The San Francisco International Film Festival wrapped up recently, though it seemed like it had barely begun. It wasn't until the festival's 10th day that I attended a crowded screening at the Castro, and the festival just doesn't seem like it's off the chalk line until then. Even the big screen at the Kabuki — occupied by Japantown's Cherry Blossom Festival for a day or two — didn't appear on my schedule until day 9, so the 48th SFIFF seeped in through small screenings of so-so movies. Maybe next year I should attend the opening night festivities just to get into the spirit of things.

Because of that I was extremely glad that a few friends came out this year for the first half of the festival, and though I wish they'd flown into a stronger cinematic lineup, they perked up an otherwise sluggish start. Doug, Darren, J. Robert, Girish (who was there only in spirit but who cued up his Borzage and Vertigo at the right moments), and I roamed around in impossibly nice spring weather — San Francisco once again made a liar out of me by being neither cold nor cloudy nor rainy in late April — which gave my time-tested city tour a whole new twist. It's not often that my wife and I have visitors who crane their necks to get a look at Scotty's apartment or point to the redwood cross-section in the Muir Woods and say "Here I was born, and here I died." It's not often they stroll through the woods talking about Ozu and Marker, or notice that a hill in the Marin Headlands could have been where Johannes from Ordet made his ominous pronouncements (if only it had been in Denmark), or spend half an hour at Film Yard Video in North Beach just gabbing over box covers, or browse long and hard at City Lights and Moe's.

Was there a festival going on somewhere?

There was, but for me it doesn't start in earnest until 1) film fans pack a movie palace for a foreign film, 2) hopped up San Franciscans hiss at something, anything, and 3) the festival's executive director displays contempt for the movie-loving audience and subordinates film to celebrity, all of which happened after my friends left, sadly.

But happen it did. The trifecta screening was the April 30 showing of Ingmar Bergman's latest film, Saraband, a followup to his classic television and film project from 1973 Scenes from a Marriage. The Wurlitzer organ which plays before every show at the Castro — festival or not — sank into the pit as the crowd clapped along to the rousing chorus of "San Francisco," the house lights came down, people settled into their seats, and then things veered dramatically off track.

The next half hour was a distillation and personification of everything that's wrong with the festival.

It started with a lone spotlight on Roxanne Messina Captor, executive director and acting artistic director of the San Francisco Film Society which runs the festival, standing stage right. After reading a few words about the film (which highlighted its "use of artificial sets"), Messina Captor inexplicably introduced someone who "actually knows Bergman" to "speak about the film." And speak he did, to a confused and increasingly impatient audience, for a good 20 minutes about the film we were about to watch. While he may have had some interesting things to say — I'm not sure, I had my ears plugged and heard only fragments like "as you'll see in the scene at the end" — and while he probably just prepared whatever he was asked to, his placement before the film was idiotic. (I unplugged my ears near the end of his talk just in time to hear him say, "So I think you'll like the film. I do, and I'm not that big a fan of Bergman, actually." Nice!)

Then Messina Captor returned to the stage, the house lights came up, and she said they would take questions.

A rustle went through the crowd until someone shouted what I'm sure many of us were thinking: "Do it after the movie!" (Of course that would have required the executive director to stay for the screening. Maybe I'm being uncharitable.) "Show the film," someone else said as the chatter increased. Then rolling her eyes, Messina Captor said, "We'll show the film in three minutes. I think some people want to ask some questions." A woman near me stood up and yelled, "Please don't do this," and the few hands that had been raised went down. "Don't you want to ask about Bergman?" Messina Captor asked, looking across our heads and into the balcony, clarifying that the evening's guest speaker was the celebrity proxy for the night. No doubt Bergman himself would have been a brighter gem in Messina Captor's tiara, although he surely would have insisted on taking questions afterward.

"No?" she said when no one came forward to query the man who once shook Bergman's hand (though he's not a fan, actually). "OK, we'll show the film," she said, exasperated. And they did, in grand Castro style, with a parting curtain, a huge screen, and an appreciative audience who had successfully turned the wheel in the direction of the skid.

