Program 6
Sunday, March 17, 2019 @ 7 pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 56 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
1997c (Red Sketch)
Steve Polta
1997 | 6 minutes | USA | super 8 | color | sound
in the real world
that there was the real world brought in chaos and it brought in
unpredictability and the richness of the flow of light spectrum and color
spectrum had a lot more going
-SP
Studio Sunrise
Kioto Aoki
2018 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
A reflected self-portrait imitating celestial movements of the sun.
-KA
Helios
Eric Stewart
2018 | 5 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Time-lapses of cacti and succulent over the course of a year. Environmental data drives the tone and filtration of the sounds while the rising and setting of the sun illuminates plant growth in and out phase with each eachother.
-ES
An Empty Threat
Josh Lewis
2018 | 8 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
A sequence of truces. A personality test offering mostly slippage.
-JL
Intertropical Vision
Adriana Vila Guevara
2018 | 5 minutes | Spain/Venezuela | 16mm | color | sound
Contrary to the standardization of a single hegemonic point of view, the “center” in the tropics is not the whole. It is the starting point of a powerful range of visions. This is a trip into the core of its multiple indomitable condition.
-AVG
Filament (The Hands)
Amy Halpern
1975 | 7 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
In the politically charged atmosphere of the early 70s, Mikis Theodorakis conducted a concert of his music in Philadelphia. His music was banned in Greece, his own country, at that time by the US-funded junta. Visiting the US on a limited visa, he was restricted to musical appearances only - no public speaking permitted. His hands, eloquent even when their gestures are deprived (by silent filming) of the music they are making, speak. Several in-camera phenomena resulted from the highly-charged nature of the shoot. Flashes of lightning appear, in directional continuity with Theodorakis' movements. These are the product of static electricity, which caused flashes of light inside the camera to make additional exposures on the film while it was being exposed through the lens. The apparent double exposures are the result of the speed of the gestures interacting with the camera shutter speed, and seem to multiply the hands' locations. A shift from Plus X to Double X and finally to Tri X film stock causes the image to become progressively grainier, and the hands more glowing and halated.
-AH
Porter Springs 3
Henry Hills
1977 | 5 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
These beautiful, intricately animated reflections were unfortunately shot in ECO which has proved to be remarkably unstable, turning blue before I had an internegative made. Therefore, this is one of only three prints of this "elegant and serene experience"
-Pat O'Neill
Xochipilli
Annalisa D. Quagliata
2018 | 1:20 minutes | Mexico | 16mm | b&w | silent
Short film that captures fragments of the statue Xochipilli "The prince of flowers;" aztec god of art, dance and poetry. The statue is covered with flowers, some of them psychoactive plants. The figure seems to be in a trance; looking up to the sky, in communication with the divine.
-ADG
Black Out
Aldo Tambellini
1965 | 9 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
This film, like an action painting by Franz Kline, is a rising crescendo of abstract images. Rapid cuts of white forms on a black background supplemented by an equally abstract soundtrack give the impression of a bombardment in celestial space or on a battlefield where cannons fire on an unseen enemy into the night.
-Grove Press Film Catalog
Elli
Esther Urlus
2016 | 8 minutes | Amsterdam | 16mm | color | sound
Calm shots of a seascape also examine optical colour mixing using various flicker effects. Shot on the exact spot in Greece that marked the country’s entrance into World War II.
-EU
Change 变
Lily Jue Sheng
2017 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm x 2 | color | sound
Change is a 16mm text animation that deconstructs and manipulates Chinese language in its representation of morphology, Taoist principles, and celestial cycles of time. The title refers to the I Ching, the Book of Changes, and 变 (traditional: 變), the Chinese word for 'change', in its translation that implies 'transformation'. The film structure surveys Chinese seal script, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese, repeating 64 variations of 8 cosmic colors - red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white. Each string of characters correspond to a revolution of time in lunisolar and astronomical denominations. The allegorical usage of radicals and colors convey a universal interconnectivity, articulating meanings outside the confines of literacy, acting instead as a cryptogram, machine/mind symbiosis, series of rituals, and play of metronomic afterimages.
-LJS
Steve Polta is a San Francisco a filmmaker, occasional writer, occasional historian and former taxi driver who lives in Oakland. He is the Director of San Francisco Cinematheque and curator (and co-founder) of the annual CROSSROADS film festival.
Kioto Aoki is a visual artist whose practice includes photography, film, books and installations to engage the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process. Using the nuances of time, space, form, light and motion, her work explores different modes of perception as it relates to the space between the still and the moving image; as well as the human body within the device of photographic frame.
She has exhibited and screened in Chicago, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Japan. Her work is held in Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library. Kioto received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a HATCH Projects artist-in-resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Eric Stewart is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist and educator. Working predominantly with 16mm film his artistic practice invokes photochemical and darkroom processes to investigate landscape, place and cultural identity in the American West. Before moving to Colorado in 2013, Eric lived in the San Francisco Bay Area where he taught a biweekly analogue filmmaking workshop called “The Elements of Image Making”. He was awarded the 2015 Mono No Aware Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the Haverhill Experimental Film Festival and his films have shown at: The Yerba Buena Center for Fine Arts (SF), Yale University, Crossroads Film Festival (SF Cinematheque), 25fps (Zagreb) and The Florida Experimental Film Festival. His current film examines the philosophy of science, ecology and the 19th century natural sciences as a window into contemporary issues of globalization, climate change, and social perspectives on wilderness. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He currently splits his time between Central New York and Southern Colorado where he works an Assistant Professor in Photography at Adams State University in the beautiful San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado.
