presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Community Partner: Shapeshifters Cinema

anticipated artists in person: Jeanne Liotta, Arte Matu, Lydia Moyer and T2R/Laura Gillmore
pictured above: Path of Totality (2017) by Jeanne Liotta

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ADMISSION DETAILS
Single Screening Admission: $12 general/$10 Cinematheque and SFMOMA members with member code. Single Screening advance tickets available here.
CROSSROADS festival day pass (Saturday & Sunday only): $25
CROSSROADS festival day pass provides admission to all daily CROSSROADS screenings and general admission access to SFMOMA galleries (including Pat O’Neill: Three Answers).
Saturday, June 8 CROSSROADS festival day pass available here.
NOTE: Admission to the special exhibition Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again is not included with the festival day pass but can be purchased here.

Jeanne Liotta’s tour de force projection performance Path of Totality spins the most ecstatic of the cinematic from flickering loops and household objects to create a luminous show and tell that transmutates base matter to pure energy. Path of Totality anchors a program of discovered sights, found sounds, and meditations on the fragility of life and the inner lives of the inanimate. Reports from the world reinforce the urgency of our actions: forced, folded, and coaxed to motion.

SCREENING:

Night Eyes (2019) by Arte Matu ( US); digital video, color, silent, 4 minutes, exhibition file from the maker
          A light poem. (Arte Matu)

The Forcing (epilogue) (2018) by Lydia Moyer (US); digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
          An attempt to contend with the atrocities surrounding immigration in the U.S. from a far away and unconnected place. (Lydia Moyer)

Fluorescent Girl (2018) by Janie Geiser (US); digital video, color, sound, 2 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
          A meditation on the photograph Tailor’s Apprentice (1953) by Paul Strand. Fluorescent light reflects on a girl's image, found in a book of photographs in a bookstore. She merges with other images of shadow and light, highlighting her ephemerality and ours. (Janie Geiser)

Valeria Street (2018) by Janie Geiser (US); digital video, color, sound, 12 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
          Music composed by Laura Steenburge.
          In Valeria Street the American industry, its efficiency and promise, encapsulated as the ‘American way of life, emerges as a mirage. The melancholy of such a transformation, the visual degradation or alternation of the image, its shadowing, or haunting, is heightened by the repetition of the father figure—the face, the amplified male hands, a displacement and disfiguration of the sturdy, authorial body. The partly mournful configuration is offset by the sheer playfulness and multiplicity of the compositions.” (Ela Bittencourt, Lyssaria)

Preemptive Listening (part 1: The Fork in the Road) (2018) by Aura Satz (UK); digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
          The Fork in the Road serves as part one of a larger research project on sonic obedience and disobedience through the trope of the siren. It posits the siren's loud glissando wail as a conditioned and learned signal, one that can potentially be perceptually and musically rewired. For this first chapter of the project, Lebanese trumpet improviser Mazen Kerbaj has composed a new siren sound using circular breathing, alongside the actor and activist Khalid Abdalla's account of the siren as the emblematic sound of resistance, oppression and lost futures during the Arab Spring. Shot on 16mm, the film is literally driven by its soundtrack, as the voice becomes a beacon, activating emergency rotating lights. (Aura Satz)

How to Fold a Napkin (2018) by T2R/Laura Gillmore (US); digital video, color, silent, 1 minutes, exhibition file from the maker
          The core of T2R’s work references social media, influencers, content marketing, and co-branding. She directs most of her research towards apps like Instagram and Youtube which feature lifestyle branding, “sponcon,” memes, skincare routines, etc. How to Fold a Napkin is a meditation of this absurd of content and how our identity dissociates in order to engage with it. Our attention and loneliness has been commodified into an economy of “bottomless” scrolling. (T2R/Laura Gillmore)

Path of Totality (2017), by Jeanne Liotta (US); projector performance, color, sound, 30 minutes, from the maker bay area premiere
          A live projection performance for handmade 16mm film loops and objects, precipitated by the solar eclipse event of August 21, 2017. With recorded sound by the band of poets: Eric Baus, Phil Cordelli, and Oren Silverman. (Jeanne Liotta)
          ...The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over... (Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse, first published 1982 in Teaching a Stone to Talk)

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CROSSROADS 10 is generously supported by the George Lucas Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, the Willow Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Cinematheque’s Members and Donors.