2005 Headlands alumnus Jeanne C. Finley and partner John Muse's Lost (with John Muse) combines an excerpt from the audio diary of an Army Chaplain serving in Iraq, who must reconcile his soldiers’ justifiable shooting of an Iraqi man with the dismal reality that the dead man’s widow and children now face, with a serene and foggy landscape symbolic of its narrator’s clouded perspective. 2007 Headlands Artist in Residence Magnus Bärtås’ series of short documentaries, Who is...? reenact their subjects’ eclectic biographies in large and small detail, their histories translated from memory by the filmmaker from conversations many years earlier. 2004 Headlands alumnus Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 feature Man Push Cart tells the story of a Pakistani coffee-cart vendor in New York City, played by an actor whose own biography overlaps substantially with the fictional narrative. (Anuradha Vikram, Headlands Center for the Arts)

In the films featured tonight, fabrication and nonfiction collide, meld and intertwine to confront truth, reality and expression. 1999 Headlands alumnus Aline Mayer's S'Aline's Solution expresses with haunting complexity the agony and affirmation of an abortion. Roger Deutsch's Mario Makes a Movie is the story of a developmentally disabled man who learns how to use a movie camera. Deutsch's film mimics the style of personal documentary leaving the viewer to question, "Who really is Mario?" In The Stillness in the Room, current Headlands MFA Awardee, Vanessa Woods, evokes the poetry of death, mourning and decay in the visual imagery of Queen Victoria's "weeping veil" and by putting the celluloid itself through a process of decay. Todd Herman's Forbidden Acts explores the limits that social institutions attempt to impose on the expression of the body, sexuality and disability. Who is Bozo Texino? by 1999 Headlands alumnus Bill Daniel, explores the truths of vagabond subculture and reveals the romantic appeal of wanderlust in American society. (Caroline Savage)

Program Notes

Anthony McCall has been creating film installations and performances for over 30 years. Four Projected Movements was produced in 1975 as a further exploration of his previous work Long Film for Four Projectors, and it has rarely been shown in the US. It is the last piece of his series of "solid light" films that used projector and film. For McCall Four Projected Movements is a succinct rendering of the structural principal of Long Film for Four Projectors. It uses one of the light wedges from Long Film for Four Projectors and explores the seeming gravitational pull that his solid light forms are famous for.

Placing one of the wedges into the corner of the gallery, parallel to the wall, a single fifteen-minute reel of film is run through the projector in four different ways: head-to-tail, tail-to-head, head-to-tail back-to-front, and tail-to-head back-to-front. This produces four different sweeps through space: wall to corner, ceiling to corner, corner to floor and ceiling to wall. The moving wedge interacts with the actual architectural frame. The plane of light transitions vertically and horizontally, confronting the viewer with a question of spatial orientation and movement.

NOTE: Saturday, September 15, 2007 there will be an ongoing projection of Four Projected Movements from 12pm to 5pm at New Langton Arts. (Tickets: $5)

Traverse the rough terrain of border control, brutal dictatorships and the aftermath of war in tonight’s innovative hybrid documentaries. In Stranger Comes to Town, Jacqueline Goss re-works Department of Homeland Security animations, combining them with the personal stories of six immigrants crossing the US border, the online game World of Warcraft, and journeys via Google Earth. By focusing on how identity is determined at the border, Goss examines the immigrants' sense of self and their view of the world. Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, whose The Speculative Archive has traditionally focused on the past, have turned toward the future with their new five-part video documentary, We Will Live to See These Things (Premiere). Shot during 2005–06 in Damascus, Syria, each section offers a different perspective on what might happen in a place where people live among the forces of repressive regimes, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and shifting pressures from the United States. (Ariella Ben-Dov)

