Special Admission: $10

Around 2003 a confluence of scribblers and flickers brought forth a new kind of film commentary. In neo-benshi, movie scenes are projected silently only to be reinterpreted by narrators from the stage. Tonight as part of the 2006 Poets Theater Jamboree an all-star lineup of local poets continues this restoration of theatrical cinema with live overdubbing sessions of popular films. With Dennis Somera; Leslie Scalapino; Ronald Palmer; Summi Kaipa; Tanya Brolaski; Alan Bernheimer; and Dodie Bellamy, Colter Jacobsen, and Kevin Killian. (Konrad Steiner)

These recent works merge history and historical record in varied dances of repetition and release, meditating on the plight of the photographed human subject, suspended in time and fixed on film as ancient insects in amber. Using material drawn from appropriated sources, these films preserve original contexts, uses, and intentions while placing them into vibration and resonance with newer meanings, considerations, and experiences. Screening: Carolyn Faberís For The Record, Peter Kubelkaís Poetry And Truth, Leslie Thorntonís Another Worldy, and two by Ken Jacobs: Mountaineer Spinning and A Tom Tom Chaseróa digital-era consideration of his 1969 classic. (Steve Polta)

Special Times

Susan Sontag wrote ìNotes on Campî in 1964, which put performance of identity on the road to high culture. Warholís 1965 rejoinder, Camp features Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga, Baby Jane Holzer, Tally Brown, Jack Smith, and others in a variety show format put on in the foil festooned Factory. Malanga emcees and recites poetry, Tally Brown imitates Yma Sumac, Paul Swan dances, and Smithís over-the-top minimalism is just short of a refusal to perform that implies camp is not a pose or a praxis, but a way of life. Also screening is the short compilation of Screen Tests, Four of Andy Warholís Most Beautiful Women. (Konrad Steiner)

Special Times, Place, Admission

We co-present three programs this year with Activating the Medium, an annual trans-disciplinary festival of international sound art presented by 23five Incorporated, showcasing sound, film/video, and live performance. Friday night's program: The Movement of People Working by Phill Niblock, (un)commonsounds by Xabier Erkizia and Dimitris Kariofilis, la danse des fous by Joachim Montessuis, and the sound/film performance I.C. You by Laetitia Sonami and Sue Costabile. Held at San Francisco Art Institute. For complete festival line up, visit www.23five.org.

Special Times, Place, Admission

We co-present three programs this year with Activating the Medium, an annual trans-disciplinary festival of international sound art presented by 23five Incorporated, showcasing sound, film/video, and live performance. Saturday night's program: Celebration of a Revolution by Leif Elggren; Waiting 2006 8:0 by Michael 9; Speaker Swinging 1987 by Gordon Monahan and the sound/video performance Ilios, by Dimitris Kariofilis. Held at San Francisco Art Institute. For complete festival line up, visit www.23five.org.

In his development of myriad radical cinematic languages over his long filmmaking career, Stan Brakhage frequently promoted a profound aesthetics which frequently positioned intense silences as ground for his complex and subtle visual compositions. In his interest in non-verbal expression, he was greatly inspired by music and his rare forays into sound filmmaking stand as some of the most unique sound/image statements in the history of cinema. Tonightís program presents a survey of this work, including Boulder Blues and Pearls andÖ, Fire of Waters, Christ Mass Sex Dance, Crack Glass Eulogy, Kindering, ìÖî (Reel 5), and Passage Through (A Ritual). (Steve Polta)

Some say glamour is the mirror of emptiness. But to others pop is an ethereal substance, though they mold it like plastic. Star Exercise by Karla Milosevich revives the idle verbal output of Jamie Lee Curtis while Badass Supermama by Etang Inyang engages Pam Grierís characters as not quite role model. Anne McGuire stalks Mr. Coffee in Joe DiMaggio 1,2,3, and the pixelvision intimacy of Barbieís Audition spies Joe Gibbons on the casting couch. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kota Ezawa marks the eternal return of the Kennedy/Lincoln parallel. In 1974, Pullout/Fallout by Daniel Barnett turned a James Bond trailer into political commentary. In Bruce Connerís Marilyn Times Five Monroe poses and repeats ìIím through with Loveî while Sid Laverentsí Multiple Sidosis made this amateur a star through form alone. Plus Andy Warholís TV Episode 6 features Carlene Carter, Pee Wee Herman, Sparks, and Frank Zappa. (Konrad Steiner)

A dancer/choreographer turned filmmaker, Shirley Clarke was one of the few women making any kind of film in the 1950s and ë60s. Her first feature, made after several avant-garde shorts and before her better-known The Cool World and Portrait of Jason, was restored last year by UCLA from original 35mm negatives. Based on Jack Gelberís play about a group of junkies hanging out in a New York loft waiting for their fix, The Connection is part beat narrative, part interrogation of documentary form, part portrait of a subculture. Noted for Clarkeís innovative camera-choreography, it was banned for its obscenity but won the Criticís Prize at Cannes. (Irina Leimbacher)

