It'll soon be time to finalize those New Year's resolutions, and if (like us), one of yours is to shoehorn more art and culture into your life, we have a suggestion to get a head-start on a richer 2012. Since the San Francisco Film Society took over programming for the sleek theater in Japantown's Harajuku-style New People shopping mall, it has featured short runs of new cinema from around the world, restored prints of classic films, cult favorites, and even a live performance or two. Now it screens something contemplative to transition us into the new year: the 2010 Russian film Silent Souls.
Federal agents arrested Daniel McGowan in 2005 in a sweep of activists involved with the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, a group the FBI called the country's No. 1 domestic terrorism threat. Filmmaker Marshall Curry, whose movies include Street Fight, which follows Cory Booker's first run for mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and Racing Dreams, about two boys and a girl who dream of racing in Nascar, has made If a Tree Falls, chronicling McGowan's house arrest when he facing life in prison and the period from 1995 until early 2001 when environmentalists were clashing with timber companies and law enforcement.
The movie has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. We sat down with Curry before a screening in San Francisco to talk to him about how this movie overlaps with the Occupy movement; the link between Nascar, inner city politics, and radical environmentalism; and persuading timber company officials, cops, and members of the ELF that New York City filmmakers could tell the whole story fairly.
Thanks to advances in technology (hello Google), the definition of "map" has evolved oh so radically in the past decade. Not surprisingly, visual artists are utilizing these high-tech tools to reconfigure cartography. The result -- at least in this exhibit, "Here Be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination" at Intersection for the Arts -- is almost orgasmically delightful.
Exhibit A: The Magic Story Table by JD Beltran and Scott Minneman, who purpose an interactive globe with audio stories from everyday people. Spin the table, zero in from space to the edges of a neighborhood, and listen in as men and women spin yarns about money, school and other central issues. There's nothing quite like it.
