`FURNITURE' WINS FAVOR AT FILM FEST.

THE COMEDY and poetry of workaday movement propel Office Furniture, the sole dance film to be nominated for a Golden Spire Award at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. The film was one of four to win nominations in the Bay Area Shorts category (and one of 1,600 entries in the festival at large), making it eligible for a cash prize.

The Rebecca Salzer Dance Theater stars in this black-and-white eight-minute short, which director Chris Brown shot on the bustling streets of San Francisco's Financial District. Salzer, inspired by her own corporate job-hunting experiences, acts as a narrative figure thwarted at job interviews by a parade of unfeeling would-be employers who draft grocery lists as she nervously tries to impress. Her eight dancers, dressed in suits, serve as a corps of office drones, spilling over street corners into traffic and suspending themselves from bus shelters.

Shooting some of the sweeping movement sequences in the area's shoulder-to-shoulder crowds was tricky, but Salzer wanted lots of people for background, to capture the frenetic pace and mood of Friday afternoon rush hour. Performing without composer Darin Wilson's original score, which David Scott Smith added after he finished editing the footage, proved challenging too: Salzer's dancers timed themselves against a noisy electronic metronome. "Shooting in the street was hard because we had to stay focused and keep our energy up, because we had to do it so many times," she said. "The final product is so many steps away from the performance .... I had to try to keep the integrity throughout the process with all those collaborators."

But the collaborators worked well together, and Salzer was gratified by the results. "As a choreographer, I couldn't do everything," she said. "I didn't know how. Now I have a movie that I can show anytime that will always look great. It's such a struggle to get people to come to performances, and after a weekend, it's over. This way I can reach more people at a time."

Furniture was shot in 1998 and debuted at San Francisco's Dance Footage Film Festival the following year. It is and it isn't a dance film, said Salzer, which may help explain its general appeal in the International Film Festival's Bay Area Shorts category. "I hoped it would cross over," she said. "It's really more than a dance film. Non-dancers get it, laugh at it and enjoy it. They're surprised there's dance in it." The festival was held in San Francisco April 20-May 4.