presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
anticipated artists in person: Dianna Barrie, Brittany Gravely and Richard Tuohy
pictured above: Marking Time (2016) by Robert Todd
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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.
It’s something pretending to be something else. It starts one brick at a time. The films in this program collide the abstract with the concrete and the mighty concrete crumbles. Astrology meets machinery. Alchemy meets astronomy and space noises bloom. Lines are drawn, erased, blurred, and drawn again.
SCREENING:
Astrology (2018) by Brittany Gravely (USA); 16mm, b&w, silent, 4 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
An ancient artifact, an alchemical algorithm, astrological archaeology. (Brittany Gravely)
Inside the Machine (2016) by Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy (Australia); projection performance, b&w, sound, 12 minutes, from the makers bay area premiere
Lines change size and frequency as the camera zooms closer and further away. From these lines, the machine generates sound. This sound is the voice of the machine. Tones rise and fall like an alarm. There is urgency in its voice. Into the field of lines emerge the hands of the operators. The fingers of these hands make new patterns of lines. The hand shadows are increasingly filled-in by the cross-hatch of lines. The hands become disembodied and embedded within the lines. Humans and machines merge. This is how cinema works. (Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy)
Decoy (2017) by Alee Peoples (USA); 16mm, color, sound 11 minutes, print from the maker
Decoy sees bridges and walls as binary opposites and relates them to impostors in this world. Humans strive for accuracy. You don’t always get what you wish for. (Alee Peoples)
Marking Time (2016) by Robert Todd (USA); digital video, b&w, sound, 8 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
Figures grounded, seeking sunlight, and at sea, following varied directions. (Robert Todd)
Absteigend (2012) by Paul Clipson (USA.); Super-8mm, b&w, sound, 6 minutes
Music by Evan Caminiti.
At The Horizon (2018) by Manuel Knapp (Austria) & Makino Takashi (Japan); digital video, b&w, sound, 30 minutes, exhibition file from sixpackfilm U.S. Premiere
This entirely abstract video consists of two commensurate, superimposed visual layers on a black surface. The background appears like a snowstorm at night. The layer on top of this suddenly builds itself up out of a straight white horizontal line. This line expands, growing into a three dimensional, filigree grid. The square segments of the grid rise up at the corners to become irregular mountain formations, until they dissolve into a storm of lines. After the background alternates from black to red and back again for a few moments, a rotating dice marked with a grid appears at the center of the image. Again, the corners of the object begin to rise up irregularly in all directions, until reaching beyond the edge of the frame while assuming a continually changing chaotic pattern of lines. The layer of white noise likewise changes; the pixels enlarge and change color, first to red, then to green. Associations of fire and water come to mind. An even, filigree grid layers the image and fills the entire screen, mounting up anew. While the electronic soundtrack previously had condensed itself in dramatic synchronicity with the visual track, it subsequently becomes increasingly harmonious and almost melodic. At the end of the clip the imagistic background noise dissolves entirely into graphic lines that pull back together into a single horizontal line, inverse to the beginning of the film. Although it is clear which visual layer in this collaboration can be attributed to Takashi Makino and which to Manuel Knapp, the interplay of elements creates a hermetic overall impression. Both artists participated equally in the creation of picture as well as sound. Together they have produced an audiovisual composition as dramatic as it is hypnotic, perfectly complementing one another without departing from their own personal styles. (Norbert Pfaffenbichler)
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.