Rebecca Baron’s exploration of the British Mass Observation Movement, How Little We Know Our Neigbours, receives its San Francisco premiere in this program of innovative documentaries revealing the power of modern surveillance technologies and the whittling away of civil liberties and upending the notions of privacy. Other works show renegade independent radio stations keeping activism alive by stealing from the corporate airwaves, and ubiquitous video cameras capturing a steady stream of unguarded moments. For full description, see www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Based on a nineteenth century case study of a young woman who was admitted to La Salpêtrière insane asylum at age fifteen, Charming Augustine reimagines her psychosis and explores connections between attempts to document mental states and the prehistory of narrative film. Beloff’s remarkable 3-D film of love and madness reveals Augustine, who became the star, the “Sarah Bernhardt” of the asylum. For full descriptions and other 3-D screenings by Beloff and others, see www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Martina Kudlácek (In the Mirror of Maya Deren) turns her archivist’s eye and passion for the avant-garde to a less publicly fêted woman: Marie Menken, star of Chelsea Girls and pioneering filmmaker in her own right. Notes on Marie Menken includes rare footage of Menken and her milieu (Warhol, Gerard Malanga, husband Willard Maas) as well as interviews with friends and colleagues Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and others. Revealing Menken's creative life, Kudlácek affirms her powerful legacy to avant-garde film history.

Capturing fragments of light, color and texture of the world while becoming one body with her camera, Marie Menken blazed a pioneering trail for filmmakers to follow. Her exquisitely seen and constructed films had no predecessor and have been declared “filmic haikus,” revealing the intimate observations of an artist fascinated with natural mysteries and camera-eye discoveries. Andy Warhol, Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, Visual Variations on Noguchi, Notebook, Eye Music in Red Major, and more will be shown, alongside Valentine for Marie by Willard Maas and John Hawkins.

If any film artist has succeeded in portraying the beauty and cruelty of San Francisco, it is Bruce Baillie. In his marvelous first film, On Sundays, and the later Mass for the Dakota Sioux, Baillie evokes the city and its human and physical landscapes in the early sixties. Mournful rather than celebratory, revealing idiosyncratic details rather clichéd sites, Baillie’s films include elliptical narrative elements as they weave images and sounds into exquisite city sonatas. We also screen several early CinemaNews works by Baillie with friends: Mr. Hayashi, Here I am, The Gymnasts, and Termination.

The art of cinema may be ultimately optical and auditory, but its processes are chemical, electrical and material. Two young Bay Area-based film artists, Krahn and Nishikawa refract landscape and gesture through the technology called cinema and orchestrate its traces into expressive nuance and delicate visual pleasure. They will each screen a selection of their work with rent and re-sewn 16mm film, hand processed emulsions, pinhole and slit-aperture videos and pixilated films. Nishikawa is currently an artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

SOLD OUT

Filmmaker, writer and performer Miranda July is no stranger to the Bay Area (she grew up in Berkeley) nor to Cinematheque, where she has shown The Amateurist, Nest of Tens and performed The Swan Tool. Internationally acclaimed since the success of Me and You and Everyone We Know, July graces us with a special two-night performance at Project Artaud to benefit San Francisco Cinematheque. In collaboration with the audience, she will perform a story of love, obsession and heartbreak.

After the Tuesday performance, Cinematheque will host a reception in Miranda's honor. Admission is by ticket only to this special reception.

SOLD OUT

Filmmaker, writer and performer Miranda July is no stranger to the Bay Area (she grew up in Berkeley) nor to Cinematheque, where she has shown The Amateurist, Nest of Tens and performed The Swan Tool. Internationally acclaimed since the success of Me and You and Everyone We Know, July graces us with a special two-night performance at Project Artaud to benefit San Francisco Cinematheque. In collaboration with the audience, she will perform a story of love, obsession and heartbreak.

After the Tuesday performance, Cinematheque will host a reception in Miranda's honor. Admission is by ticket only to this special reception.

With a meticulous attention to detail and exquisite sensuality, Hannes Schüpbach’s beautifully photographed films are elegant weaves of color and light, forming meditative and precisely timed tapestries of wonder and revery. Similar to the rigorously lyrical works of Robert Beavers and Nathaniel Dorsky, Schüpbach’s films transcend their diaristic origins and present the world anew, as luminous silent mystery. He joins us tonight from his native Switzerland to present Toccata, Falten and Winter Feuer. Copies of two publications on his work—Falten and Film Solo—will be available at the screening. Thanks to Swiss Films for their support of this program.

Lauded at Cannes, the finale of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s World War One trilogy examines the effect of warfare on the human body. Oh, Uomo! (Oh, Man!) is the fruit of the artists’ extensive research in historical and medical film archives. While the visceral images of shattered but living bodies, as well science’s attempts to repair and document them, orginate in the aftermath of the first “modern” war, they speak clamorously about the wars being waged with even more technological ferocity today. With Transparencies, a peek at more mutilated cinematic treasures.

