San Francisco Plays Itself: Scenes from the Bay

San Francisco has been the fascination, foreground and background of the moving image since the beginning of cinema. The same year that Eadweard Muybridge captured a horse in motion, he took a famous panorama, a 360-degree look from atop Nob Hill, and years later the Miles Brothers took a cable car ride down Market Street just a few days before the infamous 1906 earthquake, in A Trip Down Market Street. San Francisco’s pull is clear even in these early documents; there is something magnetic and fortuitous about its landscape, its rhythm, its streets, hills and light that is ever changing. San Francisco is a small city with a big history of doing things on its own terms — a place of firsts, a place of discovery, a place of acceptance, a place of ideas — while also being a difficult, precarious and complex city. It is in this friction that something unique to the Bay is created.

San Francisco Plays Itself takes a look at a selection of films that feature San Francisco in the frames. While no amount of work can fully capture the dynamic and diverse place, this series will highlight the energy and essence of the city that has been the draw for so many. Its streets and dark alleyways help emphasize the drama in Dark Passage and The Streets of San Francisco. A city in change is the background for characters that are trying to figure out love and lust in the first features by Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) and Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl). A ferocious attitude is captured in the personal films about the punk rock bands that played the Mabuhay Gardens, while artist-made and experimental work appears throughout. With a critical eye, a classic (Vertigo) is examined through an Indigenous lens and of course, the Golden Gate Bridge, makes an appearance in many films throughout the program, but all with a different angle, literally and figuratively. Through these fiction and non-fiction shorts and feature films, tour the city and feel the spirit and magic of “the heart of all the golden west.”