Providence-based Sheri Wills and San Francisco-based Karen Johannesen work intimately with self-processing, photogramming and other direct techniques to create impressionistic films of subtle color and fleeting, soft gesture. Wills' films?including Fever, Acetylene, specimens 28 to 42, Anodyne, Effigy: specimens 4 to 12, Elegeia, Nocturne Nos. 1&2, Palliation, Riderless and H?un (Lacerations)?are lush, flower-like works made with a Victorian attention to intimate detail and obsessive ornamentation, accompanied by hauntingly minimal and evocative soundtracks. Similarly delicate, Johannesen's films focus particular attention on texture and small detail, resulting in works which subtly merge their photographic subjects with their filmic surfaces into fields of deep, quiet mystery and beauty. Johannesen will screen 76 Station, Algonquin Winter (both small-gauge landscape studies), RMF #2 and a recently completed series of abstract photogrammed films. (Steve Polta)

Cinematheque is proud to present the West Coast premieres of two new digital video works by master film artist Ernie Gehr. Gehr describes Glider as "cool, delirious and mysterious. Futuristic, yet ancient. A voyage into a pictorial space-world that seems to be governed by extraterrestrial optical and gravitational laws." City, he says, is "grounded in the familiar everyday world of the street. Yet, the ground often gives way plastically, opening up a dense and paradoxical field for visual musings and delight as colors, solids and transparencies as well as spaces within spaces weave a tapestry of a somewhat familiar 'city.' Though recorded in a specific location (downtown San Francisco), the anonymity of the spaces and architecture transposes and shapes them into a portrait of a mid-size downtown, anywhere USA." (Scott Stark)

One of the most prolific filmmakers from the 1920s through the '40s, Jean Epstein is renowned for his critical writings on film, his avant-garde narrative work and his quasi-documentary explorations of rural life in coastal Brittany. His sister Marie, who collaborated with him on a number of scripts and also directed her own films, is much less well-known. Here we pair one of Jean's films, The Three-Paneled Mirror (La Glace á Trois Faces), a tale of a spoiled young man as seen through the very different visions of his three lovers, with one of Marie's: Children of Montmartre (La Maternelle) is a poetic-realist social drama of children in Parisí urban ghetto, based on months of research and cast mostly with amateurs. (Irina Leimbacher)

We recognize strong effects of the urban landscape on our psyche, but who catalogues these effects in detail? To find out, we've borrowed from three practices: 1) the surrealists' cinema-crawl (skipping from movie to movie with minimal breaks for reality to set in); 2) the fl‚neur's open city strolling (characterized in literature from Baudelaire to Benjamin); and 3) the Situationists' dÈrive (Debord's "rapid passage through varied ambiances"). Tonight's show features the U.S. premiere of Scott Stark's Mutable Commute along with local filmmaker Jenni Olson's haunted Blue Diary. We will also traverse Chicago's Halsted Street from tenements to lakeshore in 1934, climb the Brooklyn Bridge in Zack Winestine's On Some Consequences of a Passage by Guy Debord, and take Michael Gitlin's Nine Guided Tours on an investigation of the commercialized underground. (Konrad Steiner)

Persistence of Vision winner Pat O'Neillís most recent masterpiece, The Decay of Fiction, focuses on the Ambassador, a Los Angeles hotel that featured conspicuously in the city's fabled past until earthquake damage closed it down. It is constructed as a geometric ballet of time-lapse long takes though the gardens, corridors and rooms of the decaying hotel. O'Neill also introduces a distended filigree of narrative vignettes, fragments from the lives of the hotel's guests that appear in superimposition. Transparent and insubstantial, they are a brilliant filmic realization of the hotel's memories, the ghosts of its long-departed guests. But if they once resided in the hotel, their real home was film noir, and the narratives in which they flicker into life all resonate with the conventions of the industryís most sustained engagement with the city. Also screening are two recent shorts: Coreopsis and Squirt gun/Step print. (David James)

Advance ticket purchase is strongly recommended. For ticket information, call the San Francisco Film Society at 415.561.5000 or visit www.sffs.org.

For his first personal appearance in a decade, New York-based filmmaker/optical printer wizard/film preservationist Bill Brand presents a series of films and videos that explore the body and landscape as sites both of beauty and abjection. Chuckís Will's Widow is a film eulogy to his parents as well as a magnificent visual exploration of landscape. Brand's recent digital video works-My Father's Leg, Double Nephrectomy and Moxibustion- deal with the implications of being the only sibling of five not to have inherited Polycystic Kidney Disease, an incurable disorder. Both Gazelle, a portrait of Brand's wife (the artist Katy Martin), and their new collaborative film Skinside Out feature Martin's signature paint on skin, carried out in an expressionist mode on the couple's bodies. Brand also will show some of his rarely seen films from the '70s and '80s. (Scott Stark)

Evoking a sense of contemporary anxiety, these recent films explore narrative and history through fragments, repetition, mood and metaphor. They are films for our times-cautionary tales, concerned with safety, peril and hope. Travis Wilkerson's National Archive V.1 examines the repetitions of history, while Lewis Klahr's Daylight Moon and Janie Geiser's Ultima Thule use collage to suggest the fears of childhood or the anxiety of impending disasters. Jim Jennings' Megalopolis reveals a claustrophobic New York cityscape, while Julie Murray's untitled (light) is a memorial to that city. Narrative ellipses are explored in Abraham Ravett's And ThenÖ and historical ones in Michael Wilson's Flora's Film, while Kerry Laitala's Out of the Ether examines our bodies' invisible worlds. Finally, Stan Brakhage's transcendent Resurrectus Est releases us entirely from the grip of objects, and we let go. (Kathy Geritz and Irina Leimbacher)

Advance ticket purchase is strongly recommended. For ticket information, call the San Francisco Film Society at 415.561.5000 or visit www.sffs.org.

Cinematheque is proud to present the first exhibition of media artist Jun Jalbuena's Bridge Pattern for Apology, a seven-hour marathon of motion pictures and sound. Jalbuena explains: "I make recordings, I deal with time, where it becomes a past, where the dead-ness of it becomes its life. I do a lot of work about the predicament of inhabiting physical spaces. Architecturally all movies are installations. A marathon is a kind of long-life, even if it's actually short." The eight pieces in the program include: Throwaway, Land On Water 1, Everyday Eleven Years Before, Land On Water 2, The Experience of Airplanes and Tourists Around the World, Cars Animal People, The Sound of Kids or the Moonless Nights of March and Undertow. Jalbuena has been creating dense and provocative media installations, performances and single-channel works in San Francisco since the early 1980s. (Scott Stark)

Our Fresh Eyes series gets even fresher with this revue of some of the most inspired work being produced by younger film- and videomakers in the Bay Area. These artists embody an unruly passion for experimentation, uncoiling somewhere into the future. Utilizing often hybridized forms of both cutting-edge and primitive techniques, these works speak to the continued and unrelenting vitality of local alternative cine-practice. This "Super" show features The Easy Target by Alex Killough, Another by Nefertiti Kelley Farias, Color Time by Elizabeth Block, Stone Welcome Mat by Gina Carducci, Construct by Daniel Gahr, A Vision by Hiromi Yoshida, Luggage by Cihan Sesen, itís ok to be lost by Irwin Swirnoff, Months of Jupiter by Aaron Coyes, Untitled by Syra Smith, The Waves by Kent Long, Disneywood by Brian Traylor and 3 Ways to remember Xanadu the Cat aka Sweet Pea by Rivkah Beth Medow. (Total Mobile Home)

James Benning's films have long provided unique insights into American landscapes and the geo-politics and psycho-histories that shape them. His California Trilogy, shot between 1998 and 2001, and consisting of El Valley Centro, Los and Sogobi, is a remarkable portrait of our state, focusing first on the Central Valley (and the politics of land and water use), then on the urban environment of Los Angeles, and finally on California wilderness. Benning combines a rigorously formal structure (each film consists of 35 shots, each 2-1/2 minutes long) with an acutely political eye and a deep sense of reverence for the land made palpable through his stunning cinematography. For Sogobi (the Shoshonean word for earth), Benning spent an entire year filming, and he feels that this is the closest he has ever come to portraying a true sense of place. (Irina Leimbacher)

Chicago-based Deborah Stratman is a filmmaker, teacher, artist and alchemist. With well-crafted picture and sound she scientifically documents the stoic crispness of the Icelandic landscape or the tell-no-tale blankness of suburban secured communities. Yet in transmuting this plain imagery-the leaden tool of appearances-she shows even more than meets the mind. As with an x-ray, you know that what is invisible is really there, from the wounded psyche to the history of peoples. After exposing the ominous safety of the Chicago suburbs, Stratman goes on to explore the vast Western power and radio broadcast grids in her Power/Exchange project with the Center for Land Use Interpretation. We will be screening: Palimpsest, Untied, From Hetty To Nancy, In Order Not To Be Here and Meet Adiljan (trailer). (Konrad Steiner)

Martina Kulacekís In the Mirror of Maya Deren is both a both a fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking and influential artist and a pitch-perfect introduction to her strikingly beautiful and poetic body of work. Maya Deren made such mesmerizing films as At Land, A Ritual in Transfigured Time and her masterpiece Meshed of the Afternoon. Starting with excerpts from these films, In the Mirror effectively interweaves archival footage with observances from her contemporaries such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, dance pioneer Katherine Dunham and Living Theater founder Judith Malina. This illuminating documentary features an original score by experimental composer John Zorn. (Red Vic)

For show times and ticket information, call the Red Vic Movie House at 415.668.3994 or visit www.redvicmoviehouse.

In its constant and ever-renewing explorations of the detritus of electronic transmission-noise, interference, static and the pixel-the work of Scott Arford hovers at the extreme thresholds between the concrete and the abstract. His audio work and performances push sound far beyond the realms of music towards conditions of pure force and visceral experience, while his video work picks apart, distresses and shreds elements of televisual imagery in invasive explorations of electronic data. Arfordís first Cinematheque appearance will consist of the ominous surveillance tape Airports for Lights, Particles and Spaces; video noise installation documents Static Room and Manifst.; Airports2; a remixed season of the cable-access Fuck TV (made with Michael Contreras) and TV IV, a multi-monitor audiovisual feedback loop that he will perform live. (Steve Polta)

Co-presented with SF Camerawork's exhibition Agitate: Negotiating the Photographic Process, May 13-June 14, at 1246 Folsom Street

A cinema based on touch, gestures of contact between the surface of film and the world, is the basis of tonight's screening. Emulsive transformations, both human and the earth's, palimpsests of paint and scratchings, or traces left by light and life transform the site of film into a new experience of sight. Films include: silt's performance of their triptych Untitled (excerpted from All Pieces of a River Shore), a continuation of their investigations of film emulsion as a microcosmic peering into the earth's crust, Fred Worden's Automatic Writing 2, Rock Ross' Psycho Porpoise, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof's Light Magic, Saul Levine's Light Lick: Only Sunshine, Karen Johannesen's Untitled, Alexis Bravos' The World's Dry Lever, Luis Recoder's Silver Recovery, Steve Polta's A Glimpse of Soviet Science and Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage's Ö (The Seasons). (Irina Leimbacher and Steve Polta)

The formal renderings of Tony Wu's dense black-and-white imagery-often achieved by printing 16mm film onto 8mm film, or vice versa-create compelling musical textures, beneath which resonates a shimmering reservoir of emotional and sensual energy. Tonight the Taiwan-native Wu presents a range of short works made during the past four years: Intimacy, More Intimacy, During Chaos, Cemetery 4, Cemetery 6 and Frame Parade. The dark mysteries of the films of JosÈ Rodriguez unfold in brightly lit landscapes of oblique desire and memories just out of reach. The Mexican-born San Francisco resident Rodriguez presents several short films made since 2001, including at least one premiere. (Scott Stark)

Special Benefit Admission Rate: $50 and $20. Call 415.978.ARTS for advance tickets. Additional donations will be accepted by Cinematheque on the Brakhage Family's behalf.

From 1952 until his passing on March 9, 2003, Stan Brakhage was the most prolific experimental filmmaker in the medium's history, inspiring hundreds of filmmakers with his passionate vision. Cinematheque honors Stan's memory with a rare screening of his entire 35mm output-Eye Myth, Night Music, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Dante Quartet, Interpolations, Night Mulch and Very-hand-painted films of a richness that exceeds even that of his 16mm works. Co-hosted by filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky and poet Michael McClure (a friend of Stan's since 1954), the program will open with 1955's In Between (made in San Francisco) and will conclude with the West Coast premier of Panels for the Walls of Heaven, Brakhage's hand-painted conclusion to his "Vancouver Island Series." A reception will follow the first screening. (Steve Polta)

We now live in fear: fear of flying, fear of falling, fear of moving across uncertain ground. We compartmentalize our fear, allowing ourselves to be surveilled, giving up pieces of our private selves in exchange for a promise of security. We inhabit a new American landscape that looks the same but seems riddled with hidden scars. Tonight's program features a range of work exploring flight, fear, surveillance and landscape, including three premieres by local filmmakers: Bruce Landick's darkly mysterious Deed Without a Name, David Sherman's anxiety-laced The Graceless and Konrad Steiner's bleakly compelling landscape study, be tw. Also included: Flight by Greta Snider, Skyworks, Wind & Fire by Le Ann Bartok Wilchusky, Triumph of Victory by Rodney Ascher, Hong Kong (HKG) by Gerard Holthuis, G by Rolf Gibbs, Airports for Lights, Shadows and Particles by Scott Arford and The Geosophistís Tears by Peter Rose. (Scott Stark)

Belgium quÈ? Brussels: the capital of the European Community (nevermind Nato's nukes tucked away in secret basementsÖ). From a country known for chocolate, beer and the Flemish versus the French, we find work that incorporates elements of experimental electronic music, fashion and stylized performances. Tonight's screening includes work by cutting-edge multimedia artists StÈphane Aubier & Vincent Patar, Pascal Baes, Yves Bernard, Claude Cattelain, Antonin de Bemels, Manon De Boer, Anouk De Clercq, Daniel Daniel, Alexandra Dementieve & Mark Mancha, Nicolas Dufranne, Dora Garcia, Lucy Grauman, Ryoji Ikeda, Kiila, Thomas Kˆner, Julie Morel, Frank Theys and Karen Vanderborght. As an ode to the sound collaborations in many of these works, this selection is structured as a DJ set, with dance parts, melancholic moments, pure noise eruptions and resting points to mark the measures. Thanks to www.argosarts.org  and participating artists. (MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter and Karen Vanderborght)

Our Baldwin series kicks off with the artist's double-fisted take on the compilation doc. We offer the classic coupling of RocketKitKongoKit-1986's energized exposÈ on neo-colonialism in Africa-with Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, 1991's psychotronic and paranoic pseudo-pseudo-doc that connects the dots and blows the cover on the Hollow Earth, the Quetzal conspiracy, Latin American-U.S. "relations," the secret history of the twentieth century and more. As a special opening night party favor, Baldwin performs live with Day and Night and Day. (Steve Polta)

Taking collage to vertiginous extremes, the self-proclaimed "King of Found Footage" here offers a pair of films (and then some) dealing overtly with the recontextual reflex-the seemingly unstoppable drive to reuse, recycle (and reinsert) borrowed and/or stolen elements of contemporary cultural content. 1978's Wild Gunman finds advertising imagery and cowboy iconography manically collaged within the penny arcade, while 1995's Sonic Outlaws reformats the rockumentary in exploration of the misadventures of Oakland's own rogue samplers, Negativland, as they dodge the blows of the litigious recording industry. Latecomers will miss Baldwin's earliest admitted work, the provocative Stolen Movie, composed of provocative bum-rushing (w/ Super 8 camera) of SF movie houses circa 1975. (Steve Polta)

Baldwin's final program surveys his focus on the military/industrial destruction of the American Southwest through the twin lenses of speculative history and dystopian fantasy. 1992's black-comic Conquistador chronicle °O No Coronado! weaves live-action into Baldwin's characteristically dense montage to draw a parallel between a gold-crazy Coronado's rabid rampages and more contemporary environmental exploitations. 2000's Spectres of the Spectrum uses a post-apocalyptic sci-fi narrative to chart the development of monolithic corporate media in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the activities of its Kamikaze counterforce. Also featured: sketchy transmissions from Baldwin's in-progress New Age exposÈ Mock-Up on Mu! (Steve Polta)

French filmmaker Germaine Dulac was the feminist of the 1920s avant-garde and a tireless advocate of film as an independent and idiosyncratic art. Working in narrative, experimental and finally newsreel forms, she also wrote some of the earliest manifestoes for an avant-garde cinema. This year the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents rare archival prints of her masterpieces, The Smiling Madame Beudet-the tale of an imaginative but oppressed young wife-and the controversial The Seashell and the Clergyman. With a script by Artaud, who had hoped to star in it, this work is arguably the first surrealist film, preceding BuÒuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou by a year. Gorgeous prints from the CinÈmatheque FranÁaise will be accompanied by an original piano score by Michael Mortilla. Look out for a planned Dulac retrospective in September. (Irina Leimbacher)