From bursts of perspective trickery to homoerotic celebrations of the male body and philosophical musings on public versus private, the award-winning videos of Pierre-Yves Clouin never cease to delight. His witty examinations of the quotidian elements of life bring transcendental revelations combined with laughter. "Alone in front of the camera, and without a word, I spy on myself in the monitor during the action. I am double: seer and seen. As if freedom from surveillance meant inventing, within surveillance itself, an illusion that subverts the watching eye." (P-YC)) Weíll screen My Levitating Butt and Iíve Got Mouths All Over, as well as the more recent ThÈ au Riz (RiceTea/ Theory), Flying Sculpture, Strong Enough, and US premieres of new work. (MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter)

The films of Michael Rosas-Walsh continue the tradition of such Bay Area icons as Robert Nelson and Dean Snider, whose works reflect passionate lives and serious cinematic commitment while remaining entertaining and ripe with humor, taking a funky approach to form. Tonight MRW presents a veritable festival of short works representing these local luminaries and others. Program includes his own films Raw, Luv, JACE, Alaskan Opus in D, Skipp Forrest Crow, and Lake Orion; Nelsonís Hot Leatherette; Sniderís Stink; Diane Kitchenís The Penfield Road; Adriana Rosas-Walshís No Words; Rob Yeoís Winterships; George Kucharís Visitation Rights; Rock Rossí Psycho Porpoise; and the Rosas-Walsh/Ross collaboration Thoughtless. Come early for live music from The Goat Family! (Steve Polta)

Call it calligraphy or cacography, our program of the hand-painted films of Stan Brakhage and inscribed poetry of Robert Grenier will engage and even delight lovers of the complex interaction of painting, film and language. Tonightís event explores both the influence of the Abstract Expressionist and Action painters on Brakhageís art and the introduction of gesture into writing through the work of Grenierís drawn poetry. Films to be screened include Thigh Line Lyre Triangular, Chinese Series, Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse, Rage Net, and First Hymn to the Night ó Novalis. Grenier will present slides of his notebook poems and guide the audience as we literally relearn to read his haiku-like inscriptions. (Konrad Steiner)

This program showcases the most innovative short documentary work. Using unconventional methods to investigate their subject matter, these filmmakers challenge our notions of the production of history and memory. From Abigail Childís appropriated family history in The Future is Behind You to Benita Raphanís delightful animated musings on Buckminster Fuller in The Critical Path to Nurjahan Akhlaqís hauntingly beautiful Death in the Garden of Paradise, we see how images can construct memory. Till Passowís The Ecstatic meditates on the transformative powers of a pilgrimage while Gloriana Severdijaís Night takes us on a sweeping journey through nocturnal Berlin. Also: Cynthia Madansky and Elle Flandersí The PSA Project #6: Simulation . (MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter)

The need to speak about horrific events, to witness the beauty of the everyday, and to ponder the inexplicable are variously explored in these pieces. The power of revelationóthrough testimony and confession, or by the cameraó make the possibility of transformation imaginable. Yet, the potential of an imminent breakdown colors the works. Dos Hermanos by Juan Manuel EchavarrÌa; Tabula Rasa by Vincent Grenier; Harmony by Jim Trainor; Chapel of the Bells Wedding Chapel Exposure: To have and to hold by Lynn Marie Kirby; Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8 by Leslie Thornton; Trace Elements by Gunvor Nelson; Come to See ëYa by Eric Saks; Shape Shift by Scott Stark; and Play by Matthias M¸ller and Christoph Girardet. (Kathy Geritz and Irina Leimbacher)

See April 24 listing above for details ...

Marked by their sensitivity to their subjects, these films also articulate the subtleties of light, form, content, and montage in ways that celebrate the moving image. From Tirtza Evenís urban space wizardry in Icarus; to Leighton Pierceís sublime video manipulations in Viscera; to Lisl Pongerís politicized constructions of race, ethnicity and class in Phantom Foreign Vienna; to Mara Mattuschkaís delightful collaboration with choreographer Chris Haring in Legal Errorist; be prepared to have your retina tickled and your thoughts provoked. Also screening: Cynthia Madansky and Elle Flanderís The PSA Project #1: Color Theory and #4: Homeland; Penny Laneís We Are the Littletons: A True Story; Kerry Laitalaís Torchlight Tango; and James T. Hongís The Form of the Good. (MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter)

In the late 1950s, Bronx-bred brothers George and Mike Kuchar began a prolific lifetime of filmmaking, using neighborhood friends and locations to optimistically ape Hollywood genre pictures. As teenagers, they unleashed their 8mm melodramas on New Yorkís unsuspecting underground, introducing much-needed elements of camp and comedy to the film scene, and influencing the likes of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and John Waters. The world has not been the same since. Tonightís program presentís a selection of the twinsí early works, recently preserved by Anthology Film Archives: Georgeís Sylviaís Promise, A Town Called Tempest, and Anita Needs Me; and Mikeís Born of the Wind. (Steve Polta)

