Shot in Los Angeles, the Solomon Islands, and Mexico, Los Angeles-based Adele Horne’s first feature-length documentary explores the work of an evangelical missionary group known not only for their numerous conversions but for their recordings and translations of over 5,500 languages since their inception in 1939. Working in regions where indigenous communities face crises caused by global economic shifts, and using amazingly efficient low-tech audio recording devices, the missionaries seek out displaced and impoverished people, ostensibly in need of some kind of enlightenment. Elegantly structured and photographed, The Tailenders explores both the material and ideological means and meanings of these linguistic translations and spiritual transformations.

Experimental video artist Michelle Dizon joins us from Los Angeles for her first solo screening. Working with home movies shot in California and the Philippines, low-end video, numerous found images from the web and other films, and carefully culled and original texts, Dizon articulates a compelling political and aesthetic vision that constantly questions the status quo of language, images, and the power embedded in them. In our current context of globalization and war, pieces such as Calibrate; Département des Arts de l’Islam; We, the Undersigned, Girls of Hiroshima; and her newest piece, The Great Wall compel us to re-think representational and political practices. We will also screen earlier, more intimate, works including My Child, Anak and A Family Sick.

In his own words, Allen Ross’ The Grandfather Trilogy takes “a radical approach to portraiture” and plays as a “long sustained accident” and a “record of a divinely shadowed presence.” Made between 1979 and 1981, consisting of Papa, Thanksgiving 1979, and Buriels, the trilogy is a unique, unsettling, and moving document of intergenerational relationships. Through frequent use of disorienting camera angles, lingering images of stasis and uncomfortable breaks in conversation, The Grandfather Trilogy embodies the troubled yet ultimately close relationship between the filmmaker and his subject, allowing them their own space and time while reflecting on the intimate, yet intrusive, process of documentation.

FOLLOWED BY DOCUMENTARY ON LIFE AND DEATH OF ALLEN ROSS
Missing Allen: The Man Who Became A Camera at 8:50 pm

Allen Ross, experimental filmmaker, co-founder of Chicago Filmmakers, and cinematographer for numerous television documentaries, vanished in 1995. After his disappearance, his friend and fellow documentary filmmaker Christian Bauer decides to try to find him, or at least understand what happened. Although the deeper questions raised by this unsettling documentary are never answered, Missing Allen is a haunting investigation into America’s dark side of religious cults and fringe groups, a tribute to Ross as a person and filmmaker, and a reflection on how little we sometimes know each other. It features interviews with Chicago filmmakers Tom Palazzolo, Bill Stamets, and others.

From his late-sixties series of sublime “single-shot” films to the dense sound/image constructs of the mid-seventies and after, the cinema of Larry Gottheim is the cinema of presence, of observation, and of deep conscious engagement. While addressing genres of landscape, diary and assemblage filmmaking, Gottheim’s work properly stands alone in its intensive investigations of the paradoxes between direct, sensual experience in collision with complex structures of repetition, anticipation and memory. Tonight’s program includes new prints of Blues, Doorway, and Tree of Knowledge (from the four-part series, Elective Affinities) plus Your Television Traveler and The Opening, part of the in-progress Chants & Dances for Hand, based on material shot in Haiti.

This program also screens this Saturday, April 22 at 3:30 pm.

Appropriated from a righteously poetic scientific term describing the physics of lenses, “circles of confusion” refers to the impossibility of cameras to achieve technically perfect focus. The production of ambiguity and excess is inevitable during the translation of light through an optic. Similarly, each of the titles in this program reorient our perception, often pointing viewers towards the processes of the film's production. Whether through playful and confusing visuals or challenging dramatic techniques, they disrupt the construction of easy interpretations and resonate with our desire to experience the poignant and strange.

Featured artists include: Jay Rosenblatt, Sergio Basso, Tess Girard, Cathy Begien, Désirée Holman, Amy Hicks, Olivo Barbieri, Katherin McInnis, and Semiconductor.

For complete film descriptions and ticketing information, please visit: http://fest06.sffs.org/films/film_details.php?id=15

In this year’s annual co-presentation of new experimental work with San Francisco International Film Festival and Pacific Film Archive, nine experimental films and videos pay homage to early cinema and its precursors, witness the ordinary made extraordinary, and mourn tragic events. Using elegantly constructed images –original, archival, or animated– these visions encompass both the concrete and the abstract, the material and the spiritual. Films include Bill Morrison’s How to Pray; Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s fugitive l(i)ght; Stacey Steers’ Phantom Canyon; Pawel Wojtasik’s Naked; Olivo Barbieri’s Site Specific_Shanghai 04; Dolissa Medina’s 19: Victoria, Texas; Tomonari Nishikawa’s Market Street; Nancy Andrews’ Haunted Camera; and Jos de Putter’s Passers-By.

Cinematheque presents a rare showcase of recent experimental media from Taiwan brought by Bay Area filmmaker Anita Chang, who has been an artist resident and Fulbright lecturer there for the past few years. These works and their techniques reverberate with incisiveness, sensitivity, and introspection as they speak to what remains for a young democratic stateless nation vulnerable to the whims of dominant global economic exploits. Shifting between the lingering and fleeting, reconstructed and abandoned, sentiment and satire, they are soulful reclamations in the midst of precipitous change and loss. Works include: CHEN Chieh-Jen’s Factory, Tony Chun-Hui WU’s exTAIPEIit, LIN Chun-Hua’s She says, Mia CHEN’s Red-Label Rice Wine, HOU Chi-Jan’s Stardust 15749001, and Nana WU’s Farewell 1999.

The works in tonight’s program examine, use, and imagine technology in provocative ways. Collectively they ask not only how do –or might– technologies affect us, but how they determine our images and imaginings of the world. From fairgrounds to the Zuse strip, from push buttons to cars, video games, reproductive and waste technologies, the works explore our cyborg nature. Created using either hand-processed film, cgi, appropriated tv, or plain old cameras, and made for the big screen or the i-pod, works include Kerry Laitala’s Orbit, Caspar Stracke’s Zuse Strip, Gibbs Chapman’s Push Button: A History of Idleness & Ignorance, Scott Stark’s Driven, Pawel Wojtasik’s Dark Sun Squeeze, Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong’s Suprematist Kapital, and Hong’s The Coldest War Part 1.

Exuberant, witty, and politically incisive, Tahimik’s now classic 1977 feature/essay Perfumed Nightmare takes a wry look at American cultural influence and globalization from the artist’s playful and idiosyncratic perspective. The nightmare is the “cocoon of American dreams” which the film evokes and then parodies. From Tahimik’s childhood village, where Voice of America, movies, and space travel transform his lively imagination, the film moves to Paris and Bavaria where he tastes the fruits of the capitalism alongside an American bubble gum entrepreneur. Produced with the help of Werner Herzog, Perfumed Nightmare “reminds one that invention, insolence, enchantment –even innocence– are still available on film” according to Susan Sontag.

As a filmmaker and cinephile, Dominic Angerame has been behind both the scenes and the lens. Tonight Cinematheque celebrates his twenty-five years at the helm of Canyon Cinema, our sister organization and the world-renowned distributor of experimental film, with an overview sampling of work from early urban sketches to his current project. Threads of eros, violence and melancholy weave through the cityscape in the following films: Demonstration (1968-1974), The Mystery of Life (as Discovered in Los Angeles) (1982), Freedom's Skyway (1980), A Ticket Home (1982), Premonition (1995), Anaconda Targets (2004)In the Course of Human Events, (1997), Consume (2003), and Untitled (work-in-progress)

Fifty-one years after his Golden Gate Bridge disappearance, we present the film work of legendary poet/painter/iconoclast Weldon Kees. During his years in the Bay Area, Kees collaborated with filmmakers, jazz musicians, and scholars such as Gregory Bateson, while also writing plays, screenplays and film reviews (alongside Pauline Kael). Films include: Kees’s haunting portrait of East Bay urban detritus, Hotel Apex; William Heick’s poetic Golden Gate meditation, The Bridge, made with and featuring Kees; James Broughton’s The Adventures of Jimmy, with music by Kees; and examples of Kees’ educational films: the quirky exploration of mundane routines on San Francisco streets, Approaches and Leavetakings (with Jurgen Ruesch) and Hand-Mouth Coordination (with Bateson), a look at the daily routine of a one-year old boy.

This program of queer experimental shorts begins with 7,200 Drawings of Bill T. Jones, an animated rendering of the dancer/choreographer from a San Francisco performance. Using archival footage and intense editing, Matt Palazzolo offers insight into the experience of queer teens growing up in a digital society in Green Room. Shon Kayli's Drafting Dimensions is about an artist who visits her past while the military plans her future. Purge, by Etienne Kallos, is a lyrical, emotional journey of a young gay man struggling to come to terms with his HIV+ status.

