SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Fleur (2020) by Susan DeLeo

CROSSROADS 2021 — program 4
darkness provides protection

Livestream (with live filmmaker intros!) Monday, September 20 at 7 pm PDT. Watch the livestream here.
Program online September 20–October 21
program community partner: KADIST

 

 

Silent films and quiet films. Films that look skyward and inward. Rituals of privacy and gestures of hushed intimacies, enacted over distances great and small. Comforts and frictions of shared spaces and unbridgable divides. Nostalgias ambivalent or embraced. Idiolectical missives are sent out into the void, only sometimes to be returned. 

SCREENING: Because the Sky is Blue (2021) by Wenhua Shi; digital video, color, sound, 4 minutes. Footnote to a Season (2021) by Julia Dogra-Brazell; digital video, b&w, sound, 6 minutes. Black Vulture (2021) by Kevin Jerome Everson; digital video, b&w, silent, 4 minutes (livestream only). Recursive Lattice (2020) by J.M. Martínez; digital video, color, silent, 4 minutes. Fleur (2020) by Susan DeLeo; digital video, color, silent, 4 minutes. absolving the valve (2021) by Alix Blevins; digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes. Move (2021) by Douglas Urbank; digital video, b&w, sound, 5 minutes. Dad is Gone (2020) by Pere Ginard; digital video, color, sound, 4 minutes. The Visitors (2020) by Milton Secchi & Liyan Zhao; digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes. Interstices Volume III (2019) by Kyle Whitehead, with Ale Samaniego, Jeremy Moss and John Porter; Super-8mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 11 minutes.

TRT: 62 minutes


Because the Sky is Blue (2021) by Wenhua Shi

Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief twelve frames. The duration of today’s social media video clips is similar to Muybridge’s brevity. Wenhua tries to reimagine what subject Muybridge would capture today. All source footage is from Wenhua’s social media feed. He used the cyanotype method to reprint the individual frames to create the final short videos.

Footnote to a Season (2021) by Julia Dogra-Brazell

A couple argues, a lethal twist of past and future plays out in ordinary lives. Adapted from Arthur Rimbaud’s enigmatic poems War and Fragments of Folio 12, this new interpretation of the poems offers a stark warning to an age where time—fragmented, decontextualized and stored as optical or auditory data—accumulates, while memory fades. (Julia Dogra-Brazell)

Black Vulture (2021) by Kevin Jerome Everson

Black vulture is the native bird of Cape Charles Virginia where the full moon was somewhat visible. (Kevin Jerome Everson)

Recursive Lattice (2020) by J.M. Martínez

Refracted light commingles in spectrum pools.
The recursive lattice presents itself.
It gives us, for nothing in return.
The landscape senses indifference, vibrating impermanence.
Imagery created in-camera, the lens was flanked by double concave glass and prisms. Moving them by hand concentrically, at times intersecting with each other, provided encompassing views of the Sequoia Semperviren’s habitat. I am fortunate to live next to Big Basin State Park surrounded by an old-growth forest. California’s oldest state park and my backyard were the locations of Recursive Lattice. Made during the COVID-19 shelter in place order, before the August fires that burned through 97% of the park. Big Basin is a place of refuge and unbounded curiosity for me, one I hope to return to. (J.M. Martínez)

Fleur (2020) by Susan DeLeo

A flower reveals a journey through dreamscapes of rituals from childhood, the natural instincts of animals and submersion into the unconscious. Time is portrayed as malleable, referencing a shamanic state of non-ordinary reality. Archival and 8mm footage projected onto a Hibiscus flower and shot digitally. (Susan DeLeo)

absolving the valve (2021) by Alix Blevins

A tactile, trance-induced exploration of the filmmaker’s innate yet mediated relationship to her anonymous biological father. (Alix Blevins)

Move (2021) by Douglas Urbank

A nature of children, birds and insects. (Douglas Urbank)

Dad is Gone (2020) by Pere Ginard

Dad is Gone. Dad is Ghost. Dad is Thing… spinning on its own skin. (Pere Ginard)

The Visitors (2020) by Milton Secchi & Liyan Zhao

A close look at the domestic lives of different beings during quarantine. An experimental documentary about shared life, media consumption and lifeforms under lockdown. (Milton Secchi & Liyan Zhao)

