From the dustbins of time comes this review of the truly marginalized cinema; the mysteries of the archive unleashed.  Unessential Cinema is an (ir)regular series at New York City’s Anthology Film Archives that focuses on the thousands of prints, negatives, and elements that have been collected over the years from defunct laboratories, dumpsters, widowers and complete strangers. For this special screening Anthology’s Archivist, Andrew Lampert, will present a selection of orphan reels that by their very nature demonstrate what archives cannot, will not, and prefer not to save. Expect to see double projections, unfinished opuses, optical soundtracks, inexplicable footage, prints dumped by distributors, camera tests and otherwise elusive whodunits.  Titles might include:  Student Film Trilogy, In The Pants Of The Universe, The Second Cameraman Theory, Bilateral Approximation, Please Stand By and more. (Andrew Lampert) (NOTE: Andrew Lampert will also be appearing at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on Tuesday, April 3 at 7:30 pm with a program of films recently preserved by Anthology Film Archives).

Program Notes

These films broadly combine analysis of the structuring of perception with an exploration of film’s material components: time, light, space and celluloid. Screening will be the intellectually paradoxical Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice by Hollis Frampton, where the themes of sexuality and infidelity are “projected” in narrative sequence as a script with the voice revealing the story; Straight and Narrow by Beverly Grant Conrad and Tony Conrad which expands and extends the flicker phenomena to attack our visual sensibilities and optic nerves; Annabel Nicolson’s Frames, created in a contact printer with 8mm color film that had deteriorated in a projection event; 24 Frames Per Second by Takahiko Iimura who reduces the examination of time and space to the alternation of black and clear leader with a series of fractions; Peter Gidal’s Clouds which uses obsessive repetition as materialist practice not psychoanalytical indulgence; 1933 by Joyce Wieland which reworks found footage, camera outtakes and film ends shot in NY and Rate of Change by Bill Brand a film with no original, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colors created in the film lab. (Caroline Savage)

Program Notes

“I am deeply anxious about the state of the world: the deadly confluence of easy access to intrusive database technologies, self-righteous fundamentalisms in East and West and environmental collapse on a massive scale. This combination fills me with apprehension on a daily basis, a sense of foreboding that I am attempting to express in my art work, while maintaining a sense of irony and hope.” Grahame Weinbren has been making films since the early seventies and has written and lectured internationally about cinema, interactivity and new technology. Tonight we feature Weinbren’s Frames; Cheap Imitations Parts II & III  (Madwomen and Point Point); March Fragments (the endless middle), a farcical attempt to think about desire, obligation and responsibility; Turner on the Tyne, a film inspired by a JWM Turner painting, and Weinbren’s work-in-progress 25+ Letters, a series of short films that investigate an array of themes while loosely correlating to a letter of the alphabet. (Jenn Blaylock)

Program Notes

Inspired by the Mexperimental Cinema program curated by Jesse Lerner and Rita Gonzales at the Guggenheim in 1998, we present a selection of contemporary experimental films from Mexico, an eclectic mix of short films that resist categorization, revealing the permutations of film and video art by emerging and established Mexican filmmakers. Screening: Habitáculos by Gabriela Santos del Olmo , Gladiator by Artemio Narro, All Water Has a Perfect Memory by Natalia Almada, Amor es...de plástico by A. Salomón, Untitled 4 by José Rodríguez, Mi Camotal by Carlos Isael, asi late mi corazon de aceituna by Marisol Cortes and Pin Whole Series Application 1: Bulb by Jorge Lorenzo Flores. (Rosario Sotelo)

Inspirado por el programa Mexperimental Cinema, curado por Jesse Lerner y Rita Gonzáles en el Guggenheim en 1998, estaremos presentando nuestra selección de piezas contemporáneas de cine experimental mexicano. La selección consiste en una mezcla ecléctica de piezas que resisten categorización. Son varias permutaciones de arte en película y video por cineastas mexicanos emergentes y establecidos. Habitáculos por Gabriela Santos del Olmo, Gladiator por Artemio Narro, All Water has a Perfect Memory por Natalia Almada, Amor es…de plástico por A. Salomón, Untitled 4 por José Rodríguez, Mi Camotal por Carlos Isael, asi late mi corazon de aceituna por Marisol Cortes y Pin Whole Series Application 1: Bulb por Jorge Lorenzo Flores.

Program Notes

The San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Awards Competition in New Visions is unusually deep this year with eight films competing in the category, seven of which screen here (including four produced in the Bay Area). This program runs the gamut from pleasure to pain. From Bill Morrison’s blissful filmic essay on floods and disasters in The Highwater Trilogy to Sandra Davis’ meditation on frustration in Ignorance Before Malice, this program mixes the comfortable and difficult with an ease that may not always seem so easy. Also screening: Breath on the Mirror by Vanessa Woods and Sarah Friedland, The Denazification of MH  by James T. Hong, The General Returns from One Place to Another  by Michael Robinson, Muse of Cinema by Kerry Laitala, and When We Are Big by Eveline Ketterings. (Sean Uyehara)

Targeting and skewering bourgeois complacency, religious hypocrisy, patriarchal authority and European moral conventions, these two films continue to challenge and confront the audience. Irreligious and scandalous, Luis Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or attacks the Church, the State, the family, not simply to shock for shock’s sake but also to argue the case for the surrealist belief in giving our unconscious irrational desires free reign. As Buñuel states: “It is love that brings about the transition from pessimism to action: Love, denounced in the bourgeois demonology as the root of all evil. For love demands the sacrifice of every other value: status, family and honor.” Although La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) by Germaine Dulac, is often regarded as the first Surrealist film and is based on Antonin Artaud’s scenario, it was Dulac’s passion for “films made according to the rules of visual music” that ignited Artaud’s narrative about a clergyman struggling against his own eroticism and desire. Banned in England in 1929, the film was declared “apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable.” (Caroline Savage)

Program Notes

See above for program description.

Told through the eyes of a traumatized Dutch soldier who has returned home from a tour of Afghanistan, Why didn’t anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan? documents the brewing tensions between native Dutch citizenry, immigrant youth and the police in a small square in the heart of Amsterdam. In this decidedly experimental work, shot almost entirely with a cell phone video camera, these tensions are made palpable through a process of accumulation. Scene after scene of youths gathering, police detentions and aimless protests are lensed from a claustrophobic, subjective viewpoint. The film also happens to be the first feature-length work shot on a cell phone to screen at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, making it the first such work to premiere at any international festival of prestige worldwide. In itself, this represents a major accomplishment, but more importantly it recharges the first-person narrative with startling intensity. Director Cyrus Frisch uses the qualities of the cell phone—its degraded video quality, its mobility, its unique cultural standing as both a public and private tool for communication—to imbue his film with themes of intense subjectivity, alienated paranoia and the immediacy of documentary. Frisch notes, “There is a lot of fear about war, the environment and the economy, and this is projected onto something smaller that we can cope with, like immigrant kids in our streets. But, at the end of the day, I think it is understandable and even healthy that we feel insecure about our future.”

See above for program description.

Ripped from the funny pages of collective pop memory, these films pay unabashed, if troubled, homage to cartoon icons and “low” media forms (many quickly receding into the distant past). Fusing images from 77 Sunset Strip comics to music by Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and a pantheon of 60's folk rock, Lewis Klahr’s The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy sequentially essentializes a heist gone horribly wrong. Ken Jacobs’ Krypton is Doomed, derived from his work on the Nervous Magic Lantern, imagines the Superman fable as metaphor for WWII Europe. Kenneth Anger’s Mouse Heaven, shamelessly fetishizes Disney’s Mickey through classic Angeresque montage while Fred Worden’s Everyday Bad Dream presents a vertiginous encounter with an equally ubiquitous icon. shalo p’s Adam is an equally ambivalent music video mashup, while To The Beat by Thad Povey and the Scratch Film Junkies joyously overindulges in vibrating, rhythmic, light, color and sound. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

Lawrence Jordan has been making films since 1952. Most widely known for his animated collage films, of which Jonas Mekas said, “His animated (collage) films are among the most beautiful short films made today. They are surrounded with love and poetry. His content is subtle, his technique is perfect, his personal style unmistakable.” Tonight’s screening sketches out a sampler of Jordan’s films, starting with Trumpit, a 1950s ‘psychodrama’ starring Stan Brakhage, with sound by Christopher Maclaine; Pink Swine an anti-art dada collage film set to an early Beatles track; Waterlight the first of Jordan’s “personal/poetic documentaries” made in the 1950s aboard a merchant marine freighter during his days as a wandering flâneur; and Winterlight, a visual poem of the Sonoma County winter landscape.Lawrence Jordan’s four most recent films will conclude the night: Enid’s Idyll, Chateau/Poyet, Poet’s Dream, and Blue Skies Beyond the Looking Glass. (Jenn Blaylock)

