Can this pastime be saved?
Taking swings at Mel Gibson, timid investors, and the shrinking screen, a distinguished panel ponders whether film festivals are really our last, best hope for the cinema

HAVE MOVIES REALLY become so small that they can fit into 19-inch boxes? Do they like the feel of a plasma screen? The cinema moved from the art house to your house sometime in the past few decades, but that doesn't mean it's happy about it. Every spring in San Francisco, as reliably as Barry Bonds, film busts out, courtesy of the quadruple threat of San Francisco IndieFest and the S.F. International Asian American Film Festival, followed by the S.F. International Film Festival and the S.F. International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. You'd be right if you wondered whether the proliferation of film festivals in San Francisco (those four biggies only scratch the surface of the week-by-week offerings) makes people tired of going to the movies, but you'd be wrong if you assumed the answer was an easy yes. Single-screen movie houses are dying, but film festivals seem to keep rising in their ashes as alternative distribution sources for an art that won't let anyone say "Wrap."

As the S.F. International Film Festival was approaching, we gathered a panel at B. Ruby Rich's San Francisco home to talk about the cinema – where it's going, where it's been, and what the idea of an international film festival means in the year 2004. Associate arts editor Johnny Ray Huston and senior arts editor Susan Gerhard posed questions to S.F. International Film Festival guest programmer Roger Garcia, Bay Guardian and beyond contributor Rich – who's giving the festival's "State of Cinema" address this year – as well as veteran filmmaker and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism documentary program director Jon Else, who's receiving the festival's Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award. Else's head-turning 1980 film, The Day after Trinity, screens during the festival.

Bay Guardian: It seems to me we can't talk about the state of cinema without talking about the state of the world. Jon, I wondered if you could help with that question since the festival is showing your film about the making of the atomic bomb. How does it feel to revisit The Day after Trinity now, after almost 25 years?

Jon Else: When we were making The Day after Trinity, we were psychologically still in the war in Vietnam. In some ways here we are again. I think there has been a national forgetfulness about nuclear weapons that is eerily reversing itself now. Here we are with North Korea, and with chunks of plutonium floating around Europe and Syria and Iran, and with the Bush administration working to develop new small weapons. Where it's all linked for me is that I'm doing a new film about nuclear weapons through John Adams and Peter Sellars, who're doing an opera about Oppenheimer and Teller and the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. I'm trying to follow them in the course of making this new opera. Every generation needs its own retelling of the new nuclear creation story. I had my go at it; Sellars and Adams are about to have theirs. The nuclear predicament has worsened. Which makes it appropriate and timely for them to have a go.

It's funny watching The Day after Trinity now because for me – and maybe this is true for all filmmakers – it feels clunky and old-fashioned. It feels like a 19th-century film. But it still works. We happened to be at the right place at the right time: we happened to be at a moment in history when the development of that weapon, the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was far enough behind that the people who had concocted it could think and talk about it. But today we're not so far away. It's too late; we couldn't make that film now. Those people are all gone – to where physicists go.... I think the people who're making weapons now aren't like the people in The Day after Trinity. I don't think they're people who've read romantic poetry and studied the classics in Greek and wrestle with moral demons at four in the morning. I think the people who were cooking up bunker busters in Livermore and Los Alamos probably don't quote from the Bhagavad Gita. To say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing would betray my sentiments.

B. Ruby Rich: You've already betrayed your sentiments.

BG: You're saying when you look back on it, it seems clunky, a "19th-century" film. Have film festivals sped up the revolution in terms of the presentation and audience appeal of documentaries?

BRR: Only recently, during the past decade or so, has there been a real theatrical opening for documentary. Before that, the place where you saw documentaries was in film festivals. If you go all the way back to the '70s, maybe one documentary a year would make it into a movie theater. I.F. Stone's Weekly was the first one that I know of that made it into the movie theaters.

JE: It was like one a year.

BRR: One a year. Jill Godmillow got one – whoever was hooked up or really determined. Where documentaries first appeared was on public television as it was then, in universities as they were then, or at film festivals. Film festivals were key to the development of documentaries. The vestigial evidence of that is the structure of Sundance: they give equal priority to documentary and narrative film because at the time that Sundance became Sundance, in the late '80s, there was nowhere else to see these docs.

People overlook the way the Sundance Film Festival kept that place for docs. And I think that has also been really important here in San Francisco with its festival – given how important San Francisco is as a location for documentaries, the fact that the S.F. International Film Festival started the Golden Gate Awards and shows international documentaries, which Sundance has only just gotten around to.

