In Person: Malic Amalya, Gina Basso, Stephen Broomer,  Nathan Hill, Nishat Hossain and Karly Stark

presented in association with Canyon Cinema Foundation, Center for New Music, Oddball Film + Video and Shapeshifters Cinema
sponsored by LUNA, MUBI, Ninkasi Brewing and Vimeo
technical sponsor San Francisco Film Society

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Admission: [$10 general/$5 Cinematheque members]. Advance tickets available here.
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Films of bodies on screen and in collision, solid and mutable identities. Delirium, danger, risk and intimacy. Boundaries rise and fall. Love letters and horror stories. Can you read my mind? (Steve Polta)

SCREENING:
Body Contours (2015) by Kristin Reeves; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Make movies in your mind, feel the soundtrack, and drift away from your body for the win. Produced through a media-art residency at Signal Culture using real-time analog video processing tools. (Kristin Reeves)

Soliloquy (2015) by Gina Basso; digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes, from the maker
Lo-fi found-footage collage traverses spaces between the abstract and the surreal, alienation and intimacy. Love’s thoughts are unknowable and infinite. (Gina Basso)

the problem is that everything is fleeting (2015) by Karly Stark; digital video, b&w, silent, 1 minute, from the maker  world premiere
A poetry film on anxiety, love, and the cosmos. (Karly Stark)

between us by Coral Short; digital video, color, sound, 4 minutes, from the maker U.S. Premiere
Queering the triptych, the three playful scenes shot on an iphone provide brief glimpses at wild joy. Trained dancers Sasha Kleinplatz, Hana van der Kolk and C.T. Thorne collaborate with videographer Coral Short to create a new visual language. These creatures of movement perform dreamy interactions in bed amongst a sea of textiles—silk, mesh and sequins. Flirtatious giggles and cackles emerge from the comfortable and continuous movement. Commissioned by IN YOUR POCKET, Inside Out, Toronto. (Coral Short)

Magnetic Resonance (2015) by Malic Amalya & Nathan Hill; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, from the makers  world premiere
Video #12 in Detours & Fences, an on-going diary series that uses methods of collection and scavengry.
In psychoanalytic theory, a dream of a fallen tooth represents fears of castration. In Magnetic Resonance, a cicada falls to its death and New Wave musician Marc Almond falls to the feet of Clint Ruin; a tooth stands in for a brain tumor and the naked legs of filmmakers Malic Amalya and Nathan Hill on a sheet-less mattress stand in for Almond and Ruin's performance on stage. "Castrated" bodies become conduits of attraction. (Malic Amalya & Nathan Hill)

Hold On (2016) by Bettina Hoffman; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Four people are gathering in a vast room. Suddenly one gets weak and is about to collapse. The others try to keep her upright, though two of them cannot use their hands and arms, whereas the third one can only use her/his hands and nothing else. Their movements result in a chaotic and intimate, sometimes violent, at other times sensual struggle, like a dance of caring and indifference.
All four move like one organism, an entity, which experiences a sick member or limb, trying to regain functionality. The imposed restrictions of not using hands or body create a very fragile situation in which one’s movement that is not in line with the others can lead to falling and failure. Once a person falls it is impossible to bring her up. Their clothing suggests an office or corporate environment in which their extremely busy but disengaged actions of helping are an obligation rather than a selfless, human reaction. (Bettina Hoffman)

Her Silent Seeming (2014) by Nazli Dinçel; 16mm, color, sound, 11 minutes, from the maker
A transcription of what I have been told during intimate experiences while separating from my husband. Sections consist of destroyed originals from Leafless (Dinçel, 2011), motifs of the "feminine" alluding to Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and of reconstruction of a pomegranate. These decorative objects are re-valued through a controlled act of cutting, with an allusion to synchronization. Obscured images clear out while the hand-scratched text becomes harder to read with each section. Direct sound of cuts and hand-processing are composed of 26 frame shots. Un-synced, it reveals a hearing of past images, as an act of translation. (Nazli Dinçel)

Landform 1 (2015) by Stephen Broomer; 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Studies in motion, made red, black and blue by tone and tint. To be present in a landscape is to turn from vision to a menacing rhythm. (Stephen Broomer)

Jenny & John (2014) by Heather Trawick; 16mm, b&w, silent, 3 minutes, from the maker
Jenny & John is a film about text & art & gender & politics. It's made by Heather Trawick, but it's also made by Jenny Holzer & John Baldessari. (Heather Trawick)

Vito Acconci’s Pryings (1971/2014) (2014) by Nishat Hossain; digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
When I first viewed Vito Acconci’s Pryings (1971) I felt inclined to contextualize Acconci's and Kathy Dillon's actions in the performance within the themes of male masochism and domination and interpret their actions symbolically. But, their actions were so oblique it felt limiting to do this. I therefore worked with several collaborators to explore the space of performance, the discomfort of the audience, the constraints of the camera and Kathy Dillon's experience in the original performance. In doing this I came to discover the themes of collaboration, control, assertion vs. passivity, intimacy and objectification in the work. Through the non-narrative structure, interactions with the constantly shifting camera and the video compression that causes the screen to materialize, I try to transcend simply re-enacting the original performance. Making this film was research into Acconci’s work, but also a way to extend his work, alter it, author it, not as the one grappling, but as the one being grappled. (Nishat Hossain)

Something Horizontal (2015) by Blake Williams; digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Flashes of Victorian domestic surfaces and geometric shadows transform the physical world into a somber, impressionistic abstraction, while elsewhere a spectre emerging from the depths of German Expressionism reminds us that what goes up always comes down. (Blake Williams)

Love Me (2014) by Barbara Sternberg; digital video, color, silent, 5 minutes, from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre  bay area premiere
Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating: emotions conflict, confuse and are difficult to reconcile. The texts “speak” unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. They are suppressed exclamations from past injustices and hurts; angers surface which are interrupting, erupting and demanding of attention. (Barbara Sternberg)

Yi-Ren (The Person Of Whom I Think) / 伊人 (2015) by Tzuan Wu; digital video, color, sound, 14 minutes, from the maker  bay area premiere
Yi-Ren (which can be vaguely translated to “the person of whom I think”) is a collaged love letter made of various sources. Such as my Super-8mm diaries, karaoke videos, found-footage from Kang-Chien Chiu (1940-2013)’s films and poems. It is also an act of homage and a queer reading of Chiu. Reassemble, manipulate the materials and melt the ready-made and the personal into one. Or, maybe the personal emotions and experiences are actually all borrowed from someone and somewhere… As the line “my moans have a bit of Hollywood in them” suggests, our emotions would not exist without acting, or movies we have seen.
This double channel employed the duality of the forms, the images and the media. They are played in counterpoints, and presented as a metaphor of the mechanism of our emotions. Like the generation loss came from transfer between digital and analogue film. The materials were handled as the ready-made effects. The flowers bloom and wither, the hands caress or grab the air, people pass through and the faces vanishes… Through reproducing and manipulating the lines and images, it generates a floating narrative, a murmur between the subject of loss and the object of desire. (Tzuan Wu)

Above still taken from Body Contours by Kristin Reeves

CROSSROADS 2016 receives generous support from: Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation and The Willow Foundation.