Program Notes

“This evolution of music is paralleled by the multiplication of the machine.” (Luigi Russolo, 1913: “The Art of Noises”) Join us! One night only! Bay Area film artist, r.fox will install twenty-five astounding16mm and 8/S8mm projectors and conduct performers in a three-part composition of audio-visual fantasy. Sound Exposure 16/8, using found footage, hand painted and manipulated optical and magnetic soundtracks and live projector sound, will create an immersive tactile cinematic experience projected onto multiple surfaces and installed in the Ninth Street Screening Room. (r.fox and Caroline Savage)

In the nonfiction work presented here, digital video becomes a tool for observation, excavation and extraction, mining both existing and personally (often surreptitiously) taped records of everyday life for moments of larger meaning and resonance.  Brook Hinton will present the 9/11 focused Wave/Wake; an “extra-temporal” study of Union Square, Transit; Trace Garden: Markings where found home movie footage is  presented as communication from beyond; a textual surveillance of violent terminology, Hack; and the San Francisco premiere of a new work. Katherin McInnis, who digitally records and transforms the archived and seen, will screen Landscapes in Alphabetical Order,an examination of how moving images are coded, organized, and archived; Predictions,a pixilated portrait of the Musée Mechanique; Suspicious Activity, which explores the surveillance atmosphere of transportation tunnels under San Francisco’s financial district; Open, an examination of dubious commerce through a crack-pipe-damaged window of an empty office building; and elevations, a meditation on architecture, visibility, and history at the Berlin Sony Center. Also screening by McInnis: A Clear Story; San Quentin, CA 94964; Model Prisoner and a selection of new work. (Brook Hinton and Katherin McInnis)

For more information, check out Michael Guillen's interview with Brook Hinton on The Evening Class!

Program Notes

“Death advances, and life falls away. That happens gradually and unnoticeably for us; we gradually immerse ourselves in the nightmare of a completely absurd existence.” (Sergei Loznitsa). A monumental work of sound design and archival research, Sergei Loznitsa’s Blockade brings the devastation of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad—a WWII battle considered to one of the most lethal in world history, in which nearly one million people died of starvation, disease, and cold—crashing solidly into the present day. Through the addition of seemingly synchronous sound to brutal and beautiful actuality footage held in archive of the St. Petersburg Studio of Documentary Films, the harrowing historical events become uncannily real and alive. Also screening: Brian Frye’s post-apocalypse psycho-melodrama The Anatomy of Melancholy; Stephanie Barber’s lonely late-night laundry-scape total power   dead dead dead; Vanessa Renwick’s Portrait #2: Trojan, an ambivalently beautiful ode to destruction; and Michael Robinson’s End Times elegy, The General Returns from One Place to Another. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

Pretend it's really summer, and join us Friday night for a film and video event. The artists and filmmakers in this screening approach the subject of landscape with a critical eye, taking a fresh look at how landscapes are constructed and understood. The works in Terra Incognita I chart contemporary visual practice and the depiction of land. And we'll be serving tamales and beer, so come early!

Lindsay Benedict and Joăo Penalva focus on the resonance of the site in narrative and psychological landscapes; Hernan Khourian and Miguel Alvear & Patricio Andrade take a surreal, yet critical approach to the correlation between identity and land; Mungo Thomson explores the political ramifications of landscape and territory; and an anonymous group of Waorani from Ecuador challenge the limits and dangers of documentaries.

Lindsay Benedict
b.1976, Port Jefferson, New York. Based in Berkeley, CA.
Aiming her camera toward the body, Lindsay Benedict creates an evocative image of a landscape that is both memory and site in Turn Back (Home) and You Coated Me With a Layer of Fat.

Joăo Penalva
b. 1949, Lisbon, Portugal. Based in London, England.
Joăo Penalva uses storytelling to focus on the translation (or mistranslation) of narratives. White Nightingale comes from Penalva’s exploration of the River Avon bed under the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. The film uses documentary footage and a fantastical narrative to create a tale based in both reality and myth.

Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade Alvear
Alvear b. 1964, Quito, Ecuador. Based in Quito, Ecuador.
Andrade b. 1959, Riobamba, Ecuador. Based in Quito, Ecuador.
Blak Mama is a feature length film based on a contemporary dance piece, written by filmmaker Miguel Alvear and choreographer Patricio Andrade as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration that started in 2002. Alvear and Andrade have taken as a starting point Ecuador's Mama Negra festival: a parade that takes place twice a year in the Andean city of Latacunga. This festive ritual is rooted in North African and Spaniard traditions, and was brought to South America by the conquistadors, where it has evolved into an impressive manifestation of hybrid forms and symbolic content. However, rather than trying to recreate a precise representation of this festivity, the film imagines a tragic comic tale that resonates on some of Mama Negra's narrative, played to the beat of Ecuador's contemporary life.