The carrier wind listens to itself. Sound and image artists Loren Chasse and Keith Evans present a special handcrafted multi-media event, beginning with the observers/ audience entering into an intimate performance space and concluding in a screening room. For Chasse and Evans, awareness of landscape is a creative, physical phenomenon, and intention in performance creates an ecology of attention. Using idiosyncratic cinematic systems constructed from old projectors and sound devices with found materials grafted onto them, Chasse and Evans open apparatus-bodies in absurd and mysterious ways.

After moving to England in 1965, Dr. Yash Pal Suri, and his family in India began communicating with each other via super-8 home movies and reel-to-reel audio recordings, as a means of staying close and in touch. Forty years later, I for India, directed by his daughter Sandhya Suri, pieces together the super 8 footage and audio messages to create a compelling time capsule and bittersweet portrait of separation from one's parents, roots and country. This intimate, absorbing and rewarding film weaves through archival footage and old home movies reflecting not only upon the expatriate familial experiences of loss, separation and nostalgia for the past, but it also looks at the family in the present.

For full description, see www.thirdi.org/festival

The Forsaken Land reveals its secrets gradually shot by shot with painterly stylized compositions reflecting the disorientation and desolation of un-ending civil war. Set near a desolate military camp on the wind swept coast of Sri Lanka, the film unfolds in a sort of no man's land criss-crossed by tanks and military trucks carrying soldiers. Two men work as guards, who are alternately bored and oblivious, or humiliated by those who have more power than they do.

For full description, see www.thirdi.org/festival

Joining us from her native Sweden, much-loved Bay Area artist and teacher Gunvor Nelson returns to Cinematheque and Pacific Film Archive with several new video works. The half-hour True to Life is a lush close-up study of a garden in which flowers and plants bare their life force and cycle to Nelson’s probing digital camera. This is accompanied by two earlier collage films combining cinematography and animated painting. Light Years journeys through the Swedish landscape and reflects on time and displacement while Field Study #2 is a delightful cinematic enigma. Nelson has two additional screenings at PFA, see www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

To celebrate what would have been poet Frank O’Hara’s 80th birthday, we present a mix of film and poetry in several permutations. Poet and essayist Bill Berkson discusses and reads from O’Hara’s work. The American Poetry Archives at SF State contributes rare footage of the poet in his milieu. Theater director Mac McGinnes collages text from O’Hara’s plays into an alternate, subversive dialog for a scene from Trouble in Paradise, one of O’Hara’s favorite films, and Dan Fisher and Julian Brolaski perform it live to the film. Finally we conclude with The Last Clean Shirt, the poet’s collaboration with artist Alfred Leslie.

Known for their critical interrogation of political violence and documentary strategies, Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer + David Thorne) presents their new work shot in Damascus, Syria. It reflects on “how citizens think through a complex political context in which thinking itself is crippled by uncertainty, secrecy, and fear” (SA). Experimental geographer Trevor Paglen follows with a multi-media lecture/performance, Tracking the CIA’s ‘Torture Planes’ based on research for his new book Torture Taxi (with AC Thompson). He investigates planes and prisons used in the US government’s covert program to kidnap, “render,” and “disappear” suspected terrorists.)

The films in “Military Culture” reflect the loss civil space to military institutions and ethos. Part of a series curated by Akram Zaatari (co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut and renowned videomaker) for the 2006 Oberhausen Festival, this program includes Oussama Mohammad’s exquisitely shot portrait of the militarization of rural life in Syria, Sharif Waked’s caustic fashion show for Palestinian men crossing Israeli checkpoints, Köken Ergun’s video installation on the militaristic pageantry of Turkish nationalism, Avi Mograbi’s depiction of an excruciating stand-off between a Palestinian family and an Israeli tank, and more. Zaatari will present additional programs from “Radical Closure” at PFA, see www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

We also co-present a public lecture by Akram Zaatari at San Francisco Art Institute on Wednesday, Nov 29 at 7:30 pm. See www.sfai.edu

Nathaniel Dorsky’s new Song and Solitude (2006) was conceived and photographed with the loving help and kindness of his close friend Susan Vigil during the last year of her life. Its balance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an exploration of the external visual world as such. This latest film will be shown with Threnody and The Visitation. Dorsky’s films refine the everyday into a luminous image, which is neither here, nor beyond the here and now.

Investigating aural-optic perception and the foundations of cinema, Christopher Musgrave creates an immersive, live audio-visual environment. He will install Alpha Channel, a sensory integration environment that will be viewable externally (objectively) from the street through frosted windows and internally (subjectively) in the Ninth Street space and on the 'interior screen' (ie. through closed eyes). Simultaneously the Lemurians and Nate Boyce and Phase Chancellor will each play an improvisationally-based hypnotic, psychedelic sound and image set, using delay time in the projected image, creating a feedback loop.