Program 1
curated by Samuel Breslin
Friday, March 13, 2020 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 54 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Resonant Being
Briana Marela Lizárraga and Joel Skavdahl
2020 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm direct animation and live sound performance
A collaborative visual and sonic work exploring the interaction between 16mm direct animation loops projected on subtle movements of an emoting body.
Surface transducers placed on cymbals amplify and resonate qualities of Briana's voice, enhancing and distorting sung and spoken text. A meditation on witnessing our own deepest flaws and transforming them into qualities that can contribute to our greatest strengths.
Oh My Homeland
2019 | 4 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sang the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. Oh My Homeland is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films I’m currently building. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration. A minimal gesture akin to the practice every portrait painter or mother recognizes as ineffably powerful.
It is essentially a readymade and, like my book 'Night Moves' and my video 'Tatum's Ghost,' it continues to explore YouTube as a cultural and social archive.
Oh My Homeland, while being simply a shot of Ms. Price’s face as she receives the applause and before returning to the role, expands with the unaltered meditation on the shot. The transformational power of art for society and the maker alike; the implication of Ms. Price’s race and the context to which she dedicated her life; the staggering political implications of the Verdi aria (a mournful and complicated love letter to Aida’s homeland) in a time in which love of country is hard to muster.
-SB
How A Sprig of Fir Would Replace a Feather
2019 | 8 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
Taking its title from Charles Altamont Doyle, the film is a meditation on ritual, at once a labor of love and of pain, of parting. A taxonomy of the investigation of love, of becoming. In perpetual beginning. In perpetual ending. Coming into vision, into the present, a leaving. A leaving.
-AK
RUN!
2019 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
RUN! is a queer, experimental, anti-war film.
Production on RUN! began in the summer of 2017, during Trump’s ongoing escalating threat of nuclear war and shortly after he announced his transgender military ban. While many mainstream LGBT organizations and their allies committed to fight against the trans military ban, RUN! is aligned with radical queer activists who have responded with critiques of the US military’s violence around the globe, destruction of the environment, and the trauma inflicted on service members and veterans. More: https://queertranswarban.wordpress.com
RUN! includes three main components: footage from sites of nuclear development, detonation, industry, tourism, and activism in New Mexico and Vermont; a found-footage film on the lifecycle of houseflies; and a reenactment of Jack Smith’s 1969 drag performance as Rose Kennedy in his film Song for Rent. Through layering and juxtapositions of these sections, RUN! examines how the interlocking ideologies of war and white supremacy structure landscapes, community rituals, cinematic technology, entomology, epidemic management, and even notions of LGBTQ liberation.
-MA
Close at Hand
2001 | 4 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
Hand processed black and white images of an icy world collide with the sounds of breathing, heavy machinery and a drunken tune to create a sense of claustrophobic confusion and longing. Distortion, this is what happens when you get too close.
-SH
Film digitalia, profile picture, No. 8
Matt Whitman
2019 | 4 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
This body of work is a textual and archival response to and documentation of perpetual discrepancies—between living and deceased, public and private, physical and virtual—found in moments of contemporary mourning. Shot and exhibited on 16mm film, the work’s own ontology speaks to the material vulnerabilities, susceptibilities, affective properties of the physical archive, particularly in juxtaposition to contemporary modalities of digital memory. This body of filmic work is seen to perpetuate, in vain, a synoptic visual language of social media, while challenging the immediacy and omnipresence of written language created for and within a digital social space by allowing it to be made readable only through its recording onto and reading from film.
-MW
Kitchen Beets
2019 | 1 minute | UK | 16mm | b&w | sound
Never-ending tidying up turned into rhythmic beat and magic trick. A brief structural film cut to the rhythm of the gap between the optical sound head and the image.
-BH
IT WASN'T MEANT TO BE SEXY! / Sexy hätte das nicht sein sollen
2019 | 2 minutes | Austria | 16mm | b&w & color | silent
The male body in movement, in observation, in minimal processing, in fire, iron and steel. We watch and analyse, while the black and white delivers the inner monologue of the colour material. And the scratches. And there is only silence but be sure it wasn't meant to be sexy. Gentle hands, leading to self-observation. Until turning away: it will not stop, so say no more.
-CSL
Catalog
2005 | 11 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Catalog is a composition of stillness-inversion of the spectacle—actors are posed recreating various photographs in surroundings unfrozen. The sound track is a labile and dense tale of spaces, royalty and a photograph more mutable than an image should be. The sound track is read by Gregg Biermann.
-SB
Briana Marela Lizárraga is a Latinx composer/artist formerly from Seattle, WA and now currently based in Oakland, CA. Pursuing an MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College, she has returned to working with a more experimental sound focus than past albums released commercially through independent label Jagjaguwar. She is also known for her work with sampled instrumentation and synthesis performance with MaxMSP, using her voice as a focal point as well as an ambient texture in compositions. Her current interests involve working with surface transducers, analog circuitry, and digital coding with micro controllers to engage objects and the body in live performance with mapping and gestural control.
Joel Stephen Skavdahl is an American visual artist using a wide range of mediums including 2D illustration, screen printing, 16mm direct animation, analog photography and ceramics. He has been published by alternative small press publications such as Neoglyphic Media, Cold Cube Press, and DDOOGG. He often goes by pseudonym SEAGULLINVASION (also the name of his solo music project) and has played in bands Fake Sick, Holy Komodo, Crumbs, and Briana Marela. Currently living in Oakland, CA.
Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Her films and videos are literary/cinematic hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic, works. They consider the basic philosophical questions of human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor.
Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals.
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. The forthcoming Trial in the Woods will be published by Plays Inverse in Spring 2020.
Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born multimedia artist. Her work spans multiple disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and video. Her moving image work has screened at festivals internationally at Crossroads Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Antimatter, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, Slamdance Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Haverhill Experimental Film Festival, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, among others. Anna's work also screens in classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, basements, and school houses! She is also painter, printmaker, curator of exhibitions, programmer of screenings. Anna currently lives and works in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Malic Amalya’s films and videos have screened widely, including in the Transgender Museum of Art and Herstory exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Museum of Northwest Art in Washington State, the San Francisco Cinematheque’s Perpetual Motion series, Festival Les Merveilles in Paris, MIX Copenhagen, Cinema of the Dam’d in Amsterdam, EXiS Festival in Seoul, Onion City in Chicago, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and the TIE Cinema Exposition in Milwaukee & Montreal.
Malic collaborates with the artist Nathan Hill as Vitreous Chamber. They are currently Affiliate Artists at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA and have been Artists in Residence at Signal Culture in Owego, NY. Malic teaches time-based art at the California College of the Art and film production at the City College of San Francisco. Originally from Burlington, Vermont, Malic lives in Oakland, California.
Sarah Hanssen’s film and video works have shown at festivals, museums and screenings around the world. She received her Masters of Fine Art in film and video at the Massachusetts College of Art. Her writing has been published in The Projector: A Journal on Film, Media, and Culture, Community College Journal of Research and Practice, and The Curator. To see her film and video work, visit www.sarahhanssen.com
Matt Whitman (b. 1988, West Chester, Pennsylvania) is a New York-based artist working with moving image, photography, installation, writing and performance. His work has appeared at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Microscope Gallery, New York; La MaMa, New York; Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York; the Brooklyn Film Festival, New York; SF Cinematheque, San Francisco; The Front, New Orleans; The Lab, San Francisco; Unexposed Microcinema, Durham, North Carolina; and ‘8 fest’ Toronto, Ontario among others, with forthcoming screenings at the Manchester Film Festival, Manchester, UK. He has taught at Parsons School of Design since 2014.
Bea Haut is an artist and Experimental filmmaker who works with mainly black and white 16mm film. During the 1990s she worked in the Live Art collective Loophole Cinema, and more recently produced Analogue Recurring, a 16mm screening event in London. She ran a B&W process and print service at the 16mm lab within the University of East London (Film In Process), as well as teaching.
Her films have been shown internationally in festivals such as Media City Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Alchemy, Light Field and the London Film Festival.
Her films are distributed by Light Cone.
Claudia Siefen-Leitich, born in 1972, theatre work & film editing; publicist, editor and filmmaker, focus with analogue film and Japanese avant-garde, as well as industrial film.