Dramatic Turn of Events

Last week the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Messina Captor has, scarcely a week after the festival's close, stepped down from her post. The decision, according to the festival's board of directors, was "mutual." Very very mutual. And not a moment too soon.

While the city now has a golden opportunity to restore the festival to its place of prominence — it's the oldest festival outside of Europe, quickly approaching its fiftieth year, and has sent its former programmers to run such highly regarded institutions as the Cinémathèque Française in Paris (Peter Scarlet), the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes (Marie-Pierre Macia), the new but increasingly prominent Tribeca festival in New York (Scarlet again), and the festivals in Palm Springs and Seattle (Carl Spence) — I'm not sure the problem is completely solved by Messina Captor's departure.

The article in the Chronicle includes some mean-but-hilarious information about Messina Captor's background, and I'm sure many of the city's filmgoers will feel a natural tendency to pile on now that she's leaving. Not me. Wait, OK, let's pile just briefly: at the member preview a few weeks before this year's festival, she pronounced the name of the latest film by legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda, Cinévardaphoto, as "Cinévar (pause) da (pause) photo". Now, I'm sure my pronunciations are frequently wide of the mark, but this particular one shows an ignorance of the name "Varda" and its playful use in the film's title, a name a festival director should be required to know. Knowing the name "Varda" shouldn't get you into the director's seat, but not knowing it should sure as hell get you out.

Devil's Advocate

Despite my own urge to pile on, I also feel a need to poke holes in the arguments of people who are critical of this year's festival because I think many of them miss the point. Playing devil's advocate, I wonder why the complaints of Messina Captor's critics — not all of them, but those who are, say, writing for the local newspapers — seem to have so little to do with film. The Chronicle lists among Messina Captor's failures that she didn't bring more stars to the festival as she was expected to do when she was hired. My question is who on earth hired a festival director with the purpose of bringing more stars to San Francisco? That she was incompetent in this regard, if she was, is secondary.

(The Chronicle, by the way, also mentions that Messina Captor couldn't get Francis Ford Coppola to come to any screenings, despite her intimations that she knows him well. I personally saw Coppola, with his wife and his pal George Lucas, at the Kabuki two years ago attending a screening, although he was just in the audience, and, of course, the film was C.Q., the first feature by Coppola's son Roman. I doubt wild horses could have kept him away. The same writer in the Chronicle has wondered why SFIFF last year didn't include solid programming like The Woodsman and Garden State which she saw at Sundance. Yeah, great, let's rally behind the movies with stars and major studio distribution. We'll never get to see them otherwise. Also: "From my perspective, the San Francisco festival could have used more sizzle. Stars go a long way toward creating that, but few were on display.")

I'm often skeptical of the mainstream press when it attempts to play watchdog of the arts. It's a rickety soapbox. Every year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces the Oscar nominations, some loud-mouth populist says that such-and-such was robbed and that so-and-so should have been nominated. Aren't they bold to fight the power on our behalf, these gilded warriors, who by the way haven't seen a fraction of the 2000 or so films that screen somewhere in this country in a given year? Shh, they don't mean those movies. Their mock outrage reinforces the most widely held American misconception about film as I see it: that the world output of film is vastly smaller than it really is. You can thank the American distributors and the small, tightly controlled pipe through which their product flows for fostering a stunted view of film, and, yes, thank those critics who, wittingly or not, reinforce not only this misconception but also their own importance — they have seen all the movies. They know what was best.

I have a similar complaint with the "number people," those protectors of the film community who boil their criticism down to a few statistics. When the S.F. Weekly complains up high in their coverage that a whopping 38% of the films playing at this year's "international" festival are American, or when I overhear those-in-the-know who are lining up for the member preview night loudly boasting that they've already seen most of these films in Toronto, I'd prefer to step back and ask what the point of a festival is.

Statisticians are lousy film critics. What does your college grade point average say about your knowledge of Flaubert? The Weekly doesn't provide any context for the 38% figure, except to say that it "seems odd" given the festival's name. You know, like the airport with its low-brow flights to "Chicago" and "New York." So odd.