Stitching together pieces of horror and sci-fi Bmovies, scraps of vintage children's books and science texts, Mark Taylor's Sensing the World by Echo presents an unconventional narrative about growing up feeling like an alien from outer space and finding one's place in a mad world.

Two guys give their take on trying to connect in the city, describing their mutual attraction and doubts in Cameron Groves' World's Worst Architecture. Fre'de'ric Moffet provides a queer rewriting of the events surrounding the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Jean Genet in Chicago.

7,200 DRAWINGS OF BILL T. JONES dir Rudy Lemcke 2006 USA 2 min video GREEN ROOM dir Matt Palazzolo 2005 USA 6 min video DRAFTING DIMENSIONS dir Shon Kayli 2005 USA 22 min video PURGE dir Etienne Kallos 2005 USA 14 min video SENSING THE WORLD BY ECHO dir Mark Taylor 2006 USA 18 min video WORLD'S WORST ARCHITECTURE dir Cameron Groves 2005 Canada 8 min video JEAN GENET IN CHICAGO dir Fre'de'ric Moffet 2006 Canada 25 min video in French & English with English subtitles

From postman’s son to Postmodernism’s founding father, and from schooner fisherman to scholar, this hulking six-foot eight Harvard-educated historian drifts back to the hard-luck New England fishing port of his boyhood summers after the 1956 close of Black Mountain College. There, surrounded by the cruel poverties and sorrows of a town at war with the sea for over 300 years, Charles Olson creates a unified and transcendent vision of a besieged people caught between tradition and modernity. Featuring John Malkovich, Amiri Baraka, Jonathan Williams, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Pete Seeger, and others, Polis is This investigates the seminal avant-garde poet, Charles Olson, in conjunction with his enduring connection to his place and origin of inspiration, Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Repressive postwar England was not the ideal place for a boy with an unbridled imagination to come of age. Nor was London in the '60s a warm and welcoming milieu for a gay man. Yet Derek Jarman wasn't bullied by his environment so much as inspired by it. Sure of his talent and energized by his outsider status, Jarman made bracingly original films that waged full-frontal war on conformity, narrow-mindedness and ugliness. Director Andy Kimpton-Nye eschews an exhaustive analysis of Jarman's life and oeuvre (which could never fit into sixty minutes, anyway) to proffer a breezy survey of the director's childhood and a joyful appreciation of his career. In lieu of Jarman's own words, we are treated to the witty and insightful reminiscences of collaborators including actors Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry and producer James MacKay.

Their droll recollections, alongside glimpses of such landmark Jarman films as Sebastiane (1976), Caravaggio (1986) and The Last of England (1987), comprise a vivid portrait of the artist as experimentalist and smiling provocateur. One of cinema's great radicals, Jarman transmuted his sexual and political concerns into fabulous art. His contribution was not limited to the screen, however; Jarman made his AIDS diagnosis public in 1986, galvanizing Thatcher's England.

The program will conclude with Jarman's 1984 short film, Imagining October.

Frameline30, the 30th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, screening June 15-25 at the Castro Theatre, Roxie Film Center, Victoria Theatre, Cinearts@Empire, and the Parkway Theatre is the oldest and largest event of its kind in the world. Tickets go on sale to Frameline members Friday, May 26. General public ticket sales begin Friday, June 2. Tickets are available at Superstar Satellite video store located at 474 Castro Street (between Market and 18th Street in San Francisco), online at www.frameline.org/festival, by phone at 925 866 9559 and by fax at 925 866 9597.

Curator Jackie Moe gathers short films every month for a screening series at Edinburgh Castle Pub that harbors a vast proof of home grown film talent in the City. Tonight she’s assembled a cast with new and classic shorts from that burgeoning scene. Cathy Begien’s playful maturity and unintentional detachment are expressed in Blackout, The Dream Diaries and more. David Enos constructs careful, primitive histories and home-made portraits in Light My Fire (Jim Morrison) and In Service to the Waxen Moon (the Wolf-Man). Sarah Enid presents The Great Unknown, portrait of a young man with an old hand, and The Progeny, a fable about an unlikely family. Jose Rodriguez’s taste for depravity and longing for beauty fuel Boy Crazy, exploring sexuality and indulgence. Plus many more films from this hotbed of production.