By Paul Duclos
Published: August, 2013
Many commuters choose to ride the ferry because of the relative peace and quiet on board. Unlike BART, Muni, or even the cable cars, the ferry offers passengers a chance to contemplate the beauty of our Bay and enjoy the panoramic views while being alone in a crowd. What other form of public transportation can make such a claim? It’s rather like watching a silent movie.
We address this subject now because our City just finished hosting another colossal movie event, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF).
Throughout the year, SFSFF produces events that showcase important titles from the silent era, often in restored or preserved prints, with live musical accompaniment by some of the world’s finest practitioners of the art of putting music to film. Each presentation exemplifies the extraordinary quality that Academy Award-winning film historian Kevin Brownlow calls "live cinema."
One of the festival highlights was the screening of Augusto Genina’s Prix de Beauté (aka Beauty Prize) at the Castro Theater. Most of the transport scenes featured noisy trains and motor cabs, but viewers were spared the banal exclamations contained in most "talkies."
SFSFF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about silent film as an art form and as a culturally valuable historical record. For more info, visit www.silentfilm.org.
Classic cinema will play also an important role in this fall’s upcoming San Francisco Symphony season, with the screening of a number of important works done by Alfred Hitchcock.
In the 2013-14 season, the SF Symphony offers a new film series, starting with a week of Hitchcock films Psycho, The Lodger, Vertigo, and Hitchcock! Greatest Hits, all with live musical accompaniment, during the week of Halloween.
The full season also includes a two-night screening of the film White Christmas, A Night at the Oscars, Chaplin’s City Lights, and Disney’s Fantasia in concert. For more info, visit www.sfsymphony.org.
Our glorious Bay plays a major role in Vertigo, but is also featured in Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966.
Currently on view at the de Young Museum through September 29, is the first exhibition to explore in-depth the work produced by Diebenkorn between 1953 and 1966, when he lived in Berkeley. The presentation will include over 130 of the artist’s paintings and drawings assembled from collections across the country, many of them rarely or never before seen in public exhibitions.
Diebenkorn’s engagement with the unique settings of the Bay Area, along with his personal history, ties this exhibition deeply to the region. The artist underwent a remarkable metamorphosis during what is now known as his "Berkeley period," beginning with an abstract phase influenced by the Bay Area’s natural environment, and then moving to figurative works, including figures, interiors, and still lifes. Fiercely independent, Diebenkorn continued to explore his shifting conceptions of abstraction and figuration over these years, and rejected allegiances to schools or movements.
His challenge to prevailing orthodoxy also helped to elevate Diebenkorn’s national profile. As contemporaries like Willem De Kooning and Jackson Pollock wrestled publicly with abstract expressionism, Diebenkorn’s work offered another important perspective in the critical conversation of the time. His appearance in Life magazine, as well as an article titled, "Diebenkorn Paints a Picture" in ARTnews magazine, both published in 1957, further expanded the painter’s influence.
Diebenkorn was profoundly influenced by the nature and culture of the Bay Area, and many of these works are saturated with light and atmosphere, as well as the deep reds, greens and ochres of the region. Although born in Portland, Diebenkorn grew up in San Francisco’s Ingleside Terraces neighborhood, attended Stanford University and UC Berkeley, and was both a student and an instructor at the California School of Fine Arts (today the San Francisco Art Institute).
Diebenkorn’s very first solo museum exhibition was held at the Legion of Honor in 1948, and Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966 continues the Fine Arts Museums’ long engagement with the artist’s work. Though Diebenkorn would also make significant contributions to the modernist tradition through his work in New Mexico and Southern California—work celebrated in other recent exhibitions—Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966 is a story rooted in the Bay Area, an exploration of one of the most complex and interesting chapters in postwar American art. For more info, visit deyoung.famsf.org.