The Weekly arrived at the 38% number apparently by scanning the country index of the festival program where shorts are listed individually alongside features. If you exclude shorts, the percentage of American features in the lineup this year is 22% (26 of 114), far lower than the complaint. It's not only that I prefer to think of the glass as 78% full, it's that the number is perfectly in line with other festivals, even Toronto [including shorts: (23%, 77 of 330, 82 from Canada)]. Tribeca touts on page 10 of its festival guide [pdf] that "half" of its films are American. The percentage also compares favorably with the SFIFF itself, whose 1997 number was 29% (33 of 113) when the festival was run by the sorely missed Peter Scarlet. (Yes I know that Toronto is in Canada. The point is whether the makeup of a festival is skewed relative to the world's output of film.)

(The same article in the SF Weekly called the amateurish, self-serving Whisky Romeo Zulu from Argentina "superb," I'll point out, just to twist the knife. But of course we're all entitled to our opinions. I saw the movie in Toronto, natch.)

I'm not saying the San Francisco festival is better or worse than those other festivals. Toronto has become a mecca for those of us who love film, for good reason. And I'm not saying the festival is better or worse now than it was in 1997. I'm just saying that neither does this number. Because numbers are a lousy and distracting way to measure a festival's worth. Just look how this particular metric — the percentage of American films — changes as you adjust a festival's program: Toronto makes an effort to highlight Canadian films just as San Francisco makes an effort to highlight Bay Area films, yet these commendable endeavors improve the number for one festival and hurt it for the other, Toronto being in Canada and San Francisco, despite the wishes of many a San Franciscan, being in the U.S. And obviously the festival's decision to show six Malaysian films this year means the Malaysian percentage is extremely high, off the charts relative to other festivals. But that's not odd. It's what festivals do.

Thus, it's a stupid metric, an over-simplification that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's not like many — any? — of the American films in this year's festival are major studio-produced films, if that's the concern. The festival could dramatically improve its lineup next year and the number would still look odd to the Weekly.

The Chronicle uses another number in its article about Messina Captor. They say that festival attendance has dropped from 94,500 in 2001 to 73,000 last year and 77,000 this year. (Actually, they say it "spiked" to 77,000 this year, implying the recent improvement is temporary.) Conclusion: Messina Captor was floundering. Of course other things have changed in the Bay Area since April 2001, too. The highways are less crowded. The waiting lists at the world-class, gourmet restaurants are much shorter. And the percentage of people having trouble finding jobs is way up, especially if you count those who left this expensive city in frustration. It's called the dot-com bust. It's called 9/11 scaring travelers away from a city that's dependent on tourism. It's called an anemic, limping economy. It may also be true that the festival appears less attractive to cash-strapped film-goers, but I don't trust the number people with an artistic evaluation. Note that the number of attendees in 1998, before the boom's peak, was only 78,000. You could draw a similar curve for the amount of venture capital invested in Silicon Valley, just south of the city, over those same years.

(By the way, another piece of news in the past two weeks is that paid circulation at the Chronicle, has dropped 6% in the past six months. Is someone over there floundering? Or is a disruptive technology shift afoot? It's both, I imagine. The Chronicle is the kind of paper that makes many of us who live here just read the New York Times instead, something that always makes me feel bad, especially when I hear about local events only when they make the national news. Of course I read the Times online for free.)

Isn't there a number that could measure the festival, a coefficient of quality? Well, you could count the number of internationally known filmmakers who have a movie in the schedule. But then you might as well start plumbing the narrow pipe, because you've just constructed the pseudo-cinephile's multiplex. Shall we dump your bricks out front so you can get started on the wall right away?

Or you could count the number of films that you saw in Toronto, as the boasters at the member preview did, each such film earning a demerit for San Francisco, as if the festival should cater to what must be a vast market of people who attend more than one major festival per year. Gotta keep those folks happy. Heck, even after you subtract the dual-attenders who got comped because they're in the biz, why, there must be a hundred of 'em with ticket money burnin' holes in their pockets. Jackpot!

