Pan of the Landscape by Christopher Becks; Careless Reef, Part 2: Abu Kifani by Gerard Holthuis; July Fix by Jason Livingston; Mother (revised) by Luther Price; The General Returns from One Place to Another by Michael Robinson; Hwa-Shan District by Bernhard Schreiner; The Sequent of Hanna Ave. by Sami van Ingen; the double screen The Velvet Underground and Nico by Andy Warhol; Anodyne by Sheri Wills; X-Ray Movie I from the Fleisch Archive; selected Super-8 films by Frank Biesendorfer.

For more information,
TIE: The International Experimental Cinema Exposition

Progetti (Plans) by Paul (Eating Raoul) Bartel; No Wonder by Frank Biesendorfer; Peng Peng by Dietmar Brehm; Meat Packing House by Eduardo Darino; Malanga by A. Keewatin Dewdney; The Influence of Ocular Light Perception on Metabolism in Man and in Animal by Thomas Draschan and Stella Friedrichs; Dirt by Amy Greenfield; While Revolved by Vincent Grenier; Colorfilm by Standish Lawder; Still by Tim Leyendekker; Clip from Colorado Springs Home of Champions by James Prange; And We All Shine On by Michael Robinson; Daume by Ben Russell; Vom Innen, von aussen by Albert Sackl.

For more information,
TIE: The International Experimental Cinema Exposition

NOTE: The Program Note below represents both screenings listed above. It was designed to be printed, folded and read as a booklet. Please download, fold, read and enjoy.

Program Notes

"Looking back, it seems that all my films have been explorations of corporeal and sensual being--in the world, in the self, even if each was engendered by different event, and periods of life." The work of San Francisco-based Sandra Davis contrasts exacting editing structures with lush, even abstract, photographic imagery. Intended to appeal to the body as much as the mind, Davis' work bravely manifests a fusion of interior subjectivity and the external world. Featured tonight is the Bay Area premiere of Ignorance Before Malice, "a true story--and the aesthetic sequel of the filmmaker's recovery process following an auto accident. Parallel voices of narrativized testimony describing a woman's struggle to heal within the American medical system, and a personal rumination on the journey through a sudden rupture of health into disability." Also screening are Davis' An Architecture of Desire, Une Fois Habitee, and Crepescule: Pond and Chair. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

This screening includes work that breaks erotic taboos, going beyond the acceptable. Barbara Rubin's 1963 Christmas on Earth uses double projection of overlapping and orgiastic images to present a document of radical heterosexual cinema and assault the aesthetic discourse on contemporary art forms, including performance and chance operations involving the projectionist. Andy Warhol's Blow Job reveals the pleasure of, but not the actual act of sexual gratification. In Hermes Bird, James Broughton lifts the male member to the sky. Peggy Ahwesh's The Color of Love and Tony Wu's More Intimacy use sexually explicit images to confront and reveal taboo, veiled worlds. (Caroline Savage and Janis Crystal Lipzin)

Program Notes

Our city is widely recognized as a significant pad from which flights of artistic discovery have long been launched. These works by recent San Francisco Art Institute graduates demonstrate ongoing pursuits of exploration and excellence, showing clearly the broad range of investigation and viewpoint Bay Area creativity represents. Taeko Horigome's Facing the Dragon explores personal intimacy, plus both tough control—and radical loosening—of her processes. Minyong Jang's newest work, The Breath, looks inventively at quiet beauties of the natural world. Joshua Kanies' Zen of John Muir and Scar lyrically focus on our planet, but are concerned with man's relationship to it. In Rue Vaugirard, L'Amour Physique, Matthew Swiezynski patiently expands time in his observations of quotidian minutiae mediated by technology. Finally, Christina Battle explores filmic tactility in her 35mm works Hysteria, Traveling With Eyes Closed Tight, The Distance Between Here and There, and Migration. (Charles Boone)

Composing his work "in camera," the films of Nicky Hamlyn incorporate each shooting's unique character, producing open-ended outcomes while questioning matter and perception. Quoting from his Film Art Phenomena (published 2003): "I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris' reading of Jackson Pollock's paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris' behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading." Screening: Minutiae, Hole, Not Resting, Pistrino, Water, Matrix, Penumbra, Object Studies, and Transit of Venus, which records two consecutive passes of Venus across the sun. (Caroline Savage)

Program Notes

These films are shocking, appalling and transgress limits circumscribed by mainstream taste, morality, and commodifiable art practices. In Kurt Kren's 16/67: September 20^th Gunter Brus, we experience the intake and outflow of bodily fluids, via strange camera angles and editing. Jon Moritsugu's Mommy, Mommy, Where's My Brain? references AC/DC and Jacques Derrida in its attack of academic film theory. In Remote, Remote, Valie Export tortuously takes the act of self-mutilation to an extreme. Zock-Exercises by Otto Muehl, is an "Vienna Actioniste" collaborative project consisting of manifestos, films, and performances that, according to Muehl, has "no dread of chaos, rather it fears forgetting to annihilate something." Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes inhibits the production of illusion by depicting autopsies without explaining them or containing them within a narrative. Through framing and editing, the audience is confronted ceaselessly with the raw actuality of these cadavers. (Caroline Savage and Janis Crystal Lipzin)

Program Notes

"What happens when you take cinema out of the movie theater, wrench the reel off the projector and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? LIVE CINEMA!" (Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image) The mysterious multi-media ensemble viDEO sAVant has travelled the world presenting its own brand of live improvisational cinema since 1990. This will be their first Bay Area appearance. This dynamic performance will feature a synthesis of sound and moving images with elements produced and mixed on the spot in a process of live interaction between projectionist and musician, yielding fluid results, shifting and varied, never the same twice. Participants include Charles Woodman on images, Margaret Schedel on cello and electronics, and Yoni Wolf (of Anticon's Why?) on vocals, samples and assorted sound makers. (Steve Polta)

For advance tickets go to:
viDEO sAVant and Friends In Person

(PLEASE NOTE: This program's special admission price: $10 general admission, $8 for students and Cinematheque members-is good for both screenings)

The Berkeley-based Women of Color Film Festival provides a welcome forum for both emerging and established artists from one of the most creative yet continually underrepresented sectors of the film community. This year's festival commences March 1 at UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, with four programs screening there over ten days (for complete program information and screening schedule, please visit www.bampfa.berkeley.edu). Cinematheque is honored to host the final two programs of this years' WOCFF. Please join us at 6pm for a pre-screening reception.

7pm: WOCFF, Program One: Revisioning

Fashion Resistance to Militarism by Kimberley Alvarenga, Take a Walk by Hsin-I Tseng, The Body in the Park by Shi Liu, The Shooter by Jin Yoo-Kim, Migration by Christina Battle, What Keeps Me Going by Joenel Scott, Come on Big Empty by Kirthi Nath, Re/Camara by Rosario Sotelo, and Palpable Invisibility of Life by Tran T. Kim-Trang.

9 pm: WOCFF, program two: Queering the Image

Game by JJ Goldberger, Rated F by Donna Lee, Girl Cleans Sink by Sook-Yin Lee, Before Nine by Hana Abdule, Make a Move by Hanifah Walidah, and other titles to be determined.

For more information visit, http://wocff.berkeley.edu

Issued bi-annually by Film Arts Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation, the James D. Phelan Award in Film and Video honors California-born artists "whose body of work is non-commercial in nature, has made a substantial contribution to the field, and merits recognition for its creativity and innovation." Working in the proud traditions of West Coast funk, junk, projector performance, and optical printing, Alvarez' films--screening will be Down on the Farm, Calling All Cars, La Reina,and the performative Night Soil with collaborative musical and image support by The Overdub Club members, Lucio Menagon, Suki O'Kane and Thad Povey--explode with color and sound, are dizzying and effervescent visual delights. With overlapping passions for amateur filmmaking and the organization of large-scale and participatory film/video spectacles, Melinda Stone's work--including A Trip Down Market 1905/2005, and for a brief moment 1906; The Incredible Adventures of a Primitive Creature and others, including the latest installment of her How to Homestead series--investigates landscape and culture, while cultivating a charming and personal homegrown documentary aesthetic. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

-------------------------------------------------------

SPECIAL PROJECTS WINTER 2007

In our desire to expand our connections to the larger arts and cultural community, we are pleased to sponsor a screening at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, March 20 -25, 2007.

Please contact Ann Arbor Film Festival for information.

San Francisco Cinematheque Co-Presents with the Ann Arbor Film Festival

Saturday, March 24, 2007, Geography of the Body Curated by Alfonso Alvarez.

"Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language--this will become not merely unspoken, but unspeakable." - Adrienne Rich

The San Francisco Cinematheque and the Ann Arbor Film Festival both showcase and celebrate work that pushes the boundaries of the status quo and challenges the mainstream. In these times, so few organizations support and defend artistic free speech by programming risky and provocative films that may be construed as offensive or otherwise stand outside of the mainstream of cinema. These works screened tonight, highlight a wide range of makers whose films use the body as the location to examine political issues, celebrate beauty, and ask the audience to personally re-examine what is artistic expression and free speech. In an effort to highlight issues of taste, morality and standards guiding funding decisions related to the AAFF, and with the additional support from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the San Francisco Cinematheque is pleased to co-present the following films at the 45th Ann Arbor Film Festival:

Geography of the Body by Willard Maas. 1943,16mm b&w/so, 7m

Hold Me While I’m Naked by George Kuchar. 1966,16mm, color/so, 15m

The Bed by James Broughton. 1968,16mm, color/so,20m

Riverbody by Anne Severson. 1970,16mm, b&w/so,7m

Holding by Coni Beeson. 1971, 16mm,color/so,13m

No No Nookie TV by Barbara Hammer. 1987,16mm, color/so, 12m

Our Gay Brother by Greta Snider. 1993,16mm, color/so, 9m

The Honey Pot by Todd Lincoln. 1998, 16mm, color/so, 7m

Noema by Scott Stark. 1998,16mm,color/so,11m

Spiders In Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical by Martha Colburn. 1999, 16mm, color/so, 5m

In the history of San Francisco filmmaking, two filmmakers stand out as iconoclasts, creators of unique and innovative works reflective of passionate approaches to life and to film. Founding member of San Francisco's No Nothing Cinema, Snider was a highly charismatic cinematic instigator, an extremely productive and influential filmmaker. His films, notable for their irreverent humor and no-nonsense approach to cinematic form, content and duration, include Stink, Ish and Vinnie, Rock Falls/ Mudslide, and Yes Ta Day (many others will also screen). Greg Sharits, brother of filmmaker Paul, lived a life of relative obscurity, haunting the streets of SOMA throughout the '70s, a skid row filmmaker flaneur. Using single-frame shooting, Sharits' films are pixilated city symphonies of neon sign and sidewalk life. We will screen new prints of Transit, Transfer, and Cipher (all recently preserved and restored by Anthology Film Archives) as well as Untitled #6. (Steve Polta)