Weekend viewing in San Francisco.

Witness to War, though strikingly direct and to the point, is perhaps not the most appropriate title for the Documentary Film Institute series launching tonight and running in various impressive San Francisco venues throughout the weekend. It brings to mind the "achingly plangent films with no commentary about graves in Bosnia" that the BBC film essayist Adam Curtis dissed so memorably at GreenCine all those months ago. But of the films being screened in this interesting series, there are none born from that journalistic tradition. Instead, we are being offered a brief examination of form in documentary filmmaking from, as the subtitle reads, "WWII to Iraq" (but really, mostly WWII).

James Longley's Iraq in Fragments (the sole Iraq film screening), and also the films featured in the Humphrey Jennings tribute, are very observational, it's true - they are all about getting into the reality or heart of the people they're showing us. But they are also important experiments in form. On the most basic level, they often use the stylistic conventions of narrative filmmaking, with an emphasis on characters, scenes, "dialogue," etc, to tell the non-fiction stories of their subjects. It makes the films quiet but powerful, which in today's documentary landscape of (often justified) real violence and sensationalism, keeps them, and others like them, hidden away from the mainstream. Even more hidden away than mainstream documentaries.

Humphrey Jennings was an English artist who produced several landmark propaganda films during WWII and just beyond, until his tragic early death in a fall from a cliff while scouting for locations on a Greek island. In the years before the War, he co-founded the Mass Observation movement, whereby some intellectual elites from the UK's South conducted methodical observations of the Northern heartland's working class. Mass Observation was a sincere pop-anthropological attempt to understand the day-to-day concerns and activities of real working people, and while Jennings was only involved with it for a brief period of time, this concept was to become a lynchpin of his work for the Crown Film Unit. His propaganda films, made after several formative years as a filmmaker for the GPO, were widely seen in wartime England and proved to be an influence on the British film industry that would be felt through the Free Cinema movement and the social realist works of the British New Wave - the "Kitchen Sink Realism" that would come to define British art cinema up to and including Mike Leigh, Michael Winterbottom and now, seemingly, Andrea Arnold.

The three Jennings films that are screening for free as part of Witness to War are Listen to Britain, A Diary for Timothy and Jennings's only feature length film, Fires Were Started. The last two in particular are what we might call "docu-dramas" today. Fires Were Started is a portrait of the Auxiliary Fire Service during a 24-hour period in the "bitter days of 1940/41, played by the firemen and women themselves" as they fight deadly blazes in London's docks. All of the films feature real people, not actors, in spontaneous-seeming scenes (a highlight in Fires: "One Man Went to Mow" is sung in the firehouse as each man enters the room). Although probably scripted, the dialogue seems like it was taken directly from the real lives of the subjects, much like Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor write the scripts for their wonderful, though not at all naturalistic, Civic Life shorts. And just as in those Civic Life shorts, funded by city councils in the UK, Jennings often draws on vaguely surrealist cutting techniques, perhaps a reflection of his actual serious involvement with that movement.

This surrealism is particularly notable in Listen to Britain, a cinema-poem about the sounds of wartime London which reaches out of itself to become a stirring portrait of its people. There seems to be a Dziga Vertov influence in the cutting - from tree to street to schoolyard - but for cinephiles, there is also the feeling of jumping from one tradition to another. One moment we feel like we are watching a dialogue-free narrative scene - two-shot, close-up - but then we cut straight, slam, into the landscape, or something else equally impressionistic. There is certainly a chain of consciousness story there; one sequence goes from inside a factory to the same factory workers watching a variety show, to the RAF orchestra performing, to an exhibition of paintings. Music, as in all of these Jennings films, becomes essential, and is played out at length, with respectful attention given to the various players' interaction with their instruments.

A Diary for Timothy is the most didactic piece in the program, with a narration written by EM Forster and voiced by Michael Redgrave. The baby Timothy, we are told, has been born in the last full year of the War, and as such is being asked to shoulder the burden of the good men coming before him, not to mention the unmapped future that lies ahead. There are filmed portraits of three men: A miner, a farmer and a soldier. Beyond this, there is a lurking unease about the world of unemployment, injury and now-strange normalcy to be faced just around the corner. But the most ringing sentiment for the contemporary audience comes in the questions put to Timothy at the end of the film: "Are you going to have greed for money or power ousting decency from the world as they have in the past? Or are you going to make the world a better place, you and the other babies?" Well, we know the answer to that one, as I'm sure Jennings did when he posed it.

Author David Thomson will introduce the Jennings tribute at the MH de Young Museum, and it will be followed up by a screening of Sergei Loznitsa's award-winning Blockade, to be introduced by program curator Tom Luddy. Blockade is a found footage portrait of Leningrad during the 900-day siege in WWII that saw the death of over half a million citizens, mostly from starvation. The footage was pulled from newsreels found in the archives of the St Petersburg Studio of Documentary Film and is accompanied by a recreated, realistic soundscape. Over a long hour, Loznitsa strings together the disturbing reality of a city slowly crumbling into snow, starvation and the numb acceptance of a daily madness that has become almost mundane. Also screening at the de Young will be the other non-WWII film of the series, Bertrand Tavernier's documentary on the French-Algerian "conflict," The Undeclared War.

To end at the beginning, Witness to War will kick off with a high profile event featuring a filmmaker whose popular techniques have changed the landscape of documentary form and who is especially notable for his unique ability to reach the masses through non-fiction filmmaking. He is, of course, the great Ken Burns, creator of what is now officially known in video editing software as the "Ken Burns Effect," the use of a slow pan or zoom on a still image to lend it drama. Burns will present a 90-minute compilation from his new seven-part series on WWII, The War, followed by an onstage conversation at the Castro Theatre tonight. On Friday night, he ventures over to the Premier Theater (at the Letterman Digital Arts Center) to present The War: Part 1 in its entirety.

It should also be noted that there will be an accompanying exhibition at the SFSU Fine Arts Gallery, Witness to War: Revisiting Vietnam in Contemporary Art, which will be open through March 15.

It's quite a weekend for San Francisco audiences. Beyond the Witness to War series, the 4th Annual San Francisco Irish Film Festival will take over the Roxie Film Center, also starting tonight and running through the weekend, with a special free screening of Cannes-winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley on March 7 at the Lumiere.

It's going to be a very diverse festival playing host to a whole slew of cinema-friendly formats. On Friday night, there will be a shorts program (with free Magner's Irish Cider) followed by Irish Telly Night. Then on Saturday, a silent matinee, Irish Destiny, will screen before Irish TV Night Program 2 and a feature presentation, the popular comedy Man About Dog. John Carney's Bachelors Walk will screen during the second TV night; the SF Irish Film festival will be co-presenting Carney's latest film, Once, a recent Sundance winner, at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April.

Sunday is for contemplation and will see a rounding out of the weekend events with a slate of docs and a Gay Cinema program. Free tickets for The Wind that Shakes the Barley will be available from the Roxie box office throughout the festival.

Posted by dwhudson at March 1, 2007 7:28 AM