Labor of Love (2020) by Sylvia Schedelbauer
CROSSROADS at the ROXIE
need falls away
Sunday, October 17 at 1:30pm
CROSSROADS at the Roxie 2: need falls away
facebook event here
Admission: Tickets on sale HERE! Discounts for Cinematheque Members!
Please read the Roxie’s Health and Safety Protocols & Precautions (relevant to COVID-19) and note special admission requirements before purchasing tickets.
CROSSROADS at the Roxie 2: need falls away
In its first (non-online) public screenings since February 27, 2020, Cinematheque is overjoyed to be partnering with San Francisco’s Roxie Theater on the occasion of CROSSROADS 2021 for two programs of remixes of our online presentations, featuring 16mm and 35mm projection, artists in person (to be announced) and more!
With emphases, variously, on filmic materiality and the poetics of the body, the works on this program blend CROSSROADS 2021’s themes of transition, spirituality, interiority and isolation with tentative attempts at communication across great expanses, across generations and across metaphysical divides. Orisons and apotropaic conversations mingle amongst letters to friends and family lost.
SCREENING: untitled (teeming) (2021) by Gina Basso; digital video, color, sound, 4 minutes. The Mouth is Still a Wild Door (2020) by Guta Galli & Anne Lesley Selcer; digital video, color, sound, 4 minutes. Rehearsal (2020) by Talena Sanders; digital video, color, silent, 3 minutes. absolving the valve (2021) by Alix Blevins; digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes. Zero Length Spring (2021) by Ross Meckfessel; 16mm, b&w, sound, 16 minutes. Blue Distance (2021) by Devin Jie Allen; digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes. Not (a) part (2019) by Vicky Smith; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes. Oceano Mare (2020) by Antoinette Zwirchmayr; 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes. Labor of Love (2020) by Sylvia Schedelbauer; digital video, color, sound, 12 minutes.
TRT: 69 minutes
untitled (teeming) (2021) by Gina Basso
Undulating surfaces, shifting horizons and perspectives merge with layered landscapes shimmering in hyper-saturated color and textured brilliance. Within the liminal space of sea and land, a shapeshifting woman—the mythic Selkie—breaks through the watery surface to search for her lost love. This project is a collaboration with ambient duo Animated Matter for their song teeming. Handmade animated sequences and still photography combine with found footage to create a kaleidoscopic, vivid and vibrant video that finds inspiration in early silent film color techniques, microscopic studies and psychedelic abstraction. (Gina Basso)
The Mouth is Still a Wild Door (2020) by Guta Galli & Anne Lesley Selcer
Now they preceded the country of their future which contained as yet only the arrow of their mouth whose song had just been born. (René Char) I will recite all the names of the apples in a chain, enchain them, enchant them, bind them, bound them, chant them. The “feral house” of the poem is not a metaphor, it is the term for an abandoned house overtaken by foliage, a domicile lurking, covered, protected, masked, hidden, returned, and wild in a world that was not working. We will not be going back. The unmaking of the future has accelerated. Our entanglement is clearer than ever. Urgent memories of a world before our time, before our time keepers, appear with astonishing presence. They overtake what we thought was the future. It has no name yet, and is growing. (Guta/Selcer)
Rehearsal (2020) by Talena Sanders
Intimate moments of preparation for performances—for audiences and the everyday. (Talena Sanders)
absolving the valve (2021) by Alix Blevins
A tactile, trance-induced exploration of the filmmaker’s innate yet mediated relationship to her anonymous biological father. (Alix Blevins)
Zero Length Spring (2021) by Ross Meckfessel
A walk through corridors and rooms culminates in a familial Reiki session—searching for what’s underneath and within. Zero Length Spring is an apotropaic film, imprinted by rituals and symbols, basking in ruptures of the body and the earth. ASMR brush tracks, the language of self-help therapy, film surface abrasions and alleged paranormal photos, combine to give shape to various unseeable forces. You’re worth it, you deserve love, you can grow. (Ross Meckfessel)
Blue Distance (2021) by Devin Jie Allen
Occupying gaps in memory and history, Blue Distance serves as a personal and poetic intervention into the filmmaker’s familial immigration story. The film places in communion the mythic powers of cinema and the production of personal and cultural histories. Underpinning these tensions is the immigratory reality of occupying stolen land while trying to secure one’s own actualization. (Devin Jie Allen)
Not (a) part (2019) by Vicky Smith
Not (a) part responds to both the rapid decline of flying insects and the high recurrence of works that employ either, or all, of the methods of animation, handmade or contact film, and with the subject and/or material of flying insects. Using the photogram method, found dead bees were contact printed by positioning their parts directly onto negative film: occupying approximately 24 frames they run at a rate of 1 bee per second. (Vicky Smith)
Oceano Mare (2020) by Antoinette Zwirchmayr
Seemingly stranded and enthralled like a somnambulist: a female figure amid a rocky, dried up riverbed. Motionless, exposed and yet turned inward. Now entwined in the branches of the sparse vegetation, now lying on the delicate fissures of the parched ground, from these convergences and from the interplay of images arises a sort of approximation, or analogy. The view of the details, of the particularities and textures of things, widens into the distance; standpoint and perspective shift, whereby the water, the river—and likewise the face of this woman, even with eyes closed—are revealed in succession. (Naoko Kaltschmidt; translation: Geoff Howes) Read the full statement here.