Josh Lewis is an artist and filmmaker working primarily with photo-chemical media. His handmade films look to explore the boundaries of manual knowledge and the persisting enigmas of material potential. He's shown work at venues such as The Centre Pompidou, Anthology Film Archives, Microscope Gallery, Eyebeam, Uniondocs, and at festivals such as The International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 25fps, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter. He is the founder and co-runner of Negativeland, an artist workspace dedicated to experimental filmmaking located in Ridgewood, NY.
Adriana Vila Guevara cofounded the analogue film lab Crater-Lab. Since 2010 she has created expanded film pieces and given performances at a number of film festivals, art centres and alternative spaces across Europe, the United States and Latin America. She has a PhD in Anthropology and Ethnography from the University of Barcelona.
Amy Halpern is a New York filmmaker, living & working in Los Angeles. Since childhood, composing with movement and light, and making 16mm abstract films since 1972. Taught film for many years, most recently 7 years at U.S.C, also at California State University L.A., Cal. State Northridge, Otis-Parsons Art Institute and a second grade class in L.A. Unified School District. She has collaborations (lights, camera, person) with Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding, Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction, Julie Dash's Illusions and David Lebrun's Breaking the Maya Code and Dance of the Maize God. She also appears in several of Chick Strand's films, Soft Fiction, Krystalnacht, Cartoon Le Moose & Fever Dream. Born and raised in New York City, Halpern studied & performed in modern dance with Anna Sokolow & Lynda Gudde, worked in the early 1970s in 3-D shadow-play with Ken Jacobs' New York Apparition Theatre and co-founded New York's Collective For Living Cinema with 3 other guys.
Henry Hills has been making dense, intensely rhythmic experimental films since 1975. A longtime resident of New York's East Village, he has ongoing working relationships with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, composer John Zorn, and choreographer Sally Silvers. Since 2005 he has been Visiting Professor at FAMU, the Czech national film academy in Prague, and currently lives in Vienna. He received a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship & his films, which are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, are available on DVD from Tzadik. His most recent work, arcana, was awarded Best Experimental Film at both Curtas Vila do Conde festival in Portugal and the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia. His films, with an eccentric humor, seek abstraction within sharply-focused naturalistic imagery & the ethereal within the mundane, promoting an active attentiveness through a relentlessly concentrated montage.
Annalisa D. Quagliata (b. Veracruz, Mexico) is a visual artist whose films and installations focus on the human body and portraiture. In her work the body is explored as a mirror that reflects different states of being; spanning from the personal to the social and political. She has a strong interest in analog and handmade film as a medium that captures the poetics of light and the moving image. Annalisa grew up in Mexico City but has lived in Taiwan, New York and Boston. She is a graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she majored in Film/Video and Studio for Interrelated Media. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including the Museum of the Moving Image and Mono No Aware Festival in New York, Museo Tamayo in Mexico, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento in Argentina, Fronteira Festival in Brazil, Analogica Festival in Italy, and otherfilm festivals and venues. She is a Princess Grace Foundation Honoraria and recipient of the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship. Annalisa currently resides and works in Mexico City.
As a key figure in the 1960s underground scene of New York – a missing link between the European avant-garde and the artistic movements that followed Abstract Expressionism – Aldo Tambellini (born 1930 in Syracuse, NY, US) is an experimenter, agitator, and a major catalyst of innovation in the field of multimedia art. Tambellini took the transformational potential of artistic expression that stems from painting and sculpture and brought it to the experiences of Expanded Cinema.
Esther Urlus is a Rotterdam-based artist working with motion picture film formats Super8, 16mm and 35mm. Resulting in films, performances and installations, her works always arise from DIY methods. Kneading the material, by trial, error and (re) inventing, she creates new work.
Urlus’ work has been exhibited and screened at film festivals worldwide, among other 25FPS festival Zagreb, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Sonic Acts, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Urlus is the founder of WORM Filmwerkplaats, Rotterdam, an artist-run workspace dedicated to motion picture film as an artistic, expressive medium. More and more it’s the artist-run film lab that represents the leading standard in contemporary analogue filmmaking. These labs have acquired professional, but commercially discarded equipment from all over the world. Now that artists have access to these tools, combined with the open culture-based knowledge sharing, they can move forward and innovate independently from the industry.
Lily Jue Sheng works across film, video, 2D, performance, and installation. She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, and is currently based in New York City & New Jersey. Her work has shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Parrish Art Museum, Knockdown Center, Eyebeam, Artbook @ MoMA PS1, and Microscope Gallery in New York City; Mana Contemporary in Jersey City; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in Montreal; the 1933 Slaughterhouse (老场坊) and West Bund Art & Design Fair in Shanghai; and 3331 Arts Chiyoda in Tokyo.