presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
anticipated artists in person: Simon Liu, Warren Ng and Sheri Wills
pictured above: High View (2017) by Simon Liu
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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.
Shutter-induced visions confound, overreach and dissipate. Films as overflowing boxes of coagulated speed, color and contrast. Confusion in slow motion; eclipses and occlusions. The mechanisms of memory evoke the future. Time moves in all directions (and sometimes not at all). Live quad-projection (in 16mm) by Simon Liu + live sound by Warren Ng ring in our CROSSROADS Saturday night.
SCREENING:
Note to Tetsua (2018) by Saul Levine (USA); 16mm, b&w, silent, 1 minute, print from the maker bay area premiere
Moon flight
loud silence
soft dark
hard light
a Ray o gram
made with a camera
out of sight
—Saul Levine
Saint Bathans Repetitions (2016) by Alexandre Larose (Quebec); 35mm, color, sound, 20 minutes, print from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre bay area premiere
Shot in a saloon and horse stables in the former gold mining town of St. Bathans, New Zealand, the film drifts between representation and graphic abstraction as these cinematic portraits, which are layered in-camera, multiply the solitary figure through temporal diffraction. (Images Festival, Toronto)
Abound Box (2015) by Sheri Wills (USA); digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
Shot on Super-8mm and combined with photograms, this abstract piece explores the film frame as a box for things that live within the margins of experience. Small moments, soon to be placed in a crowded shelf, impossible to find again. The sound is adapted from recordings from the University of California, Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive. (Sheri Wills)
Confusion Is Next (2018) by Pathompon Mont Tesprateep (Thailand); digital video, b&w, sound, 22 minutes, exhibition file from the maker U.S. premiere
A portrait of a nomadic musician Thom Assajan-Jakgawan. In the film, he appears as a fictionalized version of himself living in a fragile state, a collapsed country. He solitarily confines himself in an unoccupied room, continuing the meditative rhythms of his tunes. mare lu ze=i is not a real word. He accidentally heard it from the repetitive layers of the loop of his sounds. It slips out of nowhere. It makes its own sound, in his head, which he then utters, as a mantra for protection, which transports him into a meditative trance before the working of his sounds. This is all part of his project, Sap (bewitched). Confusion Is Next is an attempt to become aware of the fine line between having beliefs and being fed those beliefs, between resistance and obedience. It is an attempt to bring awareness to the survival instinct under the state of fragility and insecurity, as a citizen under a fickle authoritative power. Confusion Is Next, is inspired by the idea of ‘mental time travel,’ based on Endel Tulving’s hypothesis. The mechanisms of memory can evoke the future. The film plays with the idea by shifting between backward glance into a dark history and imagined to be lost in an oneiric dystopia. (Pathompon Mont Tesprateep)
About Thom Assajan-Jakgawan: After getting together to make music since they were young, the bandmates of Assajan Jakgawan took a break and went different directions. One of the bandmates also passed away. But Thom, one of the members, continues to make music through his personal projects and live performances under Thom AJ. MadsoN. His performances, with marvelous rhythms and melody, utilize guitars, a microphone, a loop, delay pedal and sometimes objects. Currently, Thom is working on a project Sap (bewitched) and another project Vimutti, or “liberation” in Pali.
High View (2017) by Simon Liu (Hong Kong/UK/USA); performance projection, color, sound, 24 minutes, exhibition file from maker bay area premiere
Live Soundtrack by Warren Ng.
Up on the North Point a torrential downpour of instants tease their way into our sight, but never fully form. Shutter-induced memories reduced to speckles, dissipating into fog. Here, my initial disappointments in a material defect morph into opportunity—satisfying an itch to melt instances together, to see any number of places as one. I want to go home. These images were meant to show us what goes where—but I can’t make out the path. Maybe we should lay them all out on the floor and try to put the pieces back together. In another five days, I’ll need to leave. (Simon Liu)
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.