Screen Grabs: Blasting off with Jordan Belson’s mind-expanding cinema

Last week saw the demise at age 90 of Allie Light, the San Francisco documentarian who with late partner Irving Saraf produced, directed, sometimes also edited and wrote decades of significant nonfiction films, winning an Oscar (for 1991’s In the Shadow of the Stars, about the SF Opera Chorus), two Emmys and other laurels en route. Their subject matter was extraordinarily wide-ranging, from mental illness (Dialogues With Madwomen) and clerical activism (The Sermons of Sister Jane) to health issues, crime, education, poverty, folk artists and more, with a frequent emphasis on how U.S. governmental policy impacts the individual.

Another SF-based giant of independent cinema will be honored this weekend with a three-day symposium about his work and influence. “Jordan Belson: COSMOGENESIS” is a co-presentation of San Francisco Cinematheque, BAMPFA and Gray Area that will be held at the latter venue on Mission St. this Fri/26-Sun/28. Belson (1926-2011) was a Chicago-born childhood SF emigre who studied painting in SF Art Institute, then UC Berkeley’s fine arts programs. He was among many young Bay Area artists who attended the “Art in Cinema” series at San Francisco Museum of Art in the post-WW2 years, absorbing foreign and homegrown experimental films that would help them shape a West Coast avant-garde in various media.

He shot fellow UCB grad Christopher Maclaine’s landmark 1953 The End, an anarchic farce reflecting both the Beat and atomic age, though that ill-fated figure’s erratic behavior ended their collaboration soon after. Meanwhile his own interest in animation, light play and projections with live performance began finding expression in “Vortex Concerts” at the California Academy of Science’s planetarium, in conjunction with electronic composers. Taking place in the late 1950s, these events were an obvious progenitor to the psychedelic “light shows” that became omnipresent in the next decade’s countercultural art and commerce.

Belson’s aesthetic was well-suited to that coming era of hippie spirituality, drug experimentation, and sensory overload: Dubbed “Cosmic Cinema” in 1972 by media theorist Gene Youngblood, his plotless, wordless screen abstractions offered visual mind expansion influenced (as the symposium’s description puts it) by “many subjects including yoga, Buddhism, mandalas, Indian holy men, Tibetan mysticism, theosophy, Egyptology, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, Jung, magic, Tantra, alchemy, symbolism, astronomy, Japanese mon design, Arabic patterns, optical phenomena and science imagery.” Like less hyperbolic versions of the “trip” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, they pull you in to “contemplation of the Absolute.” 

Belson said his films were “not meant to be explained, analyzed or understood,” calling them purely “experiential, more like listening to music.” He preferred not to be interviewed, refused to discuss his work’s complicated techniques, and for a long time withdrew most of it from public circulation. So the “Cosmogenesis” event will be very special, as it features twenty or so titles including 16mm and digital preservations. There will also be lectures, spotlights on pioneering local multimedia and the Beat film scene (including a couple Maclaines), a “Listening Room,” and more. For the full schedule, go here.

Not everyone yearns for the transcendental; some gravitate towards the heavy metal. They are advised to head instead this Sat/27 to North Beach’s The Lost Church, where from approximately 3:30 to 10 pm they’ll get the 9th annual edition of the Scumdance Film Festival. Billed as “Like Cannes for dirtbags,” it’s a celebration of underground “bizarro cinema from around the world.” The variously rude, raucous, silly and sometimes sophomoric movies on tap run a gamut from romance gone very wrong (Wet Ingredients, Murder in the Park), to a mock behind-the-scenes extra for a fictitious slasher franchise (Behind the Signal) and a mock anti-sexual-harassment PSA (F.A.S.H.).

Two of the more inventive offerings owe a debt to the surreal boob-tube-culture satire of Too Many Cooks: Grandma’s Pleasure is an ersatz “rediscovered canceled sitcom from the early ’90s” that’s like Married…With Children meets The Greasy Strangler, while Skip Intro turns the living room watch party into a Mobius strip of blurred televisual reality. Not everything here is for yoks: The Ghost That Wouldn’t Die applies B&W noirish cool to its tale of a female rocker whose lust for life is rather literally bloodthirsty.

These and other selections are all shorts of differing length, with just one feature reportedly in the mix this year. But it is a good one: Dead White & Blue from LA-based archivist Mike Davis and his Stag Films is a pastiche retro action-thriller set in Atlanta, where the mayor is about to host a national “crime symposium” before he is abducted. Meanwhile, a paranoid racist cop shoots an unarmed black man in his own home, stirring an investigation and coverup; the aggressively mainstreaming “new K.K.K.” has developed a shrinking machine “for purposes of targeted mass destruction and death; and there are subplots involving Native American reparations, space travel, US military invasions of US cities (timely!), and more.

Davis drew footage from 300 or so public domain titles, adding some fresh footage shot on short ends, and re-dubbing the whole contraption a la Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and Situationist screen pranks. It’s an ingenious editorial stunt whose antic political commentary isn’t all that far from big-budget One Battle After Another, and is frequently very funny to boot. For full Scumdance info, go here.

A few regular new commercial releases of note:

Dead of Winter
We’re back in Fargo country with another folksy female protagonist investigating a messy crime plot in this vehicle for Emma Thompson, on which she was also a producer. She plays Barb, a retiree in Minnesota’s frozen north who ventures out one very cold day to go ice-fishing in honor of her beloved late husband. Getting lost on confusing back roads, she stops for directions at an isolated farmhouse, where the man of the place (Marc Menchaca) acts suspiciously—and there’s blood on the snowy ground, which he curtly explains as “deer.” Soon, however, Barb realizes that he and his sharper-witted wife (Judy Greer) are fentanyl addicts who’ve apparently abducted a terrified young woman (Laurel Marsden) for some nefarious purpose. It is up to our heroine to save the day, which is not going to be easy.

