SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Living in the World:

Films by Helga Fanderl

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art





Helga Fanderl In Person
presented in association with SFMOMA
[members: $7 / non-members: $10]

Helga Fanderl is a sensitive poet who works with cinema. Her use of the medium is straight and simple. The films, mostly edited in the camera, make me sometimes think of the work of Emily Dickinson. (Peter Kubelka)

Working with film since the late 1980s—exclusively in Super-8mm—the German-born and Paris-based artist Helga Fanderl is a master of cinematic duration and the in-camera edit, each of her over 700 short films a small epiphany of graphic composition and poetic form. As if taking cues from the latent lyricism discoverable at the margins of certain “structuralist” works—including films of Gehr, Snow, Stark and Warhol—Fanderl’s compact and formal works (which resemble superficially travelogues and portraits) are subtle revelations of vibrant energy and light embodied in (and flowing through) the surfaces of the physical world. Tonight’s screening presents an approximately sixty-minute—all silent—program of short works ranging from 1–3 minutes each in Super-8mm format as well as in 16mm blow-up. (Steve Polta)

Download program notes (PDF)