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SAT. 2/15: Kuchars’/Smiths’ Lovers of Eternity +Our gala Valentine's Day season-opener is headlined by two Kuchar Bros. films from the mid-60s!! Starring none other than Jack Smith(!), Lovers of Eternity was shot in 1964, when the Bronx twins were 22 years old. That sole surviving 8mm original, thanks to an Anthology Film Archives grant, was blown up to 16mm just a few years ago, and this screening, apparently, will be the first time this ultra-rare camp treasure has EVER shown on the West Coast! Anchoring our second half, The Secret of Wendel Samson, shot by Mike on 16mm two years later, stars Pop artist Red Grooms as he works through issues of sexual desire in surreal mise-en-scenes. Tonight Mike appears in person to premiere his 10 min. Soulmates, while an orgy of erotic romps flesh out the other parts of the program. Come early for free wine, condoms, and Craig Baldwin's 16mm triptych of psychedelic smut, to the recorded music of Pornorchestra!
SAT. 2/22: FEST OF (IN)APPROPRIATION + KPR +From collage to hip-hop, remix to mash-up, detournement to machinima, the appropriation of pre-existing sounds and images has become integral to the creation of new and provocative works of art. Artists are taking "found" sounds and images and stitching them into new works with new meanings. Featured in SF's first screening of this traveling fest are Soda Jerk's The Time That Remains, Stacey Steer's Night Hunter, Robert Todd's Machine Language, Gregg Biermann's Magic Mirror Maze, Heidi Phillips' Forsaken, Michael Guccione's Cat Scan, and many others! For this particular version of the Fest, Mission District maestro Ken Paul Rosenthal introduces his locally made found-footage confessional In, Light, In, to afford a resonant personal entree into this international event. The Soda Jerk geniuses also grace us with their presence, proudly dispensing their favorite Pirate Rum at the bar.
SAT. 3/1: LUSZTIG's MOTHERHOOD ARCHIVES +Opening our SisPics couplet is the world premiere of The Motherhood Archives, personally introduced by UCSC maker Irene Lusztig. Her meticulous feature compendium of mid-century material certainly represents the most comprehensive collection of childbirth films in the history of cinema! Culling from film libraries around the world, Lusztig deftly deconstructs these incredible discoveries to foreground the contending ideologies of their various time-periods. Honoring the critical importance of archival resources, a percentage of our proceeds goes to SF's own Internet Archives, with Rick Prelinger here to report on reconstruction after their recent fire. $7-20 donation.
SAT. 3/8: PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER + VOINA + SUKI +A watershed report on widening cracks in the Putin regime, Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin's Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer traces the brave performance-art of those three young women who stood up to the religious cronyism endemic to the Russian power structure. Opening is the West Coast unveiling of the half-hour Voina, documentations of the group's public pranks over the last few years. Come early for the inspired percussion of local heroine Suki O'Kane, drumming up a fabulous atmosphere of girrrl power, playful activism, and cheap vodka shots!
SAT. 3/15: PASOLINI'S LAST WORDS + BURROUGHS +Comes now the Cali premiere of Cathy Crane's hour-long consideration of Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. Combining staged and archival material, this elegiac essay considers his brutal murder in 1975 against the texts he left during the last year of his life. In fact, Crane's homage comes to us as we also celebrate the centennial of William Burroughs' birth; this program does double-duty in honoring this other righteous gay visionary. We screen tributes to Burroughs from Antony Balch, Andre Perkowitz, and Lars Movin, and marvel at our own Dream Machine, a product of Burroughs/Gysin's collaboration. ALSO: Anthony Buchanan's short on local champ Charles Gatewood, creator of the most memorable Burroughs photographs. $7.
SAT. 3/22: ZIZEK: THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY
Opening our Intelligence Agents initiative, cultural theorist-cum-rockstar Slavoj Zizek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes for a wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Zizek literally goes inside some iconic movie sets to explore how these stagings reinforce prevailing ideologies. Epic narratives, action pictures, youth movies, as well as propaganda pieces from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Zizek's provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic rants. The screening is framed by the neighborhood's own radiant raconteur, Prof. David Cox.
SAT. 3/29: CHRISTIAN DIVINE's IMPERIAL 80s CINEMA
With the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, Hollywood exited the New Seventies Cinema for a "State of the Art" genre that sub-texted jingoism and imperialism--powdered with the cocaine of Capitalism and edited to the video beat of MTV. Our fave psychotronic cinema wizard Christian Divine takes a Cult Studies approach to the industry products that became emblems of the era. From masked slashers to weird science, this clip-show will weave a thematic narrative of the pop-neon decade, exposing the colonialism of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Cold War propaganda of Top Gun, the entitled teen world of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the proto-revolutionary realms of Star Wars, and so much more! Come early for cheap 80s cocktails, our toy helicopter, and the original USAF Star Wars promos; Andre Perkowski's mash-up of Orson Welles movie lore will kick off our Hollywood review.
SAT. 4/5: LAITALA/DARR's OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN +Inaugurating our 4-part Psycho-Geographic suite, the endlessly inventive Kerry Laitala unveils her latest 16mm masterpiece, The Old Man of the Mountain. Her handsome handiwork explores the history of this New Hampshire landmark, as well as its ritual and totemic properties. Collaborator Brian Darr, on various wind instruments and gongs, performs audio-tracks to not only this headliner, but also to the 1924(!) Epic of Everest, as well as to variously convulsing volcanoes, earthquakes, and underground caverns. PLUS the early-30s Alps-lensed Love to a Harmonica, idiosyncratic personal travelogs from around this orb of ours, and episodes from monumental sculptural projects--Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial...even the Hollow Earth! Come early for free beer and Craig Baldwin's Crazed Cystals.
SAT. 4/12: BEN RIVERS’ TWO YEARS AT SEA +Based in London, UK, Ben Rivers has has newly awoken the world to the ever-fresh possibilities of a hand-held Bolex. Against all the odds, his humble, largely wordless 16mm b/w rolls were cut together, blown up to 35mm, and screened to enthusiastic audiences in theaters across the U.K. This careful, attentive feature doc is, simply enough, a glimpse into the life of a middle-aged man who lives in the middle of a Scottish forest. He is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man. Opening are a couple of Rivers' earlier shorts, Origins of the Species and A World Rattled of Habit.
SAT. 4/19: ERIK DAVIS' RICK GRIFFIN & THE FLYING EYEBALL +OC is once again honored to host thee lightning-rod of "pulp mysticism", our long-lost prodigal son Erik Davis, now returned to his SF stomping-grounds after doctoral studies. In a compelling meta-commentary on 60s West Coast counter-cultural identity, here Erik's slide-show unpacks the complex personality and career of Rick Griffin, a true California psychonaut who graduated from his surfer-boy beginnings (Pacific Vibrations) to the higher states of psychedelic art, there to develop the classic visual tropes, including the famous flying eyeball of many a rock poster. Opening is Trashman, an eye-popping short on Mission graphic legend Spain Rodriguez, a much-loved underground comix artist of the same period. AND liquid light show by Josh Harper!
SAT. 4/26: CONTESTED SAN FRANCISCO+Kicking off our Scritti Politti triptych, Leslie Dreyer serves as guest emcee, introducing Heart of the City Collective's bevy of Google Bus protest videos, which she'll narrate in real time. She and other collective members will be on hand answering questions and discussing the growing movement fighting for a right to the city. ALSO in the house are advocates from the SF Tenants Union, partial beneficiaries of door and bar monies, so come with a thirst for sangria and locally crafted beer! In second half, we broaden our focus to again embrace the particular psycho-geographic reasons why we live here in the first place, including the SF debut of Sam Green/Andy Black's single-channel Study of Fog, Veronica Majano's legendary Calle Chula, Whispered Media/Peter Plate's Realtors' Tour, and, yes, our Google bus dart-board.
SAT. 5/3: IN AND OUT OF AFGHANISTANThe dearth of credible reporting on America's longest war should be a point of shame to the corporate media that controls way too much of the national bandwidth. Tonight we finally see some independent perspectives, generated from both inside and out of the war zone, including a sizeable chunk of Jon Gianvito's Far from Afghanistan, an enlightened omnibus drawn from the States' most engage makers (Minda Martin, Soon-Mi Yoo, Jon Jost, et al). ALSO delivering the news is Kathleen Foster's 10 Years On, recapitulating Afghani and Pakistani politics from the period of the Soviet occupation, and Paul Refsdal's Taliban: Behind the Masks, affording us an extremely rare encounter with the native resistance themselves.
SAT. 5/10: PETER SNOWDON's THE UPRISING + The West Coast theatrical debut of Peter Snowdon's riveting feature on the Arab Spring: Recalling Farocki's crowd-sourced mosaic on the '89 fall of the Romanian regime, Snowdon's thunderbolt is composed entirely of amateur video and cell-phone reportage, spontaneously generated and uploaded by the everyday citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Unfiltered images of protestors, brutal police crackdowns, and destroyed cities demonstrate that the best way to understand chaos is to be a part of it. In a bold, epoch-defining leap forward in doc method, we see that technical breakthroughs are integrally bound up with the actual process of political liberation; media-literate populations empowered not only by a sharpened awareness of their oppression, but also by the means by which they may record it, transmit it, and propose to change it.
SAT. 5/17: HEADBOGGLE + BECKER + VISION NOCTURNA Celebrating the resonances between contemporary video and sound art, this program proffers a party platter of creative projects that work the edge between disciplines. Headlining: the histrionic antics of Derek G, AKA Head-boggle. Derek's analog synth compositions follow those of Tommy Becker, back by popular demand with two new pieces: Song for the Pain Body and Song for the Discarded. Initiating tonight's electronic synesthesia are the moody soundscapes of Everrett Thompson and Nico Cevallos of Vision Nocturna. PLUS Delia Derbyshire, Bruce Haack, Auroratone, and Painleve's Sex Life of an Octopus. $7.
SAT. 5/24: GENDREAU's DISCREPANT PARATAXIS + FUNK's 3-D + Our second set of Live A/V action is anchored by Renaissance man Michael Gendreau, a true pillar of the international experimental music scene. With collaborator Lisa Seitz, he orchestrates an amazing assemblage of antique transcription discs, phonographic cylinders, and mid-century audio letters, wringing out the long-lost timbres and tonalities--not to mention the linguistic content--of these "obsolete" media-archeological artifacts. Popping open this Memory Palace is Walter Funk's Hologlyphic Overscan, a volumetric display of floating 3-D visuals that reflect the same spirit of resourcefulness, ingenuity, and the Marvelous. PLUS: Dan Gunning's hand-cranked 78rpm discography, Thomas Edison's tin-foil trickery, Warner Bros.' optical sound-tracking. $6.66
SAT. 5/31: NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHere's an energized evening of new cinema that champions personal expression and radical form, with many of the makers in person! Featured are Jeremy Rourke's Good-bye Cole, Kelly Gallagher's Pen Up the Pigs, LJ Frezza's Golden Eye, Robert Edmonson's Too Still, Human, James Samsing's Forsaken, Geoff Johnston's Amiri Baraka in Harlem, Marcus Rosentrater's Fire Piece, and the world premieres of Salise Hughes' Lucky, Peter Lichter's No Signal Detected, Steve Yamane's Academy of Science, Chris Landreth's Subconscious Password, Adam Butcher's Bradley Manning Had Secrets, and Craig Baldwin's Communique for the Cube. PLUS new pieces from Sylvia Schedelbauer, Bryan Boyce, and the much-anticipated North American premiere of James T. Hong's The Duck of Nature, The Duck of God. Come early for Linda Scobie's Decked Out installation, free pencils, and artists' reception! $7.
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