A ìmeta-Warhol movieî according to Vincent Canby, Lionís Love (1969) is the fruit of AgnËs Vardaís foray into 1960s US pop and avant-garde culture. While Viva (of Warhol fame), Rado, and Ragni (both of Hair) are a mÈnage-‡-trois looking for a future in LA, Shirley Clarke, played somewhat unwillingly by Shirley Clarke, attempts to leave behind her experimental work in New York (see The Connection above) for a Hollywood career, and Bobby Kennedy is assassinated on television. Varda takes on a few Warhol tropes, but Clarkeís uneasy presence and Vardaís whimsy shift the tone. The film is playful and witty, spicing up its fascination with a bit of cynicism in this tribute to a ë60s American way of life. (Irina Leimbacher)

Back in the Bay Area to take a position at UC Berkeley, longtime Cinematheque collaborator Jeffrey Skoller joins us to introduce two evenings of films discussed in his new book, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. Tonightís program features two very different modes of excavating autobiographical and historical memory. In Chile, Obstinate Memory, Patricio Guzmán returns to Chile after 25 years to examine re-membered traces of the Allende coup and its horrific aftermath, while Daniel Eisenberg journeys across Europe to revisit his parentsí experience surviving the Shoah in Cooperation of Parts. In both, filmmaking becomes a process of mourning and a means of tracing the pastís continual resurfacing. Please join us for a small reception and book signing after the screening. (Irina Leimbacher)

Two Shows, Special Day and Times
6 pm reception; 7 pm ‘seeking same’; 9 pm ‘tempest tossed’

Cinematheque is honored to host the Women of Color Film Festival for a second year with two shows. WOCFF provides a welcome forum for both emerging and established artists from one of the most creative but underrepresented sectors of the film community. The 7 o'clock program ‘seeking same‘ revisits the conundrum of displacement, from the distant mountains that divide Korea to an emotional homecoming in the Philippines. These filmmakers, including Soon-Mi Yoo, Tina Bartolome, Kristina Cervantes-Yoshida, and Isabella La Rocca, attempt to piece together missing parts and re-envision universal cycles of beginnings and endings. At 9 o’clock, in ‘tempest tossed,’ local and international filmmakers including Marianne M. Kim, Crystal H. Weston, Sonali Gulati, and Lauren Woods uncover their inner frustrations, taking on burdens in unexpectedly transformative, sometimes tantrum-like ways. From conflicting identities to unsettling ambiguities, we pay homage to the fluidity of circumstances that both separate and intertwine us in the search for self. WOCFF opens at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, March 2-5. For full information: www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/women_of_color/. (Linda Charmaraman,WOCFF)

Korean artist Soon-Mi Yoo kicks off our new series exploring personal and experimental filmmaking emerging from or engaging with the Pacific Rim. Combining aesthetic grace with emotional intensity, the personal with the political, her experimental videos explore Koreaís lesser known peripheral histories. Thus ssitkim: talking to the dead is a moving essay on grieving and the little known role of 320,000 Korean soldiers who fought in Vietnam for the United States and carried out mass civilian killings. ISAHN uses the stereoscopes placed on North Korean borderówhere exiled North Koreans can look back at state approved photographs of ìhomeîóto dwell on the difficulties of displacement and the pain of being separated across borders. Also screening: faith, the new supplements, and a work-in-progress. (Irina Leimbacher)

Former Bay Area artist Lynne Sachs comes to Cinematheque to screen her newest cine-essay States of Unbelonging, made in collaboration with her Israeli friend and former student Nir Zats. Intrigued by the life of a young Israeli filmmaker, Revital Ohayon, who was murdered with her two children, Sachs begins a digital correspondence with Zats as a means of exploring the meanings and aftermath of this violent act. Approaching the Middle East conflict through this singular event, the filmís layered and multiple images and sounds—of Israel and Brooklyn, of private and public spaces—weave their sensitive and increasingly complex tale through dialogue with Zats and others. (Irina Leimbacher)

Jeffrey Skoller continues his investigation of avant-garde film's multi-faceted relation to history with tonight's screening of James Benning's Utopia. Visually reminiscent of the 'California Trilogy' in its carefully wrought long takes of landscapes—here of Death Valley and southwards, past the Mexican border—Utopia 'steals' its soundtrack wholesale from Richard Dindo's film about the last days of Che Guevara and his unsuccessful Bolivian campaign. With the intriguing notion of 'virtual histories,' Skoller examines Benning's piece and its insinuations about the political and topographical history of Southern California as a 'complex interplay between events that actually did happen and what can be imagined or desired in relation to them.' (Irina Leimbacher)

Two Shows, Special Times

Nagisa Oshima's films of the 1960s combine incisive political commentary and riveting psychosexual explorations with a radical Japanese New Wave aesthetic. At 7 pm we present his early masterpiece Death by Hanging (1968), a Brechtian tour-de-force and one of the strongest indictments of capital punishment ever made on film. Based on an actual criminal case, the film tells the story of the execution of a Korean worker found guilty of rape as it denounces the oppression of Koreans in Japan and suggests that murder is the outcome of social repression. At 9 pm we screen Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969), a look into the sexual and cultural politics of young Japanese radicals of 1968 through the tale of a book thief/fetishist, with references to Japanese avant-garde theatre, French political writing and cinema (Genet, Godard), and Mohammed Ali. (Irina Leimbacher)