The Odds of Recovery is the story of Friedrich's battle with a multitude of often unexplained illnesses, the series of operations she endures and her struggle to understand the web of Western medicine. Both poignant and funny this intimate portrait takes a look at the realities of aging, personal stagnation and growth. It allows the viewer to peek into the filmmaker's fight to understand her body as well as the private world of a long-term relationship as well. Friedrich weaves documentary and first person experimental filmmaking to create a film that falls between genres allowing her to approach her subject in a way that recognizes its complexity. The Odds of Recovery includes a series of texts from medical and self help books, the principles of T'ai Chi and gardening books. The viewer is led on a journey through the seasons which tells a story of rebirth and one woman's determination to understand and gain control over her body and her life.

Also screening, Beloved by Andrea Leuteneker.
With its rich colors and time-lapse photography, Beloved is an ode to the beauty of flowers and a love poem to the filmmaker's lover.

For more info, visit the MadCat International Women's Film Festival website at http://www.somaglow.com/madcat/

See September 23 for details.

For eight years local filmmaker and teacher Anita Chang has been making intimate documentaries exploring the political and emotional aspects of place and belonging. Investigating her familial relationships and, in turns, a wide community of Bay Area immigrants and transplants and an eclectic group of Nepalese women, Changís films combine experimental techniques with a deep commitment to her subjectsí stories and ways of telling them. Evoking the transience of being through the ephemerality of her medium, her films turn fragility into strength and displacement into a deeper form of rootedness. Tonightís retrospective features Mommy, Whatís Wrong?; Imagining Place; She Wants to Talk to You and premieres of An elegy to our small selves (a linking of the human and animal, in part a response to 9/11) and Exquisite-Eye.

I make films to explore the unfamiliar, to go beyond borders, myths, clichÈs, or other assumptions about how we see the world. Past, present, future, circle in a construct of on-going present-ness, or presence. In the end I seek to ignite a heightened sense of being alive. Kalama Sutta is a meditation on the political and cultural upheaval in the country of Burma. The nationís Post-Cold War legacies of militarism, ethnic genocide and environmental abuses are linked in this collage-like ìliving history.î Yet Burma here acts as a conduit to explore common vulnerabilities in an increasingly globalized world. History, memory, and myth collide and find resonance in what is missingóbetween frames, images and ideas. (Holly Fisher)

In this era of electronic/ digital media making, the films of Cade Bursell and MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter delight in the tactility and sheer physicality of the essential elements of cinema. Their screens unite light, surface and gesture into textural fields of color and rhythm, within which appear fleeting and ephemeral suggestions of images. Manipulated by handóvia self-processing, hand-painting, home-made emulsions and other ìdirect cinemaî techniquesóthese films directly activate the senses and provide exhilarating visual and auditory experiences while meditating on desire and memory, history and politics. The program will include Carpenterís Site Visit, The Shape of the Gaze and Sans Titre and Bursellís Jump, Skate and the 35mm Test Sites. (Steve Polta)

The cinema of Jeanne Liotta is fraught with mistakes and missteps in the flimsy world of representation; these handmade films are meditating on the ephemerality of life itselfóall the while celebrating the subtle pleasures of the lived experience. Sensual, elegant and ragged, the philosophical inquiry is a fragile one: these images may disappear before your very eyes. Expect the conceptual nuance of the ready made, the rigor of silent abstraction, the sound of stereo and more spontaneous accidents. This screeningóthe artistís first appearance in San Francisco-includes all recent works in Super 8, 16mm, & video: Ceci níest Pas, Muktikara, Maria Movie, Window, Manifesto!, What Makes Day and Night, the projection performance Rothko Variations plus other surprises. (Jeanne Liotta/ Steve Polta)

An ex-police officer turned head of security for a chemical corporation takes his job a little too seriously. After an explosion in the factory, Ferdinand steps up security measures, and when the Director orders him to stop, he treats the director himself as a risk, ultimately arresting him. An example of security-run-amok, the film is perhaps pertinent to our current political situation. (Irina Leimbacher)

With its German title literally translated as ìThe Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time,î Klugeís film, made in 1985, is an episodic and fractured essay on time, history and the way in which the present tyrannizes both past and future. Depicting people who ìplan their lives in an ad hoc fashion,î the film concludes with the blind director who works on, fuelled by the store of images in his mindís eye.

Robert and Mary Beth had the privilege of studying with Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon in Boulder, Colorado. They developed ways of filmmaking in which the surface is as important as what is depicted, in which depiction itself becomes a question rather than a given. Both embrace hand processing and optical printing, and both share a basic concern for visual rhythm and the possibility of non-representational form. Schaller will present a cross section of his works from the past ten years that use musical and mathematical form, home-made emulsion, home-made cameras, dance and multiple projection. Reed will show several short hand-painted, manipulated and animated films, including Jakob, Montessori Sword Fight, Sand Castle, Moon Streams, Sunday Afternoon and Moose Mountain 2. (Mary Beth Reed and Robert Schaller)

Cinematheque showed two early films by German avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter in a program of modernist documentaries in 2000. Tonight we explore more of Richterís career with two early shorts, Race Symphony and Ghosts Before Breakfast, both made in Germany in 1928, followed by his first American feature, Dreams That Money Can Buy, a collaboration with Man Ray, Ernst, Duchamp, LÈger and Calder, with music by Bowles, Milhaud and Cage. An odd mix of surrealist images with an occasional proto-beat aesthetic, the 1947 film narrates the dreams (each suggested by a different artist) of the clients of a down and out poet-turned-dealer in dreams. The ìmost startling film of the yearî according to Sight & Sound. (Irina Leimbacher)

Traversing the trials and tribulations of experimental film is never easy but whoever said it should be. IN THE FLICKERFLASH is a program of experimental shorts that challenges narrative convention and satisfies the thirst for formal innovation. Each film seeks to find just the right method of expression. The program aptly begins with Brett Simonís seductive ode to narrative film/celluloid, The Flickerflash, and ends with Tom Gibbonís masterful animation, The Hunger Artist, based on a Kafka story.  Along the way we encounter Anjali Sundaramís clever and humorous stop motion piece, Buckle My Shoe, the stark, mysterious 1,020 Nautical Miles by Marcy Saude and Lynne Sachís mesmerizing domestic still life, Window Work. The program also includes a group of poetic, enigmatic and elegiac films by Sanghee Park, Waratap Pasayadaj, Anita Chang and Drew Klausner. 

The Flickerflash by Brett Simon, 4 min, DV, color, 2002; An Elegy To our Small Selves by Anita Chang, 10 min, BETA SP, color, 2002 [SF]; Hands by Sanghee Park, 4 min, 116mm, color, 2002 [WC]; Buckle My Shoe by Anjali Sundaram, 3 min, BETA SP, color, 2002 Unknown by Drew Klausner, 3 min, 35mm, b & w, 2002; Path by Waratap Pasayadaj, 4 min, 16mm, b & w, 2002 [W]; 1,020 Nautical Miles by Marcy Saude, 5 min, DV, b & w, 2002 [W]; Window Work by Lynne Sachs, 8 min, BETA SP, color, 2002 [SF]; The Hunger Artist by Tom Gibbons, 16 min, 16mm, color, 2002

$7 Film Arts Members, $9 General. For more info, call (415) 552-8760. Tickets will be available to order after October 15. To order tickets, you can order on-line at www.filmarts.org or call (415) 552-FILM.

