Special times and admission:
$7 one show, $12 both

7 pm: Phantom of the Operator
Caroline Martel In Person
8:30 pm: The Time We Killed
Jenn Reeves In Person

Cinematheque co-presents a double-feature with the MadCat International Women's Film Festival this year! At 7 pm, Martel screens her witty hour-long love affair with telephone operators, The Phantom of the Operator. Using archival footage from 1903 on to trace the evolution of this oft-filmed profession, this delightfully inventive labor history reveals a story of female workers rarely credited for their role in the development of global communications. At 8:30, Reeves presents The Time We Killed, her debut feature exploring the inner life of a writer unable to leave her NY apartment on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. Robyn (played by poet Lisa Jarnot) confronts her growing agoraphobia in this beautifully shot and emotionally compelling portrait of contemporary alienation. (Ariella Ben-Dov)

Presented in Association with MadCat International Women's Film Festival

Three artists investigate the cinematic apparatus through the media of performance and installation, voicing nostalgia, intimating impermanence. Mauricio Ancalmo’s sculptural work introduces the 16mm projector to a collection of similarly cast-off devices—sewing machine, phonograph, word processor—detouring the 16mm strip’s serpentine route through unimagined paths and surprise encounters. On display will be his charmingly monstrous room-sized works Autonomous; 1871©; and Opposites Attract OST. Alex MacKenzie, with twin analytics, will present his lush and melancholic Parallax, a long-form live sound/pix mix using archival industrial footage to weave a complex dream collage on change, impermanence and the demands of each present moment. Also: a rare West Coast autumnal unveiling of Jeanne Liotta’s live Summer Solstice. (Steve Polta)

Presented in association with Film Arts Foundation

Local filmmaker Britta Sjogren’s s new feature is a deftly structured experiment in personal narrative that gracefully, almost surreptitiously, rides between fiction and documentary. Focusing on four intertwined lives—an elderly woman ambivalently embarking on an affair, a mentally unstable man facing eviction, a frustrated actor waiting for his breakthrough, and a young woman juggling personal and professional aspirations—the film portrays the small and large struggles of daily life and economic survival with enormous compassion. With all the actors playing, more or less, themselves, it also has a bitter edge. The haunting soundtrack is by Mark Eitzel and American Music Club, with original compositions by Marc Capelle and Monte Vallier. (Irina Leimbacher)

Presented in association with Film Arts Foundation

Algeria in the 1990s was all but abandoned by the international media, while political corruption, religious fundamentalism, and violence almost destroyed the country. In War Without Images filmmaker Mohammed Soudani returns to his homeland, accompanied by Swiss photographer Michael von Graffenried who had documented the strife in the early ‘90s. Together they seek the photographer’s subjects, engaging with people from all walks of life—traumatized survivors, an activist who criticizes the photographer for focusing on veiled victims, a religious fundamentalist who condemns photography itself. Questioning the uses of documentary images, but allowing audiences to decide for themselves, the film also presents a unique portrait of contemporary Algeria. (Irina Leimbacher)

Presented in Association with the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco; SF Camerawork; and Cinemayaat, Arab Film Festival.

Remedial Reading Comprehension; Fleming Faloon; Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.; Bardo Follies; What’s Wrong With This Picture? 1 and 2; Institutional Quality; and On the Marriage Broker Joke…

A LUX Project in Association with Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna.

The Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter; Diploteratology; “No Sir, Orison!”; Wide Angle Saxon; Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present; A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California; and New Improved Institutional Quality…. Join us tonight for a special in-progress preview of Land’s Bay Area production Undesirables!

A LUX Project in Association with Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna.

