On opening night of the first San Francisco International Film Festival in 1957, there had never been such an event anywhere in the Americas - North or South.
The whole idea of a film festival in this country was an almost laughably precarious one. The big movies playing across town, after all, were "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," "Tammy and the Bachelor" and "Love Slaves of the Amazon." Even in San Francisco, the only audience likely to turn up for subtitled films was the Beat poets, many of them with Jack Kerouac's just-published novel, "On the Road," under their arms.
Hanging in the air that night 50 years ago, along with the perfumed smoke from the Beats' French cigarettes, was a big question: Would there ever be another film festival in San Francisco, or for that matter, anywhere in the United States The answer to that, as it turned out, was yes. Pretty much every day of the week. As the San Francisco International Film Festival opens its 50th-anniversary celebration with Emanuele Crialese's "Golden Door" on Thursday (7 p.
m. at the Castro Theatre), the granddaddy of American film festivals is thriving, and it's not alone. In fact, it's no longer even the biggest such event going on that night.
The Tribeca Film Festival - which began six years ago to help lower Manhattan recover from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 - now competes almost head-to-head with San Francisco. And because one of its organizers is Robert De Niro, Tribeca has managed to pull off what such established European festivals as Cannes and Venice only attempted half a century ago - limiting the number of film premieres and stars that might otherwise flow to San Francisco.
At the same time the San Francisco festival is going on, the May Day Labor Film Festival will begin screening in Santa Cruz, and they are both quickly followed by the San Francisco International LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-, Transgender) Film Festival, known as But wait. In the Bay Area alone, there also is a Black LGBT Film Festival. And the San Francisco Black Film Festival, the Asian American Film Festival, the Latino Film Festival, the San Jose Jewish Film Festival, the Arab Film Festival, the United Nations Film Festival, the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival, ResFest, MadCat Women's Festival, Hi/Lo Film Festival, the Irish Film Fest, IndieFest, Another Hole in the Head (horror and animation) Film Festival, DocFest, Noir City, the Green Screen Environmental Film Festival, the Global Lens Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival and - world cinema without end, amen - Cinequest.
Jon Else, an award-winning documentary director who lives in the Bay Area, is back at the San Francisco festival this year with "Wonders Are Many," his second feature dealing with J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. When he entered "The Day After Trinity," his first Oppenheimer documentary in the festival before its release in 1981, San Francisco "was fairly high-profile," Else says.
But that was then. "There are thousands of film festivals now. Every little town has one.
" That isn't such a bad thing, of course, except for festivals such as San Francisco's, which remains in the top tier of international city festivals but has undoubtedly lost some of the prestige it commanded before Sundance and Toronto became the dominant North American film gatherings. Irving M. Levin, who founded the San Francisco International and paid for it out of his own pocket during the early years, liked the role of upstart, but before his death in 1995, he saw Sundance emerge as the pre-eminent festival venue for American independent films.
"I know that he found that very upsetting," says his son, Fred Levin, a member of the Film Society board. "When he started, there weren't places you could go and interact with your peers. I think he particularly saw the value of the niche festivals, but the other major international film festivals he would have considered competition and not been terribly pleased about those.
" Most of the so-called niche festivals are simply what once were called "underground" festivals, and that is where the real profusion of growth has come in recent years. "The danger of these things for any ethnic community is that the more closed the community, the more difficult it is to become part of the greater culture," Else says. "This is America, and it's really important for everyone to be part of the broader culture.
"On the other hand, it's really important that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender films have a place that they own, that's theirs. If you go to the Asian American Film Festival here, that's a place where Asian-American filmmakers and audiences feel very, very comfortable." The need for festivals and filmmakers to hook up has become so intense that Withoutabox, a matchmaking service based in Southern California, was founded in 2000.
To date, Withoutabox claims to have placed 110,000 filmmakers in more than 2,000 film festivals in 200 countries worldwide. Nilsson, who once won the jury prize at Sundance with "Heat and Light," is the sort of low-budget indie director you might expect to find prowling the festival circuit. And, indeed, the tribute to his work on Saturday (7 p.
m. at the Sundance Cinemas Kabuki) will mark his third appearance in the San Francisco International, his home festival. "They're immensely important," Nilsson says of the festivals' function as gatekeepers.
"They are the first step for anybody to speak to that first audience." But Nilsson thinks the explosion of festivals has diluted their value as a showcase for experimental work like his. "The proliferation of them is a whole other thing," he says, "because they all have to fill their rosters.
I've seen a lot of stuff that it might have been nice for them to wait until it was ready to show." Though Nilsson doesn't mention any names, it can't be lost on him that in the year of the San Francisco International's golden anniversary, its honor for acting is going to Robin Williams, and the tribute named for the festival's founder is going to George Lucas, who practically invented the blockbuster phenomenon. "Look who's leading the charge, the opening nights and all that stuff," Nilsson says.
"I understand. That's done to pull in the people. But we're colonized now by the Hollywood system, and naturally I'm not too impressed with that.
The festivals are there at the behest of the people who sponsor them, which means they" often have to bow to "popular taste." San Francisco used to accept only films that were being seen for the first time at its festival, but dropped that requirement when Tribeca took it up. The more powerful the festival, the more demands it can place upon the filmmakers clamoring to get in.
Sylvia Binsfeld of Petaluma has made a short film, titled "Dorme ," and she is turning her life inside out to make sure her seven-minute film gets its 15 minutes of fame. "Dorme " - the story of a little boy's dream, filled with dazzling computerized effects - has been accepted by Tribeca, San Francisco, the San Diego Children's Film Festival and the Reno Film Festival. And all four are scheduled for virtually the same two-week period.
Binsfeld is flying to New York on Wednesday, attending as many VIP parties and screenings as she can stay awake for, then getting on a flight at 6 a.m. Sunday for San Francisco, where she will attend a screening of her film and answer questions from the audience.
At the end of the week, she'll drive to Reno, then back to San Francisco. "We're going to pull some all-nighters," she says. "We enjoy every single festival, but realistically, some will totally jump-start your career because they put you in touch with the right people.
The parties are more important than the screenings, frankly. That's what you're there for, to promote your next project. You want to keep that ball rolling.
You don't want it to end with this film." Getting into San Francisco and Tribeca means her short has become a hit on the festival circuit. "Every time I open my e-mail, I've got a new invitation from another festival," she says.
"I'm not going to turn anything down, but I don't know when I'm going to sleep." .com or (408) 920-5004.
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