Are the physicals of meta-systems touching? Anthropology? E-Motion?? A Vaudeville Spectacle of New Work by Emerging Media Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area. In the hands-off environment of the electronic shock people put their finger on it. Alex Killough, Antonette Glenn, Beca Lafore, Chihcheng Peng, Christina Battle, Crystal Liu, Elaine Buckholtz, Hazel Chang, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Hilary Underwood, Hiromi Yoshida, Hrayr Eulmessekian, Jennifer Locke, Jim Tantum, John Alston, John Fadeff, Jorge Flores, Josh Pieper, Joshua Kanies, Kent Long, Lauren Woods, Louis Lee, Matt Day, Mauricio Ancalmo, Michael Damm, Modou Dieng, Nate Boyce, Paul Zografakis, Rachael Abernathy, Ryan Glenn, Sean Horchy, Selene Foster, SeongSin Jeon, SowYee Au, Taeko Horigome, Teddy Roh, Todd Fiore, Tom Nishikawa. (Guest Curator Jun Jalbuena)

Bill Basquin will screen his award-winning The Ride as well as his recently completed series exploring rural life: Martin, The Last Day of November, and Range (premiere). Across this triptych Basquin follows several acquaintances and family members. As he gently inquires into work, identity and the flesh, Basquin limns the subtler textures of masculinity and mortality. Michelle Silvaís more carnal and urban view in How the West was Hung, Cum Shots and Field Goals, and Amor Peligrosa itself turns philosophical in Fluorescent Influx, her study of the wounds of a city. Both exuberant and macabre, Silvaís work peers into the cracks our city and our personalities leave open. (Konrad Steiner)

Hungarian-born Bauhaus artist L·zlÛ Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), known primarily for his influential photographic and design work, brought his formal and aesthetic concerns to the practice of cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s. Tonightís screening includes his Berlin Still Life (shot mostly in Berlinís slums), Marseille Vieux Port (a portrait of the cityís harbor), Lightplay: Black/White/Gray (made with his light-space modulator), Gypsies, and the subaqueous documentary The Life of the Lobster. Impassioned French film critic Louis Delluc (1890-1924) began filmmaking by collaborating with Germaine Dulac in 1919. Fever, an impressionist melodrama set in the Marseilles waterfront, is Dellucís fourth film in a brilliant but brief career.

7:30pm Nathalie Granger; 9pm Marguerite, A Reflection of Herself

Nathalie Granger (1972) is a story of two women (Jeanne Moreau and Lucia BosÈ) who worry about a daughterís violent behavior at school, listen to radio accounts of a murderer at large, and are visited by a traveling washing-machine salesman (GÈrard DÈpardieu). Less formally experimental than later works, it refuses conventional narrative payoffs and powerfully evokes the emotional bonds between the two women and the tensions which pervade their off-screen world. The hour-long Marguerite, A Reflection of Herself (2002) is an eloquent portrait of Duras by her collaborator and editor Dominique Auvray. It incorporates a rich array of archival materials from Durasí childhood in what is now Vietnam and throughout her long career as both writer and filmmaker.

Two Shows at 7 and 9:15 óbrand new 35mm print!

Her best known film, India Song (1975) is a Durasian love story and an exploration of the melodic power and autonomy of off-screen voice. Set in India of the 1930s during monsoon season, a beautiful diplomatís wife (Delphine Seyrig) suffers from "colonial sickness," haunted by the specter of a beggar woman and unable to engage with the world and the suitors who surround her. While the images reveal only a luxurious gathering of an indolent colonial elite, the voices evoke frustrated passions and the desolation of characters who cannot act upon their desires nor articulate the horror which occasionally pierces their choreographed world.

Note: Venue changed to Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission Street. 

Discover the alchemy between leading-edge music and film in this third in a series of "informances" on 21st-century music improvisation. Program includes: Rova Saxophone Quartet discussing filmís influence on improvisation and composition; live demonstration of Rovaís visual cues for improvisers; screening and discussion of short films by Stan Brakhage and their relation to musical thought; Q&A. For more information, please visit http://www.rova.org .

7:30 Les Enfants; 9:15 CesarÈe and LíHomme Atlantique

Durasí last feature, Les Enfants (The Children) (1982), directed with Jean Mascolo, is a darkly humorous film about knowledge in which seven year-old Ernest, played by an adult, refuses school "because at school they teach me things I donít know." In the short CesarÈe (1979), Duras tells the stories of CesarÈe (in Palestine) and BÈrÈnice while the images alternate between still and traveling shots of monuments of Paris. LíHomme Atlantique (1981), made using the outtakes of another film, explores writing and the imageís disappearance. "I think the darkness is in all my films, buried, beneath the image...I have only tried to reach the filmís deep flow...." (Duras)

This special event features the World Premiere performance of new large-ensemble work by Rovaís Larry Ochs featuring Rova Saxophone Quartet plus cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, percussionists William Winant and Scott Amendola, guitarist John Schott, and other master improvisers. Since this work is inspired by the revolutionary filmmaking of Stan Brakhage, we will screen several short films before and after the music, including Stellar, The Wold Shadow, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Commingled Containers. For more information, please visit http://www.rova.org .

See June 10 for details...

Tom Comerford and Bill Brown join us from Chicago and Detroit with new films about the space of history and the history of spaces. The films explore how historical text becomes physical texture, and how filmmaking itself is memory recovered from landscapeís amnesia. Brownís Mountain State is a brief history of the westward expansion of the United States as told by 25 historical markers in the state of West Virginia. Comerfordís Land Marked/Marquette Series is a site-specific Chicago film that examines the monuments to Jacques Marquette, the stories the monuments tell, and their relationship to their surroundings. Also: Chicago Detroit Split, a collaboration-in-progress on unsplit 8mm film. (MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter)

"That mouth, those eyes, she makes my heart sink when she says she'll  call me and I know she won't." So confesses the lovestruck butch-dyke narrator of local filmmaker Jenni Olson's extraordinary rumination on the twin impulses of physical yearning and emotional abandon in our fog-shrouded city. Voiced in a throaty purr by Harriet "Harry" Dodge, the film's unseen narrator delves into a fascinating personal history of bewitching ex-girlfriends, Frank Capra movies (seen at the Castro Theatre, where else?), and the dangerous allure of the Golden Gate Bridge.  Olson's one-of-a-kind film, a gorgeously photographed, hypnotically paced sequence of urban landscapes, links Eros and Thanatos in an alternately joyous and despondent dance of desire. Olson's ode to hot nights and cold mornings-after doesn't shirk from explicitness with its strap-on studs and fits of fisting, yet is equally frank in its sober study of suicide. Olson, having lost a dear friend, beloved Frameline programmer Mark Finch, when he jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge ten years ago, asks why the bridge beckons depressives and what can be done to prevent their final fall. THE JOY OF LIFE has galvanized the Bridge District's Board of Directors to reconsider the installation of a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate.  Family ties are tested and strengthened as parents and children grapple with sexual identity in SMALL TOWN SECRETS.

frameline29: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival June 16-26, 2005
http://www.frameline.org/festival

In November 2004, Princeton University and Anthology Film Archives put together a week of activities focusing on the work of maverick filmmaker Hollis Frampton, an event meant to coincide with the (Summer 2004) publication of October #109, which contained several significant new readings into Frampton's work. Not wanting to see those events go by without appropriate recognition here on the West Coast, we have organized this ad hoc screening.

Hollis Frampton was a conceptual holographer. His films build thought-sculptures in the attentive mind. He played with the mental language of film like no other (perhaps David Larcher does so with Video-Void). Frampton anticipated the computer-made film. His major project, Magellan, was intended to be viewed over the course of a year, a film a day, or in various configurations. Nothing less than a metahistorical inventory of the totality of films formal and material possibilities (and unfortunately left incomplete at the time of Frampton's death in 1984), Magellan stand as perhaps the most ambitious and conceptually challenging projects in the history of cinema.

Our screening June 19 represents a subjective selection of films from the Magellan cycle, none of which have screened publicly in the Bay Area in over ten years, to include:

Drafts And Fragments: Straits Of Magellan (1974)
Mindfall, Part I & VII (1980)
More Than Meets The Eye (1979)
Otherwise Unexplained Fires (1976)
Palindrome* (1969)
Tiger Balm (1972)
Yellow Springs (1972)

*note: Palindrome is not really part of Magellan.

Admission: $10 general; $7 Cinematheque members, seniors, students (w.ID)

The Japanese term benshi means film-teller, and the profession thrived in Korea and Japan during the silent film era. The benshi would write their own narration for silent films which they declaimed on stage, using different voice characterizations to switch between narrator and various on-screen roles. Neo-benshi is a step beyond fan fiction, DVD commentary tracks and vidding (pop songs cut against footage of favorite actors) because it is a live performance alongside the playing film (sound off), which reinterprets the scenes to the audience. Tonight we present original works of neo-benshi performance by Brandon Brown, Norma Cole, Roxanne Hamilton, Rodney Koeneke, David Larsen, Mac McGinnes, and Stephanie Young. (Konrad Steiner)

A rare screening of Judex (1963) by Georges Franju, the director of the surrealist-influenced Blood of the Beasts, a poetic documentary of the abbatoires on the outskirts of Paris, and the classic horror film Eyes Without a Face, recently released on Criterion DVD.  Judex is a faithful remake of the original Louis Feuillade serial crime drama from 1917, with subtle surrealist touches.

WITNESS: Judex, master of disguise, on a mission to stop an arch criminal from stealing a crooked capitalist's fortune, while teaching him a lesson.

GASP: As, cornered, the beautiful villain in a nun's habit escapes by stripping to her catsuit, diving through the country mill's trap door and swimming away ...

THRILL: To the stunning 25mph car chase through the countryside of France (the movie is set in 1914) ...

HEAR: The haunted dirge composed by Maurice Jarre for the masked-ball kidnapping scene.

(Programmed by Konrad Steiner)

For more info, http://www.atasite.org