Fiftieth Anniversary SFIFF 2007

[Chris Knipp]

Thank you for your comments. I'd probably like to watch This Charming Girl.

I cannot comment knowledgeably on the technicalities of festival film screening and the image quality. I gather that the projection of a video or non-film entity can be quite sophisticated now. I just saw The Sugar Curtain, the documentary by Camila Guzman Urzua, and it looked pretty good, it was projected on a really big screen in a really large auditorious, and the equipment they used was not film projection but it looked quite elaborate, in the back of the auditorium. So I'm not so sure that the use of a projected dvd is now always to be considered "lamentable."

It's the festival administrators who don't seem to care.

In the case of Taking Father Home, then, if you want to put it that way, niether the admistrators nor the jurors "seem to care." They probably do care. But they make allowances for lack of image sharpness that they would not have made probably during the era when there was only film used. And then, there is David Lynch's Inland Empire, used with a "cheap" video camera ($2,000-$3,000) and grainy looking, yet it works. But in the cases of beginners with no budget, like Ying Liang, it just looks like a biginner working with a cheap camera. He's never used film, unlike Lynch.

Some of Camila Guzman Urzua's camerawork didn't appeal to me much, but I'll deal with that later. One usually makes some allowances for low budget documentaries one doesn't make for narrative features, I guess.