Labor of Love (2020) by Sylvia Schedelbauer
…I resolved to try and visualize a feeling of nowness that unfolds when one is in love. That feeling where the past and futures seem to fall away, when all that matters is every moment that evolves into another, and when that expanded grounding in the present tense seemingly lasts without effort. I didn’t want to narrow things down to one specific experience, or literal story; and I wanted to go beyond one singular notion, or definition. But how can you visualize affective structures that open up in what feel like cascading intervals, like traveling through infinite portals within portals, each opening up new and unexpected spaces? Processes that induce inspiring conversations––creative, intellectual and emotional? Processes that invite possibilities––and allow for change, generosity and growth? (Sylvia Schedelbauer) This film is dedicated to the memory of Paul Clipson. Full artists’ statement here.
Gina Basso (US) works primarily in video, collage and painting. Her video work has been presented at HÄXÄN Film Festival, CROSSROADS Festival, Artists’ Television Access, the Roxie Theater, Antimatter Experimental Film Festival and online via publicrecords.nyc. As an independent film programmer, she has curated programs for the Roxie Theater (SF), Alamo Drafthouse (SF), Design Within Reach (SF), Hunters Point Shipyard (SF) and the Northwest Film Forum (Seattle).
Gutta Galli (Brazil) is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, video, installation and photography. She holds a postgraduate degree in Photography (FAAP, São Paulo) and an MFA (San Francisco Art Institute). Her feminist researches study the intersections between womanhood, power, race, sexuality and violence. Galli’s last researches use her personal experience as an expatriate artist to make a critical commentary on immigration politics on Trump’s era. In her current work she investigates how neoliberalism and its radical freedom has impacted labor and the contemporary body.
Anne Lesley Selcer (US) is a writer and artist. Her book Sun Cycle, winner of the CSU Poetry Center Book Prize, investigates image, vision, power and gender and is named for the star that makes vision possible. She is also author of Blank Sign Book, a collection of essays about art and politics. She has been commissioned by Artspeak and 2nd Floor Projects for limited edition text pieces, and often writes for art spaces, most recently ON FIGURE/S: Drawing after Bellmer for The Drawing Room, London. Her writing can be found in Prelude, Jacket2, Hyperallergic, Open Space, Art Practical and Fence and has been included in several anthologies. Her language-based video, sound and text pieces have exhibited, screened or been performed at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, ProArts, Southern Exposure, Krowswork, Visible Verse, Experiments in Cinema and Artists’ Television Access (among others) and are forthcoming at film festivals in Moscow and Brazil.
Talena Sanders (US): I am an artist and filmmaker who creates experimental documentary films that reflect the wild complexity and strange poetry of lived experience. Expanding and challenging mainstream documentary conventions is at the center of my work. I like gaps and mystery and opening up more questions than giving easy answers. Sometimes my work is about my own experiences, sometimes it’s about artists and people I admire—trailblazing women and queer people. My work is collage-like, weaving together materials from many different sources and angles. I record on 16mm most often, in part for the way that material destabilizes a viewer’s sense of time, blurring the line between found footage and what is contemporary. I am proud to be a film educator, serving as Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sonoma State University.
Alix Blevins (US) is an artist, filmmaker and curator currently based in Los Angeles, pursuing an MFA at California Institute of the Arts.
Ross Meckfessel (US) is an artist and filmmaker who works primarily in Super-8mm and 16mm film. His films often emphasize materiality and poetic structures while depicting the condition of modern life through an exploration of apocalyptic obsession, contemporary ennui and the technological landscape. His work has screened internationally and throughout the United States including in Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS Film Festival, Internationales Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Curtas Vila Do Conde among others.
Devin Jie Allen (US) is a filmmaker based in San Francisco, California. His films situate themselves within personal and cultural histories.
Vicky Smith’s (UK) work in experimental animation explores the vulnerable and vital body. Her work has screened internationally in galleries and festivals including, in 2021: A Picture of Health at Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Raw Vision in Splash, Scratch, Dunk! Films Made by Hand at London Barbican; and Bodies and Boundaries, Cinenova UK. She runs workshops in experimental film practice and has curated many film screenings, including recently Go, Go, Go! Women in Experimental Animation (2019). Publications include: Hand Drawn and Non-Natural Colour in Films by Barbara Hammer and Sandra Lahire in Animation Studies Online (2021); Experimental & Expanded Animation: Current Perspectives and Practices, co-edited with Nicky Hamlyn (2018), and in Animation Practice, Production & Process, Issue 7 (2019).
Antoinette Zwirchmayr (Austria). Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her works have been featured in festivals including Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Indielisboa, Media City Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and FID Marseille. She has been awarded with the Outstanding Artist Award (BKA 2020), a six month residency in New York (ISCP), the Start-Up Grant for Young Film Artists (Austria 2017), the annual grant for photography (Land Salzburg 2017) Simon S. Filmaward (2016), Kodak Cinematic Vision Award (Ann Arbor Film Festival 2016), among other awards.
Sylvia Schedelbauer’s (Germany) films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage.