SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Sunday, November 30, 2008

Dark House

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Tonight’s program offers shifting perspectives on the privacy of domestic space and its relation to the transience and decay of modern urban architecture. In these works, discreet moments from the past, capturing the city’s excitement and vitality, are momentarily recovered and irrevocably lost. Memories of intimate, everyday routines are rendered in solitude while the flickering facades of buildings reverberate in a dust-enshrouded and dilapidated present. In Ben Rivers’ House, crumbling interiors, peeling walls and shattered windows are reoccupied by the history of horror cinema. Robert Todd’s Office Suite captures the ambience and daily rhythms of the filmmakers’ workspace. Arianne Olthaar’s Binnenverblijven (Zoo Enclosures) is a disturbing meditation on the primate “bathroom architecture” once popular in European zoos, while Michaela Grill and Martin Siewert’s Cityscapes, a lush fragmentation and optical dissection of archival imagery from the Austrian Film Museum, captures the ephemeral, fleeting nature of a city’s swiftly passing architecture. Additional films on the disintegration of urban space to be announced. (Jessica Allee and Wago Krieder)

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