SFCINEMATHEQUE

shadow swells (2022) by Karissa Hahn 

…..the moment the shadow swells is the moment the image is realized…. (Karissa Hahn)

….as the visitation began to manifest itself visibly in the room, at first only as a quavering illumination, like that from a guttering candle, and then as the shape of a woman. She shimmered, and her light shook. Around her the shadows trembled. And then it was Gladys—nobody else—flickering and false, like a figure in a motion picture. (Denis Johnson, Train Dreams) bay area premiere

Sometimes a little Sin is good for the Soul (2020) by Alex Beriault

Sometimes a little Sin is good for the Soul takes place within an architectural, painterly world within which three women are suspended. They remain bound to their environment, all the while a glowing red EXIT sign periodically reappears to tease and perturb these cold, taciturn surroundings. No matter how often the sign reveals, it never points towards any clear way out for them. (Alex Beriault) bay area premiere

The Girl Who Is (2021) by Sara Sowell

Conjuring Freud’s id while watching America’s Next Top Model. 16mm hand-processed in Milwaukee WI. Text by Kirsten Schmid.
I’m not like other girls
People say that
But for me
Its true because
I don’t have a body
I’m just one element
Of the psyche
bay area premiere

First Hypnotic Suggestion (2020) by Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan

First Hypnotic Suggestion conjures telepathic transference, hypnosis and collective dream space. Through its spectral tele-cinematic waves, the analogue horror-film protagonists participate in paranormal and fringe scientific experiments, attempting to comprehend the immaterial and incomprehensible expanses of their perception—simultaneously aided and obstructed by the temporal interventions and technological mediations of their transitory parallel dimension. This double-projected film—including distinctive left and right soundtracks—will undergo subtle, unpredictable shifts and alignments which naturally fluctuate from screening to screening. (Brittany Gravely)  bay area premiere

Dans les cieux et sur la terre (2022) by Erin Weisgerber

Vertiginous masses of carved limestone give way to an ecstasy of light and living colour through an alchemical spell of elemental transformation. Hierarchies dissolve as the transient quotidian inspires the monumental. Imprinting successive layers of time in a ritual of repeated gestures, active attention, walked paths, shifting seasons and cycling years. Filmed over seven years in the neighbourhood around the filmmaker’s Montreal home, a foundational local monument meets fleeting traces of urban flora. Golden autumn leafmeal meets the cool of a late-spring iris within the frame’s architectural ground. The film was shot and hand-processed entirely on reversal films, with all of the composite images created in camera. (Erin Weisgerber) bay area premiere

Object Permanence (2022) by Alix Blevins

Objects disappear. (Alix Blevins) bay area premiere

Of This Beguiling Membrane (2021) by Charlotte Pryce

The story unfolds on the Eve of Midsummer: on the day when the threshold between worlds is porous, and an idle gesture can tempt fate. Inspired by Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth (1671), this work takes the outward form of a nature film. But observation gives way to illusion and the surface gives way to murky waters strewn with debris of those who have succumbed to its lures (the Lady of Shalott, Ophelia). They remain trapped; menacing reminders of the dangerous seduction of beauty and anger of the elusive spirits who resent being examined. (Charlotte Pryce) bay area premiere

la mia camera (2019) by Friedl vom Gröller

“La mia Camera” means my room, a balcony with curtains (and my film camera). The main characters are the wind and its dancing playmate, the curtain. The wind always needs a partner, otherwise it cannot appear. On this hot summer day he shows his exuberant, wanton, but also thoughtful, contemplative nature. Sometimes, when you’re alone, everything seems animated. (Friedl vom Gröller) bay area premiere

Das Rad (2021) by Friedl vom Gröller 

A film in twenty-six shots dreams about the captivating rotations of seventeen cartwheels executed by a young girl. Friedl vom Gröller condenses children’s literally active fantasies into just a few seconds and searches for their counterpart in the movements of her S-8 camera. […] Das Rad is a film based on analogue analogies: fantasy, children, dreams, movement, cartwheels and film. Suddenly it becomes clear that all of cinema is inspired by gymnastics: film reels, jump cuts and the fine balancing act between reality and unreality. Rotating in the spirit of imagination and movement, the cartwheels and the film fulfill the dreams of cinema. (Patrick Holzapfel) bay area premiere

Ertrunken (2022) by Friedl vom Gröller

world premiere

Am Rande des Vorhangs (2022) by Antoinette Zwirchmayr

A place essentially bound up with dismal memories and the smell of old leather and sweat becomes a stage for enraptured performances. The setting and habitat of At the Edge of the Curtain is a gymnasium. Its occupants: three women whose relationships and states of desire are as multiple and ambivalent as their selves are amorphous and fragmented. Subjectivities circulate, but their bodies persist in stasis. (Esther Buss) bay area premiere

