anticipated artist in person: Anton Ginzburg
presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
in association with the Canyon Cinema Foundation
Admission: $12 general/$10 Cinematheque and SFMOMA members with member code
Advance tickets available on May 1 here.
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Ranging from subtle emulsive photochemical magic, found footage poetry, aggressively asserted diatribe and chillingly detached electronic landscape study, the films on this program envision mediated spaces beyond our grasp. Uncanny visioning systems, familiar yet alien. Cinema technologies past and future, for us, by us, with us and without us. Welcome to the machine.
SCREENING
Les larmes d'Éros (2014) by Andrée-Anne Roussel & Guillaume Vallée; digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes, exhibition file from the Vidéographe U.S. premiere
Inspired by Georges Bataille's essay Tears of Eros, this short hybrid film/video is about erotism and death. Through different analogue manipulations of the image, we are witnessing the psychological and physical decay of the character and the filmic matter. (Andrée-Anne Roussel)
Reworlding (Elizabeth) (2016) by Alison Bennett, Jeremy Martino, Greg Penn & Autumn Royal; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, exhibition file from the maker U.S. premiere
Reworlding (Elizabeth) is a collaborative work by artists Alison Bennett and Greg Penn and writers Jeremy Martino and Autumn Royal. The work offers a multidisciplinary investigation into the concept of digital-hybridity. The collective process in producing the work imitates the technological and physical layers we often encounter to expose the limitation of the dichotomy between the representational and the real. There is an online interactive iteration of the work at http://reworlding.xyz/
Last Train (2016) by Dianna Barrie; digital video, color, sound, 12 minutes, print from Nanolab
Found in the (now possibly lost) film archive at Lab Laba Laba, footage from a trailer for the 1981 Indonesian propaganda film Kereta Api Terakhir (The Last Train) melts into a soup of chemigrammed perforations. A film about the silence that follows the unspeakable; about blurred visions, untold histories and inaccessible archives. (Dianna Barrie)
Answer Print (2016) by Mónica Savirón; digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
"The fading that devastates color films occurs in the dark. It is accelerated by high temperatures and, to a lesser extent, relative humidity. Dye fading is irreversible. Once the dye images have faded, the information lost cannot be recovered" (Image Permanence Institute)
"An answer print is the first film after the original has been timed for every shot with fades and dissolves if any. The questions that it answers are ‘what is this going to look like?’ and ‘what corrections, if any, are needed?" (Bill Brand)
Answer Print is made with deteriorated 16mm color stock, and it is meant to disappear over time. Neither hue nor sound has been manipulated in its analog reassembling. The soundtrack combines audio generated by silent double perforated celluloid, the optical tracks from sound films, and the tones produced by each of the filmmaker’s cuts when read by the projector. The shots are based on a 26-frame length: the distance in 16mm films with optical tracks between an image and its sound. (Mónica Savirón)
...Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.
From Poems of Home by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
Le bulbe tragique (2016) by Guillaume Vallée; digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes, exhibition file from Vidéographe bay area premiere
Voice & text by Al Razutis. Music by Political Ritual.
Ephemeral traces of nothingness—rotoscoping farmers, crumbling churches, dying memories as hand-painted layers, decay & collage on film emulsion as incidental traces of nothingness.
A work that is aware of his own mechanisms. (Guillaume Vallée)
Wedding Song (2016) by Mónica Savirón; digital video, color, sound, 2 minutes, exhibition file from maker world premiere
Film for Janel Leppin's “Wedding Song,” from the album Songs for Voice and Mellotron (2016) Wedderburn Records.
With thanks to MONO NO AWARE, Steve Cossman, Chris Knudsen & Brandon Rowe.
Discontinued Eastman Plus-X Negative 16mm film, hand processed without chemical developers. (Mónica Savirón)
Ultraviolet (2015) by Anton Ginzburg; digital video, color, sound, 25 minutes, exhibition file from maker bay area premiere
Ultraviolet explores the issues of perception and phenomenology at the intersection of nature and technology. The film is divided into three parts that correspond to the musical structure and composition. The film was conceived as an ongoing dialogue with its soundtrack composed by Michael Pisaro. The relationship between the cinematic image and the live sound is an experiment in a tradition of expanded cinema. It starts with very high frequencies for the first part and then works its way down into the guitar range. The film addresses the aura of representation through the video footage of various landscapes. Waterfalls, treescapes and mountains have been recorded by various devices—from airborne camera at night to cinematic HD footage and low resolution iPhone video clips. It is intercut by analog video signal recordings, reminiscent of the abstract color-field paintings. (Anton Ginzburg)
Pictured above: Le bulbe tragique (2016) by Guillaume Vallée
CROSSROADS 2017 is generously supported by: National Endowment for the Arts, Fleishhacker Foundation, Grants for the Arts, Zellerbach Family Foundation, George Lucas Family Foundation, Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation and the Willow Foundation.
With thanks to our festival sponsors:
