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SAT. SEPT 18:
BUCHANAN + GOLDBERG + SOE's A.S.S. +
On Sat. Sept 18, ATA Gallery's Other Cinema finally restarts its Fall (in-person) season with Grit wit Crit: San Francisco Psycho-Geography! Featured on this festive evening of film and video shorts is the theatrical premiere of Anthony Buchanan's City street Pilgrimage, Valerie Soe's (tentatively in-person) Auntie Sewing Squad--on Chinese-American women sewing Covid masks for the community, Daniel Gorrell 's Proposals--on the Tenderloin's Roving Tailor Michael Swaine, and Jim Goldberg's photo essay Los Hermanos--on the immigrant experience.
ALSO on the program are Dan Janos' Flora My Dear--on Muybridge's murder act, Bruce Baillie's Tung, Mike Kavanagh's Twilight of the Movie Palace, Steve McQueen in a Bullit promo, and shorts from Jeremy Rourke, Bryan Boyce, and Chris Marker!
PLUS 49ers SuperBowl film for the free champagne intermission!
Come early for Frank Stauffacher’s mid-century 16mm love-letter, Notes on the Port of St. Francis...and a Laughing Sal loop!
Doors open at 7:30 for 8:00PM show. Admission is $7.
Come early for Frank Stauffacher’s mid-century 16mm love-letter, Notes on the Port of St. Francis...and a Laughing Sal loop!
On Sat. Sept. 25, ATA Gallery's Other Cinema initiates its 2-part Optronica duplex with an intense program of visually playful pieces,most in eye-popping 3-D!!!
Headlining is Dale Hoyt's The Farm, an experimental melodrama starring Winston Tong, Annie Sprinkle, Monet Clark, and the last movie appearance of Arturo Galster (AKA Pasty Cline)...with music by local cult heroes Chrome! Dale will be here in person to introduce his daring 40-min. featurette, shot right here in San Francisco.
Four other stereoscopic films enliven the bill, with shorts by Kerry Laitala, Craig Baldwin, Rich Pell, and Pete Smith.
AND—in keeping with the optical explosion—here's a long-form promofor Close Encounters of the Third Kind, yes, in anamorphic CINEMASCOPE!
Come early to try on Dale's VR helmet and catch a glimpse of that 60's oddity, The 4-D Man!!!!
Doors open at 7:30 for 8:00PM show. Admission is $7.
FLUTTER AND WOW
OCT.2: DAVIS/CHURCHILL + VARGA + 99 HOOKER+On Saturday October 2nd, ATA Gallery’s Other Cinema presents FLUTTER AND WOW, the second installment of our Optronica couplet, showcasing Live A/V acts that create sound-image hybrids in real time! Headlining is the alchemical magick of projection-artist John Davis and process-guitarist Josh Churchill, in a 20-minute finale called Night Country.
All the way from New York City is the video performance artistry of 99 Hooker, premiering a new COVID-made piece, Viva Sparks.
Oakland’s own Lori Varga is also in-person with a debut—her double-S8/Live Vocal recitation, Your Flesh Is My Flesh.
In The Ultra Tapes, Mission maestro David Cox channels the spirit of Alan Turing, the UK inventor of the Enigma Machine, a device used to decode Nazi messages during WWII, which was recently found on the Baltic seabed. Ben Wood appears as the celebrated Turing!
AND: Acting as prelude and interstices between the live sets are amazing experimental animations by Len Lye!
DOORS OPEN AT 7:30PM FOR THE 8:00PM SHOW. ADMISSION IS $9
OCT.9: FINLEY'S BEYOND THE COSMODROME + MUSE +Re-starting our season-series on the Sensibility of Place, esteemed San Fran cineaste Jeanne Finley personally introduces her hour-long essay, interweaving a poignant group portrait of nine Kazakh orphans coming of age in the shadow of a nearby Cosmodrome. Herself a mother of a Kazakh adoptee, Finley conjures a complex yet lyrical sense of space and time from the majestic landscape of the Steppes, from the local traditional culture, from the imagination of Soviet rocket science, and from the teens' own writings and performances. Opening the program are four premieres from Finley's long-time collaborator, John Muse, all the way out here from his professor's chair in Philadelphia! Muse's videos alternatively explore an interior landscape of anxiety and imagination via playful gestures and direct address: American Breakfast, Alive, Duet, and giroscopio. $8
OCT.16: BRECKE + MCCORMICK + RIVERS + U5This third installment of our Focus on Locus series showcases some seven short docs that address contemporary topics across–and inside of— planet Earth!! Headlining is Mark Brecke’s (in person) exquisite The Lost Reel, which anticipates his soon-to-be-released feature doc on the loss—and now the re-discovery—of thee foundational motion picture in the history of Somali cinema! From Spokane, our hero Matt McCormick sends in his Deepest Hole, on the Cold War contest to dig the deepest! UK auteur extraordinaire Ben Rivers affords to California the debut of Distant Episode, his giddy meta-cinematic take on a Moroccan movie shoot! Oaxaca-based Charles Fairbanks maps out/rhapsodizes on the cultural reverberations of his Ecos del Volcan...while the Swiss two-women U5 crew double-down on the volcano theme, and the bottom-up collective agriculture in Indonesia. PLUS: Merve Caskurlu’s Happy Fishbowl (on Istanbul) and Anto Astudillo’s Golpes (on Chile). $8
OCT.23: ROURKE + D.JOHNSON + LIPMAN’s OWLS +
An ornithologist's dream show! Lovers of birds demonstrate the pleasures of attending to our feathered friends, in all their beauty and odd behavior. Master pixillator Jeremy Rourke lets fly a animation/performance, Birds and Movements, as well as his earlier Jazzy Birds and Ashland Birds. Complementing his stop-and-go motion is Dan Johnson's video update on the California Condors of nearby Pinnacles Peaks, an intimate account of their precarity he calls The Lost Crowd. AND conservationist Mark Lipman offers a delightfully detailed diary of the now-famous Glen Canyon owlettes. PLUS Jake Scott/Mitch Stallman's flute/shadow-play on Murmurations, Penny Lane's The Commoners, Lauren DeFilippo's post-Hitchcockian Life of Birds, and Disney's It's Tuff Being a Bird! $8.88
OCT.30: WASTEDLAND + BATMAN CULT/YOUTUBER +
On this irrepressibly pagan Halloween eve, creature spirits crawl up to the surface of the skin--so come in costume! Featured is outsider Andrew H. Shirley's picaresque Wastedland2, on a trio of animal-costumed graffiti artists who, by animal instinct, migrate from one dystopia to the next, tagging the walls as they inquire into selfhood! Co-hit is Youtube ruler Ernest Ramon's “critical-paranoiac” conspiracy-rant on Batman's origins, Dark Night Rising. PLUS the epic 16mm ending of Toho's 60s Turtle-Monster, Gamera the Invincible. ALSO other Godzilla goofs, a King Kong cameo, and a rare 16mm peek at the '65 animal-costumer Bremen Town Musicians! Tricky treats amidst scary smoke machines!! $6.66
NOV.6: MCLAUGHLIN + T.JOHNSON + SCOTT +Our annual Media-Archeology Dig celebrates a robust range of distinct–even peculiar–art practices, still thriving on the so-called “margins”. Headlining is 35mm stereoscopic maestro Pad McLaughlin, with dual-projector works both old and new, including the world premiere of Binocular Disparities! AND: Tree-of-knowledge Tim Johnson takes apart the mythic Amiga Toaster to reveal missing links between generations of electronic graphics. Also surfing our wave of obsolescence, analog champ Jake Scott drops the needle on Flexidiscs, to sync the plastic sheets' soundtracks to S8 Frankenstein digests! PLUS bits and bytes of Variophones, Vocoders, the Cox Optigan, and free 35mm filmstrips! $9.99
Long-time ATA staffer Liz Canning is back in person with an award-wining feature doc! Always an avid cyclist , Liz had to search far and wide to discover the best transportation solution.,.once she had twins!! She stumbled upon a global movement to replace cars with long-frame bicycles designed to carry heavy loads, and joyfully threw herself into the world of cargo-bike inventors, advocates, and of course riders. The ultimate social revolutionizer, the sturdy and eco-conscious family vehicle connects with the earlier Suffragette cyclists, and women's seemingly endless fight for bodily autonomy. $8
This celebration of film artifacts—both in collections and “found”--focuses on some half-dozen revered re-mix artistes and a quartet of crucial archives. OC's beloved ally Bill (Dawson City) Morrison floats in his sublime raft of cursed-sea-cruise newsreels that serve as sidebar to The Village Detective, his tale of sunken cinema treasure now out in theaters nationally! Editor extraordinaire Scott Calonico dares to deconstruct the police-emergency anomaly Sudden Birth. And Angelo (North by Current) Minax offers up his Stay with Me, wherein Dallas TV anchors from 50 years ago are re-imagined as Proclaimers of Doom. That piece, and Michael Morris' uncanny The Night in the Last Branches, are part of the West Coast Premiere of the Ghosts of Lost Futures project that radically re-edits Dallas TV holdings from the year 1970! Also represented are the re-mixes of Curt Heiner, Marwa Benhalim, Lisa McCarty, and Zak Loyd. PLUS Mariam Ghani on the stillborn Afghan film industry, Ian Saroka on the Slovenian cinema safe-house, and Sarah Woods on the Palestinian motion picture legacy. $8
NOV.27: NEW RED ORDER
As is our custom this time of year, OC flips the
traditional Turkey Day celebration of white-settler
survivalists back into an acknowledgement of the original inhabitants of
the land being colonized. This year's program of Native American media-art is given over to a feisty
collective of young makers who've made quite an international splash (Art Forum, NYTimes, London Times) with their
non-stop stream of critical works--shorts, features, and
installations--that take oppositional positions on a wide range of aboriginal issues...and in ways both comic and
apocalyptic. Principals Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil (Ojibway) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) presented here in
person to a sold-out crowd two years ago, but this time will be sending in
a quiver of indigenous essays from the shooting-set of
their in-production Nosferasta...including a sneak peek of that same project! Amongst the many other titles are Culture Capture, Violence of a Civilization, plus trailers for
both Empty Metal and INAATE/SE/. $8
DEC.4: V.VALE AND MARIAN WALLACE
We're honored to host the hardcore of SF's RE/Search publishing project, V. Vale and Marian Wallace, for an evening of rare—and new--underground films, videos, and books! Marian introduces 8 of her experimental shorts, including Project Y (offering glimpses of Kurt Kren at the legendary SOMA punk venue A-Hole Gallery), Drowned World (her JG Ballard riff), plus Words of Wisdom and Human Condition (“cut-up” homages to William S. Burroughs). Complementing her post-Beat cinema is Search & Destroy, Vale's copiously illustrated lecture-demo on punk publishing. Plus his—and Jerry Casale's--”classical” interpretation of DEVO's Mongoloid, and the premiere of a hybrid live-music performance—with Josephine Torio on vocals, Vale on mod synth, and all new visuals—providing the evening's climax...with RE/Search books on display, including brand new hardback re-issues of both Burroughs and Ballard! $9
DEC.11: BECKER + WOOD + COX +Final Optronica(#3) for this Fall boasts FOUR Live A/V acts!! Local light Tommy Becker makes his Autumn calendar debut with his long-awaited Mirror Neuron, celebrating human neurology through musically driven collage visuals. David Cox John Smalley, and Ania Samborska up the ante with their radiant re-consideration of Bauhaus meister Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space Modulator Art-world coup, practically initiating the category of “Kinetic Sculpture”...and Cox' exquisite mini-operetta manages to re-activate those oh-so-Modernist moves! With vivid history bursting out of every frame—and in conjunction with SF's Western Neighborhoods group—Ben Wood brings his projection-art chronology of the now-in-limbo Cliff House! AND Jake Scott conjures up a playful hybrid of gamelan, Moog, and 16mm film in his multi-media assemblage How to Build a Boat. PLUS ex-Haight/now-Montreal Francois Miron's re-mastered Evil Surprise—an optically-printed party for the retina, Critter's KA loop-installation, and Gilbert (Shapeshifters) Guerrero's Barbary Fig beer, specially crafted-brewed!..and oh yes, come early for David Cox' Drone Alone aerial stunt! $9.99
DEC.18: NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKSATA/OC's penultimate Fall event offers a robust roster of NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS! Among the 16-some(!) pieces--with many artists in person(!!)--are a bounty of local, national, and international premieres:
Dominic Angerame debuts Flashback, Thad Povey launches Sketches for Rock, Bryan Boyce premieres Simfield Peaks, Greg Marshall releases bearing, Matt Soar inaugurates Gnaw their Tongues, Charles Cadkin unspools Past Life, and Jessica Bardsley premieres Good-bye Thelma.
PLUS: Pat O'Neill/Martha Colburn's Messages, Lynne Sachs' Maya at 24, Natalie Tsui's International Face, Jason Brasier's Oblivion, Louise Bourke's Etre-ete, Anabel Oliveros' Un Tipo de Cambio, Nick Pasquariello's Met Statue, and Others TBA. Free pencils! $9
Soley: The Hidden People of the Shadowy Rocks is the only feature film by Icelandic avant-garde artist Róska (Ragnhildur Óskarsdóttir, 1940–1996), made in collaboration with her husband Manrico Pavolettoni. Educated in Prague and Rome, Róska was known for her radical leftist political views which are often evident in her art. A founder of the The Living Art Museum in Reykjavík and a member of the diverse artist collective SÚM, Róska made waves in a male-dominated field, and indeed, the situation of women was a primary theme of her work. The negatives to Sóley have been lost, but two Icelandic artists have managed to restore this ultra-rare title to 4K from the only remaining archival film print.
Set in the 18th Century, Sóley focuses on a young farmer’s resistance to Danish colonial oppression with the help of supernatural forces, including titular elf-maiden Sóley.
Restoration mastermind--and NorCal native!--Lee Lynch will appear in person to introduce the project, and answer questions after the screening. Doors open at 7:15 for a reception for our prodigal son! $7
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