———————————————

Artist Bios

Karissa Hahn (US) is a visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work articulates the nature of contemporary image reproduction and dissemination through the use of analogue and digital technologies. Whether creating performative films to highlight the hidden intensities of the everyday or blurring digital ephemera into physical reality through inkjet printing, she conjures up a storm of “spectra ephemera.” Hahn has shown around the planet Earth in various cinemas, galleries and institutions such as the New York Film Festival Projections, TIFF Wavelengths, MoMA, CROSSROADS, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Anthology Film Archives, among other venues. 

Alex Beriault (Canada) is a visual artist whose artistic works encompass performance, installation and, recently, film. In 2014 she received her BFA from OCAD University in Sculpture/Installation and has since developed performance-centric work, within which she positions herself as a central subject. Beriault has participated in exhibitions and screenings across Canada, the United States and Europe.

Sara Sowell (US) is a film editor and multidisciplinary artist who works in moving image, performance and sound. Her films and videos undermine the legacies of art and media production throughout history, including Dada, Surrealism, reality television and cinema’s prehistory. Her work has shown in venues, galleries and festivals including The Wexner Center, Antimatter [Media Art], ANALOGICA, Athens International Film and Video Festival, and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. She is currently teaching multidisciplinary arts and film courses in Milwaukee WI.

Brittany Gravely (US) has focused on 16mm film for the past several years, but also creates works in many other media. Currently, she creates expanded and non-expanded cinema projects of a more mystical nature in Magical Approach with Ken Linehan. Recently, their films screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Artifact, Fracto, CROSSROADS, Chicago Underground and Antimatter, among other venues. She also works as the publicist and designer for the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge MA and is a founding member of the artist-run film lab AgX.

With a focus on sound and audio media, Ken Linehan’s (US) creative work explores intermedia space through works including field recordings, 16mm motion picture films, silkscreened images, works of cut paper as well as a variety of music projects. Most recently, Ken has been engaged in a series of psychic/cinematic collaborations in Magical Approach with Brittany Gravely. Having graduated in 2001 with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Kenneth has taught courses on sound art and film sound at MassArt and RISD. Over the past decade his work has been exhibited at arts spaces, live music and cinematic venues such as the RISD Museum, the Boston Center for the Arts, Apex Art, AS220 and the Brattle Theatre, including events programed by Mono No Aware, Magic Lantern Cinema,  Millennium Film Workshop and Balagan Films. (Ken Linehan)

Erin Weisgerber (Canada) is a Tiohtia:ke/Montreal-based artist working with photochemical film to produce installations, performances and short films. She manipulates the photographic, chemical and material properties of film to transform the world framed through her camera, rendering moving images that exist between figuration and abstraction, external vision and internal landscape. Weisgerber is a member of the Double Negative Collective, a group of moving-image artists dedicated to the creation and exhibition of experimental and avant-garde cinema and who maintain an artist-run film lab. Since 2019 she is a member of Jerusalem in My Heart, a live audio-visual performance project, with Lebanese producer and musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh.

Alix Blevins (US) is an artist, filmmaker and curator currently based in Los Angeles.

Charlotte Pryce (US/UK) has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Born in London, Charlotte Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London and completed an MFA in Fine Art/Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglas Edwards Award for Best Experimental Cinema Achievement. In 2014 she was the recipient of Film at Wits End Award and in 2015 she received the Gil Omenn Art and Science Award from the Ann Arbor film Festival. In January 2019 she presented a career retrospective at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and her work was performed at the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles, Bozar in Brussels as well as at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Friedl vom Gröller (Austria): Born in London. She spent her childhood in Vienna and Berlin. From 1965-1969 she studied photography at the School of Graphic Arts. First films in 1968. 1971 Masters certificate and commercial atelier for photography. 2005 National award for photography. 1990 Founder and director of School for Artistic Photography, Vienna until 2010. 2006 Founder and director of School for Independent Film, Vienna.
2016 National award for film.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr (Austria): Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her works have been featured in festivals including Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Indielisboa, Media City Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and FID Marseille. She has been awarded with the Outstanding Artist Award (BKA 2020), a six month residency in New York (ISCP), the Start-Up Grant for Young Film Artists (Austria 2017), the annual grant for photography (Land Salzburg 2017) Simon S. Filmaward (2016), Kodak Cinematic Vision Award (Ann Arbor Film Festival 2016), among other awards.