SPECIAL TIMES: PLAYSPACE GALLERY RECEPTION AT 5, SCREENING AT 7:30

This rare conjunction of film screening and gallery exhibition is the fruit of our collaboration with California College of the Arts. Evidence Is Everywhere is both an exhibition at CCA’s PlaySpace Gallery (from Oct 8-20, located at CCA’s San Francisco campus, 2nd floor) and an evening of screened shorts featuring recent work by artists who trained in CCA’s film/video/media arts program. Playing upon different ideas of “evidence,” from records of personal or public events to bodily scars, diaries, and the very material of film, photographs, or television, the artists engage diverse media, exhibition formats and approaches to temporality. Gallery artists: Tommy Becker, Rick Danielson, Anthony Discenza, Hannah Henry, Alex Killough, Dana Plays, Mary Tsiongas. Screening artists: Hailey Ashcraft, Morgan Barnard, Elizabeth Block, Harrell Fletcher, Sean Horchy, Alex Killough, Virginia Kleker, Katherin McInnis, Laura Plotkin, Julia Shirar, Kim Wood, and live performance by Alfonso Alvarez and Steven Dye. (Tanya Zimbardo)

Presented in Association with California College of the Arts, PlaySpace Gallery, and California College of the Arts Alumni Association

Known not only for his cinematic oeuvre, but also for his brilliant lectures on cooking, his fervent advocacy of experimental film, and his seminal role in founding the Austrian Film Museum and Anthology Film Archives, Peter Kubelka returns to the Bay Area for three lecture/screenings co-presented with Pacific Film Archive and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. “Metaphoric Films” features visually lush and aurally complex gems: his earliest, the lyrical Mosaik Im Vertrauen; the ever-timely de- and re-construction of tourism’s tyranny, Unsere Afrikareise; Pause!; and finally, his first film in twenty-six years, an ethnography of and for our time made from the detritus of advertising, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth). (Irina Leimbacher)

Presented in association with Pacific Film Archive and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
PFA screens Programs 1 and 2 on October 18 and 20 at 7:30 pm.

Fresh from recent screenings at MoMA in New York, Rotterdam, and Berlin, Cynthia Madansky joins us with several new experimental and political works. The PSA Project (with Elle Flanders) is an ongoing series of short films that speak out against the American invasion of Iraq and the act of war. Devotion, a lyrical film set in Istanbul at the outbreak of the American invasion of Iraq, observes identity as performed in public and private rituals through the eyes of a love-bereaved subject. Filmed in Palestine, Still Life evokes an unsettling awareness of unfamiliar devastation in a place thought recognizable. All with award-winning soundtracks of Zeena Parkins. (Maïa Cybelle Carpenter)

Presented in association with the Jewish Film Festival.

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors...”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Less of a “how-to” manual than a hall of mirrors, these works move beyond the True, the Beautiful, and the Good to pose their questions with a flicker, wrestling with the world of appearances and searching out subjective spaces rather than smashing them to smithereens. In Tony and Beverley Conrad’s Straight & Narrow, visual perception is subjectivity. Peter Rose’s video-poem-performance-lecture Metalogue, takes on the simulacra by becoming inseparable from it. Stephanie Barber’s Dogs employs sophistry and sock puppets in a hyper-reflexive enclosure play. Barbara Sternberg’s Like a Dream That Vanishes interviews philosopher John Davis and plunges us into the fleeting, miraculous temporality of cinema itself. In Corinna Schnits’ Living a Beautiful Life, simulation is all: no questions, only answers, and unreliable ones at that. Plus surprise works by Libby Hux, USCO, Liotta. (Jeanne Liotta)

John Reily joins forces with EPIC[abridged] and Owen O’Toole to create an eclectic evening of Super-8, video, and live performance. Reily’s films, such as Intrepid Truculence, Never Stop Seething and Aristotle’s Lantern, blend whimsy and angst in animated single-frame spectacles. These dreamscapes frequently explore elements of decay, renewing our senses by destroying our sensibilities. EPIC[abridged] (Christian Bruno, Charles Kremenak, Steve Dye, Biagio Azzerelli, Eric Steinberg, Arturo Cesares), formed to musically re-interpret ‘digest’ versions of B and art house classics, will accompany some of Reily’s work. Nonet (Reily, Kremenak, O’Toole) conclude the evening with a multiple Super-8 projection performance with live sound from dead tech media. (Irina Leimbacher)

Lynn Marie Kirby and Harrell Fletcher’s collaborative Side by Side engages the live and the recorded, the literal and the abstract, the individual and the dyadic, as it explores the representational traces of an event, in this case a children’s karate class. Using different media (16mm cameraless exposure, digital video) and varying degrees and forms of mediation, Kirby and Fletcher recorded the class simultaneously, to produce images set next to and in dialogue with each other and with the original event. Kirby’s son James and his teacher Sensai Shanus participate in the piece not only on camera, but with a live performance-demonstration. Additional work by Kirby and Fletcher will be presented. (Irina Leimbacher)

