SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Sunday, May 6, 2007

To The Beat!

Scanning the Pages of Pop

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Ripped from the funny pages of collective pop memory, these films pay unabashed, if troubled, homage to cartoon icons and “low” media forms (many quickly receding into the distant past). Fusing images from 77 Sunset Strip comics to music by Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and a pantheon of 60’s folk rock, Lewis Klahr’s The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy sequentially essentializes a heist gone horribly wrong. Ken Jacobs’ Krypton is Doomed, derived from his work on the Nervous Magic Lantern, imagines the Superman fable as metaphor for WWII Europe. Kenneth Anger’s Mouse Heaven, shamelessly fetishizes Disney’s Mickey through classic Angeresque montage while Fred Worden’s Everyday Bad Dream presents a vertiginous encounter with an equally ubiquitous icon. shalo p’s Adam is an equally ambivalent music video mashup, while To The Beat by Thad Povey and the Scratch Film Junkies joyously overindulges in vibrating, rhythmic, light, color and sound. (Steve Polta)

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