I’ve come to Duboce Park with a film program showing images of San Francisco between 1916 and 1978. In my twenty-nine years in San Francisco and almost forty years of showing films, this is my first large outdoor event. An outdoor screening both excites and scares me. No protective box of a theater, no predictable arrangement of bodies. But then again this is just what I want: a self-regulating audience, spectators defining their roles and choosing how they want to work with the images I offer.

I’m here to show Lost Landscapes, a feature-length compilation of archival footage from home movies, industrial films, documentary footage, and outtakes — images that generally haven’t been seen since their creation. All without sound except for three short sequences, Lost Landscapes is made for audience members who speak with one another and talk back to the screen as the movie plays. Above all, this project is about combatting historical amnesia — challenging received ideas about the history of San Francisco and California and presenting images and people from all of San Francisco’s communities. But I also harbor more covert objectives: to push people to stop seeing movies and start looking at images; to encourage people to construct their own narrative, if they need one, rather than forcing on them a particular mode of “storytelling”; to create a collective, dialogical experience that continues reverberating after people leave the theater; and to present an alternative to the spectacle that distracts the many and enriches the few.

This is, to me, a much more exciting destiny for cinema. And tonight I’ll find out if it works in the open air.

I usually know my audience and edit to the rough bounds of their sensibilities. Not this time: I don’t know who’s attending. Like an old-school comic, I count the moments I think will get a rise out of people. For my annual December shows, I generally aim for thirty to thirty-five; for this show, there are about fifty-seven. It’s a greatest-hits cut, a Lost Landscapes for newcomers.

Early arrival. Bright sun in the park; the air is warm, the wind is harsh. How long have the early birds been here? The screen, a squared-off plastic balloon, inflates, but the wind blows it in every direction. I remember reading about bouncy-house accidents. I imagine a wind-shaped screen and a distorted image, sure to please a few experimentalists who are even now staking territory on the grass. The organizers have gone so far as to relocate the dog area, an audacious play in San Francisco, and interns have picked up poop where people will sit during this spatially ambitious event.

A kid-friendly preshow begins. Trivia questions are posed. I walk around and talk with friends, who offer me beer (no), tequila (yes), edibles (no). The crowd grows.

The Sundown Cinema organizers, who put on movie screenings in city parks, play a trailer for the series of which this show is part. It’s an assault on the senses, a supercut of sensational scenes from “real movies” with loud music, extreme sound design, Hollywood stars, wild motion. Here and there a quiet historical shot from my event briefly slows the flow of rollercoaster pop-culture sampling. The trailer is an inductive experience, made to pep people up for the main event. Tonight it’s a dramatic mismatch.

I am introduced. Quiet in the park. It occurs to me, perhaps later than anyone else, that many, perhaps most of the audience, came to see a “real movie.” They have no idea what they’re going to see.

The promoters from San Francisco Parks Alliance have deployed crowd counters who report over two thousand people are assembled. I don’t know if people can see me; I can really only see twenty or thirty of them. I am looking uphill at a sea of humanity stretching back much further than I can make out, stars, planets, and constellations of people. I hold my radio mic and address them. All of you are my soundtrack, I say. But the crowd’s voice is faint and faraway.

We begin along the San Francisco waterfront before the bridges were built. Why are we here, I can imagine people thinking. But they are reassured to see Sutro Tower, something from their own lifetime — I hear people shifting on their blankets and murmuring to one another. And then the glider floats over the unbuilt sand dunes of the Sunset District in 1920, and I hear excitement. Maybe this will all work. When the Muni car emerges from the Duboce tunnel there are cheers. Somehow public transit has recently become hip. I show the outtake from the noir film The Lineup, taking us up the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway and almost pitching us over the dead end. This always gets a rise, and I never fail to use it. The ferryboats and the smoky city. The unfinished Bay Bridge: so many people shot it, our archives is swollen with Bay Bridge construction. Market Street: the chaos of the 1930s public sphere, a 1964 civil rights demonstration, the entertainment district before it was taken by high-rise developers. The audience is playing along. The Black square dancers on the 1914 Barbary Coast draw loud applause.

Neon signs, always a crowd-pleaser. The smiling expertise of an operator at the Chinese Telephone Exchange, an outtake from The Lady from Shanghai. When I began these events in 2006, I focused on public landscapes like buildings, streets, highways. It was a breakthrough to realize that it worked better to counterpose public and intimate: private landscapes, workplaces, realities experienced by individuals firsthand. Home movies, the product of a deeply personal and often indescribable connection between shooter and subject, add a sense of human-to-human narrative that draws viewers into the historical moment fixed in the films. We join three elder women riding the ramp at the Ellis-O’Farrell Garage before it’s opened, we hop on cable cars in the 1960s, and then I show the start of a pre-opening BART film. BART is always a winner. I only wish our friend, library host and BART historian Jay Bolcik, could narrate; he would find the magic words to go with these pictures.

Of what do we construct our internal histories of place? A measure of lived experience. For settlers and newcomers, perhaps a dose of movie clips. Many of my own memories of place are now synthetic, sampled from archival film. I think of the minimum needed to establish cinematic narrative: two frames. And the most powerful two-frame narrative is the then-and-now juxtaposition. With Lost Landscapes, the then is in the film and the now is in the viewers’ brains, brains being rewired as the show plays. A view of a familiar location as it once looked almost always draws a spectator into an uncanny zone.

Black Panther Party members paste posters on Western Addition walls. Tourists score on Haight Street. We are halfway done. A postal worker encourages his orange tabby cat to look at the camera. I’ve put a lot of cats in this show — cats span every divide. There’s ninety seconds of baseball fans leaving Candlestick Park circa 1962. It’s a coda, a break, a chance at people-watching. I mention that one spectator has brought a box of Ritz Crackers for lunch rather than the expensive garlic fries of this day — and the audience studies the crowd intensively, watching, watching, until they see the Ritz Crackers and applaud. Clapping for Ritz Crackers!

There is much more. Children hanging out the back window of a station wagon, a freedom denied to kids today. A sort-of-hip scooter club in 1960. The most celebratory scene of Harvey Milk I’ve ever seen, five months and two days before he was killed. Kids building a robot from old motors and lightbulbs and dipping their fingers into a pool of chocolate at the Annabelle Candy Company in 1957. A pitch for public power from 1940. And playing at the end of the continent, Ocean Beach.

For years I believed in Brecht’s objective for his epic theater: that theater could avoid creating an illusory sense of unity in the auditorium and instead divide its audience into competing class interests. Now as then, we’re in the midst of a violent worldwide wave of dispossession and displacement that forces us to take sides. It’s hard to step out of combative mode. Not all moments in this film are pleasant, and not everyone will experience them the same way — but as I hear the subdued cheers, laughs, and applause stretching back three hundred feet, I realize that this non-movie has been a deeply unifying experience. Audience members have found their own ways into the film and raised their voices. For a few minutes we are beyond polarization. And, as far as I can see, no one has drifted into the shadows.

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Notes‍

“History Is Made at Night” describes one out of one hundred and thirty presentations of thirty-five “interactive and dialogical” archival films, half under the title Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (2006-present). This screening occurred on the evening of September 6, 2024, in Duboce Park, San Francisco. Other Lost Landscapes films show Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Oakland. The 19th annual Lost Landscapes event will be at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, on December 9 and 10, 2024.‍

My archival work and writing take place on the unceded traditional lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, including the villages known as Petlenuc, Sitlintac, Chutchui, Amuctac, Tubsinte, and Ompuromo; these sites are within the boundaries of today’s city of San Francisco, where the Ramaytush Ohlone people are still present.

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