SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Thursday, April 17, 2003

PsychogeographiC CinemaP

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





We recognize strong effects of the urban landscape on our psyche, but who catalogues these effects in detail? To find out, we’ve borrowed from three practices: 1) the surrealists’ cinema-crawl (skipping from movie to movie with minimal breaks for reality to set in); 2) the flâneur’s open city strolling (characterized in literature from Baudelaire to Benjamin); and 3) the Situationists’ dérive (Debord’s “rapid passage through varied ambiances”). Tonight’s show features the U.S. premiere of Scott Stark’s Mutable Commute along with local filmmaker Jenni Olson’s haunted Blue Diary. We will also traverse Chicago’s Halsted Street from tenements to lakeshore in 1934, climb the Brooklyn Bridge in Zack Winestine’s On Some Consequences of a Passage by Guy Debord, and take Michael Gitlin’s Nine Guided Tours on an investigation of the commercialized underground. (Konrad Steiner)