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CALENDAR - FALL 2001 [Unless otherwise noted, all screenings take place at 7:30pm at the San Francisco Art Institute (800 Chestnut Street) or Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission Street at 3rd Street).] Thursday, October 4 In May 1968, nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. Now in their seventies and eighties, six of the original Catonsville Nine (including Daniel and Philip Berrigan) reflect on their experiences and political activism in Lynne Sachs' new poetic documentary, Investigation of a Flame. Investigation is followed by Which Way is East: Notebooks from Viet Nam, a personal essay in which lyrical, probing images are illuminated by journal reflections by Sachs and her sister Dana Sachs as they traveled though Vietnam.
Our 40th Anniversary celebration continues with a four-part retrospective revisiting some of the many films which Cinematheque championed through the years.
Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand and others organize screenings of art films, documentaries and features in East Bay backyards and community centers as a response to the lack of public venues available for independent filmmakers. These Canyon Cinema screenings eventually move to San Francisco where they are absorbed into screenings devoted largely to work drawn from a newly formed distribution cooperative of the same name. The era is imbued with social idealism and communal energy, and the filmmaking boldly embraces purely cinematic visual expression and cultural critique. Sunday, October 7 San Francisco has always been home to upstarts determined to blaze
their own radical approaches to living, whether in historic Gold Rush
times, the Beat era, or as recently as the Sixties. This program celebrates
and remembers the latter with films frequently shown at Cinematheque.
Thursday, October 11
Friday and Saturday, October 12-13 at 7:30 pm Kinetica: Abstraction in the Moving ImageKinetica is a touring film festival produced by Los Angeles' iotaCenter, an organization dedicated to preserving, promoting and exhibiting the art of abstraction in the moving image. Cinematheque is proud to host this year's festival, which features work of widely influential Bay Area filmmakers Hy Hirsch and Jordan Belson. Friday, October 12 Early (analog) computer-generated abstractions of Hy Hirsch will be seen in a context of related jazz-influenced films from the Beat Era. Hirsch's Chasse des Touches, Autumn Spectrum, Scratch Pad, Dèfense d'Afficher and La Couleur de la Forme will screen alongside works by Jordan Belson, Mary Ellen Bute, Harry Smith, Patricia Marx, Robert Breer, Shirley Clarke, John Whitney, Sr. and James Whitney. Saturday, October 13 Since 1961 Jordan Belson has produced over twenty films using intricate abstracted light exploring the relationship between scientific theories and spiritual perception. Tonight marks the San Francisco premiere of Belson's Bardo, in addition to films by Paul Glabicki, Larry Cuba, Joost Rekveld, Chris Casady, Ed Zajec, Richard Reeves, Al Jarnow, Ernie Pintoff and Mel Brooks, Mar Elepano, Bob Snyder, Ying Tan, Stephen Arthur and Sky David.
Sunday, October 14 Emory Menefee assumed leadership of Canyon screenings from August, 1965 to July, 1967, at Intersection in North Beach. Programs became more firmly rooted in contemporary avant-garde/ experimental film, and Canyon Cinema presented its first artist retrospective (of the visiting Kuchar Brothers) and premiered several significant works of the period. Tonight Emory will reproduce one of his imaginative programs from February, 1966. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Kustom Kar Kommandos by Kenneth Anger; Emak-Bakia and Les Mystères Du Château Du Dé by Man Ray; An Astronomer's Dream (color version) by Georges Méliès, and a surprise serial.
Thursday, October 18 at 7:30 and 9pm In his extraordinary animated film series the Soho Eckstein Cycle, South African artist William Kentridge creates a profoundly disturbing portrait of the apartheid-infected psyches of three fictitious characters and the social realities that surround them. Kentridge's animation is created from drawings which are erased, elaborated and constantly transformed, with the melting traces of their past visible like the traces of our unconscious desires and fears. A formidable artist who also works in drawing, installation, and opera, Kentridge is the subject of a major retrospective at the New Museum (New York). (Irina Leimbacher)
Sunday, October 21 In May of 1966 Menefee produced the first Bay Area retrospective of an avant-garde artist's work, in this case actually two closely related filmmakers, George and Mike Kuchar. The four-program "Kuchar Festival" featured most of the then-completed work by the two young filmmakers from the Bronx, presented by George, who was visiting the Bay Area for the first time. Tonight we screen two long 16mm films, each of which was included in that retrospective: Mike's The Secret of Wendell Samson and George's Corruption of the Damned.
Saturday, October 27 at 7:30pm Nathaniel Dorsky returns with his three most recently completed films, including the second American screening of Love's Refrain. Even though Nathaniel's last Cinematheque show was interrupted by mechanical failure, viewers were treated to two of this great artist's latest and most mature films, which weave breath-taking images into intricate and taut suspensions of cinematic light and movement. (Steve Anker) "Perhaps the most delicately tactile in this series, Love's Refrain rests moment to moment on its own surface. It is a coda in twilight, a soft-spoken conclusion to a set of four cinematic songs." (Nathaniel Dorsky)
Sunday, October 28 Women artists gained increasing prominence through the Sixties Canyon screenings as more and more began making their own films. Several Bay Area women filmmakers emerged during these years whose work would continue to be widely celebrated, and their films were often shown on group programs with women from other parts of the country. Fog Pumas by Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley; Women and Children At Large by Freude; Riverbody by Alice Anne Parker (Anne Severson); Mosori Monika by Chick Strand; Third Eye Butterfly (dual-screen projection) by Storm De Hirsch; and Eye Music In Red Major by Marie Menken. Thursday, November 1 Over the next weekend we will celebrate the 35th Anniversary of Canyon Cinema, which formally began in November 1966. Tonight's program "is a landscape of light, emulsion and paint through which a series of characters dance, walk and cycle. Death is an important figure and winter an important season, with its metaphoric grains of snow." Diane Kitchen's Notch, Robert Huot's Snow, Stan Brakhage's Dance, Dominic Angerame's Battle Stations, Ken Paul Rosenthal's I My Bike, Maïa Cybele Carpenter's Site Visit; Frédérique Devaux's Entrecroisées; Mark Street's Sliding off the Edge of the World; Jeff Scher's Yours, Kelly Reed's Pink Film and Chris Sullivan's Master of Ceremonies. (Claire Bain)
Saturday, November 3 at 8pm Join the Canyon (35) and Cinematheque (40) staffs in celebrating the anniversary of both organizations with a pot-luck (bring something to share), a party, and multiple projections of films from Canyon's current catalogue, with many local filmmakers, famous and infamous, in attendance. Re-scheduled from July 21, this is an event not to be missed!
Sunday, November 4 at 5pm and 7:30 pm 5pm | Panel Discussion, Recalling the Early Days of Canyon Cinema Tonight is the first of four panels which will explore the world of Cinematheque screenings from 1961 to the present. Join Canyon's founder Bruce Baillie; early screening co-organizers Chick Strand, Emory Menefee, Edith Kramer and Loren Sears; and filmmaker, Berkeley Barb film journalist, and author Lenny Lipton, and moderator Steve Anker for a round-table discussion with audience participation recalling the spirit and circumstances surrounding early Canyon screenings. 7:30pm | Early Canyon Productions: An Evening with Bruce Bailie, Chick Strand and Friends Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand will present an evening of early Canyon Cinema films, including Baillie's rarely shown lyrical Cinemanews documentaries (Brookfield Memorial Recreation Center, Mr. Hayashi, The Gymnasts, Termination) made on shoestring budgets but already informed by Bruce's unmistakably expressive sense of composition. They will also show early films by Chick, Will Hindle, Stan Vanderbeek, Bruce Conner and other filmmakers; a section of the serial The Isle of Lemuria, starring Bela Lugosi as Uncle Frank; and more.
Sunday, November 11 at 3:00 pm Straight Outta Hunters Point (world premiere) is a powerful documentary by first time filmmaker Kevin Epps about life in the Hunters Point district of San Francisco where he lives (and where Cinematheque now has its offices). A gritty, uncompromising film about the evolution and perseverance of a black culture in the shadow of poverty, race riots and gang-related rap wars, Straight Outta Hunters Point documents the trials and tribulations of a neighborhood in crisis, of a community in limbo.
Sunday, November 11 While Lawrence Jordan and Bruce Conner - two of the Bay Area's earliest and most celebrated personal/ experimental filmmakers - never primarily identified themselves with Canyon Cinematheque, each has been prominently represented in many of our screenings over these 40 years. Tonight we present a selection of Jordan and Conner's films shown at Canyon during the sixties: Triptych In Four Parts, Duo Concertantes and Hamfat Asar (by Jordan); A Movie, Cosmic Ray, Breakaway, Report, and The White Rose (by Conner)
Thursday, November 15 Internationally renowned Slovenian artist, media theorist, art critic and curator Marina Grzinic will present a selection of videotapes that address politics, sexuality, rock and roll, and telerobotics. Using humor, original and found imagery, and the body as canvas, Grzinic and collaborator Aina Smid confront the contradictions and atrocities of post cold war Balkan life with humor, evocative images and philosophical inquiry. A researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Ljubljana, Grzinic has written several books (including Retroavant-Garde) and her art has been shown at festivals and museum around the world. (Jeanne C. Finley)
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, November 16, 17, 18 Stan Brakhage was the first non-local filmmaker Canyon Cinema featured prominently on its earliest calendars. In February 1966, Emory Menefee presented the first West Coast screening of the complete Dog Star Man. Since then, Cinematheque has presented fifty-six programs of Brakhage films, mostly Bay Area premieres. Certainly no other non-local filmmaker has had as strong an impact on the Bay Area experimental film community. In tribute to Stan's fifty years of uninterrupted filmmaking, and following his brief residency at UC Berkeley/PFA (November 13th & 14th), we present three programs of key Brakhage works premiered between 1961-71. Friday, November 16 at 7:30pm The Machine of Eden; Pasht; The Horseman, The Woman, and the Moth; The Peaceable Kingdom; Fire Of Waters; Thigh Line Lyre Triangular; The Weir Falcon Saga; Scenes From Under Childhood Section #3 Saturday, November 17 at 7:30pm "A colossal lyrical adventure-dance of image in every variation
of color." (Michael McClure) Sunday, November 18, at 6:00pm A Brakhage Weekend Cinematheque rounds out its weekend-long look at Sixties work by Stan Brakhage with an extremely rare screening of the 4 1/2 hour meditation on the basic nature of cinema, his "expanded" version of Dog Star Man, The Art of Vision.
November 29 and 30, December 6 and 7 Since premiering his first films at Cinematheque in 1981, San Francisco film and video artist Scott Stark has produced one of the largest and most original bodies of work of an American media artist of his generation. Always addressing the properties and idiosyncrasies of whatever medium he is working with - including 8mm and 16mm film, video, still photography, projected image installations, and multiple image performances, Stark also plays with ideas intrinsic to narrative and documentation. (Steve Anker) Thursday, November 29 New Work: More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda; Angel Beach; SLOW; Suite for VCR's and Rescission (1980).
Friday, November 30 at 8:00 pm The Sound of His Face; Hotel Cartograph; Texturale; Chromesthetic Response; Probability; Splitting You Splitting Me Still; Corporate Accounting; Air; Acceleration; Generation 30; Imperfect Solutions; NOEMA; Degrees of Limitation; Archimedes' Screw.
Sunday, December 2 Peter Kubelka visited the Bay Area for the first time in August, 1966, and presented his complete films (all except the 1977 Pause!) at Canyon Cinema during the same month. Peter appeared with his films again at Cinematheque in 1970, becoming an influential visitor during Canyon's first decade. Tonight we will present his complete films: Mosaik im Vertrauen, Adebar, Schwechater, Arnulf Rainer, Unsere Afrikereise (twice), and Pause!
Thursday, December 6 Urban Archeology #1; Language; Low Resolution TV; 11/9/85/Las/Vegas/NV; Corners; Protective Coloration; Don't Even Think; Field Guide to Feeding Humans (Female); Crazy; Field Guide to Feeding Humans (Male); Episiotomy; Under a Blanket of Blue; in.side.out; Posers; Circus Animal. Friday, December 7 at 8:00 pm Tender Duplicity (16mm film, 1992)
Sunday, December 9 Even though the primary focus of Canyon and later Cinematheque screenings has always been on experimental or avant-garde work, all forms of cinema representing great figures of world cinema have been shown since the earliest programs. Tonight we present narrative works which were shown and celebrated during the mid Sixties: two moody portraits by Dimitri Kirsanov (Menil-montant): Autumn Mist (1928) and The End of Autumn (1952); and The Music Room (1952) by Satyajit Ray, an ironic elegy for the dying upper-class world of India's aristocracy.
Thursday, December 13 The films of Kerry Laitala evoke a glowing world in which spirits, memories and moldering artifacts swirl into feverish dreams recalling gothic conditions of poetry and decay. Seeming to hover on the borders between life and death, madness and sanity, these haunting alchemical films raise the dead from long slumbers to become luminous phantoms of flickering cinema. Just in from the Black Forest, Ms. Laitala will present Awake, But Dreaming; Retrospectroscope; Secure the Shadow (including its mysterious Prelude); The Adventure Parade; The Escapades of Madame X; and new films Conquered; Hallowed; and Black Bile. (Steve Polta)
Sunday, December 16 Loren Sears ran Canyon screenings in the late 60s and early 70s, and fondly recalls an evening of "loops running until they wore out in the projector" as one of the highlights of those years. As a tribute to this mysterious yet memorable program presented in April 1970, Cinematheque closes the year with an evening of filmic meditation. You are cordially invited to submit a single loop of 16mm (two foot minimum/indefinite maximum). All loops, sound or silent, silly or sublime, will live, alone, in the blackness for exactly five minutes. 0 to 30 fps projection rates available. Makers must be present; limit one per customer; loops will be run in the order received, beginning at 6:00pm. (Steve Polta) © 2001 San Francisco Cinematheque |
