SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Saturday, June 9, 2018, 1:45 pm

CROSSROADS program 4

lines are drawn

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

151 Third Street (between Mission & Howard Streets)

San Francisco, CA 94103





presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
in association with the Canyon Cinema Foundation


anticipated artists in person: sair goetz, Nico La Shae, Talena Sanders, Kelly Sears and Alexander Stewart
pictured above: me and my army (2017) by sair goetz


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ADMISSION DETAILS
Single Screening Admission: $12 general/$10 Cinematheque and SFMOMA members with member code. Single Screening advance tickets available here.
CROSSROADS festival day pass (Saturday & Sunday only): $25
CROSSROADS festival day pass provides admission to all daily CROSSROADS screenings and general admission access to SFMOMA galleries (including CROSSROADS screenings in SFMOMA’s Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box Gallery). Saturday, June 9 CROSSROADS festival day pass available here.
NOTE: Admission to the special exhibition René Magritte: The Fifth Season is not included with the festival day pass but can be purchased here.


Films of wander, drift and encounter with the world give way to abstracted spaces and fragmentary envisionings of bodies. Self-portraiture gives way to other-portraiture, cinematic revisioning and enactment of feminist art actions. Experiences forgotten by the mind are carried by the body. Aches may linger. Is it uncommon to relive events in which your body played no part?


SCREENING:


Union (2010) by Paul Clipson (USA); 16mm, b&w, sound, 14 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema


Taylor Creek (2017) by Dan Browne (Canada); digital video, color, silent, 3 minutes, exhibition file from the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre world premiere
Notes towards a compost-based vision. (Dan Browne)


Reasonable Watchfulness (2018) by Talena Sanders (USA); 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes, print from the maker world premiere
Transitions while longing for other places and people, like a fox on the run. (Talena Sanders)


Applied Pressure (2018) by Kelly Sears (USA); digital video, color, sound 6 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
Ease the pain from past physical and mental experiences. The body remembers. Aches may linger. Lay prone, breathe deeply, release tension, let go of the pain. (Kelly Sears)


Venus Delta (2016) by Antoinette Zwirchmayr (Austria); 16mm, color, silent, 4 minutes, print from Light Cone
In Venus Delta a sequence of dreamlike scenes unfolds quietly. Set in an otherworldly layered landscape of rock formations by a pristine mountain spring, an atmosphere of eerie femininity pervades the images. Round, golden objects of unknown origin lie scattered about mysteriously. Somehow they seem connected to or springing from a nearly motionless young woman whose face is hidden behind a voluptuous, almost menacingly grand, mass of hair. Seen only in fragments and shot from odd angles, the body remains anonymous at all times. A surreal quality infests these visually sumptuous quasi-still lifes, accentuating barely noticeable tensions between human form and nature, body and object, between male and female forces in minute details. When a slightly moving bulk of shiny dark hair fills the screen it almost appears to conceal the entrance to a dark vaginal chamber of secrets. Watching the curious golden balls float out of sight down the slow-moving stream channels feelings of loss and longing as well as more positive notions of departure, promise and adventure. (Julia Dossi)


Untitled (2012) by Antoinette Zwirchmayr (Austria); 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes, print from Light Cone
Lit like the central figure on a stage the body, seen here as a quiet monument, fills out the frame. There’s a mud- and flesh colored silhouette, rounded, dreamlike and eventually resembling a softly shaped mountain range in a 1970s illustration. Small puffy clouds of steam hover across it. Through the fine mist of humidity exuding from beyond one corner of the frame, a porous landscape of skin draped in ample rings of flesh, can be made out. Before the shot changes to show a new perspective of the body, it becomes clear that it belongs to a female figure, revealed in large fragments shot by shot, creating the impression of a living and breathing Venus of Willendorf, a kind of dormant volcano. With a solemn vehemence, the image links fragility and monstrosity, associating the feminine with the uncanny. What we see is lyrically bound to the presence of the organic film material. Yellow and red streaks of light flickering across some of the images indicate the partial exposure to light during and typically towards the end of a roll of film[…]. In these instants, a reference to the life and death of analog film seems suggested. Together with the voluminous yet fragile feminine body, that in the beginning remains unidentified (we don’t see the figure’s head in the first part of the film), the film material speaks of its physical presence. The last shot shows a sitting female with her eyes closed and her head leaning against a glass wall. And while the steam is puffing and the sun gildens with mounting intensity the protagonist’s back with its light, the film body flickers one last time before it expires. Soundless and without commentary, the filmmaker presents us with this still-life like scenery, a contemplation of two bodies determining each other, […] an homage to hand made film. (Light Cone)


Rote Linie (Red Line) (2015/2016) by Rosa John (Austria); digital video, color, silent, 3 minutes, exhibition file from the maker U.S. premiere
Self-portrait with camera and red pencil. (Rosa John)


Model of a Hand (2018) by Rosa John (Austria); digital video, color, silent, 6 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
The film is a meditation on the photographic image as a result of touch: an interplay of sun, space, camera, aperture, film stock, the object of a hand and manual movement. (Rosa John)


Void Vision (2018) by Alexander Stewart (USA); 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes, print from the maker U.S. premiere
Void Vision  is an abstract science-fiction short in which the real and the simulated are equally constructions; a space where doubles, twins, duplicates, re-creations and copies blend into one another. Void Vision combines a science-fiction sensibility with the aesthetic of early CG animation experiments. Rotating arrangements of lasers and duplicated women fade in and out on-screen, appearing as both photographed scenes and CG-modeled recreations. The audio track, incorporating text from Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (1981), features an improvised electronic score and a voice espousing theories about the mind and the universe. Void Vision presents a consideration and re-consideration of a reality; a cold fever-dream of paranoia and reification. (Alexander Stewart)


I AM NOT HERE FOR YOU (2017) by Nico La Shae (USA); digital video, color, sound 5 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
A woman claims her body as her own.


me and my army (2017) by sair goetz (USA); digital video, color, sound 9 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
1. See A Clockwork Orange at the age of twelve.
2. Try to forget the scenes of sexual assault.
3. Fail.
Adrienne Corri was an actress most well known for her role as Mrs. Alexander in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). In the 2-minute scene of sexual assault, her clothes are cut off to the tune of “Singin in the Rain.” She spent the rest of the scene, and most of the four-day shoot, in nothing but red socks. She spent the four-day shoot making fun of Stanley Kubrick and making sure she got paid. She gave Stanley Kubrick red socks for Christmas. me and my army re-imagines those bodily experiences and filmic images through one feminist’s canon.
4. Come across many men who admire it for its art.
5. Become Mrs. Alexander.
The scene was constructed so that the viewer would identify with her husband.
The movie was constructed so that the viewer would identify with her perpetrator.
Her gender was constructed so that a female-bodied viewer would identify in her body.
The credit sequence was constructed so that the viewer would be left with “Singin in the Rain” in her mind.
When encountering A Clockwork Orange I became Mrs. Alexander.
When encountering A Clockwork Orange she/I became my wife.
When encountering A Clockwork Orange she/I became my victim.
Is it uncommon to relive events in which your body played no part?
5. Become Adrienne Corri.
6. Give them back twice as good as they gave.


CROSSROADS 2018 is generously supported by: the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, the Willow Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Cinematheque’s Members and Donors.