I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
Dolly said that when she was a girl she'd liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he'd died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us—it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields--I've heard Papa clear as day.
—The Glass Harp
No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.
It was right that I had gone to Europe, if only because I could look again with wonder. Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it. Going to Europe was like that. It was a bridge of childhood, one that led over the seas and through the forests straight into my imagination's earliest landscapes. One way or another I had gone to a good many places, from Mexico to Maine, and then to think I had to go all the way to Europe to go back to my hometown, my fire and room where stories and legends seemed always to live beyond the limits of our town. And that is where the legends were: in the harp, the castle, the rustling of the swans.
—Local Color
Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.
I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco and a color rather like tobacco spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled with brown age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom; it was still a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.
—Breakfast At Tiffany's
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.
"I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat."
—In Cold Blood Perry Smith
Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched.
Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather!" The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend.
—A Christmas Memory
"Son, I'd say you were going at it the wrong end first," said the Judge, turning up his coat-collar. "How could you care about one girl? Have you ever cared about one leaf?"
Riley, listening to the wildcat with an itchy hunter's look, snatched at the leaves blowing about us like midnight butterflies; alive, fluttering as though to escape and fly, one stayed trapped between his fingers. The Judge, too: he caught a leaf; and it was worth more in his hand than in Riley's. Pressing it mildly against his cheek, he distantly said, "We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed--begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it--I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life."
Thursday October 8, 2009 - Sunday October 18, 2009
Smith Rafael Film Center
1118 Fourth Street
San Rafael, California 94901
The California Film Institute celebrates and promotes film by presenting the annual Mill Valley Film Festival, exhibiting film year-round at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center and building the next generation of filmmakers and audiences through CFI Outreach.
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Website: http://cafilm.org
Mustache Cinema presents a George Kuchar Triple Threat
Price:
Free
When:
Wednesday Oct 7 (7pm)
Where:
El Rio
3158 Mission St
415.282.3325
It's never too late to expose yourself to the "cinematic cesspool" of local gems, the Kuchar brothers (that's their phrase, by the way). George Kuchar, along with his brother Mike, are tireless film making machines and underground cinema icons who have been turning out hysteric, homemade melodramas since the early '60s. Tonight, the dashingly named Mustache Cinema screens George's early 16mm trilogy Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), Eclipse Of The Sun Virgin (1967), and Knocturne (1968). Come for the movies; stay for the free facial hair.
Pink Cinema Revolution: Radical Films of Koji Wakamatsu
when: Thursday Oct 8
where:
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
(701 Mission St
415.978.2787)
price: $8 per screening
"Underground films with a sexy touch," is how director Koji Wakamatsu once described — albeit with much understatement — his late '60s and early '70s output. Extreme in form (the French New Wave was an influence) as well as in content (rape and violent crime are common occurrences), Wakamatsu's films capture the heady, reckless mix of libidinal release and revolutionary rhetoric that defined the largely student-led, radical left movements of the period. Although released as soft-core pinku eiga, films such as Violated Angels (1967) and Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) also resonate deeply as responses to the political climate of late '60s Japan, something explored much more explicitly and seriously in Wakamatsu's latest film, the docu-drama United Red Army, which this essential retrospective closes with. - Matt Sussman
My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure: Films of Robert Beavers - Program I
Robert Beavers in person
Screening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (map)
Presented in collaboration with the Pacific Film Archive & the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The films of Robert Beavers are exceptional for their visual beauty, aural texture and depth of emotional expression. Born in 1949 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Beavers began to make films in the mid-sixties in New York City. By the end of that decade, he had relocated to Europe with fellow American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, who would be his lifelong companion until Markopoulos’ death in 1992. The majority of Beavers’ films were shot in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, Switzerland and Greece. Between 1994 and 2002, the artist involved himself in re-editing the images and creating new soundtracks for his eighteen-film cycle, entitled My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure. Beavers’ films occupy a noble place within the history of avant-garde film, positioned at the intersection of structural and lyrical filmmaking traditions. They seem to embody the ideals of the Renaissance in their fascination with perception, psychology, literature, the natural world, architectural space, musical phrasing and aesthetic beauty. The act of making things by hand is central to Beavers’ cinema, as are the notions of self-reflexivity and portraiture.