Interstices Volume III (2019) by Kyle Whitehead with Ale Samaniego, Jeremy Moss, and John Porter

Interstices is an ongoing series of exquisite corpse Super-8mm films with the potential to continue indefinitely. The films are all in-camera double exposures each made by correspondence with another artist or filmmaker; the second exposure is made with no prior knowledge of the first, resulting in vignettes that are latent collisions of two discrete perspectives. Unstable and intransitive by nature, these resonant and dissonant image-sentences continuously ebb and flow in and around each other, vying for presence on screen and in the mind’s-eye. (Kyle Whitehead)


Wenhua Shi (China/US) pursues a poetic approach to moving image making and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, FLEFF, Athens Film and Video Festival, Light Field, Engauge Film Festival, Antimatter, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, and more. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Julia Dogra-Brazell (UK) has been making narrative experiments through film and video since the late nineties. She is a regular contributor to international festivals and media programmes. Recent works were included in certainty is becoming our nemesis at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and the 67th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen.

Kevin Jerome Everson (US) lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. He holds a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. His films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Tate Modern; Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; Viennale (2014); The Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou, among other venues. His work was featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. Everson was awarded the 2012 Alpert Award for Film/Video and co-curated the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar with writer/curator Greg DeCuir Jr. Everson’s films—including eleven features and over 200 short form works—have been exhibited at film festivals worldwide.

J.M. Martinez (US) is a Santa Cruz Mountains-based artist working with the still and moving image. With an intention on abstraction and biomorphism, his work explores the evolving landscape.

Susan DeLeo (US) is a multimedia artist using experimental film/video, sound, installation and photography to explore the poetics of memory, loss and the ethereal within the elemental/natural worlds. She has a 5th year Diploma in Studio Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and was a recipient of the Clarissa Bartlett Traveling Scholarship Award and also studied film and photography at Mass College of Art. She often composes sound for her films and exhibits, screens nationally and internationally and is a member of the Boston based AgX Film Collective.

Alix Blevins (US) is an artist, filmmaker and curator currently based in Los Angeles, pursuing an MFA at California Institute of the Arts.

Douglas Urbank (US), based in Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist with a background in sculpture and drawing who began to experiment with filmmaking in 2008. His short films have screened in festivals and curated programs nationally and internationally. He is a founding member of the AgX Film Collective, established in 2015. He is also a member of Fort Point Theatre Channel, an independent theater company bringing together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music and visual arts.  Between 2001 and 2013 he was regular host of a radio program devoted to experimental, improvisational and other unconventional music and sound art.

Pere Ginard (Spain) is an illustrator and filmmaker. His specialty lies in experiments with perpetual motion and variations on Lumière’s prototype; including phantasmagorical motions with robots and melancholic representations of mourning, triumphs, monsters, prodigies and mystic raptures, as well as, at times, unfinished observations on things that turn towards the sun and balding blond people with wavy hair. He has presented his films and artwork at a good number of national and international art centers, published several illustrated books and been awarded prizes for photography, illustration and audiovisuals.

Milton Secchi (Argentina) was born in 1988 in Santa Fe, Argentina. He finished his studies at ENERC (National School of Experimentation and Filmmaking), in 2009. He has made several short films that have been screened in national and international festivals. He is interested in the field between film, archive and visual arts with a particular interest in the crossing of the intimate and the social with everyday life.

Liyan Zhao (US) is a visual storyteller working primarily in video. She is especially invested in telling stories of border spaces. Moving from China to the US as a child and growing up near the US/Mexican border, she has experienced firsthand the importance of imagination and mythology as tools of survival in these kinds of liminal spaces. Liyan holds a BA in Architecture from Princeton and an MFA from Yale.

Kyle Whitehead (Canada) is Canadian artist who works primarily with small-format film to create experimental and expanded cinema projects. He prefers a careful and considered approach to image making. This should not be confused with best practices, however, as his work is more about embracing the potential of indeterminate process. What he wants is the definitive by chance, leveraging trailing-edge technologies often with unusual or startling effect. Whitehead’s film Interstices Volume III is a collaboration with Ale Samaniego (Ecuador), Jeremy Moss (US) and John Porter (Canada).