While media made from ones and zeros continues to conquer the world, these artists continue to explore the tactile medium of celluloid. Stories of disappearing rural communities, fragile filial relations, and life’s ineffable moments are revealed as if in bas-relief by these virtuoso filmmakers who use optical-printing, hand-processing, bleaching, and scratch-on-film techniques to share worlds rarified and unsung. The Bay Area Premiere of award-winning filmmaker Deborah Stratman’s The Magician’s House, a letter to an alchemist-filmmaker and quiet homage to the vanishing art of celluloid. Laska Jimsen’s Miss Rose Fletcher (World Premiere) combines interviews and archival research with the lyricism of experimental film processes to investigate the history of residents living in Oregon’s once idyllic Willamette Valley. Penny McCann’s Lake Ontario (in my head) (US Premiere) is a meditative look at a mutable and hypnotic horizon. Grainy Super-8 imagery, optically printed 16mm footage and an atmospheric soundtrack evoke the stillness of mind reached when standing before expansive sky and water. (Ariella Ben-Dov)

The artists of the Illuminated Corridor return to San Francisco with another collision of public art, film and live music: an evening of free outdoor cinema that reflects the collection, and aspirations, of the Prelinger Library and Archive. Over 30 musicians and filmmakers will simultaneously relight the facades of the Library, with premieres of new interpretations of the Rick Prelinger’s film Panorama Ephemera with a new soundtrack composed by percussionist Gino Robair and performed live by a large creative orchestra. The evening includes live light painting by Antonio Jorge Goncalves performed as graphic scores and commissioned performative projection by Killer Banshee (Kriss de Jong and Eliot Daughtry), cinepimps (with Alfonso Alvarez and Keith Arnold), Charles Kremenak, Steven Dye, and many others. (Suki O’Kane)

Combining an early-80s New Wave androgynous flair and a plugged-in proto-cyberpunk sensibility, Almy's delirious data-trip, Leaving the 20th Century, remains one of the most formidable experimental videos of its decade. For his 16mm feature, Junk, Roddy Bogawa turns to a later set of musical influences: the post-apocalyptic tendencies of post-punk noise. (Ed Halter)

Program Notes

Ed Emshwiller won five Hugo awards for his science fiction magazine covers and involved notable science fiction authors in his moving image work. Carol is a short portrait of Emshwiller's wife, an award-winning science fiction writer. Image, Flesh and Voice, a feature-length experimental work, weaves together conversations by New Wave science fiction authors, including Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Keith Laumer, Gordon Dickson, James Blish and many others talking about society, politics and philosophy with carefully shot near-abstract monochrome images; Shot by the Emshwillers' then-11-year-old son Peter, Jr. Star Trek is an all-kid remake of the legendary TV show—complete with Ed himself as an alien monster. (Ed Halter)

Program Notes

Shortly before his death in 1972, Cornell gifted his own films as well as his extensive film collection to Anthology Film Archives. Much of this work has been preserved by that institution and is exhibited regularly at that venue. These programs represent two of these recurring screenings."What Cornell's movies are is the essence of a home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. […] The boxes, the collages, the home movies of Joseph Cornell are the invisible cathedrals of our age. That is, they are almost invisible, as are all the best things that man can still find today: They are almost invisible unless you look for them." (Jonas Mekas, 1970)

Screening: Rose Hobart, Cotillion, The Midnight Party, The Children's Party, Aviary, Nymphlight, A Legend for Fountains, Angel and GniR RednoW.

Program Notes

Tonight's program includes a sampling of new films recently placed into distribution with Canyon Cinema. All the works presented will be shown in 16mm or 35mm format to honor Canyon Cinema's devotion to promotion of the distribution and projection of motion picture film. Screening: Silver Screen by Thorsten Fleisch, SSHTOORRTY by Michael Snow, Hot Leatherette by Robert Nelson, Bouquets 21-30 by Rose Lowder, Orchard by Julie Murray, Startle Pattern by Eric Patrick, You Be Mother by Sarah Pucill, Errata by Alexander Stewart, Ber-Lin 99/00 by Andre Lehmann. (Dominic Angerame)

Program Notes

Shortly before his death in 1972, Cornell gifted his own films as well as his extensive film collection to Anthology Film Archives. Much of this work has been preserved by that institution and is exhibited regularly at that venue. These programs represent two of these recurring screenings."What Cornell's movies are is the essence of a home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. […] The boxes, the collages, the home movies of Joseph Cornell are the invisible cathedrals of our age. That is, they are almost invisible, as are all the best things that man can still find today: They are almost invisible unless you look for them." (Jonas Mekas, 1970)

Screening: Mulberry Street, Bookstalls; Vaudeville De-Luxe; By Night with Torch and Spear; New York–Rome–Barcelona–Brussels; Children; Boys' Games, Joanne, Union Sq.; and Cloches a travers les feuilles/ Claude Debussy.

Program Notes

From 2004 through 2006, Voom HD LAB, a project of Voom HD Networks, conducted a residency program which offered a wide range of filmmakers access to state of the art facilities and fostered a diverse body of works, imagining the televised signal as an ambient experience based on experimentation and free play. Screening: Aerodynamics of the Black Sun by Bradley Eros; The Tension Building by Ericka Beckmann; Newr Bloodpinkis by Theo Angell; Sahara Mojave by Leslie Thornton; May Mad Gab by Lili Chin; Walden by Jennifer Sullivan; Angie Eng's Schpilin Aqui; Landfill by Pawel Wojtasik; 16 Letters by Grahame Weinbren; Unperception Now by Ali Hossaini; My Person in the Water by Leighton Pierce; Light Work One by Jennifer Reeves and Sorry by Gail Vachon. (Caroline Savage)

Program Notes

“STRUCTURE is derived through the division of a whole into parts. In my cinematic equation formal considerations are directed towards the projector where the convergence of light lines and sound evolve into an interactive play between ourselves and the character of this phenomenal apparatus. Film, meanwhile, is a cinematic server, carrying meaning by sheer presence.” (Bruce McClure) Running custom-made film loops through a three-deep array of modified projectors, Brooklyn-based projectionist/ performer Bruce McClure creates immersive sound/light experiences which reach far beyond the cinematic ecstasy, fusing sound and image in hallucinatory frenzy. (Steve Polta)

Screening: Rack & Slide; Nethergate

While Cornell's best known films are collages of pre-existing material produced in relative privacy, Cornell briefly collaborated with filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt and Lawrence Jordan, deeply influencing the work of each of these significant artists. This program presents a sampling of this collaborative work with a selection of recent works continuing Cornell's fascinations with film, the found object and the magic of the everyday. Screening: Two films by Lawrence Jordan: Cornell, 1965, a rare film portrait of the artist and Our Lady of the Sphere; Centuries of June and Wonder Ring by Stan Brakhage (and Cornell's response to the latter, GniR RednoW); What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street by Rudy Burckhardt (assembled from footage shot for Cornell's Mulberry Street); The Secret Story by Janie Geiser; flower, the boy, the librarian by Stephanie Barber; What Makes Day and Night by Jeanne Liotta; Her Fragrant Emulsion by Lewis Klahr; Oona's Veil by Brian Frye; and Cornell's own Rose Hobart. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

STRUCTURE is derived through the division of a whole into parts. In my cinematic equation formal considerations are directed towards the projector where the convergence of light lines and sound evolve into an interactive play between ourselves and the character of this phenomenal apparatus. Film, meanwhile, is a cinematic server, carrying meaning by sheer presence.” (Bruce McClure) Running custom-made film loops through a three-deep array of modified projectors, Brooklyn-based projectionist/ performer Bruce McClure creates immersive sound/light experiences which reach far beyond the cinematic ecstasy, fusing sound and image in hallucinatory frenzy. (Steve Polta)

Screening: Evertwo Circumflicksrent …page 298; Pierced But Not Punctured; Unnamed Complement

Program Notes

Bruce Baillie, founder of both Canyon Cinema and San Francisco Cinematheque, visits San Francisco to present two screenings honoring a selection of departed filmmakers who have given a piece of their souls to the noble cause of avant-garde cinema. Having known several of the filmmakers presented in tonight's show, Baillie will present his personal reminisces on these classic and forgotten films from Canyon Cinema's vaults. Screening: The Mexican Footage by Ron Rice; Heavy-Light by Adam Beckett; Bridges-Go-Round by Shirley Clarke; Aleph by Robert Fulton; Peyote Queen by Storm De Hirsch; Non Catholicam by Will Hindle; Glimpse of the Garden by Marie Menken; Occam's Thread by Stan Brakhage; Si See Sumi by Charles Levine; Sailboat by Joyce Weiland; Portrait Two, The Young Lady by Earl Bodien. (Dominic Angerame)

NOTE: Bruce Baillie will present Dia de los Muertos, Honorar las almas de Cineastas de avant-garde vanguarda, part two on Friday, November 2, at 7:30 pm, at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center.

Program Notes

Anne McGuire re-edits Robert Wise's 1971 film The Andromeda Strain (based on Michael Crichton's novel) into Strain Andromeda The so the shots run backwards, end to beginning, creating an awesome and spellbinding film that throws everything from story structure to character motivation into question. (Ed Halter)

Program Notes

In Cinepolis, the Film Capitol, Mexican artist, Ximena Cuevas, spins a video from the other side: a meta-metaphor of American economic imperialism, told through CGI multiplex trailers and masochistic Hollywood fantasies. Culled from Bay Area legend Craig Baldwin's infamous personal archive of obscure cinephemera—gladiator flicks, newsreels, travelogues, James Bond films, B-grade horror and Mexican thrillers—Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America implodes an SF universe into the hot core of the New World Order psyche. (Ed Halter)

Program Notes

Filmmaking in the Bay Area has an explosive history and has had a far lasting dynamic effect around the world. Explosive new forms of film have emerged from the Bay Area community over the years to reveal unheralded new visions of the medium and explorations into its aesthetic properties. This program presents a sampling of experimental cinema by artists in the Bay Area from the late 1940s and '50s. Screening: Horror Dream and Clinic of Stumble by Sidney Peterson, Things to Come and Obmaru by Patricia Marx, Four in the Afternoon by James Broughton, Notes on the Port of St. Francis by Frank Stauffacher, Divertissement Rococo and Eneri by Hy Hirsch, In Between by Stan Brakhage, Logos and Odds and Ends by Jane Conger, and Beat by Christopher Maclaine. (Dominic Angerame)

Program Notes

Witness tonight’s unfolding: an aural-optic remedy for dyspepsia, constipation, sick headache dizziness, low spirit caused by disordered stomach, neuralgia, kidney and liver complaints, bilious attacks, piles, malaria, and general debility! Demons—the wrecked-synth duo of Nate Young (Wolf Eyes) and Steve Kenney (Isis)—erupt amidst a live vortextual video drone by Alivia Zivich. An uncontrollable bout of Tarantism (Sharkiface vs. Anti-Ear) flails boundlessly, with their lurid McCarthy-mounts-Kuchar eruption of spastic sonic ticks, screeches, and invasive manhandling in The Black Tar of Midnight, an eye-opening epic of overwhelming magnitude. Scott Arford’s stroboscopically epilectric video-generated audio attack rewrites the sensory registry. Come one, come all for this delicatrocious social massage and mood enhancement. (Christine Metropoulos)

Citing a diverse cast of major influences, including Sharits, Breer, LaPore and Dorsky, the prolific New York filmmaker Hans Michaud has, over twenty years, produced a body of sublime and concentrated works of cinema entirely his own. Simultaneously obsessive and meditative, Michaud applies a taxonomists' rigor to both cinematography and editing, describing the city landscape and urban experience as a locus of serenity, reflection and grace. In his premiere West Coast screening he will present selections from The Nicotine Series, intensely, "mindlessly and repetitively" edited works born from the nervous wreckage of withdrawal; and The Inquiry Series, inventories of the artist's accumulated orphan rolls. Also: double-projection work from The MorningFilms series. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

Shortly before his death in 1972, Cornell gifted his own films as well as his extensive film collection to Anthology Film Archives. Much of this work has been preserved by that institution and is exhibited regularly at that venue. These programs represent two of these recurring screenings. "What Cornell's movies are is the essence of a home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. [...] The boxes, the collages, the home movies of Joseph Cornell are the invisible cathedrals of our age. That is, they are almost invisible, as are all the best things that man can still find today: They are almost invisible unless you look for them." (Jonas Mekas, 1970)

Screening: Rose Hobart, Cotillion, The Midnight Party, The Children's Party, Aviary, Nymphlight, A Legend for Fountains, Angel and GniR RednoW.