BG: Are film festivals correctives?

JE: For me as a documentary filmmaker, there's just no question that the festivals are the Mother Church, especially as public television outside of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and the new documentary strands are more and more marginal to innovative documentary, and as really courageous documentaries moved away from PBS to wherever they went to – to HBO, or ... The center, the solid place that you could always return and pretty much understand that you're seeing the hot stuff, was Sundance, and maybe Toronto and here and New York but mainly Sundance.

RG: Did it help theatrical distribution possibilities to show it at festivals?

JE: At least until very recently, Sundance oddly wasn't a market for documentaries. There wasn't that wild stuff going on with the bidding wars, $4 million 2 a.m. meetings that you can see around.

RG: But I think that's going to change now because Bowling for Columbine, etc., made such a lot of money at the box office that people are now coming and looking at documentaries, and they're getting to be, at least some of them, releasable theatrically.

JE: There are catches in the funding system though. Documentaries in general aren't an investor-driven art in an investor-driven industry. You aren't going to find half a dozen orthodontists to put up four million to do a Columbine.

BRR: On the other hand, ITVS, which has become one of the major alternative funders of documentaries, is also in San Francisco. And they've increasingly gotten their films into film festivals. Chisholm '72 – Unbought and Unbossed is playing the S.F. International. It's fascinating to look at in the year of a prevalent presidential campaign – to see Shirley Chisholm in 1972 running for president, an African American woman whom most younger people don't even know. Festivals have opened up a space for documentaries and foreign film that wasn't there before.

I think festivals have become more important in direct relation to the expansion of "home entertainment." As more and more people have video and as more and more people have DVDs, how do you get them out of the house to go to movies? One of the ways you do that is turn the film into events the way that dance or music or theater are events. And I think you do that by having film festivals.

BG: In this year's San Francisco international festival, there seems to be a move away from getting premieres and a move toward getting films audiences may want to see – regardless of whether they had already been seen in New York City or Toronto or Cannes.

RG: It's partly a function of the fact that there are so many festivals nowadays, and the timing of them is always quite critical. April and May are particularly busy times. I think that significant festivals need to have premieres of work in their areas. You wouldn't show a film in the San Francisco International Film Festival which was perhaps shown here last month. You have to at least have a San Francisco premiere or a New York premiere or whatever. So, to some extent, that does determine some of the films you can get. And obviously if you're a filmmaker, there are certain film festivals in the world that you want to premiere your film at. And those are the ones where you get the maximum exposure. I subscribe to the concept of the wholesale festival and the retail festival: There are the wholesale festivals, essentially Cannes, Berlin, and Venice, that get the major premieres. And then there are the retail festivals, of which there are some very important ones, including San Francisco, which draw from major films that have premiered at the major three film festivals, as well as the work they seek out themselves.

BRR: You know Toronto used to be called "the festival of festivals" because they showed films that were shown in other festivals, but that changed and it became the Toronto International Film Festival because they were no longer only taking films that were in other film festivals. They began doing world premieres.

RG: When I ran the Hong Kong International Film Festival, we were to some extent "a festival of festivals" as well, and we would draw things from other festivals. That was a long time ago, and the whole structure of getting films at that time was different from now. I'm talking about the late '70s, early '80s. Then I would be able to phone Satyajit Ray, or phone Nagisa Oshima, and be able to say, "I would love to show your film in the festival," and I would get the film. But nowadays you have to go through this whole phalanx of distributors, people, and often the director doesn't have a say in where his film shows.

BG: What about this notion of film festivals as alternative distribution networks? A lot of companies at this point will treat smaller foreign films almost as a lead-in to the DVD release of the film here in the United States. I would hope the proliferation of festivals would help broaden the way people are thinking about what films they would like to see, period – whether they're going to the theater or not.

BRR: I think one of the dirty secrets about American independent films is that not only are American independents becoming more commercial – as in "Indiewood," or the way to get your three-picture deal – but also I think that there's a way in which American independent film took up the theatrical space that used to be available to films from other countries. It took up the foreign art-film space. And then Americans who don't like to watch subtitles anyway say, "Well, good – we can get sex and exoticism in this film from somebody who went to NYU that speaks English."