While the accents, setting, and other factors can hardly help but recall Fargo, this isn’t a black comedy like the Coens’ ingenious effort—it’s a more straightforward thriller, one that’s intriguing enough but not especially inventive in either incident (the script is by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb) or style. The solid performances and direction by Brian Kirk (who’s mostly worked on quality TV series to date) maintain sufficient involvement. Yet even at just past 90 minutes, Winter feels a bit overextended, with less pacing urgency than it could have used. Still, those nearly all-white widescreen vistas make a decent-enough movie a pleasure to look at. It opens Thu/25 at area theaters including SF’s Metreon, the Century Daly City, and Emeryville’s AMC Bay Street.

Chain Reactions
Rural terror assumes a different color—and temperature—in this latest from professional fanboy Alexandre O. Philippe, whose prior documentaries have included inquiries into various screen objects of cultish obsession: The Exorcist (Leap of Faith), Alien (Memory), Psycho (78/52), Star Trek (You Can Call Me Bill), Star Wars (The People vs. George Lucas), zombie flicks (Doc of the Dead), etc. Here, he turns his gaze to the now 51-year-old Texas Chainsaw Massacre, an ultra-low-budget independent production that wound up being stupendously successful, and a huge influence on the future course of horror cinema.

Philippe doesn’t interview participants from the original film (director/coscenarist Tobe Hooper passed away in 2017), instead structuring his essayistic tribute around the insights of five successive superfans: Actor-comedian Patton Oswalt, author Stephen King, critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and two active latterday directors (Japan’s Takashi Miike, American Karyn Kusama).

Each recall their memorable first exposure to the film, analyze fine-points of technique, and decode the messages that may or may not lurk beneath its compact, harrowing, alternately realistic and stylized surface. Philippe brings in clips from other movies to contextualize Chainsaw within cinematic history, and additional archival materials to amplify its reflection of the offscreen world at large. It’s a respectful, illuminating homage that won’t really spoil the original for those who somehow haven’t seen it yet, but really does dig under the skin of why it remains so intensely disturbing an experience. (This despite the fact that there’s very little explicit violence or gore—Hooper made you think you were seeing atrocities he sneakily kept just off-screen.) Reactions opens at SF’s Roxie on Fri/26 (https://roxie.com/film/chain-reactions/ ); that night and on Oct. 1 it will also show the 1974 feature (https://roxie.com/film/the-texas-chainsaw-massacre/ ).

Predators

Discomfiting on a whole ‘nother level is this documentary by David Osit. It looks at the impact and legacy of To Catch a Predator, a popular reality/true crime series that ran on NBC from 2004 to 2007. Host Chris Hansen presided over hidden-camera “investigations” in which people were courted online by “decoy” actors pretending to be underage girls and boys, then lured for anticipated sexual acts to “sting houses” where they were recorded being surprised by camera crews, then handed over to phalanxes of police outside.

Needless to say, the ethics were questionable: Of course pedophilia is abhorrent, but how many of these men would have even truly considered acting on their fantasies if not goaded into it by insistent professional trickery? Their repentant pleas for psychiatric help when “caught”—not that any physical contact ever occurred—was edited from broadcasts that often played the situations for “gotcha!” laughs, a la Jackass. Eventually the show was canceled, amidst scandal (at least one perp committed suicide), criticism, and some courts’ refusal to prosecute cases they felt were in violation of entrapment laws.

Yet Hansen is still at it, currently via a company called TruBlu whose “investigative” programs are seen on YouTube. He remains blandly unapologetic about their downside. His producing partner shrugs “I hope we don’t ruin his life” when they lure an 18-year-old high school into an assignation with an imaginary 15-year-old boy—but of course they do, anyway. Hansen may claim some “greater purpose,” yet the primary one seems to be simple, lurid entertainment value (and profit). That same partner pegs the basic appeal when he says “People like to compare themselves to the depraved to feel better about who they are.” However, some former Catch decoy actors and at least one cop feel horribly guilty in retrospect about their involvement, as interviewed here. And that 18-year-old’s mother says “I wish Chris [Hansen] could feel one percent of our pain,” as her son is heard crying in the suburban bedroom he now seldom leaves, having been ejected from school and nearly everything else.

There is never any attempt at understanding where such illicit desires come from, how they might be discouraged or treated—the entire focus is on public shaming and punishment. No one here even has a thought about the possibility of rehabilitation. Worse still than Hughes & co. are a wave of “amateur predator hunters” who’ve surfaced online in recent years, their clickbait strategies even more showy and dubious. These people are repellent opportunists—no matter that some claim they are drawn to this work because they themselves were victimized by predators in childhood. Eventually director Osit admits to the same formative experience. Yet he can’t help feeling some essential humanity is swept under the rug in creating a simplified infotainment “world of good and evil” without nuance, insight, or much apparent justification beyond the pursuit of fame. Predators is powerful, troubling stuff, as discomfiting as any film I’ve seen this year. It opens Fri/26 at the Alamo Drafthouses in SF and Mountain View; Osit will appear in person for a Q&A after screenings on Sat/27 in SF and at the Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin.