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SEPT.14: JEREMY ROURKE + BRUCE BICKFORD + LARRY JORDAN + MARTHA COLBURN + We kick off our 66th season with our by-now-eagerly anticipated X/Animation showcase, this time boasting more than a dozen dazzlers! Spotlit is the launch of local hero Jeremy Rourke’s domo domo, an expanded/performative account of his wild bike-packing pilgrimage through the mountains of northern Japan, with field recordings providing the ground for his post-Basho road songs and delightful hand-drawn pixilations. AnOther focus is on recently deceased Bruce Bickford, the Seattle hermit-genius whose claymation Prometheus’ Garden will ever remain THEE break-out piece of personal fantasy and libidinal imagination. Larry Jordan, our own elder statesman of experimental animation, tops the roster with the world premiere of Oz, a 16mm blessing buoyed by a John Davis track! PLUS Martha Colburn’s Spiders in Love, Lewis Klahr’s Dead Celebrity, Kelly Sears’ Applied Pressure, Salise Hughes’ Antarctica, Ellie Vanderlip’s Feet Flat, Eric Leiser’s Anthrophic Principle, and Skizz Cyzyk’s Pataphysics (on Alfred Jarry!). Free toast and nutella!! *$8
SEPT.21: SAM GREEN + GUY MADDIN + BEN WOOD + BUCHANAN’s FERLINGHETTI + A festive fun-raiser for OC OG Gilbert Guererro’s soon-coming mini-cine/micro-brewery! So we celebrate new and old film sonatas about our fair City: The world premiere of Sam Green’s Casa Sanchez (topped by delicious free salsa!), a healthy chunk of Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog, Ben Wood’s interactive report-back on the censorship-threat to Victor Arnautoff’s GWHS mural, and the live jazz debut of Anthony Buchanan’s North Beach Scene, on Ferlinghetti’s 100th! PLUS: Lauren DeFilippo’s The Life of Birds (on Hitchcock’s Bodega Bay shocker), Craig Baldwin’s 3-D Crosstown Traffic, John Lewis’ A Joyful Noise---Church of John Coltrane, James Hon's Folsom Street Fair footage, and other sundry nuggets from our motion-picture motherlode. Doug (Solo Organ) Katelus shines as house musician; come early for ½-Pro’s banjo-busking, Gilbert’s well-crafted brew, raffle prizes, and free postcards! *$8-20
HAND-PROCESSING
Teleporting in from Colorado is Process Negative Lab whiz Eric Stewart, to co-star in this hand-process showcase with our own East Bay film alchemists, in the first of four OPTRONICA events this season! Eric unspools three of his hand-made shorts, plus pieces by lab pals Taylor Dunne and Robert Schaller, before his 20-min. Meditations on the Life of a Star is live-tracked by much-loved synth maestro John Davis. The Vallejo-based Davis ups the ante by launching his own Night Country cyanotype filmwork--projected on multiple Analysts and live-sound-processed by Molly Fishman--and then reprising his masterful track married to Larry Jordan’s latest animation, Oz. The second half opens with the West Bay debut of work from Oakland’s brave Black Hole Lab: Matthew Hidy, Anna Geyer, Lauren Iverson, Zach Parrinella, Emily Chao, Alix Blevins, and Nicky Tavares. *$8.88
STRANGE MUSIC1
OCT.5: IGGY’s PUNK + HARRY PARTCH + THE RESIDENTS +AnOther annual habit here is honoring those artists who are exploding the definitions of musical genres! Showcased is the 16mm screening of Stephen Pouliot‘s The Dreamer That Remains, on Harry Partch, the free-thinking beatnik who grew from hobo to new-instrument builder. PLUS: In Iggy Pop’s paean to the Punk Revolution, Penelope Houston and Johnny Lydon reflect on the Sex Pistols’ final performance at our own Winterland. Outsider Music jam-packs the rest of the program: Sun Ra (as seen by both French TV and Soda_Jerk), Andre Perkowski’s In Between Dreams (with local eyeballs The Residents), Bill Daniel’s Butthole Surfers in Houston and Sonic Youth in NY, the BBC’s Throbbing Gristle, Ben Folstein’s Where Do Babies Come From?, Tribe 8, Wesley Willis, Matmos, and even more outlandish Soundies and Scopitones. Free LPs!
