Program 3
curated by Samuel Breslin
Saturday, March 16, 2019 @ 5pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 66 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Uzi's Party
Lyra Hill
2017 | 30 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
In this experimental teen dramedy, five young women gather for a Ouija session and gossip, bicker and flirt until someone gets possessed. All effects in camera.
-LH
imagining for lost time
Sally Decker
2019 | 12 minutes | USA | sound performance
imagining for lost time is an investigation of the lush multiplicity within a self. to embody the present calls for a negotiation of the imprint of past selves and the belief in imagined future selves. our pasts outline what the present self knows to be true, thus defining - and often restricting - possibilities for imagined future. the performance draws a process of attempting to know oneself while the self is constantly changing, to seek self-growth through presence, unflinching clarity, and empowered knowing. the piece is adapted from its original form for three voices and electronics.
-SD
3 peonies
Stephanie Barber
2017 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A brief, poetic 16mm film on a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty. The collaged soundtrack suggests weightier concerns, gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.
-SB
Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow
Malic Amalya & Max Garnet
2012 | 11 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Against a backdrop of electrocution, dominance, and scientific precision, wasps nest in an abandoned refrigerator, curtains blow in open windows, and queers congregate. Adapting Stanley Milgram's 1963 experiment on obedience to authority, Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow straddles tensions between language as a site of transgression and of regulation.
-MA
I, An Actress
George Kuchar
1977 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
This film was shot in ten minutes with four or five students of mine at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was to be a screen test for a girl in the class. She wanted something to show producers of theatrical productions, as the girl was interested in an acting career. By the time all the heavy equipment was set up the class was just about over; all we had was ten minutes. Since 400 feet of film takes ten minutes to run through the camera… that was the answer: Just start it and don’t stop till it runs out. I had to get into the act to speed things up so, in a way, this film gives an insight into my directing techniques while under pressure.
-GK
Lyra Hill is a cartoonist, filmmaker, and performer who lives in Chicago. She created and organized the performative-comix reading series Brain Frame between 2011 and 2014. Lyra works mostly with 16mm and S8mm, and focuses on the avant-garde in both her film and comics work.
Sally Decker is a composer, performer, writer and improviser based in Oakland, CA. She explores the emotional potential of sounds as portals of connection. Her approach to form and process is psychological and sensory, rooted in the goal of strengthening a reflective focus toward our internal intuitive worlds. Recent interests include feedback systems, the voice, and utilization of language in performance. In 2017 she released an album on NNA Tapes entitled Living Pearl under the moniker Multa Nox. Sally is currently pursuing her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College.
Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Her videos are concerned with the content, musicality and experiential qualities of language and her language is concerned with the emotional impact of moments and ideas. Each ferry viewers through philosophical inquiry with the unexpected oars of empathy, play, story and humor.
Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com. Her books Night Moves and these here separated... were published by Publishing Genius Press in 2013 and 2010 respectively. Her collection of very short stories All The People was published by Ink Press Productions in 2015.
Barber is currently a resident artist at The Mt. Royal MFA for Interdisciplinary Art at MICA in Baltimore, MD.
Malic Amalya is queercore filmmaker working in 16mm and video. He lives in Oakland and teaches at the California College of the Arts and City College of San Francisco.
George Kuchar was born in New York City in 1942 and is one of a twin (Mike Kuchar is the other half). At an early age the twins made pictures on paper and on 8-mm movie film, and later attended the High School of Industrial Art in N.Y.C. (which is now the High School of Art and Design). Employed in the world of commercial art in Manhattan, George Kuchar was later laid off from work and never went back to that snake-pit; instead, he embarked on his movie career full-time. Having been introduced to the avant-garde film scene in the early 1960s, he acquired an audience for his low-budget dramas and was hired by the San Francisco Art Institute to teach filmmaking. In 1985 he began making 8-mm video diaries and has completed about 50 works in that medium. The works are edited in-camera and there are no post-production embellishments to bloat the budget, so the low-budget tradition continues in full swing.