SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 6:30 pm

The Shape of a Surface

Curated by Kathy Geritz and Vanessa O'Neill with Metha Rais-Nordentoft

ROXIE THEATRE

3117 Sixteenth Street (at Valencia)

San Francisco, CA 94103





Presented in Association with SFFILM and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive


Advance tickets available here.


A program of works made in 16mm showcases the film medium itself, whether in images shot by the filmmakers or in found footage that is re-contextualized. History is reframed in some, while windows, doors, and mirrors focus our attention on the beauty of the world and its reflection in others. Fences and walls often divide the frame, casting both shadow and light, evoking the despair and hope of our times.


Screening to include:


NN (2017) by Pablo Mazzolo (Argentina) Super-8mm screened as digital video, 2.5 minutes
NN reanimates archival news footage from the time of the Argentine coup d’état (1976). The film reflects on anonymity of subject; the spectre of thousands of disappeared dissidents and civilians during the dictatorship in Argentina. (Pablo Mazzolo)


Shape of a Surface (2017) by Nazli Dinçel (USA), 16mm, 9 minutes
The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh. (Nazli Dinçel)


Day Dream (2001/2017) by Jim Jennings (USA), 16mm, silent, 7 minutes
In a way, making street films is daydreaming with a camera. It’s capturing a fantasy you’re having when you’re wide awake and life is going on around you. [Day Dream] is very much about everyday life—a nondescript New York neighborhood on a calm Sundayafternoon…but it’s also about the magic I can see in that world when I free my subconscious. (Jim Jennings) 


Decoy (2017) by Alee Peoples (USA), 16 mm, 11 minutes
Decoy sees bridges and walls as binary opposites and relates them to imposters in this world. Humans strive for accuracy. You don't always get what you wish for. (Alee Peoples)


The Forest is Offended (2017) by Stephanie Barber (USA), 16 mm, 2 minutes
A film poem thinking about the physics of sound, the need sound has to vibrate and bounce off a molecule or atom to return to our ears; thinking about this physical property as a metaphor for spirituality or love. (Stephanie Barber)


Nu Dem (2017) by Jennifer Saparzadeh (USA), 16 mm screened as digital video, 9 minutes
Nu Dem traces Europe's closed borders in the Spring of 2016, arriving at an informal settlement between Greece and Macedonia. There, people wait and try to move forward in anxious, stagnant flux—confronting the dissonance between a vision of freedom and the fact of its denial. (Jennifer Saparzadeh)


ascensions (2017) by arc (USA), 16mm, silent, 8 minutes
image and afterimage. the crystalline impermanence of the phosphene.
the scratch as wound of time, history inscribed within the image, revealing light.
the frame as the infinite fragment of a world hovering outside of time. a window on to eternity. (arc)


Spectral Ascension (2017) by Paul Clipson (USA), 16mm, 6 minutes
Music by Byron Westbrook
Clipson’s films give us a cosmology of pure energy; they stem from the realization that within all space is the compressed force of a thousand suns, waiting to be unlocked. (Dan Browne)


At Hand (2018) by Paul Clipson (USA), b&w, 16mm, 6 minutes
Music by Sarah Davachi
Clipson’s films are among the clearest articulations since Brakhage of how vision is formed through process—how sight is not a passive and inert function, but equally shapes the world just as it is shaped by it. (Dan Browne)


Running Time: 65 mins ​


Image Credit: ascensions (2017) by arc