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Welcome to our website for the ongoing series of experimental cinema in San Francisco. We show films every Saturday at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st). Showtime 8:30pm, admission* $7.
X~peri~MENTAL
ANIMATION
Gesier FEB.22:TOMMY BECKER + JANIE GEISER + SALLY CRUIKSHANK + SALISE HUGHES +
OC opens with a dazzling performance and celebration of both new and older pixilated cinema! Our spotlight focuses on SFs own word-image-sound alchemist Tommy Becker, performing FOUR of his musical poems that foreground animation passages. ALSO premiering are two sublime shorts by Janie Geiser--Reverse Shadow and Fluorescent Girl. AND Jeremy Rourke/Rebecca Solnit’s A Fine Initial Act, Salise HughesWitch, Dan Janos' Flora My Dear, Bill Plympton’s Trump Bites, Niles Atallah’s Luis, Stephanie Delazeri’s Wheaties, and Martha Colburn’s Walls & Wills. PLUS a special “legacy showcase”---classic stop-motion from Ub Iwerks' Golden Goose, (in 16mm), Gumby-maker Art Clokey’s Mandala, Sally Cruikshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero (16mm), and Helen Hill’s Tunnel of Love. Free champagne, toast, and Nutella to ring in the new season, amidst flickers from Bruce Bickford, Nina Paley, and an hilarious hysterically homophobic anti-Disney comic-rant by the American Family Assoc.*$7.77

PSYCHO-GEO1: SAN FRAN
FEB.29:SAM GREEN/CHRISTIAN BRUNO + BEN WOOD + CRAIG BALDWIN +  
Focus on Locus! The Bay Area itself is the protagonist of the first of four Psycho-Geography shows this season, with this SF showcase serving as a benefit for the in-progress book Avant to Live!. Incite editor Brett Kashmere unveils Craig Baldwin’s long-lost S8 downtown-street project, Stolen Movie, before Baldwin double-projects John Corser’s Crosstown Traffic (on Mission Street). Anthony Buchanan personally introduces his own S8 homage to Streetopia’s mid-Market interventions, Ben Wood updates us on proposals to save Arnautoff’s GWHS murals, and Daniel Johnson unfurls fascinating field footage of the endangered California Condor, at Pinnacles Peaks, just southeast of us. Ex-Mish masters Sam (Weather Underground) Green and Christian Bruno send in their Pie Fight ’69, to share the screen with the Bullitt production short, of course. Free postcards!*$8-20  

16MM RESTORATIONS
MAR.7:PETER CONHEIM’s PUNK: DEVO + RESIDENTS + LIZ KEIM +
In the first of three Incredibly Strange Music programs this season, Renaissance man Peter Conheim proudly premieres Ears, Eyes, and Throats, 1976-1981, an hour of 16mm punk shorts that he has personally restored! Among the revivals: Karen Merchant and  Liz Keim’s (in person) finally-fixed In the Red, on Mabuhay’s heydays, Devo’s Satisfaction and De-Evolution, Residents rarities Hello Skinny and Third Reich and Roll, and Richard Gaikowski’s now-legendary Deaf/Punk and Moody Teenager. PLUS other pop-surreal Graeme Whifler vehicles for MX-80 Sound and Renaldo and the Loaf. ALSO the Dead Kennedys/Western Front chapter from Iggy Pop’s own Punk omnibus, Stephanie Beroes’ raw roll of the Avengers in action, and a glitchy glimpse of The Residents in 1971.*$9

VISIONARY EXPERIENCE
MAR.14:MILLION BRAZILIANS + IDAHO JOE WINDSLOW + ALEX GREY + 
Tonight’s Incredibly Strange Musicians are none other than cult faves Million Brazilians, back again (last time as White Gourd) with their ecstatic jazzy/tribal/trance vibe. Birthed in Portland in the shadow of Smegma, and here tonight all the way from Maine, they perform in front of the NorCal premiere of their half-hour Urban Fossickated Octave. Their act is in the spirit of visionary architect and painter Paul Laffoley, whose works, as well as Alex Grey’s, radiate from our screen. Guerneville guest Ryan Riehle is also on hand to further elucidate the Laffoley legend with conspiratorial tales of the eccentric’s psychic netherworlds. CO-BILLED: Street savant Idaho Joe Windslow--AKA Oakland’s Moondog--with songs and music videos that point towards portals of astral travel. Josh Harper’s UFO pre-show shall begin the ascent.*$9

WESTERN FILM LEGACIES (POSTPONED)
MAR.21:MIKE PLANTE's WYATT EARP: AND WITH HIM CAME THE WEST + (POSTPONED)
For our second Psycho-Geography, we turn our eyes and ears to the US Southwest, as understood by Mike Plante’s masterful feature. Wyatt Earp, one of the most famous lawmen and gamblers of the Old West, is the inspiration behind decades of Hollywood Westerns. Scripted by Plante, along with Sam Green and Tim Kirk, this detailed doc highlights the influence of Earp’s legacy on cinema and our perception of the wild, wild West. Up from LA, Plante is himself infamous as the feisty editor of the delicious and delirious Cinemad zine, that morphed into online and then podcast versions, even as Plante surfaced to serve as curator of Sundance’s experimental sidebar. The hoe-down opens with a posse of 16mm Country/Western musicians, including Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Jim Reeves, Johnny Bond, Joe Maphis, and more.

PSYCHO-GEO3 (POSTPONED)
FINLEYMAR.28:JEANNE FINLEY’s BEYOND THE COSMODROME + STEFAN RUSU's SOVIET ARCHITECTURE + (POSTPONED)
In the first of a co-bill on post-Soviet Central Asia, long-time San Fran cineaste Jeanne Finley interweaves a poignant group-portrait of some 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 rocket science, and from the teens’ own writings and performances. All followed by inspiring songs from the SF Threshold Choir! ALSO out of CCA, Moldavian-born Stefan Rusu takes up the theme of cosmonaut utopianism as well, in the North American debut of his 40 min. Return from the Future, in which we—like Stanislaw Lem’s cultured-shocked space-time voyager—re-visit the boldly Modernist “science fiction” buildings of Kyrgyzstan...to find the formerly ideologically charged edifices fallen into the shabby revisionism of the new free-market economy. Come early for the '79 Ukranian anomaly, Teenage Cosmonauts.*$8 

OPTRON1:
STEREOSCOPY (POSTPONED)
Laszlo APR.4:3-D: PAD McLAUGHLIN + DAVID COX + DALE HOYT + VR +(POSTPONED)
We’re toasting the 50th Anniversary re-issue of Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema with our most eye-popping OPTRONICA ever—SIX different sorts of stereoscopic experience! Pad McLaughlin’s 35mm set proffers two world premieres, before re-visiting a few of his greatest hits from the recent past. David Cox propels his ongoing spatial-temporal probes with a 3-D operetta on Moholy-Nagy’s Art-world coup, the light-space modulator, with John Smalley and Ania Samborska delivering the musical lyrics. ATA charter member Dale Hoyt is here to introduce his star-studded Farm, an experimental psychodrama with Winston Tong, Annie Sprinkle, Monet Clark, the last movie appearance of Arturo Galster, and music by Chrome. PLUS a real-time Virtual reality trip on the big screen, stereographs to peruse during pre-show, and even a cross-eyed trick-film from Craig Baldwin.*$9.99

NEGATIVLAND
OVER THE EDGE (POSTPONED)
DONAPR.11:WOBBLY + RYAN WORSLEY's HOW RADIO ISN’T DONE + (POSTPONED)
Up from SoCal, Ms. Ryan Worsley is an unstoppable artist who caught up to a Bay Area band that was as equally unstoppable, until three deaths in the esteemed ensemble called for their current reconfiguration (new member JonWobblyLeidecker presente!). Her short feature is an attentive tribute to those canny audio-collagists who not only recorded, performed, and pranked for over 40 years, but whose weekly KPFA radio show, masterfully mixed by sorely missed Don Joyce, practically invented a new genre of live sound art. On the heels of one Negativland album and just weeks before the next, her doc is a long overdue report, a quarter-century after our last cine-visit, Sonic Outlaws. Clips from that Baldwin cult-jam-boree, as well as three new music-video collaborations, constitute the evening’s opening set. The Devo installment of Worsley’s Shit Happens vid series gives us even more poop!*$8  