Hernán Khourian
b. 1973, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The title of this Khourian film, Puna, refers to the high plateau that covers the extreme north of Argentina along with parts of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. This visual poem invokes the culture of the plateau, showing the richness of a region that others regard as barren.

Mungo Thomson
b.1969, Davis, California. Based in Los Angeles, CA.
Thomson’s work singles out and appropriates images from popular culture, altering and re-presenting them back to the audience. American Desert (for Chuck Jones) takes Chuck Jones’s classic Road Runner cartoons, digitally erases the action, and shows a sequence of clips, all of them nothing but the drawn desert scenery.

Time Schedule

4:00pm
Lindsay L. Benedict, Turn Back (Home), 2006, 4'5''
Lindsay L. Benedict, You Coated Me With A Layer of Fat, 2006, 3'5''
Joăo Penalva, The White Nightingale, 2005, 42'

5:00pm
Hernan Khourian, Puna, 2007, 43’30’’
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Blak Mama, film in progress “Blak Chases Bambola” sequence, 10’30”
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Wir Könen Es, 2007, 3’
Anonymous, Home Movie, filmed in Bameno River Ecuador, 2005, 13’
Mungo Thomson, The American Desert (for Chuck Jones), 2002, 33’45”

6:45pm
Lindsay L. Benedict, Turn Back (Home), 2006, 4'5''
Lindsay L. Benedict, You Coated Me With A Layer of Fat, 2006, 3'5''
Joăo Penalva, The White Nightingale, 2005, 42'

7:45pm
Hernan Khourian, Puna, 2007, 43’30’’
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Blak Mama, film in progress “Blak Chases Bambola” sequence, 10’30”
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Wir Könen Es, 2007, 3’
Anonymous, Home Movie, filmed in Bameno River Ecuador, 2005, 13’
Mungo Thomson, The American Desert (for Chuck Jones), 2002, 33’45”

Currently on view, Critical Foreground presents a group of international contemporary artists whose works foreground the artificiality of cultural and economic devices that condition the representation and understanding of landscape. These artists approach the subject of landscape not as natural phenomena, but as a way of perceiving urban and rural landscapes as cultural images. The exhibition includes works by French artist Melik Ohanian, Romanian artist Mircea Cantor, Ecuadorian artists María Teresa Ponce and Miguel Alvear, and American artists Matthew Buckingham and Noah Wilson.

San Francisco Cinematheque is honored to present a tribute to the late Diane Bonder through a retrospective of her ten years of Super-8, 16mm and video work. Diane Bonder died last year on June 23 after living nearly a year with pancreatic cancer. Tonight is a celebration of her life and work. Her narrative documentary fusions have been internationally exhibited and are framed with flawless lyrical potency. Dear Mom examines a girl’s identity in relation to a matriarchal family and domestic fantasies. If transforms the common object into an emblem of an absent lover. Images of rural America in If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now bring us into a struggle between private property and public space. In Closer to Heaven urban ghosts collide. I Remember Now, We Never Danced, I Miss You, Good-bye moves to a dance of memory and loss and You Are Not from Here expresses an oblique nostalgia for the pre-gentrified landscape. (Jenn Blaylock)

Program Notes

Presenting Abbas Kiarostami
Terra Incognita II features the work of Abbas Kiarostami. Kiarostami (b. 1940, Tehran) is a master of modern cinema and one of the few Iranian filmmakers to enjoy fame in the Western world. He has made such classic films as The Wind Will Carry Us, Through the Olive Trees, and Close Up. His films are distinguished by their simplicity; a poetic meditation slowly deepens into a sophisticated dialogue that mixes nature and culture, fact and fiction. In 1998, he became the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with A Taste of Cherry.

Screening
Roads of Kiarostami (2005), 32 min
Taste of Cherry (1997), 95 min, digital version

Tonight San Francisco Cinematheque opens our screen to all citizens of the world for this newly resumed Cinematheque tradition. Bring your innovative new and in-progress experimental works between 6 and 7 pm. First come, first screened. Once we have received two hours of film we will cut submissions. We encourage you to bring films under ten minutes in duration. 16mm, super-8, DVD, miniDV and VHS formats only. (Jenn Blaylock)