RG: That's interesting because I was going to say that the rise of film festivals seems to be commensurate with the decline or the shrinking of the art house film-distribution scene and maybe the college film circuit in the United States. As those have shrunk or declined, we have had at the same time all of these film festivals that have been popping up in god knows where and in a way taking their place. As Ruby was saying, home entertainment has become more important, and it's particularly important in the United States. Homes here can be larger than other places in the world, so you can have big-screen projection TVs and things like that. If I'd had a big-screen projection TV in my apartment in Hong Kong before, it would probably fill up the whole wall, and I would have to sit three feet away from the screen! But it's true that the home entertainment, DVDs in particular, and film festivals have replaced the art-house circuit and the college circuit.

JE: Now people usually watch films alone. That's one of the things that worries me. When I was going to college in Palo Alto, there were at least 10 art screens in that town. There's now one, and we probably have 25 multiplex screens. I would argue that part of the attraction at film festivals is that they're communal events, social events, in fact, they're festivals. They're not called film exhibitions – they're called film festivals.

BRR: I argue that they're the last hope for democracy.

JE: I argue that it's like the learned men of Athens getting together to talk about sex, lies, and videotape.

BRR: A Latin American friend told me that the word they use in his circles for watching videos, someone who watched videos at home, is the same word that's used for masturbation.

JE: Well, people who watch films alone now, people who're watching my films or your films or anyone's films at home, aren't watching them on big-screen plasma televisions; they're watching them on little 16-inch monitors, and the atomic bomb is six inches high, and Meryl Streep is also six inches high.

BG: What do all of you see as the most troubling trends in commercial cinema? Or even art cinema or documentaries?

JE: Let me speak only about documentaries, and I'll try to make it concise. It's an old truism, but it's still actually true that documentaries are completely driven and screwed up by the money chase. It consumes half of our time; we're lousy at it – it makes us bitter. Commercial funding of documentaries is fine with me. If HBO wants to put money into documentaries or investors want to or Alliance Atlantis wants to fund Bowling for Columbine, I say, "Great, we need more of that." But the danger there, which is the same danger you have with any for-profit funding of anything, is that sooner or later, it gets driven by somebody's need for a short-term return on an investment, and that's what has poisoned Hollywood since the get-go. And it's about to poison documentaries. On the other hand, our traditional cow, which has been public funding, has been savaged. It's almost impossible to make a documentary with public funds now. When I made The Day after Trinity, it was made 100 percent with public money, your money. It was tax money that paid for it. The new film I'm trying to do now on exactly the same subject will be funded, at best, maybe 10 percent by PBS. If we do it with PBS. So I don't know where I'm heading with this. It's a rats' nest, and if more for-profit funding can be part of the solution to get more and better documentaries made, then fine.

BRR: Haven't HBO and ITVS become the replacement for what National Endowment for the Humanities used to be?

JE: It's being done by HBO, which is a straight-ahead for-profit, centralized oligarchy, and it ironically is the engine that's driving many of the most exciting documentaries right now. Core PBS outside of ITVS has slipped. So go figure. I grew up in a world in which I believed something that was driven by profit would probably not be adventurous and not moral and not be worth looking at.

BRR: I think the biggest problem for me is what has happened to the imagination of filmmakers in the United States. And also parallel to that – and parallel to the nefarious film school disease of making formulas, whether it's the Tarantino formula, whether it's the Soderbergh formula, or whether it's the older studio formula – is the willful denial of the moment in which we're living. And the extent to which people run away from it to make their favorite fantasies and the extent to which that's being rewarded at the box office.

JE: Not in documentaries. We don't do that in documentaries.

BRR: Actually, documentarians do that: it's called personality documentaries. First you pick your famous person, then you make your film. Look at the list of any year.

RG: Like the piece on Woody Allen, Wild Man Blues.

BRR: Look at the list: even someone as esteemed and grounded as Barbara Kopple ended up doing a profile of Woody Allen.

JE: I would argue in general in the last decade that there was this huge inward turning of documentary makers in the '80s lead by Ross McElwee and others, and it's slowly beginning to turn back out –

BRR: I disagree. I've just been noticing in the past two years the emergence of the male menopause documentary. It's big. Stevie, The Same River Twice, My Architect, and many of them are very interesting documentaries, but clearly something's going on here. And I'm sure there are half a dozen of them in editing rooms this very moment. Many of them are being made by very esteemed documentarians. Just what feminist filmmakers did in the '70s, male documentarians of a certain age are doing in the 2000s.

BG: How should fiction feature filmmakers, in your view, be addressing the current moment, the state of the world?

BRR: Well, it would be interesting to see what an American Divine Intervention would look like, wouldn't it? We wouldn't know, because nobody even wants to think of anything. That's one easy example. Another would be what an American Goodbye, Dragon Inn would look like; that would be very satisfying, but we're not going to see it.

JE: I'm with you, I'm looking for an American Battle of Algiers.

RG: Well, let me just say the most successful American film about the Middle East has been The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson may well be the Cecil B. DeMille of the 21st century. But I'm probably not on the same page as Ruby here, because in essence I believe that the cinema is supposed to be entertainment, and that implies some kind of escapism.

BRR: You don't really think that or you wouldn't love Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

RG: I suppose that was a more polemical comment. However, I do believe that fiction films always work by the indirect, and its commentary is always its subtext whether it's conscious or not. The way in which you judge or measure the impact of the real world in cinema is the way in which it tends to deny it. I have a theory about American cinema which I learned from a book on westerns, which is that Hollywood cinema reflects the president who is in power at the time. In the early '60s, you had JFK – in the early '60s, you have liberal westerns, for example. And in the '80s, with Ronald Reagan, you had rather intriguing films that make interesting political statements: Flashdance, Rambo, maybe Scarface.

BRR: And with Clinton, you had more movies attacking the president of the United States than we've ever seen. Tons of them.

RG: Yes, Wag the Dog.

JE: But how do you feel about the enormous rise in theatrical documentaries under George W. Bush?

RG: The rise in documentaries under Bush comes from a need to express a contrarian view that isn't allowed for necessarily in the mainstream media.

BG: I want to shift to some of the films and trends we're excited about. Where are interesting films emerging, and are film festivals helping them? Are festivals opening up spaces for directors such as Tsai Ming-liang, who have a vision made for film and not for a specific video market? Tsai's Goodbye, Dragon Inn eulogizes cinema, and that eulogy extends beyond the '60s and Bergman, Bresson, and King Hu.

BRR: Goodbye, Dragon Inn is also eulogizing the grand old movie theaters and the moment when people were building palaces, not multiplexes, for cinema. And actually it addresses the whole question of the collapse of the art theater. I was around for the first collapse of the art scene, which was at the end of the '60s, but it was because of pornography. Once the landmark court cases were won, all of the old movies theaters got bought up as porn houses. And this was pre-video, pre-DVD, and there was nowhere to see art cinema, and that was the start of the National Endowment for the Arts support for alternative exhibition. Then alternative exhibition takes off as a result of government subsidy. And then you have the rebirth of art cinemas and new art cinemas starting up all over the country. And then along comes the second generation of collapse around video, VCRs, DVDs, and multiplexes.

RG: What Ruby is saying is interesting because a lot of people don't appreciate that movies are made because wannabe filmmakers actually see films. Now that the filmmaker generation is watching a lot of movies on video and using D.V. technology, that changes the types of films that are created.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is set in an empty movie house that's showing King Hu's Dragon Inn, which was the biggest Asian box-office hit of its time and a mega pan-Asian film in the late '60s when it came out. Tsai Ming-liang is looking back at a popular cinema that has completely disappeared. In Taiwan in particular, the commercial circuits aren't doing that well, particularly for local films. Probably his own films – a cunning commentary there. And there's another thing going on: he's showing that a popular film from the past can actually be an art film to us now. We all know this. When you watch a Frank Borzage film or a Douglas Sirk movie that was a popular hit in the '50s, now it's an archival thing.

BG: It's accrued all these different meanings over time.

BRR: Time is a great source of deconstruction. Watch a movie 30 years later and you see the conventions, the genres, the bad editing. Border crossing – when people don't know what they're looking at, because they don't know the cultures that films are coming out of – sometimes does that in reverse.

RG: Kill Bill is a cross-cultural movie by somebody who's watching films from another culture that came out 30 or 40 years ago. It translates into chaos and mayhem; I find that film quite fascinating.

BRR: Suite Habana at this year's festival is almost the opposite of that – a Cuban filmmaker throwing off all the cross-cultural overlay that other people put on Cuba. It's the anti-Buena Vista Social Club, set in a crumbling Havana where it's always raining. It's about lack instead of the excess favored by people who have a tourist's view. International festivals can almost be a corrective, providing a non-touristic look into the rest of the world.

Less than half of Americans even have passports, and the current president had barely been out of the United States before he took office. Our foreign policy is essentially being driven by a vision that doesn't see the world, only displacements of the United States. As I like to say, maybe people would like to know something about other cultures before we bomb them.