AMOR, uses themes of cutting and sewing as metaphors. Cloth is cut and fabric is sewn, shrubs are trimmed and hedges form majestic garden archways and a male figure claps his hands as if to signal a sync-cue on which there is a visual cut. Central to this work are the complex emotions surrounding love, separation and the metonymic twinning of objects, including that of edited image and sutured sound. Work Done, transports the viewer to a variety of times and places. Old-world customs (ice blocks used for refrigeration, the ancient craft of book binding and the preparation of pig’s blood pancakes) are juxtaposed with contemporary urban scenes. Color filters heighten the contrast between the natural and man-made worlds. Shot in Rome, The Hedge Theater, is inspired by the Baroque architecture and stone carvings of Francesco Borromini and St. Martin and the Beggar, a painting by the Sienese artist Stefano di Giovanni (more commonly known as il Sassetta). Beavers contrasts the sensuous softness of winter light with the lush green growth brought by spring rains. Each shot and each source of sound is steeped in meaning and placed within the film’s structure to build a poetic relationship between sound and image. The program concludes with Beavers’ most recent film, Pitcher of Colored Light, a loving portrait of his mother depicted in her Massachusetts home and garden, shot across several seasons.
This long-awaited presentation of Robert Beavers’ film cycle has been organized by the Pacific Film Archive in partnership with San Francisco Cinematheque and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is presented with the generous support of the San Francisco Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Consulate General of Switzerland
Price: SF Cinematheque, BAM/PFA, & SFMOMA members: $7 / non-members: $10
When: Thursday Oct 8 (7–9pm)
Where: San Francisco Cinematheque
145 Ninth St, Suite 240
415.552.1990
Eyes Upside Down: P. Adams Sitney on Beavers, Brakhage & Sonbert
P. Adams Sitney in person
Screening at the California College of the Arts (map)
Writing and lecturing on film since the early 1960s (and presently Professor of Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University), P. Adams Sitney stands as one of avant-garde cinema’s most passionate and eloquent theorists and critics. His Visionary Film, published in 1974, drew deeply from fields of poetry and literature in discussing the works of Anger, Brakhage, Deren, Markopoulos and others. The tome remains a classic of critical insight on the field. His latest work, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, examines the continued thread of Emersonian poetics in the American avant-garde canon and incorporates in-depth discussions of the works of many post–Visionary Film artists, including Abigail Child, Su Friedrich, Andrew Noren and Warren Sonbert. Appearing in person at Cinematheque for the first time in over a decade, Sitney will discuss his latest book, accompanied by screenings of Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation #2: Mesa Verde, Robert Beavers’ Amor and Warren Sonbert’s Rude Awakening.
Price: members: $5 / non-members: $10/ CCA students & faculty: free
When: Sunday Oct 11 (5–7pm)
Where: San Francisco Cinematheque
145 Ninth St, Suite 240
415.552.1990
Hollis Frampton: Zorns Lemma & A Lecture
Screening at the McBean Theater at the Exploratorium (map)
Introduced by Michael Zryd. Presented in association with Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts Series
In his drive to explore and catalog the possibilities and parameters of cinematic representation, Hollis Frampton delighted in paradox, frequently creating complex conceptual structures that pitted the precision of language against the abstraction and excess of photographic representation. Visiting Frampton scholar Michael Zryd of York University, Toronto, presents two of Frampton’s most significant cinematic propositions. Taking the projected white rectangle as a maximalist basis of all cinema, A Lecture evokes a profound consideration of cinematic “aboutness” and stands as one of the cinema’s most significant challenges to a reconceptualization of the art form, while his 1970 masterpiece, Zorns Lemma -- described by Peter Gidal as “the attempt to break down the authority of language” -- leads viewers away from logical and linguistic order into an exhilarating world of imagery, color and light.
The original audio recording of A Lecture has been preserved and made available for this event by kind permission of the Harvard Film Archive.
Price: members: $5 / non-members: $10
When: Thursday Oct 29 (7:30–9:30pm)
Where: San Francisco Cinematheque
145 Ninth St, Suite 240
415.552.1990
Film Festival at the Smith Rafael Film Center 
Mustache Cinema presents a George Kuchar Triple Threat
My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure: Films of Robert Beavers - Program I 
Eyes Upside Down: P. Adams Sitney on Beavers, Brakhage & Sonbert
Hollis Frampton: Zorns Lemma & A Lecture