Program 4
curated by Trisha Low
Saturday, March 14, 2020 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 57 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Zinn
2018 | 3 minutes | Great Britain | 35mm | color | sound
A reflection on the changing and unchanging geology of a Dartmoor river. A Deep Time film commissioned by Mayes Creative for the Dark Skies: Bright Stars project, Cornwall. Filmed on location with 16mm clockwork Bolex camera, at Bantham on the coast of South Devon, Great Britain, Zinn is a creative exploration of the temporalities and effects of deep time, in which the film-maker responded intuitively to the location at low tide one summer afternoon. The 16mm clockwork Bolex camera became a sensory extension of his body, capturing on film his intuitive response to the embodied experience of the particular landscape of the estuarine beach as the tide came in, its sands shaped by cycles of sedimentation and erosion, a process of lifting up then grinding down the rocks of nearby Dartmoor over many millions of years. The sound design uses sonified data from the Large Hadron Collider to imagine the deep time processes taking place within the mantle of Dartmoor, with deep resonant bass undertones suggesting geological infrasound.
-SM
Stranger Baby
1995 | 14 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
Stranger Baby by Lana Lin made in 1995, is about micro-narratives moving between fiction, non-fiction, and science fiction elaborate multiple meanings of the term "alien."
"Substituting sly metaphor for political rhetoric on immigration, Lin examines our world of ethical and racial complexities."
– LA Asian Pacific Film Festival
![Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, HeartyJodie Mack2019 | 7 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silentGarden ghosts flirt with the weeds of spring, cycling matter[s] and lives and deaths. From Felix Salten’s Bambi, chapter on Winter: "Can it be true," said the firs…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58042c925016e1b3e34a6214/1581383089581-MM1XMPXOL4BU7KFEIJGE/WL2.jpg)
Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty
2019 | 7 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
Garden ghosts flirt with the weeds of spring, cycling matter[s] and lives and deaths. From Felix Salten’s Bambi, chapter on Winter: "Can it be true," said the first leaf, "can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we're gone and after them still others, and more and more?" "It really is true," whispered the second leaf. "We can't even begin to imagine it, it's beyond our powers." "It makes me very sad," added the first leaf. They were very silent a while."
-JM
Alpsee
1994 | 14 minutes | Germany | 16mm | color | sound
“Despite the seemingly innocuous gestures of household life, a dark, unmanageable world seems to want to erupt from it. At one point it literally does: in a stunning image, the milk the mother pours for her son overflows the glass onto the table, the floor, and eventually down the hall in an endless stream. This uncontrolled secretion, pure white, is disturbingly connected to the enigmatic maternal body. The sparse decor of the home, the primary color scheme, and high key lighting all emphasize the preternatural clarity of the image in ALPSEE. As in allegory, the sharp definition of the image belies its opaque, brooding signification. The pristine look of this film thus gives rise to its confusing, nightmarish quality, borne out of its name: the German word for nightmare is Alptraum.”
–Alice A. Kuzniar
Durbaar
2019 | 9 minutes | France/India | 16mm | color | sound
A mood board for the Deccan Sultanate of South India. A tapestry of images takes us through lavish chandeliers from the court of the Last Nizam of Hyderabad to the illuminated memoir of Babur, the founder of the Mughal Dynasty. A series of disappearing sonic crescendos flood underneath, remembering the fall of a former grandeur. This film is an ode to intricacy and majesty, through reverie and voyeurism.
-GV
Tirana
2019 | 3 minutes | Belgium/Albania | 16mm | b&w | silent
An afternoon filming in Tirana, Albania; going up and down the pyramid. Kids are observed through an admiring gaze. They proudly show us their urban playground, climbing to the top, ruling their city.
-EC
Something To Touch That Is Not Corruption Or Ashes Or Dust
2019 | 7 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Fences, zooms, blastbeats and oscillators search for possibility or perforation as walls close in. Attempting to break free from patterns and spirals as bodies become contained.
-MS
Stuart Moore is a film-maker and sound artist who uses film-based and digital technologies to make single and multiple screen artworks that investigate our relationship to place, exploring landscape and the environmental tensions of urban regeneration and expansion. His work is shown worldwide across public, gallery and online spaces, with recent screenings at Festival 1666 (São Paulo, Brazil), 10th Bridges International Film Festival (Nafplio, Greece), and On The Surface of Things exhibition (Sheffield, UK).
Lana Lin is a filmmaker, artist, and writer whose creative practice concerns embodied vulnerabilities. She has produced a body of experimental films and videos that interrogate the politics of identity and cultural translation through attention to the formal capacities and historical contingencies of moving image media. Since 2001, she has focused on collaborative multi-disciplinary research-based projects (as Lin + Lam) that examine the construction of history and collective memory. Her works have been screened and exhibited at UnionDocs, Brooklyn, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Gasworks, London, and Auckland Festival of Photography, among others. Lin has received awards from the Javits Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Civitella Ranieri, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Lin is Associate Professor of Film Theory and Digital Cinema and Director of the Undergraduate Programs in Media Studies at The New School, New York.
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.
Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Locarno Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She was the 2017/18 Roberta and David Logie/Film Study Center Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a 2018/19 Fellow at the Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University. She is a 2019 Artist In Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and she is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College.
Matthias Müller is a German experimental filmmaker and curator, often working in the field of found footage films. From 1994 to 1997 he worked as Guest Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Germany), and from 1998 to 1999 at the Dortmund Fachhochschule. Mike Hoolboom writes that "Müller's gorgeous chromatic schemes, his characteristic syncopation, grand eye for detail, and his resolute focus on the traumas underlying his subjects, the fact, that his empathy with his subjects is so perfectly borne into the apparatus of a materialist film practice, all this makes him one of the fringe's most powerful and most perfect makers."
Gautam Valluri is an artist working with film. His work explores the relationship between architectural spaces and personal histories through the materiality of celluloid. He is the recipient of Masters Degrees in Experimental Film from Kingston University London and Université Paris VIII.
His work has been exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, Cinematek in Brussels, CCCB in Barcelona, Museu do Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, The Korean Film Archive in Seoul and at various film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück) and Images Festival (Toronto).
Eva Claus is working primarily with 16mm film. Educated in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium and at the Friedl Kubelka School for independent film in Vienna, Austria. Her films have been screened in various places over the world. Eva currently lives and works in Brussels.
Mike Stoltz is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice is dictated by process, working directly with moving images, sound, special effects, montage and projection to reexamine the familiar.