NUMBERING OUR DAYS: TIME AT THE MOVIES

from Smoke (1995, Wayne Wang)

THE INSTALLATION AT THE DAL SCHINDELL GALLERY HAS BEEN HELD OVER TO NOVEMBER 7!  

Monday-Thursday: 8am–9pm

Friday: 8am–6pm

Saturday: 10am–4pm

5800 University Blvd. 

Since 2004 I've been keeping track of calendar dates that show up in movies. In 2013 I started making montages of those film clips, culminating in the 2023 Richmond Cultural Centre premiere of a six-hour montage of movie scenes representing the six months of November through April. Now the complete twelve-hour Date Movie project is complete, playing Monday through Saturday until October 3 at the Dal Schindell Gallery (second floor, Regent College, on the UBC campus; enter Regent from the corner of Wesbrook Mall and Western Parkway). You'll find detailed information at the gallery website. 

There are also seven other movie montages featured in the installation. TimePiece, which debuted a year ago at the Annex of the Richmond Cultural Centre. In sixty minutes it moves around the clock showing clips featuring the time of day - a tribute to Christian Marclay's work The Clock. Marquee tracks the history of the movies through a progression of movie theatre marquees; another mashup does the same with Studio Credits taken from films featured in the installation. A pair of screens show us people in movies watching movies, and the movies they are watching, and Staircase and the Cinema Chapel look at contrasting ways we move through our days, with suggestions of eternity.

Definitely use the wireless headphones to view the Date Movie, Cinema Chapel, and TimePiece. The those three have soundtracks that are essential. 

PARKING

(this is important)

There's a lot of construction around Regent College right now, so parking is tricky. There's plenty of it, but you need to know where to look. There are a limited number of 2 hour spots along the east side of Western Parkway (Honk or Pay By Phone) - definitely the most convenient, but before 6pm you're strictly limited to two hours, and you might want a bit more time to sit down and really take in the long-form videos, the Date Movie or the Cinema Chapel - or visit the amazing Regent Bookstore. (After 6pm, parking on Western Parkway is free.) There's also plentiful underground parking off Allison Road - 2 hour limit for meter parking, or (I think?) longer durations if you use the Hangtag app (but download it in advance; I've found it a pain to try and download when I've just parked, so I don't). But here's the PRO TIP! UBC - Fairview Crescent parking. Pay By Phone or Honk app, always spots available, it's right beside a nice little forest, five minute walk from Regent, and if you book three hours or so it extends it beyond midnight for free! The other day it charged me only ten bucks to park from 10am to midnight! 

It's located south of Regent. Turn east from Wesbrook Mall onto Thunderbird Boulevard, go left when you have to turn at Osoyoos Crescent, then an immediate left onto Fairview Avenue. I've marked it on the map below. Low tech, low artistic merit, but hey, I'm not THAT kind of artist, okay?!!

annie dillard

 

JP Allen Retrospective in San Francisco | Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

HE’S MADE 11 FILMS SET IN S.F. — AND IS ONE OF THE CITY’S BEST UNKNOWN DIRECTORS

S.F. filmmaker JP Allen gets rare big-screen showcase in the Bay Area

By Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Sep 21, 2026 

San Francisco filmmaker JP Allen 

It’s long past time for JP Allen to be acknowledged as one of the city’s very best filmmakers.

Over the course of 11 films — most of them shot in San Francisco — Allen has produced a body of work that is understated yet passionate, focused on human relationships at their most intense. Imagine Ingmar Bergman’s movies, but as skewed through a West Coast sense of humor and sensibility.

 

These films don’t just deserve to be known. They deserve to be lauded, argued over and, someday, studied. This fall, three different venues are stepping up to celebrate Allen on the 25th anniversary of his first film, “Coffee and Language.”

 

The Roxie Theater in San Francisco plans to screen Allen’s latest, “Memorizing Alison” (2025), about a man recovering from the hit-and-run death of his girlfriend on Sept. 28. The next day, the Rafael Film Center in Marin will be showing “The Filmmaker” (2018), in which a man meets a troubled young woman who might be his daughter. 

 

JP Allen is the unidentified man in “Centaur.”

 

The series concludes Oct. 5, with “Coffee and Language” at the Rialto Elmwood Theater in Berkeley. The filmmaker is slated to appear at each event for post-screening Q&As with the audience. 

 

Born in 1960, Allen was raised in the country in North Texas and moved to Los Angeles for film school in 1982. Five years later, he traveled up to San Francisco and fell in love with the city’s cultural and visual beauty. “I felt that I’d found my home as well as the landscape of my imagination,” he said.

 

For those unfamiliar with Allen’s work, here are six things to know — and notice — in order to fully appreciate his work:

 

1. Feelings vs. rationality. The notion that life must be felt is a recurring idea in Allen’s work, including in “Memorizing Alison.” Curiously, Allen, who often appears in his own films, usually plays the guy trying to think his way out of feeling something.

 

2. He faces uncomfortable truths. As with Bergman’s characters, Allen’s can be surprisingly cruel to each other. He has an artist’s willingness to face the ugly truth about people and relationships.

 

3. Nothing can be taken back. As Allen has gotten older, his films have expressed a deepening sense of the irrevocable. “The Filmmaker,” one of my favorites of his movies, is especially profound in this regard. It has an Olympian vision of life as something grand, and yet it also leaves you with a feeling of loss, of opportunities that can never be regained.

 

4. Restraint is his strength. When Allen makes an emotional point, he moves on. That’s partly why most of his films are under 90 minutes. Whether it’s a feeling, a plot point or a character revelation, Allen shows what he has to show, and he gets out.

 

5. He has a gift for story. Alas, most independent filmmakers don’t have the knack for storytelling. They create characters and situations, but they can’t find a compelling narrative. Allen is one of the rare art film directors whose movies make you think, “I wonder what’s going to happen next.”

 

JP Allen wrote, directed and stars in "Centaur," 

about a man making a videotape about his planned revenge murder 

against the drunk driver who killed his girlfriend 

 

6. An eye for San Francisco. Allen isn’t interested in postcard views. He finds the city where actual people live. He likes Golden Gate Park, where much of his 2021 film “The Girl in Golden Gate Park” takes place, but in another movie he shows us the city as seen from the top of the Stockton Tunnel. In another, he shows us the outside of the Pinecrest Diner on Geary Street on a rainy day. Whatever love he has for San Francisco isn’t grounded in wishful thinking. Still, Allen’s gaze lends the city a faint air of enchantment.

 

The three screenings of Allen’s films are rare chances to see his movies on the big screen with an audience. But for those who can’t make it to those screenings or just want to see more, you should know that nine of his films are available to stream on Prime Video.

 

Of the films I have not yet mentioned, the ones I’d see first are “Gambling” (2004), “Sex and Imagining” (2009) and “Centaur” (2011). But if you take up this journey, I expect you’ll find that every film JP Allen is worth watching.

 

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle 

 

photo | children in gaza watching the lion king | omar ashtawy

 

denise levertov | in mind | poem

There's in my mind a woman

of innocence, unadorned but

 

fair-featured, and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears

 

a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she

 

is kind and very clean without
ostentation –

                       but she has
no imagination.

                     And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl

 

or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers

 

and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs –

 

but she is not kind.

photos | william klein