 2, 2007
7:00 p.m. Shadows
Time never caught up with John Cassavetes’s first film; it’s still ten minutes from now, inherently hip, mordantly funny, terribly sad, and very New York.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
2:00 p.m. Aparajito
The second film in Satyajit Ray’s beloved Apu Trilogy. “Graceful, insightful, and moving.”—S.F. Chronicle. “The characterization of Apu lies in the heart of modern India.”—SFIFF
Friday, March 9, 2007
9:25 p.m. The Cool World
Shirley Clarke’s jazz-infused feature about Harlem youth is “sharp, restless, whiplike.”—Variety. With Bruce Baillie’s Castro Street.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
7:30 p.m. I Am Cuba
Made in 1962 as an act of Soviet-Cuban friendship, and written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, this is an extraordinary example of "pure" cinema in the service of politics. "A deliriously one-of-a-kind movie, wildly schizophrenic in its bizarre mix of Slavic solemnity and Latin sensuality."—Telluride Film Festival
Sunday, March 25, 2007
2:00 p.m. Ivan’s Childhood
Lyrical and brutal by turns, the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature tells of a child's experiences during WWII.
Friday, March 30, 2007
9:15 p.m. Medium Cool
Haskell Wexler audaciously set a romance against the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, filmed documentary style. "Intensely American in its images and its ambition, it is an exciting piece of work that must be seen by anyone who cares about the development of modern movies."—Newsweek
Saturday, March 31, 2007
8:40 p.m. A Summer’s Tale
Eric Rohmer’s film, set at a coastal resort in Brittany, is “light, wistful, discreetly sexy . . . The movie draws you into a romantic quadrangle in which the emotional climate is as subtle and shifting as life itself.”—N.Y. Times
Sunday, April 8, 2007
2:00 p.m. Seasons of Arthur Peleshian
Peleshian's three tone-poems The Four Seasons, In the Beginning, and We offer some of the most exciting photography and montage craftsmanship you'll ever see, while illuminating life in his native Armenia.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
3:30 p.m. Pastorale
In this exquisite film by Georgian director Otar Iosseliani, a string quartet’s visit to a small village is treated with the gentle satire usually associated with the Czech New Wave.
Friday, April 13, 2007
7:00 p.m. The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun
The last film from Senegal’s Djibril Diop Mambéty, who created a vibrant genre—modern-day urban folklore—to look at a changing Africa. With Mambéty’s Le franc.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
6:30 p.m. On the Beat
When everyone behaves correctly, being a Beijing cop isn’t much fun. Ning Ying’s sly satire on Chinese bureaucracy mid-’90s style.
Friday, April 20, 2007
7:00 p.m. The Match Factory Girl
Aki Kaurismäki’s grimly funny gender parable is also actress Kati Outinen’s finest moment. She delivers a “beautiful, unsentimental performance (as a) deeply realized and affecting character.”—N.Y. Times
Friday, April 20, 2007
8:30 p.m. The Firemen’s Ball
Milos Forman’s Czech New Wave comedy had the censors scratching their pates over hidden meanings in memorable set pieces like the Mystery of the Missing Headcheese. “A poignant, hilarious movie in a rare genre, a tragicomedy of old age.”—Raymond Durgnat
Saturday, April 21, 2007
6:30 p.m. The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On
From Japan's Kazuo Hara, one of the most provocative documentaries ever made follows a man obsessed with finding the truth about atrocities in the Pacific jungles of WWII.
Curated by Susan Oxtoby.
PFA wishes to thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with this series: Linda Blackaby and Miguel Pendás, San Francisco International Film Festival; Todd Wiener, UCLA Film & Television Archive; Brian Meacham, Academy Film Archive; Vladimir Opela and Karel Zima, Narodni Filmovy Archiv; and Christophe Musitelli, Consulate General of France, San Francisco.
Archival and restored prints are presented with support from the Packard Humanities Institute.