BG: I want to go back to something you, Roger, were talking about at the press conference. I think something that distinguishes your programming from other programming is that you're also interested in commercial trends in different areas.

RG: I'm not the sort of person who believes that art films are superior. I always try to program a mixture of art and popular films because cinema is not one or the other, it's both. For example, this year I've thrown in a Japanese comedy, Get Up!, about a bunch of yakuza guys who try and kidnap James Brown. Commercial films do reflect something of the tastes of the societies they come from, and yakuza films are popular in Japan. Get Up! is worth showing because, as Ruby was saying, the view of the world that America receives is usually an American view. As for films that show a foreign view of America – that's a festival somebody should put on.

BG: That already happens to some degree in festivals. Quite often you'll find some sort of statement being made about the United States in films from all over the place.

BRR: Certainly, touching on Check Point and Route 181, I think we're starting to see Palestinian films, like Divine Intervention but also Ticket to Jerusalem and some others, that have views of settlers and views of the pernicious effects of the Orthodox Jews from the United States that have gone and immigrated to Israel and make up these settlements, and that is something I've never seen before. I can say this; I'm Jewish. And we're seeing it also in progressive films by Israelis, like Local Angel. So sometimes these views come about in very unexpected ways.

Also, I think that Latin American cinema is in a really exciting moment right now, and it's great that the festival is supporting that with a lot of Latin American films. Of those, apart from Suite Habana, one of my favorites is B-Happy, which is a kind of story we haven't really seen from Latin America, about a young girl who goes through terrible trauma and crisis but comes through with an amazingly intact spirit. She doesn't become Lilya 4-Ever, although she easily could – she's easily being pushed down that very road.

I also think that there's a trio of films, Baadasssss!, Brother to Brother, and Chisholm '72, that are all looking at African American histories specifically having to do with relationships to power and representation, to politics, to the Harlem Renaissance, to the start of independent film, that also indicate that this is a really exciting moment.

BG: I was happy to see a New Queer Cinema approach emerge again in Brother to Brother. Because when we're talking about U.S.-based filmmaking not being political, this is one that certainly is, and it is in ways I thought were, for the most part, imaginative. I like also how he was focusing on a figure who isn't as well-known as Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston.

BRR: It's about Bruce Nugent, whose poetry is on the soundtrack of Tongues Untied, which is having an anniversary right now. I think the contemporary parts of Brother to Brother are inspired by Marlon Riggs, and the historical parts are inspired by Isaac Julien and his early work. I think it's syncretic in very interesting ways. The Man Who Copied is another Latin American film that's quite fascinating and also a film that's really very much a younger film, not a middle-aged film. James's Journey to Jerusalem is pretty interesting in terms of a very critical look at Israel – this time from the position of materialism; the contradiction between spirituality and materialism is very interestingly played out. I just started watching Silent Waters, which is a look back; I think it's set in 1979 in Pakistan –

RG: SFIFF director of programming Linda Blackaby and I wanted to show some films from Asia by women. It's not that easy, actually, and particularly to find works by Muslim women in Islamic countries, so I thought Silent Waters was a good choice; it's about contradictions in society. We're also showing Now and Then, by Marylou Diaz-Abaya, who is now the major woman filmmaker in the Philippines. This is an interesting mainstream film where Marylou looks back at characters she created 20 years ago in an earlier film, Moral, that took place in the Marcos era, and it's now post-Marcos, so it's a way of measuring the development of society. Within the commercial conventions of the film, Marylou has managed to achieve a commentary on personal and political concerns and relationships in an entertaining but also fairly insightful way. The essentially populist way in which cinemas have developed in other cultures – since I chose only the Asian movies, I can really only talk about those – means that the artistic ambitions of popular cinema can be looked at in the same the way we looked at Hollywood films in the '50s or the '40s. There is a sort of auteurism; there's a certain artistic ambition.

BG: The Korean film Memories of Murder seems like it's a commercial film that has a resonance beyond just a genre.

RG: The Korean film industry is interesting because unlike some other Asian countries, they go through a development process – which is where you really find the tone and caliber and the resolutions of a story and of the film. Also, their movies are well made and look good. I think the Korean cinematographers are the tops in Asia now. Every Korean film that I've seen in general has been really well shot, no matter what it is. The superior technical quality allows you to enter into the movie without any real barriers.

Memories of Murder was a big hit in Korea and made as a commercial film. It deals with a horrific subject but is a very delicate movie. The movie is about the hunt for a serial killer, which is a very common subject in Hollywood cinema. But this Korean filmmaker deals with it as a political movie. He sets it in the '80s, which was a repressive time in South Korea. And through the frustrations of the cops who're trying to track down the elusive killer, I think he talks about the psychological state of the country. And that's really interesting because to some extent, South Korea now is different. And any film which looks backward always is some critique or commentary on where you come from.

BRR: Unless it's a U.S film – then you get Seabiscuit.

RG: I was about to say it's like Seven and making Seven about Watergate or something.

BRR: If only. Now we're back to my plaint ...

I think that the Latin American films are interesting in part because of what's going on in Latin America right now, which isn't on the radar in the U.S. media, except for Venezuela, which has this drumroll of attack being fostered by right-wing Venezuelan exiles. But apart from that, what's going on in Brazil now, under Lula? What's going on in Argentina right now? There's such hope in Latin America at this particular moment, and we're not seeing it in the news, but we're suddenly seeing all of these films coming out. Whether it's coming out of the economic despair of Argentina or the political hope of Brazil, we're beginning to see the way in which film is reacting. And I think that's how we see the politics of places reflected, not necessarily in the content of the films, but in the energy and quality and quantity that begin to emerge. And I think that's why Palestinian films are so exciting right now, because of the crisis and how people are responding to it. And Latin American films, Argentine films, right now are spectacular.

BG: What's the history behind Argentine and Brazilian film development?

BRR: Argentina has a really long cinematic history, but it was punished by the United States because it didn't side with us during World War II. It stayed neutral and was punished. And Rockefeller, who at that time was in the administration dealing with cinema and export-import, diverted film stock from Argentina to Mexico, which jump-started postwar cinema in Mexico. So it's kind of hilarious especially if you think about the fate of Mexican cinema right now, where the minute anybody becomes known, they want to go to Hollywood. By contrast, in Brazil and Argentina, with a few exceptions, people seem to be working at home and looking, if anything, to Europe rather than to the U.S. And Argentine cinema and Brazilian cinema both really flourished at the end of their dictatorships. So that in the 1980s, when both their military governments receded – after the Malvinas war in Argentina and in the mid '80s in Brazil – you saw this incredible energy going into making films. That was very exciting: coming to grips with the past and beginning to try to figure out "Who are we now." And at this point you see that happening again in Chile as well. Then there were these collapsing economies. Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, who made La cienaga and has a new film that may be in Cannes, said, "All of my life I have been living in an economic crisis; all of my life we have been sliding downhill." But they're still making films and finding support outside of their country.

And in Brazil they created these entirely new tax structures to find money. That's something that the U.S. can do if anybody wanted to. They allowed people to give a certain amount of their tax money to film production, and that allowed the whole Brazilian cinema to flourish. And there's a lot of cinephilia in both of those cultures. They have film festivals, they care about the cinema, they have film magazines, and there's an audience. In Brazil there's a real linguistic imperative as the only Portuguese-speaking country in Latin America to create a cinema for its own national identity. And in Argentina there's a sense of export to other places – and there's also a sense of belonging to a world film culture that's very strong there. In the U.S. perhaps we look to Europe too much for our sense of cinema.

B. Ruby Rich gives the "State of Cinema" address, followed by a screening of Suite Habana, Sun/18, 5 p.m., Kabuki. Jon Else receives the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, followed by a screening of The Day after Trinity, April 25, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki. For theater information see box, page 54.

Jon Else is a MacArthur Fellow (1988-1993), an Emmy Award winner, and the director of the documentary program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and he served on the staff of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to '65. He's best known for the films The Day after Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (1980), Cadillac Desert (1997), and Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle (2000).

Roger Garcia has worked as a film programmer, film producer, and writer. He was director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival and has been a guest curator at many others. He has written and broadcast for Variety, Film Comment, NPR, and other outlets and written and edited books on Hollywood director Frank Tashlin and Asians in American cinema. He recently completed Chinese Box Home Movies (cocreator) and commentary with Wayne Wang for the DVD release of Chinese Box.

B. Ruby Rich is a film critic, curator, professor, and cultural commentator, who, in addition to writing for the Bay Guardian, has written for the Guardian in London, the Nation, the New York Times, Sight and Sound, and other magazines. She is currently an adjunct professor of film studies at UC Berkeley and author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. She was a programmer of international cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2003.