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CALENDAR - SPRING 2002 [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).]
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Wednesday,
May 1 at 9:15 pm In this program, memories and recollections of times past flicker and dance, set in motion by fleeting images and soundtracks. Brett Simon’s Counterfeit Film reproduces some of cinema’s earliest images into a particularly modern flipbook. Ernie Gehr’s Cotton Candy brings to life penny arcade figures and early cinematic wonders. In Ericka Beckman’s Switch Center, an industrial site becomes the stage for a mechanical ballet. Sandra Davis’ CREPESCULE: Pond and Chair portrays a landscape of lingering memories and gentle reflections. Louise Bourque’s Going Back Home conveys a sense of loss and upheaval with just a few images. Jonas Mekas’ This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography documents summers on Long Island with the families of Jackie Kennedy. (Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz) Thursday,
May 2 at 7:30 pm Due to projection problems last February, we have rescheduled this program of our Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi series, co-presented with Pacific Film Archive. Using footage shot in the Alps between enemy countries Italy and Austria-Hungary during World War I, On The Heights All Is Peace hauntingly conveys the slow waiting, work and despair of war. Through the "wounded body of the nitrate material", the filmmakers give life to the ‘soldier-man’ on both sides of the invisible front. The Italian images were shot by Luca Comerio (From the Pole to the Equator), and the film is accompanied by a hypnotic original score, with lyrics based on soldiers’ letters and diaries. Preceded by Transparencies, a loving look at the damaged state of this very found footage material. (Irina Leimbacher) Thursday,
May 9 at 7:30 pm For the past thirty years English filmmaker Guy Sherwin has been exploring visual perception through a body of films that subtly focus on such subjects as natural landscapes, the visualization of verbal language and observations of animate and inanimate objects as fields for contemplation. Sherwin’s films are rigorously conceived and realized, while also being sensually and intellectually rewarding. For his first Cinematheque presentation in more than a decade Guy will show Messages, Filter Beds, Flight and selections from the in-progress series Animal Studies. (Steve Anker) Thursday,
May 16 at 7:30 pm Daniel Reeves has been a major force in sculpture, film, video, and installation since 1970. His videos focus on personal, political, and spiritual themes, from socially condoned violence to the divine nature of existence. Since 1982 Reeves has concentrated on developing a video poetics bent on exploring personal transformation and individual responsibility. For Reeves‚ experience and conviction shape not only his content, but relate directly to his commitment to revitalizing the sacred in art, making works of universal significance and profound understanding of the human condition. For his first Cinematheque program Daniel will show a range of videos made between 1981 and 2001: Obsessive Becoming, Smothering Dreams, Sabda, A Mosaic for the Kali Yuga and his latest, One With Everything. (Steve Anker)
Thursday,
May 23 at 7:30 pm Made in 1926 as a tribute to Soviet resources and to its people, One Sixth of the World contains footage shot by Vertov’s cameramen from the Arctic Circle to the Chinese border, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk. 1930’s Enthusiasm, Symphony of the Don Basin, "the most significant contribution to the Soviet sound film" according to Annette Michelson, is a gorgeous atonal celebration of Soviet coal mining, as the workers achieve their Five Year Plan quota in a mere four years. Charlie Chaplin said: "Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautifully. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard." Restored by Peter Kubelka! (Irina Leimbacher) Thursday, May 30 at 7:30 pm Colorado filmmaker James Otis is one of the country's most accomplished yet little-known personal/experimental filmmakers. Otis was an early pioneer of computer-generated animation, and his several films in that genre remain classics of the form. His pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic landscape studies bring the Western land to uniquely cinematic life. Of late Otis has been applying his precise passions to lenslessly teasing emulsion into phrasings of big questions. And all this with a sense of humor. Since Otis brings films to the Bay area only every 20 years or so, a wide-ranging selection is planned, including Family Dinners, Gridrose, Englewood Cottonwood, Upper Blue Lake and several others. "One of the best film artists I know." - Stan Brakhage Thursday, June 6 at 7:30 pm Canyon Cinema has been distributing 35mm films ever since a print of The Residents’ Hello Skinny was accidentally deposited in the early ‘80s. Since then, Canyon has accumulated dozens more, but the recent addition of Patrick Bokanowski’s rarely screened feature L’Ange (The Angel), made a 35mm program seem particularly opportune. In a rare U.S. screening, Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinemascope L’Arrivée will open the program, followed by Eli’s Moon, by S.F. filmmaker Michael Rosas-Walsh and New Yorker Donna Cameron’s unique paper-emulsion foray into 35mm, World Trade Alphabet. The shorts conclude with the Hello Skinny print that started it all. Bokanowski’s L’Ange, a surrealist/expressionist spectacle of trick photography, will finish off this evening of large-gauge revelry. (Mark Toscano) Thursday, June 13 at 7:30 pm Dana Plays will present a selection of films that she has made over the past fourteen years, including her recent award-winning Nuclear Family, which uses found footage to create a dark portrait of the violence and turbulences underlying seemingly ordinary family life. Dana will also present Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, a densely metaphorical portrait of her 90 year-old paternal grandmother reminiscing about her early bohemian life and love affairs; Zero Hour, an examination of the changing face of war documentation as evident through WWII US Navy war material and Shards. (Steve Anker)
Monday,
June 17 at 6:15 pm Thomas Allen Harris has explored his cultural heritage and personal history as an African-American gay man through numerous widely shown and celebrated films, videos and museum installations that he’s made during the past fifteen years. Thomas’ earlier Vintage is a complex essay portraying African-American family life as experienced by gay and lesbian siblings. His newest "mythobiography," é minha cara/that’s my face, was filmed on Super-8mm film in parts of the U.S., Brazil and Africa. In it he weaves together his own childhood memories as an American ex-patriot living in Africa with recent sounds and images drawn from these contemporary international black societies, combining them to create a highly personal, multi-layered and resonant vision of parallel cultures. (Steve Anker)
Thursday,
June 20 at 7:30 pm New York film and video maker Ken Jacobs last visited the Bay Area in 1999 when he presented several inspiring performance pieces from his ongoing Nervous System series. For tonight’s program he has sent CIRCLING ZERO: Our daughter Nisi and son Aza happened to both be staying at our loft on Chambers Street when fundamentalist Islam struck. A friend observing the burning buildings from Brooklyn phoned to say, "Get out. It can fall on you." But we were upstate until 9.15 when the city partially reopened to incoming traffic, so that my taping begins with our approach over the almost empty George Washington Bridge. It would be another 15 days before we were allowed to move back into our place. Our friend Lucia lent us her high-rise apartment, facing south with a dead-on view of smoking lower Manhattan. I kept taping, hours of street observations. Although I’ve given a title to this loose selection of materials it is not so much a work as sampling of the ongoing actuality. (KJ) Friday,
June 28 at 7:15 pm For our final program of the season Cinematheque will present an evening of short films and videos celebrating Berkeley’s bastion of independent film exhibition, the Fine Arts Cinema. Although the Fine Arts is one of the Bay Area’s oldest functioning movie theaters, their current form of imaginative programming — creatively pairing and juxtaposing narrative, documentaries and experimental films in ways that brings new insights into each work screened — is a result of the programming team that has been in control for only the past five years. Sadly to say, the team will soon be giving up control of the theater and retire, at least for the moment, their unmistakable curatorial imprint. Tonight’s selection will be chosen equally by our two staffs; phone our office one week prior for titles and makers to be shown. (Steve Anker) |
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