16 posts tagged “music”
What's the best music documentary or concert film you've seen?
There are many excellent films, but the best is still Stop Making Sense. I saw it when I was in high
school when it was first released, showed it several times in college, and own the DVD.
There are a couple of special film events in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 9th (tonight). The Mill Valley Film Festival comes to the San Francisco Art Institute with a screening at 7:30 pm of Welcome to Nollywood. The documentary looks at the film industry in Nigeria which only started in the early 90s, but is already the third largest behind Hollywood and Bollywood. Director Jaimie Meltzer (Off the Charts) and producer Henry Rosenthal (The Devil and Daniel Johnson) both live in San Francisco. Michael Fox interviewed Meltzer for SF360.
The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio screens at the Clay Theater at 7:30 followed by a performance by the group and Q&A with filmmaker Agostino Ferrente. The documentary tells story of an effort to save a historic theater by creating an orchestra made up of musicians from all over the world. The tour is being presented by Netflix's Red Envelope Entertainment.
This is one of the best years for silent film in San Francisco in a long time. One the highlights of the San
Francisco International Film Festival was the live performance of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain (there
was also a screening of the Phantom Carriage). Charlie Chaplin's City Lights just was at the Castro. And the San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs through Sunday, July 15th.
It opens Friday at 7 pm with Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg. Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle (who has written about star Norma Shearer in his book Complicated Women) introduces the film. He talked with Silent Film Festival executive director Stacy Wisnia and with artistic director Stephen Salmons on recent podcasts.
Michael Hawley previews the festival at The Evening Class and Max Goldberg for the Bay Guardian and for SF360. I'll just mention the free More Amazing Tales from the Archives program with Rob Stone of the UCLA Film at 10:30 am on Sunday. My photos from last year.
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival will be showing His People with a live jazz score by Paul Shapiro at 7:30 pm on July 21st at the Castro..
Gypsy Caravan director Jasmine Dellal will do a Q&A after the 7 pm and 9:40 pm shows at the Rafael on Friday, July 6th, the 4:50 pm Saturday, July 7th show at the Shattuck and the 7 pm show at the Lumiere. Voices of Roma will present live music and a discussion on Friday, July 6th at the 7 pm Lumiere and the Saturday, July 7th show at 7:10 pm at the Shattuck.
I saw the documentary last fall at a San Francisco Film Society screening and bought the band's wonderful CD (they are touring).
Also tonight on most PBS stations and online later this week is the last episode of this season of Frontline/World (though they will be posting a new story or photo essay each week this summer - subscribe to the newsletter to get updates).
Update: Richard Wong will be at the 7:30 pm & 10 pm shows on Friday, June 29th & Saturday June, 30th.
It will be opening in New York City on July 6th at The Quad Cinemas at 34 W. 13th St and in LA in August. Hopefully, it will be the sleeper indie hit of the summer (they already have an ad promoting repeat viewings) and expand to other cities.
They are promoting Colma on myspace with profiles of characters from the film including Maribel, Billy, and Rodel (HP Mendoza who also has a profile plays him). The film is also a new, shorter cut which Wong and Mendoza talk about in this interview.
More photos from the premiere at the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival where it won a special jury award (they did the trailer for this year's fest). RIchard Wong was also a finalist for the Independent Spirit Someone to Watch Award.
It took six years and $150,000 (half donated by Steven Soderbergh) was spent to get the music rights. They still weren't able to get the rights to Unforgettable by Dinah Washington which played during the closing of the film (and is still listed in the closing credits - you can buy it on itunes for 99 cents and bring your ipod to the theater).
Killer of Sheep is playing in theaters in some cities through the fall. It is at the Castro and Rafael through Thursday. It will continue through at least next week at the Shattuck in Berkeley. It will be out on DVD along with My Brothers Wedding and some short films on November 13th, but see it in a theater if you can. Hopefully, his 1990 film, To Sleep with Anger, will also soon be available again on DVD.
Interview with Burnett, another interview, interview with links at bottom (though some don't work)
Review and story from NPR.
Review by J. Hoberman
More reviews and articles.
The satellite screenings continue this year with Fabricating Tom Zé at El Rio tonight (tickets are only $5). Tom Zé says at the beginning of the documentary that concerts are boring. His performances and this documentary on him are anything but boring. Zé is part of the Tropicália movement in Brazil (Carlos Basuldo talked about Tropicália at the SF Art Institute in January - scroll down on their podcast page to listen to it). NPR profiled Zé last year. There won't Ze's traditional five encores tonight, but you can get some of his music which is available from David Byrne's Luka Bop label.
Although El Rio is mostly a music venue, they do show films including the Hub Collective's free Televising the Revolution Radical Film Series which takes play on the fourth Tuesday of every month (the next is on May 22nd at 8 pm).
Also, tonight through Thursday, May 3rd, films from Rob Nilsson's Nine@Night series will be shown in Justin Herman Plaza starting at 7 pm. Also, four of his films will be available for a limited time on Jaman starting on May 7th (I'll write more about the SFIFF Jaman films soon).
There also are two screenings of Jon Else's Wonders are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic at 7 pm and 9:30 pm on Sunday, May 6th at Intersection for the Arts (tickets are $5 at the door). Some photos from Sunday's Castro screening. Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: the Life and Death of People's Temple which was shown at Intersection last year was on PBS last month and is now out on DVD.
Notes to a Toon Underground is a program of animated films accompanied by 11 musician including Jason Lytle (Grandaddy) and Jamie Stewart and Caralee McElroy (Xiu Xiu). It takes place at the Castro on Saturday, May 5th at 8:30 pm. Kimberly Chun writes in the Guardian about animator Kelly Sears.
When the film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, Maddin wrote about the over 1800 people who were going to see it :
There are many more music related films and events, but I'll just mention the delightful Vitus which plays on Sunday, May 5th at noon at the Clay (the video above is an interview with the director and star).I hope against hope I may quell all their trepidation. Silent film is arid, they fear. Silent film is corny, they fear. Silent film is slow, stale and black & white, they fear. The possibility of a glute-deadening boredom is what preys on their minds most.
So I have recruited allies for what I like to call “boredom insurance”: live orchestral accompaniment (always good for securing the audience’s goodwill) playing an original wall-to-wall score; a narrator of exquisite Scanditalian flutiness in the person of Isabella Rossellini; three Foley artists producing more than 600 live sound effects; and an authentic castrato from Winnipeg who can produce the most unearthly and unlikely warblings from within his roughly hewn, adult and completely hairless torso.All of them will be visible to the audience as silhouettes feverishly working to cast out their night sabbath spells from the stage directly in front of the unspooling images of my misbegotten film. I’m counting on a supernatural fusion of these live elements and the ghostly projections to supply the spark of life that will re-animate silent film once and for all and make believers of the skeptics. Please pray for my soul!
Jonathan Lethem is one of the most interesting writers working today both for his work and his ideas.
In the February issue of Harper's, he wrote an essay, The Ecstacy of Influence, and then put some of
those ideas into practice with the The Promiscuous Materials Project which gave the non-exclusive rights
to adapt (for a dollar) nearly 20 of his stories as well as lyrics which could be used in songs for free. Several
films are being made and a number of songs have been recorded.
He discussed it on Open Source Radio and the Leonard Lopate Show.
On May 15th, he'll go beyond his previous experiment and select a director to grant a free film option for his new novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, which comes out on Tuesday (his tour begins March 15th in Chicago and he'll be in the bay area in mid-April).
Then five years after the film's debut, all ancillary rights to the film & novel ("anyone who cared to could make any number of other kinds of artwork based on the novel’s story and characters, or the film’s: a play, a television series, a comic book, a theme park ride, an opera – or even a sequel film or novel featuring the same characters. For that matter, they can remake the film with another script and new actors") will go into the public domain.
Details are at www.jonathanlethem.com/freelove.html He writes (I added links):
Why?
Lately I’ve become fitful about some of the typical ways art is commodified. Despite making my living (mostly) by licensing my own copyrights, I found myself questioning some of the particular ways such rights are transacted, and even some of the premises underlying what’s called intellectual property.I read a lot of Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan,
who convinced me that technological progress – and globalization – made this a particularly contemporary issue.I also read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which persuaded me, paradoxically, that these issues are eternal ones, deeply embedded in the impulse to make any kind of art in the first place.
I came away with the sense that artists ought to engage these questions directly, rather than leaving it entirely for corporations (on one side) and public advocates (on the other) to hash out.
I also realized that sometimes giving things away – things that are usually seen to have an important and intrinsic ‘value’, like a film option – already felt like a meaningful part of what I do. I wanted to do more of it.
I was planning on buying the book (from a local bookstore, not amazon, but that is all that works now with vox), but now I'll definately see the film when it comes out. I hope this will inspire other writers (and creative people).
You can also learn more about these issues at Creative Commons.
More on Lethem at his website. Lethem in Landscape hasn't been updated in years, but it still has some good links (I contributed some).
