Does a movie feel different in a museum? The movie itself can't feel, of course, it's just celluloid on a reel, or increasingly, pixels on a screen. Whatever the means of projection, movies have always been shadows dancing in a darkened room, or parking lot. Movies are images of people moving through time, and increasingly, the actual people involved are dead, and the places they seem to move through no longer exist. Even the studios have been torn down and their back lots converted to other, seemingly less ephemeral uses. Movies are ghosts that distract us from the living world, and for the next three weekends you can watch some haunting examples of Modern Cinema at the SF Museum of Modern Art.
Hard to say what constitutes Modern Cinema in the sense of what's mission-appropriate for SFMOMA's sober, cavernous, silver-pinstripe-walled, 270-seat theater, which has recently been refurbished with new seats and even that nod towards bodily fluids, cup-holders. They're still debating popcorn, which I find pretty shocking, as it would inaugurate a decidedly slippery slope. But even in a museum, the feeling seems to be, these are movies, ergo, the pleasure principal is at play perhaps in equal measure to the death drive, not to mention dreams of resurrection and the afterlife. Why not popcorn? And since it's a museum, why not Big Hunk, Abba Zabba, Good-n-Plenty, Jujubes?
Of the 26 programs running Fri.-Sun., Oct. 7-23, eight are devoted to Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose work is currently on view upstairs. His films span the year 2000 to the present. Working backwards, there are six films from the 1970s, nine from the 1960s, four of which are from 1962, and four from the 1950s. None of them are Hollywood product, so don't get your hopes up for Topper or The Unseen, Rebecca or Laura . Those literal ghosts might be too obvious for this crowd. The only U.S. product is Grey Gardens (Sat., Oct. 22, 6 p.m.). The usual foreign suspects are here: Antonioni, Bergman, Bunuel, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, Marker, Polanski, Renoir, and a few mild surprises, nothing too outre .
It goes without saying the films are made by men. Except of course the one by Chantal Ackerman (Sun., Oct. 9, 7:15 p.m.) and the ones by Agnes Varda (Sat., Oct. 8, 1 p.m.), filmmakers I always confuse because they're often the only women included and they both work mainly in French. Rule of thumb, Ackerman is edgier, and Varda, bourgeois. Perhaps coincidentally, the three programmers were men, just as the three marketing people were women, at the press conference. Just saying. There are other female directors to choose from, but maybe they're not all in the bosom of the Criterion Collection, to which the Museum has limited its choices. This intriguing exercise in branding means you can opt to simply buy the DVD, stay home, and read the companion booklet.
Please note, however, 12 of the 26 films will be shown in 35mm, marked in the program in all caps and an exclamation point. I hope I am free the night of Antonioni's L'Avventura (Sat., Oct. 8, 8 p.m.) because the last time I saw it was a long time ago and one of my abiding sorrows is that the Italian cinema of my youth has fallen into oblivion. You might say it haunts me, every time I have to sit through long patches of vague, meandering, perhaps fuzzy shots of people without emotion, who don't move their hands when they speak, don't sound like cellos, aren't willing to kill for love. I'm simple that way, a peasant, really.