Program Notes

While Cornell's best known films are collages of pre-existing material produced in relative privacy, Cornell briefly collaborated with filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt and Lawrence Jordan, deeply influencing the work of each of these significant artists. This program presents a sampling of this collaborative work with a selection of recent works continuing Cornell's fascinations with film, the found object and the magic of the everyday. Screening: Two films by Lawrence Jordan: Cornell, 1965, a rare film portrait of the artist and Our Lady of the Sphere; Centuries of June and Wonder Ring by Stan Brakhage (and Cornell's response to the latter, GniR RednoW); What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street by Rudy Burckhardt (assembled from footage shot for Cornell's Mulberry Street); The Secret Story by Janie Geiser; flower, the boy, the librarian by Stephanie Barber; What Makes Day and Night by Jeanne Liotta; Her Fragrant Emulsion by Lewis Klahr; Oona's Veil by Brian Frye; and Cornell's own Rose Hobart. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

Shortly before his death in 1972, Cornell gifted his own films as well as his extensive film collection to Anthology Film Archives. Much of this work has been preserved by that institution and is exhibited regularly at that venue. These programs represent two of these recurring screenings. "What Cornell's movies are is the essence of a home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. [...] The boxes, the collages, the home movies of Joseph Cornell are the invisible cathedrals of our age. That is, they are almost invisible, as are all the best things that man can still find today: They are almost invisible unless you look for them." (Jonas Mekas, 1970)

Screening: Mulberry Street, Bookstalls; Vaudeville De-Luxe; By Night with Torch and Spear; New York–Rome–Barcelona–Brussels; Children; Boys' Games, Joanne, Union Sq.; and Cloches a travers les feuilles/ Claude Debussy.

Program Notes

Ellen Zweig's HEAP forms a series of portraits of Westerners who have studied, imagined, loved and misunderstood China. The five videos in the collection use documentary and narrative strategies, emerging as metaphoric explorations of the multiple misunderstandings and rare moments of connection across cultures. With footage shot in China and images of an invented China, the power of our imagination to travel beyond truth and fiction becomes palpable. In one portrait, (the origin of bitterness) Joseph Rock, reflections of personal remembrances surface from implausible sources, while some mysteries remain unsolved. In another, a surplus of landscape, collages landscape views to a polygraph interview with filmmaker Leslie Thornton. The HEAP series also includes (tongue tongue stone) G.W. Leibnitz; (flick flight flimsy) Ernest Fenollosa, and (unsolved) Robert van Gulik. Also on this program: Zweig's precarious, which provides a bridge between Zweig's HEAP and her relationship with her father. (Caroline Savage)

Program Notes

Leah Gilliam remixes the racial politics of the Planet of the Apes in Apeshit and a free-form sense of foreboding and invasion inhabits James Fotopoulos' ontological horror-film The Nest. (Ed Halter)

Program Notes

James June Schneider's 1, 2, 3, Whiteout, making its US premiere, offers up a low-fi retro-futurist romance while in Victor Faccinto's last cut-out film, Shameless, is an underground-comix-inspired animation set in a multidimensional space pad; a pervy, groovy, adults-only, erotic romp. (Ed Halter)

Program Notes

While Cornell's best known films are collages of pre-existing material produced in relative privacy, Cornell briefly collaborated with filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt and Lawrence Jordan, deeply influencing the work of each of these significant artists. This program presents a sampling of this collaborative work with a selection of recent works continuing Cornell's fascinations with film, the found object and the magic of the everyday. Screening: Two films by Lawrence Jordan: Cornell, 1965, a rare film portrait of the artist and Our Lady of the Sphere; Centuries of June and Wonder Ring by Stan Brakhage (and Cornell's response to the latter, GniR RednoW); What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street by Rudy Burckhardt (assembled from footage shot for Cornell's Mulberry Street); The Secret Story by Janie Geiser; flower, the boy, the librarian by Stephanie Barber; What Makes Day and Night by Jeanne Liotta; Her Fragrant Emulsion by Lewis Klahr; Oona's Veil by Brian Frye; and Cornell's own Rose Hobart. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes