Program 6
curated by Samuel Breslin
in partnership with Frameline Distribution
▴ Em Van Loan, Jenni Olson, and Briana Marela in person ▴
Saturday, April 1, 2023 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 55 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
the information
Stephanie Barber
2021 | 1 minute | USA | 16mm | color | sound
sometimes, among the rubble of the endless forgetting and re-membering of our personal and collective histories, an artifact emerges. a clue, a document. hard evidence. maybe we struggle to contextualize these fragments, maybe we marry them to other fragments and build new narratives in an attempt to squint back through the past and explain to ourselves how we got here. the information is a short exclamation mark of a video, fragments asserting themselves as whole auto-ethnographies.
-SB
HRDPF: A Brief Rendering
Em Van Loan
2020 | 2.5 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
A portrait of a dear friend. Sound recording by Daniel Woehr and Helen Frazer. Writing by Helen Frazer. Image optically printed from footage found at a flea market in White River Junction, Vermont, after attending the Frazer Family Reunion.
-EVL
This Person
Nora Rosenthal
2022 | 4.5 minutes | Canada | 16mm | color | sound
This Person is a filmic essay about a very private person and their lover, who keeps getting distracted by the weight of the world.
No Backsies
Sara Bulloch
2020 | 3 minutes | Canada | super 8 | b&w | sound
Straight up angsty break up montage featuring cucumber. Created as part of WNDX's One Take Super 8.
-SB
The Electrolysis of Brine
Mark Toscano
2008 | 8 minutes | USA | 16mm | Color | sound
Brine is sodium chloride (NaCl) dissolved in water. If you perform electrolysis on brine you will get three substances: chlorine, hydrogen and sodium hydroxide. The electrolysis process is useful and common in the world of industry. For example, it aids in the manufacture of products as diverse as pesticides, soaps, fuels, and even margarine. This is one of the dullest educational films I have ever seen. A small attempt has been made to release its latent energy.
-MT
Wild Night in El Reno
George Kuchar
1977 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
This film documents a thunderstorm as it rages in full fury above a motel in May on the southern plains. There's sun, wind, clouds, rain and electrical pyrotechnics ... with perhaps a glimpse of a fleeting human figure. But only a glimpse.
-GK
Blue Diary
Jenni Olson
1997 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Through voiceover and static San Francisco landscapes, Jenni Olson’s classic 1997 experimental narrative short tells the melancholy story of a dyke pining over a one night stand with a straight girl.
-JO
Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons
Jodie Mack
2021 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
A world tender and unhatched, Future chaos in repose, in slumber. Yggdrasil. Microcosmos. Batter in a bowl. A living wreath. Oleander hyacinth blow away dandelion, particles of an interplanetary lullaby.
Dedicated to the one I love.
Desiccated attic must
momento mori in grace engraved.
With the loss of the imaginary and the real, I am unspeakable
as one remembers I once was this...
before myself, and then nothing, before I could touch the
envelope that is right before me, translucent,
When I could cry but could not answer.
- Darcy Shreve
THAT WAS WHEN I THOUGHT I COULD HEAR YOU
Matt Whitman
2021 | 9 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
That was when I thought I could hear you on petals, on fire, and on the edge of the bridge.
-MW
Briana Marela Lizárraga
live performance
16mm direct animation loops by Joel Skavdahl
Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic works. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and non-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. Her haiku collection Status Update Vol. 1 was published in the fall of 2019 by CTRL+P and her full length play Trial in the Woods was published by Plays Inverse in August 2021.
Em Van Loan is an experimental filmmaker, artist, and educator. They make films engaged with what they call intimate tactility, in which they cultivate a physical relationship with an analog medium while exploring deeply personal content.
Nora Rosenthal is a writer and filmmaker. She directed the darkly comic documentary Family Death Trip (2018), presented at POP Montreal, and her work as the producer and editor on the official music video for Basia Bulat’s “Your Girl” was recognized in the Prism Prize Top 20 for Best Canadian Music Videos in 2020. She is presently entering the second year of her MFA at York University, studying film production.
Nora has attended residencies at the Can Serrat International Art Residency in El Bruc, Spain, and the inaugural Momus Emerging Critics Residency in Montreal. Previously Cult MTL’s Arts & Culture Editor, where she interviewed artists from Laurie Anderson to Marie Chouinard, she founded the magazine Rat Chat in 2021, and continues to write regularly, with bylines in Momus, MUBI’s Notebook, and The Editorial Magazine. She is a guest film curator at the upcoming Images Festival in Toronto.
Sara Bulloch is an editor, filmmaker, and community organizer in Winnipeg, Canada. Many of her films explore mental health, relationships and identity. She also organizes her local OurToba Film Network.
Mark Toscano is an archivist and filmmaker, though not necessarily in that order.
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.
Jenni Olson is a queer film historian, writer and filmmaker. Her work is held at the Harvard Film Archive (in Harvard’s Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection). Her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history is featured in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema. She was recently named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list, and was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Jenni is a former co-director of Frameline (the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival). She co-founded the pioneering LGBTQ online platform, PlanetOut.com as well as the legendary Queer Brunch at Sundance. She is also the proud proprietor of Butch.org. Jenni is now in development on her third feature-length essay film, The Quiet World and an essayistic memoir of the same name.
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator. Her films unleash the kinetic energy of material remnants of domestic and institutional knowledge to illuminate the relationship between decoration and utility. Straddling the boundary between rigor and accessibility, her cinema questions how we ascribe value to things. 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.
Matt Whitman is from Pennsylvania and lives/works in Brooklyn, NY. His film have recently screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, CROSSROADS 2022, Chicago Underground Film Festival, ANALOGICA, the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter in Berlin, and Light Work UVP at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.
Briana Marela Lizárraga is a Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist. Her recent work centers the voice, embodied technology through gesture, and enhanced objects. Her gestural song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal driven pop music. Using the visual coding language MaxMSP and machine learning, she is able to make custom tools to use in combination with wearable wired and wireless technology. Her compositions carry varying fixed elements that transition into moments of improvisation.