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Anita Monga Mel Novikoff Award The Mel Novikoff Award, named after the pioneering San Francisco film exhibitor (1922–1987), is bestowed annually on an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema. Reign of Enchantment by Nancy Gerstman To an outsider, San Francisco is a most unusual film community, filled with immense talents and strong personalities, many of whom have known each other for decades and socialize often. Filmmakers, programmers, exhibitors, distributors and buffs mix easily—without a lot of pomp or pretension. Their love of movies is palpable. At the vital center of this extraordinary film-loving culture is Anita Monga. Anita’s 17-year stewardship of the Castro Theatre is legendary in the Bay Area and cinephiles worldwide have appreciated her astute programming of this magnificent venue. The breadth and depth of her film knowledge is astounding, and her taste reflects her sharp and inquiring intelligence. Anita grew up in Stockton, a delta city in Northern California (where John Huston’s Fat City was memorably set), and from the time she was in high school, she says, “Movies and books were a kind of lifeline to a world beyond my hidebound hometown.” The Hollywood films of that era—the golden age of the 1970s—turned her into a devotee. And her discovery of foreign cinema—Buñuel, Godard, Malle, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Polanski, Vigo, Bresson—cemented her devotion. She moved to San Francisco from Berkeley in late 1976 with friends who were performing artists and painters working at cafes and restaurants and holding weekly salons. “People would come with performances, paintings, writing, music, drugs, alcohol,” she recalls. “At that time it seemed like there was a repertory cinema on every corner.” But her true introduction to film life came when she met the maverick director Curt McDowell, whose boyfriend, Robert Evans, owned the Roxie Cinema, a classic movie house (and “film buff’s paradise”) in San Francisco’s Mission district. “I think I really fell in love with movies sitting in Curt and Robert’s living room and watching 16mm prints by (low-budget genius) George Kuchar.” Evans hired Anita at the Roxie to do a bit of everything, from working the concession stand to programming to schlepping prints back to the film depot (where “the super-macho guys who worked there would yell, ‘Here comes the chick!’ whenever I walked in”). In late 1982 she became the Roxie’s programmer. Among her most important innovations there was the concept of the locked engagement—one and two-week runs of some of the most challenging cinema of the time: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Ron Mann’s Poetry in Motion, Wim Wenders’ The State of Things. Anita moved over to the York Theatre, a neighborhood movie palace in the deeper Mission, in 1984. Along with her carefully chosen premieres, she launched Film Noir Mondays (a weekly tribute to one of her favorite genres), director tributes (where she could fully indulge her devotion to Stanley Kubrick) and a breakthrough Women in Film festival. A few years later she was asked to program the final Castro calendar as late cinema impresario Mel Novikoff was dying. No one knew what the new owners, the Blumenfelds, would do with the theater. But happily, when the calendar was completed, Anita was hired as the Castro’s full-time programmer. I use the word programmer loosely, since Anita is much, much more than that title suggests. She is one of an elite group of people in the United States who have an intuitive understanding of their theaters and who do whatever it takes to make those theaters successful for their communities, their patrons and their owners. In Anita’s case, this included designing the calendars, which are collectible treasures, and writing or soliciting the take-no-prisoners text that accompanied the photos. Anita recognized that the Castro was a splendid carrot to dangle in front of the studios to encourage them to look into their libraries and strike new prints of classic titles. And thanks to her discriminating taste, she was also quick to showcase gifted contemporary filmmakers Todd Haynes, Terry Zwigoff, Guy Maddin, Matthew Barney, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Peter Wintonick, Mark Achbar, Wong Kar-Wai, Caroline Link and Nicolas Philibert, among many others. Because the film scene in San Francisco is so intensely close-knit and because she and her husband and partner Peter Moore (and their beloved dog, Willy) have a special gift for making friends with just about everyone they meet, Anita is a personal favorite of many of these filmmakers. She is also a favorite of the independent film companies, whose films she championed, and who gladly met her exacting demands for the best possible prints for the Castro audience. The Castro will surely never be the same without Anita. But as Michael Sragow, her friend and film critic for the Baltimore Sun, observes, “Anita’s brand of programming increases the smarts, the energy-level and the emotional responsiveness of casual filmgoers and cineastes alike. Fans everywhere await her next reign of enchantment.”
Copyright
© 2005 San Francisco Film Society
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