These works explore different aspects of working site-dependently and look at oneís relation to ìplaceî through history, memory and conversations with another discipline or another artistís work. Films and videos include Across the Street; July 4th; LíEntrÈe, Passage et Salon: 61 rue de Mauberge; Photons in Paris: image encoding series; In Search of the Baths of Constantine and the installation C to C: Several Centuries After the Double Slit experiment. (Lynn Marie Kirby)

These works are duets in relation to questions to the self and otheróanother person, an object or a political event. Films and videos include Sharon and the Birds On The Way To The Wedding, Sincerely, Paris and Athens, Turkish Bath, and a performance about Linden Trees with poet Etel Adnan. (Lynn Marie Kirby)

These works are both about the family one comes from and the family one builds for oneself in adult life. Films and videos include Three Domestic Interiors; Love, Lynn; Choreography for camera remote; The Residue of Life Series and the installation Off the Tracks. A reception for the artist will follow this screening. (Lynn Marie Kirby)

For over thirty years Jon Jost has produced a large and varied body of film work. From early pioneering essay films, such as Speaking Directly, to later masterful independently-produced features, such as The Bed You Sleep In, Jostís films have always linked formal innovation with radical content and firmly dramatized the conflation of the personal and the political. In recent years, Jost, in self-imposed exile in Europe, has focused intensely on the possibilities of digital video, becoming a controversial advocate for the electronic medium while producing a unique body video essays and formal experiments. Shot in Italy and Portugal, Six Easy Pieces is a visual investigation of DV aesthetics, specifically in relation to painting and still photography. This program will include another recent piece by Jost, title TBA. (Steve Polta)

ìOur eyes fuse with sound and our muscles rememberî (Nisi Jacobs). For her first West Coast screening, New York-based video maker Nisi Jacobs presents three digital video works which combine DVís capacity for fleeting image capture with its incredible capacity for elaborate sound work. Jacobs surveys contemporary sound installation in an excerpt from New York, New Sounds, New Spaces (A Video Postcard). Also screening is Jacobsí Dishing, an audio-collage response to the situation of 9/11/01 and Attemptuous Grind, (made with ìlaptop visionaryî Rosy Parlane). Jacobs is joined by local filmmaker Robert Fox. In his first Cinematheque appearance in ten years, Fox screens recent digital works, Orthogonal Scores, ìdissonant videosî composed as musical notation and History of Depression, Parts I-III ìa hallucinatory history of a life of melancholy.î (Steve Polta)

Robert Fulton, filmmaker, pilot and cameraman was born in 1939 in Greenwich, Connecticut. He died at the age of sixty-two on May 30, 2002, when his private airplane crashed near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Besides making his own films, Fulton worked as a cinematographer for many of Robert Gardnerís films and was in the process of filming Andes to Amazon for the BBC, filming with a custom-made wing-mounted Arriflex. Fultonís death leaves a legacy of immense creativity. The resulting images speak for themselves. Tonightís screening includes Starlight; Path of Cessation; Aleph; Swimming Stone; Vineyard IV; Wilderness: A Country in the Mind; Running Shadow, Part I; Letter and a documentary on Fulton, The Journals of a Solitary Aviator: Pilot Notes by Vladimir Van Maule. (Dominic Angerame)

Whether re-presenting virtually intact found footage film or manually ìplayingî raw projector light, the cinema of (sometimes) Bay Area filmmaker Luis Recoder is the cinema of material, of light and of performance. Recoderís filmsóvariously performed ìliveî or projected traditionallyóalways work to keep the viewer strangely in a present tense of direct experience. Even while reflecting on the hypothetical ìdeathî of cinema, Recoderís films subtly argue for sensual renewal and direct experience of each passing moment. Tonightís program, the Liminal Lumen cycle, consists of Recoderís recent films (Shift, Still Succession, Linea, Liquid Light and a two-projector audio work Spacings), abstract films created sans camera, explorations of the ecstasies of light, time and emulsive potential. (Steve Polta)

Using discarded and forgotten films from commercial and home movies as a quarry, San Francisco filmmaker Thad Povey has been mining for the surprising glimpse into the workings of the human animal. In addition to premiering new work by Povey, the program will include new filmsóAn Alchemical Christmas, Drink From The Riveróby The Scratch Film Junkies, Poveyís collaborative ìdirect filmî collective and a live projection piece, Night Soil, a collaboration with filmmaker Alfonso Alvarez, with live sound by Lucio Menegon (on guitar) and Mark De Gli Antoni (on sampler and keyboards). (Joel Shepard)