Program 7
curated by Syd Staiti
▴ Jimmy Schaus, Karen Holmes, Rocio Mesa, Abigail He, Raymond Rea, and Zhuoyun (Yun) Chen in person ▴
Saturday, April 1, 2023 @ 9pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 64 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Fuego Rápido
Jimmy Schaus
2021 | 3 minutes | Spain | Super 8 | color | silent | North American premiere
Bonfires, police lights and an enormous moon illuminate the youthful antics of Noche de San Juan in Madrid, closing the year’s longest day.
-JS
Saving the Proof
Karen Holmes
1979 | 11 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
"SAVING THE PROOF is a complex transformation of an ordinary action: a woman walking. The rhythm of her gait and the pulsating, repetitive sounds counterpoint with alternating images of her transversing city streets, passing windows and fences, descending stairs. As the images repeat and vary with mathematical precision, one becomes more interested in the process itself than in her destination. What appears to have been simple breaks down into a complex system of dichotomies, both in form and in content: city/country, completeness/fragmentation, presence/absence, illusion/reality, light/shadow, negative/positive, fiction/documentation. The film climaxes in a spectacular burst, as one feels that the film is literally coming apart. It ends as it began, as one long chain that can be interrupted at any point, and yet can only be seen as a whole piece."
- Margaret Ganahl, Camera Obscura
Tobacco Barns Light Studies
Rocio Mesa
2021 | 2 minutes | Spain | 16mm | b&w | silent
The tobacco plant was introduced to Granada (Southern Spain) in 1923. It became a monoculture in the region until the end of the century. When tobacco production stopped being profitable, the farmers switched to new crops like wheat, corn, or asparagus. However, the lands of Granada are still replete with tobacco barns: large empty houses where the leaves used to be hung to dry. They inhabit the landscape like architectural ghosts.
-RM
MAR DE CORAL
Elena Duque
2022 | 11 minutes | Spain | super 8 | color | silent | North American premiere
A leftovers film. Croquette of own and other's super 8 collected over the years and ordered according to color tones and autobiographical adventures. The result of cutting and splicing pieces of film as a soothing action.
-ED
Eidolon
Mike Rollo
2020 | 4 minutes | Canada | 16mm | b&w | sound
The seer passes beneath branches, crosses fields, observes the quiet corners of creation. Bright and dark take turns showing their faces, a two-sided phantasm, one energy shape-shifting through time. The seer makes note, gleans eidolons.
-MR
Pensão Globo
Matthias Müller
1997 | 15 minutes | Germany/Portugal | 16mm | color | sound
The film presents one visually dominant theme, the constant superimpositions, or double exposure effect, of what is being shown. The man seems to be accompanying himself as a ghost, the world escapes him continually, things are no longer fixed in their proper places; nothing remains still. The shots of the man in the hotel are taken from two slightly different positions but from the same distance, the lighting is intensified and is slightly distorted in time and space. (...) There have been too many attempts to transform poetry into film in the history of cinema. PENSAO GLOBO, however, represents something else. Müller does not limit himself to an attempt to translate an existing verbal structure into images. His success lies in being able to repeat in cinema the same structural act that is the basis of poetry.
- Peter Tscherkassky
Double Run Eight
Kioto Aoki
2022 | 2 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
Double Run Eight uses the mechanisms of a double eight camera to play with visual collisions and inversions of the resulting four frames, rearranging the image plane with forwards, backwards, and radial motion as the artist’s body activates, holds, and navigates propositions of the analogue image.
The film was made with a Bell & Howell Filmo series 8mm camera from the Rod Slemmons Camera Collection currently housed at the Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago, as part of The Chicago Cluster Project.
-KA
He Needs Dark to See
Abigail He
2021 | 2 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
Light bored
into his eyes but where did it go?
Into a sea of phosphenes,
along the wet fuse of some dead
nerve, it hid everywhere and couldn't
be found. I've used up
three guesses, all of them
right. It's like scuba diving, going down
into the black cone-tip that dives
farther than I can, though I dive
closer all the time.
- "Eyes" by William Matthews
For Nelie and Maria
Raymond Rea
1993 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
For Nelie and Maria is a contact improvisation dance film with original choreography by Wes Staats and an original music score by George Todd. Three women start by playing paper/rocks/scissors and the game expands into an examination of the ability of siblings to use each other in movement and sound.