The collectively-run artistic project and critical journal LTTR (K8 Hardy, Emily Roysdon, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi) presents herstorical tapes and recent pieces focused on artistic practice and performance. Linda Benglis’ Now is a pioneering color video in which the artist uses layers of self images to challenge notions of agency, temporality and polymorphous autoeroticism. Ulrike Müller’s Mock Rock mirrors the social experience of loneliness in the cultural conditionality of nature, and New Report by K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood (of Tracy + the Plastics), explores utopic and banal journalistic endeavors. Additional work by: Klara Liden, Maïa Cybelle Carpenter, G.B. Jones, Fareshteh Toosi, Carola Dertnig, Pauline Boudry, and AK Burns. (Maïa Cybelle Carpenter)

Presented in Association with Frameline.

Are we Post-Feminism? Is the 1970s fight for gender equality ongoing? Are we moving into an era of Future Feminists, unfettered by constructions of gender? Paired with our LTTR, these recent pieces engage in dialogues of feminism through the varied approaches of practice and performance. Antonia Baehr’s Erika in Amerika looks at the struggle to make a film as a foreigner in the US when one is perceived as a feminist performance artist. Ene Liis Semper’s Oasis and Patty Chang’s Untitled (Eels) mix endurance art with strong statements made visible through montage. Nightshade by Megan Michalak combines the practice of circus arts with an unsettling comment about the formation of identity. Additional works by Miranda July, Ximena Cueves, Dora Garcia. (Maïa Cybelle Carpenter)

Presented in Association with Frameline.

Ted Brinkley (Evander Music, Bay Improvisors) shoehorns his large ensemble into Cinematheque’s screening space for an evening of celebrating and subverting movies made in San Francisco neighborhoods. With the original soundtracks muted, Brinkley’s orchestra performs a reverse visual kino-karaoke, ‘covering’ a montage ‘setlist’ of ‘standards’ of cinema, with an accent on the history of filmed San Francisco. All scenes were shot in SF in the last 108 years, featuring behind- or on-camera contributions from Th. Edison, Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Bogey, Elsa Bannister, ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, Harry Callahan, Frank Bullitt, James Bond, Barbra Streisand and others. Five genres will be represented: the newsreel, the film noir, the foot-chase, the car-chase, and ‘psychedelic.’ (Konrad Steiner)

On Ted Brinkley: "Upon misreading the title of a well-known album and concluding that "Jazz Goes To Collage", he could no longer recall how jazz managed to get itself sent up the river." —nach o'hargman, editor, College Jazz and Halftime Daily

Presented in association with Hugo Ball Room Productions.

Two sound artists converge, fusing projected video and poetic texts with immersive sound environments. Scott Arford’s Song of the Station weds a 1912 poem by Giorgio de Chirico to time-lapse imagery of a San Francisco waterfront warehouse; witness to the passage of time, the Little Station’s impassivity subverts surveillance’s stare into a screaming accusation of the viewer’s vulnerability. Developed from his compositional work with electro-acoustic fountains, Kenneth Atchley’s de Quincy Levitation is a submersion of language beneath rich sound fields: “guilt-ridden opium reveries compressed and magnified into a static stream of flattened space where reference and surface coexist impenetrably.” Live vocals provided by Kattt Sammon and Dean Santomieri. Also: Josh Russell’s Wall Mounted Gas Heater Overheating and Shutting Down. (Steve Polta)

Presented in association with 23five Incorporated.

Forgács is known for his unique films (Free Fall, “Private Hungary” series) exploring the intersections of public and private history and memory through his astute and sensitive excavation of amateur home movies. This fall his five-screen multimedia installation Danube Exodus is on exhibit at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. In conjunction with that exhibit, we present his award-winning brand new El Perro Negro: Stories of the Spanish Civil War. Using the 1930s home movies of a Catalan industrialist and a Madrileño middle-class student, the film evokes the violent chaos and ideological confusion that is inherent to war and questions Manichean oversimplifications of good and evil.(Irina Leimbacher)

Presented in Association with the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley.