In the opening of Aroused, photographer Deborah Anderson promises great things: "This is not a movie about porn," she says in her opening narration. "This is a story about women. Their dreams, their desires, and their lives." The film is a part of a larger multimedia project, showing conversations between Anderson and sixteen female porn stars who modeled for her latest fine-art book. Her goal, she says, was to "strip away the porn star mask, allowing for their true essence to shine through, as the exaggerated image of a porn star has stuck with us for so long. As an artist, I felt the need to change the way we view these women visually."

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Camille Rose Garcia

A mad tea party

Growing up in Southern California not far from Disneyland, the celebrated "lowbrow" artist Camille Rose Garcia fell in love with all things Disney at an early age. Disney animation in particular has remained a key influence upon her work. In looking at her distinctive work, it becomes obvious that Garcia's vision of the world is darker and more complex than that influence alone.

Rife with dystopian ideas and phantasmagorical imagery, Garcia's paintings hold a central place in the pop surrealist movement of the last two decades. Still, there's a sense of her having come full circle as an exhibition opens this week at the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio that pairs her interpretations of the Alice in Wonderland story with Mary Blair's imaginative, angular designs for Disney's Alice film of 1951. Garcia, who cites Blair specifically as an influence, spoke to us about the exhibition and her other recent work.

How did the exhibition come together?
I did the Alice in Wonderland book a couple of years ago, and I made the decision to keep all the artwork together. I was looking at the early Tenniel work -- the original Alice in Wonderland illustrations -- and I was thinking, "How great to have a whole body like that kept together." So I framed it all and showed it in Los Angeles. Then the Walt Disney Family Museum contacted me about doing a show, and I mentioned that I had this whole body of work in my personal collection. They loved it because it tied in with the Disney Alice in Wonderland -- and they do a spring, Alice in Wonderland-themed tea party every year.

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WaxWorks, a silent German Expressionist film from 1924 will be reimagined with a modern score of musical madness...

Honoring the long-held tradition of coupling together contemporary musicians with classic silent films, this year's SF International Film Festival has forged a psychedelic, improvisational aficionado dream team, sure to shock, scintillate, and maybe even offend.

Mike Patton, of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, and Peeping Tom, among other strange sublime bands, has joined up with three genre-bending percussionists, Scott Amendola (Scott Amendola Trio, Nels Cline, Jeff Parker, Charlie Hunter), William Winant (John Cage, Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Lou Reed) and Matthias Bossi (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, The Book of Knots, Skeleton Key) to perform an original "score" for WaxWorks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett), a silent, German fantasy-horror flick from 1924.

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Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid in At Any Price

Inspiration for Ramin Bahrani's latest film, At Any Price, came from reading food expert Michael Pollan's bestselling books, such as The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Bahrani, touted by the late, great film critic Roger Ebert as "director of the decade" for films such as Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, and a short narrated by Werner Herzog, Plastic Bag, started an email friendship with Pollan and asked him for introductions to farmers like George Naylor, who was profiled in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Bahrani then spent about six months in Iowa, living with farmers and watching them oversee their multimillion-dollar businesses as research for At Any Price. In the film, Dennis Quaid stars as a farmer and GMO seed salesman. Zac Efron plays the rebellious son who would rather race cars than join his father's farming empire. Bahrani says Pollan gave invaluable help.

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Ted Hope

Our interview with film producer and executive director of the San Francisco Film Society Ted Hope was an extended affair, with Hope providing far more in his substantive responses to our questions than we were able to include in an article of limited length (see that article in this week's print issue).

Therefore, we have included the excerpts from our Q&A below as a supplement. Here, Hope elaborates upon the decision to relocate to San Francisco from New York, and upon the state of the film business at the present transformative moment.

What was your process in deciding to take the position at SFFS?

I had never thought I'd leave New York. I had never thought I'd do anything other than produce. But I think I've lived my life in 10-year plans, and it happened that I had just completed a 10-year plan. I had run the company I founded, Good Machine, for 10 years, and then sold it to Universal. And then I had been an independent producer through three different companies of my own for the last 10 years. Around that period [spring of 2012], I had been doing some self-criticism, taking stock in what I had wrought, and made some determinations. I had pledged to myself to adopt a new way of working
over the last three years, which was to be budget-agnostic, to try to make two films a year that I cared about, and wait for things to shift. I had achieved that goal of getting six movies funded, but they were frequently lower-budgeted films, which meant a) that my fees weren't quite enough to live on, b) because the fees were lower, I couldn't commit as much time to them, so my personal satisfaction was reduced, and c) because the budgets were lower, the imperative that they have the same sort of cultural impact that films with higher costs carry with them was hard to deliver. So I had a realization that it wasn't particularly satisfying, and I was looking for a way to combine all those things that I had been pursuing into something satisfactory to me on a personal level. So, when that call came from the San Francisco Film Society, to me, it was a mandate: "Do you want to save film culture?" It was an offer that I couldn't refuse.

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Knows a lot about movies

Director Steven Soderbergh's much-discussed retirement from directing feature films notwithstanding, there is quite possibly no better filmmaker to assess the current status of the filmmaking arts, as Soderbergh will do this Saturday at the San Francisco International Film Festival's State of the Cinema address.

A restless innovator and a lifelong student of the movies, Soderbergh's eclectic filmography demonstrates the kind of searching, experimental creative energy that is difficult to imagine petering out. Despite swearing off features, Soderbergh's desire to create has in no way flagged; he has discussed focusing on painting, on directing plays and musicals, on a 12-hour miniseries adaptation of John Barth's enormous satirical novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, and on an extensive revision of his own 1991 film, Kafka.

I think it's safe to say that Soderbergh isn't retiring at all -- but he is, apparently, leaving behind a medium that is undergoing vast changes, after spending 25 years (and 25 features) immersed in it.

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By James Robinson

When the Brooklyn Nets debuted in the NBA last October in their fancy, Jay Z-endorsed new digs in the Barclay Arena in Prospect Heights, not everyone was applauding the news.

Daniel Goldstein, a local graphic designer, once lived in a nine-story apartment building plum in the developer's way. His neighbors left but he refused to budge, holding out for six years until he'd exhausted all legal recourse in 2010. He was protesting, joined by many from the community, what he saw to be corrupt use of 'eminent domain,' with a government seizing land for private rather than public use as the law was intended.

His losing struggle is at the heart of Battle for Brooklyn, a 2011 documentary from New York filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, which is coming to Oakland's New Parkway Theater for two screenings next week, following several successful festival airings.

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In David Mamet's film Heist, Danny DeVito's character famously says, "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." What that second sentence means is anybody's guess, but that first sentence is the subject of Katie Teague's new documentary Money & Life: Why does everybody need money? How did we get to this place of money dependence? And what can be done to change that? Come to the Roxie Theater tonight (April 10) or the New Parkway in Oakland tomorrow night (April 11) to find out.

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Jeff Bridge

"Spooky action at a distance" was Einstein's skeptical phrase for quantum entanglement, and as good a summary as any for the mysteries at play in Shane Carruth's Upstream Color. The official synopsis goes like this: "A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives." Such is Carruth's gift that the audience, too, struggles with that assembly. For some, it amounts to an hour-and-a-half of "Huh?" Others will be in hog heaven (actual pigs figure in to the story, too).

Upstream Color is only Carruth's second film, but for years he's been working up a cult mystique. His debut, the 2004 indie puzzle Primer, was about two guys who accidentally invent a time machine, then run afoul of causality and morality. Noted for being both very resourceful (it cost $7,000) and very cryptic (just for starters, no one ever says the words "time machine"), it laid a nice foundation for devoted fandom. In the new film, an artfully ragged mosaic of glassy nonlinearity, Amy Siemetz plays the woman, and Carruth plays the man. He also wrote, produced, directed, shot, co-edited, scored, and distributed it. He admits he sometimes has to try not to be a control freak. Here are some other things he admitted, in a conversation last week.

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Harrod Blank

Les Blank, R.I.P.

The rich lore of Les Blank includes a story he told about dropping out of grad school at UC Berkeley, feeling aimless for a while, then seeing Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and being steered away, last-minute, from a military life. He wound up making films instead, mostly nonfiction. That seemed like a better fit -- more suited to Blank's mildness of manner, and his penchant for the gentle ecstasies of observation.

Blank, 77, expired from cancer on Sunday in his home in Berkeley, where he lived for many years, and the city have a day named after him. But his dozens of movies seem unlikely ever to die. These are films from a time before subcultures succumbed to monoculture; before everybody's teeth got fixed and pictures got digitized and color-corrected to death; before narration came at you in twenty different know-it-all ways, leeching the wonder out of everything.

Blank ranged eagerly across a vast swath of Americana, more interested in affirmations than agitations. He put out movies like hand-made nourishments, many of them seemingly done as larks, and somehow all the more lasting for it. He was more inclined to call them movies about real people than documentaries. Here are a few worth tracking down.

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