-RR
France
Mariangela Ciccarello and Philip Cartelli
2022 | 6 minutes | Greece/Italy/USA | 16mm | color | sound | North American premiere
The formal simplicity of the “hexagon” (which refers to the idealized shape of metropolitan France) is countered in the film by convoluted drawings and twisted branches of a coastal environment, evoking French colonial domination and the illusion of national unity and harmony.
-MC & PC
Only If You Could See a View Above the Clouds
Zhuoyun (Yun) Chen
2022 | 4 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
A ghost, a face, lucid minerals, vague landscapes... What do you see when my words fall? To experience delayed emotions is like trying to decipher a riddle caught up in time lags. I wanted to tell that riddle visually.
-ZYC
Jimmy Schaus is an artist whose work spans experimental and narrative cinema, video art, sound and music.
Karen Holmes’ experimental films have been exhibited all over the US and Europe.
Rocio Mesa is a Spanish filmmaker based in California. She combines directing with production and programming. Her latest feature film as a writer/director, Secaderos (2022), World Premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival and Internationally premiered at SXSW. She has produced titles such as MBAH JHIWO (2021) by Álvaro Gurrea, premiered at Berlinale 2021. She is the director of “LA OLA - Independent Films from Spain”, an organization that showcases and promotes avant-garde Spanish cinema in North America. Mesa has worked as a programmer for festivals such as the LA Film Festival and international events like Art House Theater Day in the USA.
The Spanish-Venezuelan Elena Duque is a filmmaker, curator, writer and programmer currently living in Madrid. She works for (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico in A Coruña, for Seville Film Festival and for the University Camilo José Cela, besides writing for various publications and books, teaching workshops, making commissioned pieces and working in her own artistic projects.
Mike Rollo's photochemical practice explores alternative approaches to non-fiction cinema. Mike's films are place-based, focusing on landscape, rural industry, and communication cultures, with ecological thinking and mindfulness of the shifts, conflicts, and negotiations to themes of obsolescence, age, and decay. Mike teaches film production at the University of Regina.
Matthias Müller (1961, Germany) is an experimental filmmaker. He studied at the University of Bielefeld and the Braunschweig School of Art. Müller lives in Bielefeld and Cologne and has been working in film, video and photography since 1980, often in collaboration with Christoph Girardet. Müller has been featured in several group and solo exhibitions at institutions such as Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Hangar Bicocca and Museo Tamayo.
Kioto Aoki is an artist, educator and musician whose studio practice navigates various mechanisms and propositions of spatial and visual acuity. Grounded in the analogue image and image-making process and through tangential vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema, she forms a rhetoric of nuanced quietude responding to and formed by observations and experiences of the everyday. Often in her work, the body activates, holds, and navigates the propositions of sight and relativity, through notions of structural tangibility and material or site-specificity. Kioto has performed and exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Chicago Cultural Center, Gallery Kobo Chika (Tokyo) The Lab (San Francisco) and the Barbican Centre (London) among others. She received her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Abigail He is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and multimedia artist. Her recent work explores the interchangeable relationships between presence/absence, visibility/invisibility in both the material form and the conceptual representation through various media including film, video, sound, photography, performance, and sculpture. Using mainly recycled footage and color leader, she is interested in revealing the intrinsic physicality of film as a medium and a material.
Raymond Rea is a filmmaker and writer. He worked for over a decade as with San Francisco’s Theatre Rhubarb, a company dedicated to staging rarely seen and risk-taking theatre works. His own production company, Density Over Duration, has produced 8 stage works, 8 short films and an experimental narrative feature. His film and video work has screened nationally and internationally.
Mariangela Ciccarello and Philip Cartelli have worked together and separately since 2014, including on a trilogy of films about Mediterranean geographies and imaginaries under the collective name Nusquam (Latin for “no-place”). Their work has been exhibited at Locarno, Edinburgh, Ji.hlava, Torino, Syros, Microscope Gallery (New York), Halle Nord (Geneva), Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, and others.
Zhuoyun (Yun) Chen works with multiple mediums. Her most recent work experiments with figures, landscapes, and artificial objects as means of exploring the multiple nuanced facets in intimate relationships. Yun now lives and works in Los Angeles.