The Unreported Story

The real benefit of a film festival is that it does an end-run around the multiplex. It's as close to a direct distribution system as we have. Filmmakers send their films to be shown, and a festival chooses some of them to present to an eager audience. Most of the films will never show in the city outside of the festival. And the real news, my friends, is not the soap operas within, spats between, and attendance fluctuations of major festivals but the rise of small festivals nationwide. Many people may not be aware of it — I wrote a small article for Paste back in December about this very subject — but the country is now blanketed with small festivals. A city as steeped in celluloid as San Francisco hosts a small, niche festival every month of the year and has rep houses and film archives that offer what seem like year-round festivals. That's to be expected. But I'm talking about the rest of the country. Nearly everyone now lives within a few hours of a film festival. Most of them are closer than that.

Are these small fests competing for premieres and worried about duplicating content with their distant peers? Are they worried about their position on the calendar, so close to Cannes and Tribeca (both of which happen within weeks of SFIFF)? Are they worried about how many deals for hot movies are going to get done, how much national buzz they're creating, how many stars are going to show up? Frankly, I don't think they or their attendees care. They're flying below all of that cloud cover, and they're showing movies that otherwise would never play in Bend, Oregon, or Kansas City, Missouri.

Among the exemplary, or at least interesting, films that played at Kansas City's 2004 FilmFest are Distant, To Be and To Have, Ju-On: The Grudge, Tracker, Ghost in the Shell 2, Demonlover, Last Life in the Universe, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Friday Night, Les Choiristes, and Time of the Wolf. "I've seen those," says the big-city cinephile. Yes, and thanks to this little festival, so have people in Kansas City.

Which is why the other lampooned feature of this year's SFIFF, its marketing slogan — "Every film is a foreign film somewhere" — may actually be pretty close to the mark. Sure, when read by a film buff who's already in his theatre seat it seems to shrug. It seems to say "This American film is foreign somewhere, don't knock it." But it's aimed at someone else. The intention is obviously to encourage the non-festival-going public to venture into what can be a daunting experience, choosing a film from a festival schedule. Most of the films are foreign, and most of them haven't benefited from an advance marketing campaign to pave the way. Take a chance, the slogan says, and what could possibly be wrong with that? The slogan is clearly not intended to tout the festival's American films, which are a minority in the lineup. "You can handle a few subtitles," another of the festival's ads encourages. Hear hear.

Unsolicited Advice, or Dear Board of Directors

Next year the festival will have a new director. It may sound crazy but I suggest hiring someone who loves film, who knows film. It's one of the few predictors of success I can think of. Like the "Varda" litmus test, a love of film may not make you a good festival director, but a lack of it should send you packing, and it's what was missing at the screening of Saraband at the Castro. Extrapolate from there to the festival as a whole. The numbers may lie, and seizing on them is counterproductive, but you can tell when the person at the top loves the biz more than the medium. Maybe not right away, but over time the evidence accumulates.

Find someone who loves film. We've got a number of them in the Bay Area. They're probably busy, but ask them for input as you conduct your search. Ask Anita Monga. Go ahead and ask David Thomson. Ask Edith Kramer and her folks at the Berkeley PFA who have been keeping a watchful eye on the local theatres. They recently assembled an Ulmer retrospective when SFIFF failed to show a single Ulmer film in conjunction with the new documentary about his life, and they've begun a new "non series" called "A Theatre Near You" that's trying to fill the holes left by recently closed art houses in Berkeley. For the ongoing series they intend to show films that are in current release and would have played in Berkeley had the UC Theatre or Fine Arts not closed, films like Au hasard Balthazar and Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Kramer promises that if nobody in Berkeley shows Mouchette when the new print is ready, the PFA will.

Find someone who loves film, who knows film. The opportunity is ripe. The scapegoat is Messina Captor. But the people who hired a TV producer in hope that she would boost the starry image of the festival — well, I believe they live to hire again.

Who is the board of directors looking for? The Chronicle quotes the president of the board of directors saying they're looking for someone "who is dynamic and wants to continue to expand our year-round program." Hmm. Pray that they've learned their lesson, but don't load the confetti cannons just yet.