ARCHIVE FEVER1 (POSTPONED)
NOTAPR.18:SAMUEL BECKETT + BUSTER KEATON = NOTFILM (POSTPONED)
After many years in post-production, the Bay Area finally gets to see the kino-essay that our LA archivist-ally Ross Lipman has fashioned out of, and about, Beckett’s only motion picture, Film (1965). OC screened the 20-min. anomaly many years ago, though it dropped out of sight with the closure of Barney Rossett’s Grove Press. But Lipman was on the trail, finding out-takes, tracking down production crew members, interviewing family and friends of the principals, and consulting historians and critics like Kevin Brownlow and Leonard Maltin.The result is a fascinating feature-length think-piece that rightfully situates avant-garde literature, theater, and cinema within their 20C socio-historical contexts, and humanizes risky 60s projects like this and others out of Rossett’s provocative publishing bouse.*$8

 

OPTRON2: LIVE A/V (POSTPONED)

DOMO APR.25:JEREMY ROURKE + MADSEN MINAX + JAKE PARKER + PLU + (POSTPONED)
Dedicated to recently deceased Woody Vasulka, this performance-packed pow-wow augurs the auspicious premiere of the final, full-on half-hour version of Jeremy Rourke’s Dōmo Dōmo, a marvelous meditation on and re-mediation of his 2019 Japanese vision quest. In his multi-screen piece, tents and bikes serve as oh-so-appropriate vehicles for his musical-animation hybrid. Mills grad Jake Parker also takes a cue from Asian culture in How to Build a Boat--his home-made gamelan floats us above the Moog Storm, seen in his frothy film collage. Flying in from the East, A. Madsen Minax live-narrates his lyrical video on boyhood ambiguity, while Arte Matu debuts his 5-min. ATA-shot documentation of another pop-music re-tracking--Nine Inch Nails under Ben Christensen’s Haxan. PLUS Vicki (PLU) Bennett’s Horror, Lillian Schwartz, Ian Helliwell, and Russ Forster’s theremin-busking!*$9

PSYCHO-GEO4 (POSTPONED)
VOLCANO MAY 2:CHIP LORD + MATT McCORMICK + BEN RIVERS + CHARLES FAIRBANKS + U5 + (POSTPONED)
Comes now an extensive overview of global rumblings, as seen by the stars of contemporary non-fiction! Chip Lord is here in the flesh to premiere Venice Underwater, on the planetary embarrassment of the flooded Italian site. From Spokane, Matt McCormick sends in his Deepest Hole, on the Cold War conflict to dig the biggest. UK internationalist Ben Rivers affords to us the West Coast debut of A Distant Episode, his exquisitely giddy meta-cinematic take on a Moroccan movie shoot. Oaxaca-based Charles Fairbanks maps out cultural reverberations of his Mexican Volcán, while the Swiss women’s collective U5 also center their Double Bind on volcanoes, and bottom-up agriculture in Indonesia. PLUS a pair of world premieres, from Turkey (in person, Merve Çaşkurlu’s Happy Fishbowl, on Istanbul gentrification), and Chile (Anto Astudillo’s Golpes, their hi-con perspective on the architecture of Power in 2020).*$9

MULTI-MEDIA
ARCHEOLOGY (POSTPONED)
FLEXI MAY 9:BRIAN DARR’s RENOIR + TIM JOHNSON’s AMIGA + FLEXIDISCS +
(POSTPONED) Hell on Frisco Bay skipper Brian Darr docks at ATA with a cargo of rare 35mm slides…on the films of The Amazing Mr. Renoir! Brian’s intermedia mélange sheds light on Jean Renoir’s screwball turn on immigrant issues(!), starring Deanna Durbin and set in San Francisco in 1943. Surfing the wave of obsolescence in his wake, ATA tech wiz Tim Johnson takes apart the mythical Amiga Toaster to reveal the missing links between the electronic graphics of the last century and this one—the Amiga was the computer for video artists and animators when the Mac was still black-and-white.  Analog champ Jake Parker drops the needle on a flexible plastic sheet to sync up the soundtrack to a Super8 Frankenstein digest...Yes, all these formats still night-blossoming in a veritable graveyard of dead media---Kinetoscopes, Soundies, Scopitones, Radio Shack audiotape, Moog synths…and 35mm filmstrips projected and given away. Tape-Rookie opens! *$7.77

MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY2 (POSTPONED)
MAY 16: DANNY PLOTNICK's SUPER 8: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY (POSTPONED)
Wow! Danny Plotnick’s S8mm film book is finally out, so come celebrate--and pick up--this lush 240-page volume chock-full of color photos and colorful interviews. Tonight’s extravaganza features festive selections of both “classic” and “new” small-gauge hits—animations, docs, narratives, and music films by many of the folks covered in the publication. The focus is on Bay Area favorites, but also zooms out for major works from around the world. Spot-lit is Colin Russell and Alec Rodriques’ new piece on the creative process of Plotnick himself, followed by a couple of the author’s finest. PLUS shorts by Lenny Lipton, Rick Linklater, Bill Daniel, Martha Colburn, Dave Markey, Melinda Stone, Rodney Ascher, Syd Garon, Jim Granato, Al Hernandez, Kelly O’Brien, Bill Paxton, Rocky Shenk, silt, and many, many more!*$8.88

ARCHIVE FEVER2 (POSTPONED)
BRECKEMAY 23: MARK BRECKE’s LOST REEL + RICK PRELINGER + SYLVIA SCHEDELBAUER + (POSTPONED)
Hometown hero Mark Brecke headlines anOther iteration of our film-librarian luv-fest, a benefit for his enormously ambitious planet-spanning quest, Somalia in the Picture. He shares the back-story of that country’s “founding father”, and the tragically lost international epic that narrates that history, before screening enticing teasers and W-i-P passages. ALSO: Cheyenne Bearfoot (Chiricahua Apache) personally introduces her re-tracked “correction” of Coronet’s 1945 The Apache Indian, and Rick Prelinger, in Hazardous Materials, yet again initiates an overdue archival-research discussion: How to properly frame/exhibit “difficult”/transgressive source materials? Berlin-based Sylvia Schedelbauer’s rarely seen Memories is a chilling Farocki-esque essay on her grandfather’s final WWII trajectory to German casualty at Stalingrad, borne from a box of family snapshots found in a closet. PLUS reports on other lost-and-found film archives--Afghani, Palestinian, and Ian Soroka's (in-person) Slovenian.*$8-20 

AVANT TO LIVE (POSTPONED)
AVANT MAY 30: NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS (POSTPONED)
A mini-fest of innovation in film form, this season’s NEW night boasts more than 16 cine-initiatives and more than a half-dozen artists in person! Ellie Vanderlip takes point position in our vanguard phalanx with her live double-projection Ash Meadow, while Michael Cruz’ textured Space Lonely is also married with his live music in situ. Nick Toti wings up from LA with the SF debut of St. Frances of Hollywood and Diana Sanchez wheels in from San Jose with her California, Here I Come. From Bard College country on the Hudson River comes Peggy Ahwesh’s Re:The Operaton, from Haverford PA it’s John Muse’s American Breakfast, from Winnipeg we get Rhayne Vermette’s Full of Fire, from Seattle it’s Joe Milutis’ Arthur Rimbaud’s JOKER, and from her new base in Milwaukee, ATA stalwart Linda Scobie toasts us with her S8 DOME. PLUS 10-year-old Tala Brecke’s Reflections, Jay Rosenblatt’s Inquire Within, Nik Nerburn’s Museum of Wood Carving, Greg Marshall’s bearing, and more from Britanny Gravely and Bryan Boyce.*$8.88

RIDING THE RAILS (POSTPONED)
BILL JUNE 6:BILL DANIEL’s MOSTLY TRUE + THIS TRAIN I RIDE + (POSTPONED)
AND here’s an extra Saturday show on our calendar to especially accommodate the cross-country ricochets of punk chronicler Bill (Bozo Texino) Daniel, trucking through NorCal on his way to a Hobo Museum opening in Dunsmuir! In addition to a pop-up show of Mission School photos on our gallery walls, Bill empties out a knap-sack of San Fran shorts he’s calling “Vocational Vernacular’, including his S8 SF bike-messenger diary, his VHS-shot documentation of 80s performance-art in ATA’s basement, and the new Issue #3 of his much-loved railroad-lore zine Mostly True. ALSO in the house is the radically generous genius of our own Ivy Jeanne McClelland, introducing the area debut of Arno Bitschy’s This Train I Ride! In fact, Ivy happens to be one of the two women featured in the 77-min.doc, which follows their quests for freedom and identity, as gutsy outliers of a corrupt capitalist society that has lost its sense of authentic experience. Frito pies!*$9.99