SAN FRANCISCO: Anyone who's had the aurally disheartening experience of watching a silent film with one of those canned, rinky-dink organ accompaniments that used to predominate public-television broadcasts should want to tip his hat to the Club Foot Orchestra, the San-Francisco-based ten-piece group that, starting in 1987, has composed and performed a whole string of new scores for various silent classics. On April 12, the Castro Theatre presents three great movies with live music from Club Foot: Buster Keaton's perfect comedy Sherlock Jr. as a special "discount-priced matinee", and an evening double bill of two peerless nightmares from Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated vampire film Nosferatu. It's hard to think of a better way to treat your eyes and ears on a Saturday night.
BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives gets its goofy on with "American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin" (April 11--18), a retrospective of the work of the onetime Warner Bros. animation director who saw his years working with Bugs, Elmer, and Daffy as a mere apprenticeship for handling Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. In his most distinctive work, Tashlin used his "living cartoons' and color and the Cinemascope screen as tools with which to create a Silly Putty universe. Things kick off with Tashlin's rock and roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, a Mansfield vehicle that includes performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Julie London. Part of the humor now comes from the film's cluelessness about the staying power and the sound of rock; between that and the exaggerated sleaziness of its show business milieu, it's a movie in which Little Richard comes across as practically the most rational person on screen.
NEW YORK: The Fifteenth New York Annual Film Festival opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 9 and runs through the 15th. This year's festival, which includes forty features from across the continent, includes a special focus on the emerging phenomenon on female African filmmakers, including Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, and Zina Saro Wiwa. The festivities will also include receptions honoring Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soynika, to be held at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery, adjacent to the Walter Reade Theater.
And we couldn't let this pass without a salute: tonight, at 7 P.M., the Film Society presents Erik Nelson's documentary profile of our man, Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which includes an original score by another living god, Richard Thompson. Both Nelson and Ellison his own bad self will be in attendance.