OCT.12: MARK STREET’s NYC + GLENNA ALLEE’s HANFORD + PAUL ECHEVERRIA’s DETROIT + Our second LOCUS FOCUS is plotted out along three axes. Mark Street returns from NY with his 100 Sides of a Sphere book-launch and a few new movies: After the gloriously granular revival of his 16mm Winter Wheat, he unspools a sneak peak at Work Songs (inspired by Studs Terkel) and premieres Morning, Noon, Night; Water, Land, and Sky, on the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The program’s 2nd component is a bundle of briefs on the “Nuclear West”, anchored by (in person) Glenna Cole Allee’s Hanford Reach, a cautionary montage on the most toxic plutonium dump in North America. Glenna’s landscape is extended south to the Trinity Site by Georg Koszulinski’s New Mexico Death Wish Diatribe (world premiere), and even to the Mexican frontier by Laura Poitras’ Triple Chaser (narr. David Byrne), on the sleazy dealer whose weapons are used against the refugees on the desert border. Our 3rd vector points to famously failed Detroit--Paul Echeverria’s Glitchtown, Dustin Dehah’s God Is an Artist (on Shephard Fairey’s mural), and an exc. from Sabine Gruffat’s I Have Always Been a Dreamer. Come early for Sharon Trahan’s space-time samples of the Salton Sea! *$7.77
STRANGE MUSIC2
Long-time OC ally James June Schneider (1,2,3 Whiteout) remains an invaluable underground source, and bi-national non-fiction master, on the Washington watch. With essential help from small-gauge guru Paul Bishow, James has finally pulled together their long-awaited doc about the seminal years when punk broke in DC, with powerful new sounds and radical attitudes, thanks to bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and the Void (Chris Stover in person). Tonight James is here in the flesh with the West Coast’s first look at how the DC scene gained momentum, and an affirmative, generous, and creative community emerged. An artists’ co-op called Madam’s Organ was a space of possibility, like punk itself, where generations and musical genres mixed, eventually becoming the launch-pad for Washington’s harDCore movement. Newly discovered footage and in-depth personal accounts afford fresh perspectives on how the impact of that music and those ideas eventually grew to resonate world-wide. *$8
STRANGE RELIGION
Holy crap! For our annual Halloween SPOOKTACULAR, we couldn’t get any freakier than the contemporary hellscape of “alt religion”...and here is a veritable Flood of eschatological SPEW and wide-eyed WHEW!! We’ve got Pat Boone speaking in tongues, clips of Poke Runyon’s Magic of Solomon, Holy Ghost Hysteria, Mark of the Beast, Cult Explosion, the ever-visionary adventures of our flying-saucer/past-lives pals Unarius, and a couple clips (Arise!, X-Day Drill) from the Texas Slack sect with strong connections to SF, The Church of the Sub-Genius! Praise Bob!! The night’s 16mm high/low point is a conspiratorial section from Jeremiah Films’ ultra rare, utterly wicked Revival of Evil, with intro by collector Anthony Buchanan. ALSO the Mormon Ancient America (claiming Jesus preached in Meso-America), the post-Mormon doomsday sect Nesara, 700 Club on Burning Man’s Satanic connections, Joe Schimmel on backward-masking, black magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, and the energized rants and intra-Christian attacks of many other bizarre belief-systems. DJ Mysterious Music Meister will be spinning the vinyl backwards, of course, as well as dispensing free trick-or-treats! *$6.66
MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY1
A Live A-V luv-fest fer sure, with distinctive, daring demonstrations of creative expression from four of Cali’s leading media-artists! Prodigal son Scott Stark proffers a para-cinema set featuring the premiere of CLYPPS and his in-house 35mm scope projector, while twinkling SLO satellite Lana Z Caplan orbits back with the NorCal launch of her 35mm piece Apollonian Light and her Autopoiesis short. SF stalwart Tommy Becker sets up screen-left with the debut of his Side Two of Tape Number One--music and poetry exploring our entangled relations with auto-mobile machines. AND here’s the unveiling of The Cube by ex-Austinite Bill Baird--musical performance-art inside a projection-mapped tent! PLUS a sprinkling of cine/sonic tricks by Ryan Worsley, Bruce Haack, Brett Ingram, et al. Dizzying documentation of Brown/Gruffat’s Unsettling Texas film-performance follows Russ Forster‘s theremin busking. *$9.99
Nov.9: LYNNE SACHS + BARBARA HAMMER + SU FRIEDRICH +
Barbara Hammer (RIP) passed the batons, and tonight Lynne Sachs is back in the Bay to twirl them! Marching through on a national tour for her newly published Year by Year Poems, Lynne debuts three Hammer collabs, screens substantial sections from her own last two features, and revives an evergreen of women’s cinema. As Hammer lay dying, she bequeathed a trio of unfinished films to Deborah Stratman (Vever), Mark Street (So Many Ideas Impossible to Do All), and Lynne herself (A Month of Single Frames)...and after considerable time and effort, and with Wexner Center help, all those projects have come to fruition! Anointed to carry on Hammer ‘s local legacy (both SFSU grads!), Lynne converses about the creative process from the quotidian, to writing, to filming. That’s how we get to see Friedrich’s historic hand-scratched Gently Down the Stream, as well as a generous portion of Sachs’ latest Tip of my Tongue, and a sizable sneak peek at her in-progress A Film about a Father Who. Benefit for the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant! *$8-20
OPTRON3
NOV.16: BRIAN DARR + SYLVIA SCHEDELBAUER + APHID + X73 +
We celebrate the diversity of means of personal expression in our lo-fi media landscape! OC fave Brian (Hell On Frisco Bay) Darr deploys 35mm slides, 16mm clips, VHS tapes, Glenn Waite’s home-made analog synth, and bits of Thom Andersen/Noel Burch’s Red Hollywood to tell the tale of Hollywood 10 victim Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, a noir critique that turns on emerging surveillance themes. In from Berlin, trans-national kino-collagist Sylvia Schedelbauer’s Memories is an amateur b/w photo retrospective spun from a shoebox of family snapshots from mid-century Germany. In the Antikytheran Mechanism, X73’s David Cox, John Smalley, and Rachel Levin weave together vocals, video, film, and music to rhapsodize on the Aegean Sea discovery of that ancient Greek astronomical clock that could forecast solar eclipses. Abram (Aphid) Stern fast-forwards though this history of thinking machines to the new mode of “generative-video” with his Unburning show’n’tell, operating on FBI aerial footage of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising to reveal hidden data-overlays “burned in” by the Bureau’s infrared sensors.*$9
TALES FROM
SOUTHERN MEXICO
For our annual No-Thanks Giving gathering, we host Charles Fairbanks and Caitlin Manning, both filmmaker expats coming up from separate towns in Southern Mexico. Charles shares the West Coast premiere of The Modern Jungle, his hour-long collaboration with Saul Kak--a visual artist from a Zoque village--on a lush but critical allegory of globalization, as filtered though the fever-dream of a Mexican shaman. Ex-Mission sister Caitlin circles back to San Fran with Resistance, Autonomy, and Women’s Rights in Chiapas, on the community craftwork of A.G. Lopez. Oaxacan visionary Bruno Varela is also represented with another of his exquisite experimental essays. AND North-of-the-border Native (now NY-based) Adam Khalil sends in the debut of Cultural Capture: Terminal Addition, on cultural appropriation and the white-washing of indigenous history. Food and drink from the region will be on hand in a festive reception for our much-missed comrades!
Concluding ATA’s Nov. Performance series, this Optronia4 AUDIO-VISUAL event guarantees a garden of cinematic delights fabulously festooned by more than a dozen in-person artistes! On musical saw, Cindy Sawprano accompanies Kristin Cato’s violin in the latter’s ongoing Numbers Project, this new live-cine iteration titled L00p8L00p∞. The two women swoop through vocal, musical, biological, and psychological loops mirrored on the big screen by tip-toeing spiders, jumping ropes, planetary orbits, and gypsy curses! Ellie Vanderlip teams up with Karen Trinidad in their multi-projector Scatter, after we enjoy an animation from each. Featuring performers of all genders, Oakland’s Church of Color and Light presents IRKALLA, invoking the myth of the Queen of Hell through projections, movement, and spoken word. Exploring themes of recovery, and the reclaiming of one’s own narrative are Eva and Phaedra Restad, Kaitlin Duffy, Laura Cohen, Ryan Cicak, Sophie Becker, Jenny Yang, and Courtney Fellion. Interpolating between the three acts are precious pressed flowers from motion-picture matriarchs Mary Ellen Bute, Daphne Oram, Lillian Schwartz, and Vicki Bennett *$8.88
Here’s the New Model Army of archivists who recognize that access and use rank with preservation! The Internet Archive’s Rick Prelinger presents Wildcards of the Ether, on QSL Cards from the Citizens’ Band radio era--an amazing panoply of working-class creativity focused on “friending” 70s style—and a pre-figuration of social media tinged with workerist resistance of the times. Anthology Film Archivist John Klacsmann holds forth on his restoration/premiere revival of Anger/Nin protégé Renate Druks’ rarely seen Space Boy (1973), sequel to Harrington’s Queen of Blood, with music by Louis and Bebe Barron (and drums by Frank Zappa?). Walter Forsberg, too, jets in (from Mexico City) with a trove of fabled Auroratones–the late-40s visual-therapy abstractions for WWII PTSD victims. Walter also lays out a party-platter of Mexican TV Commercials from the early 80’s (made by father of cineasta Elena Pardo). Good neighbor Jay Rosenblatt shares family memories in his Kodachrome Elegies, and Diana Sanchez introduces her sublime STREAM, from a found photo album. Michael Morris sets sail his exquisite ARK, a marvelous montage of mid-century archival films, and Scott Calonico sends in his Sudden Birth, a hilariously disturbing doc on that peculiar sex-ed genre...narrated by Skip Elsheimer, the AV Geek! *$9
DEC.14: KEVIN B. LEE on HARUN FAROCKI + KONRAD STEINER on GUY DEBORD Keeping with our commitment to critical cinema, here’s a program that extols not only the modern “film essay”, but also the emerging genres of “video essay” and “desktop documentary”. Kevin B. Lee—creator of 360 video essays (most famously Transformers:The Pre-Make) and first-ever Goethe Artist-in-Residence at Berlin’s new Farocki Inst.— sends in rare Harun Farocki material. Kevin’s digital mastery re-invents the keyboard/interface as a new creative palette for art-criticism, that opens up media in a “real-time graphic” way. CO-BILLED is local kultur hero Konrad Steiner, who generously took on the task of producing thee best English-dub of cine-essayist Guy Debord’s infamous In Girum... (the entire title’s a French palindrome for We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire), with Dore Bowen (also in person) reading from Ken Knabb’s translation. Not seen in SF for over 12 years, this was the Situationist firebrand’s last and arguably best before suiciding, crystallizing his critique of the Commodity/Spectacle.
A sensational season-ender that honors radical expression and innovative film form, the program tonight promises a veritable tsunami of cinema initiatives (18!). Portland prodigy Carl Diehl bestows on us the first-peek at his magician-uncle ode Misdirections, whilst Bryan Boyce rushes in from El Cerrito with his latest Fake But True beauty. Specially spotlit is a raft of brill hand-rolled works by Winnipeg’s Rhayne Vermette! Two other Canadians also figure prominently–Matt Soar (Naked Launch) and Frederic Moffet (Horsey), while Andre Perkowski (Nixon Sings the Blues) and Montgomery Cantsin (SCREAMINGLY!) bring the news/noise from LA. Additional Coast debuts come from Peggy Ahwesh (The Falling Sky), Roger Deutsch (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me), Kent Lambert (Reckoning 7), Jenny Stark (Standing on Fishes), and Brittany Gravely (her 16mm Astrology). ALSO Jay Rosenblatt’s When You Awake, Anton Astudillo’s Almargen, Saifey Maynor’s Starring in a Student Production, Matthew Hidy's Relative Trains, Pyscho Gnostic’s Lithium Nuke Magick, and more! Free pencils and fruitcake!! *$9
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