Program 7
curated by Patricia Ledesma Villon
Sunday, April 13, 2025 @ 7pm
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
Wot the Ancient Sod
Diane Kitchen
2001 | 17 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
Effects of the sun move through the turning autumn leaves. Forces are in transition; the drama of ceaseless minute interactions. All of this light and life that goes into making up the earth, the ground, the sod. -DK
Black Rectangle
Rhayne Vermette
2013 | 2 minutes | Canada | 16mm | color | sound
"Time has not been kind to Kasimir Malevich’s painting, Black Square. In 1915, when the work was first displayed, the surface of the square was pristine and pure; now the black paint has cracked revealing the white ground like mortar in crazy paving."
This film documents a tedious process of dismantling and reassembling 16mm found footage. The film collage imitates functions of a curtain, while the recorded optical track describes the film's subsequent destruction during its first projection. -RV
b/w
Christopher Harris
2023 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent with audience participation for sound
Using close focus cinematography of text from commercial house paint samples, this film suggests a mythology of light and shadow. The audience is asked to participate during the screening by reading the paint names aloud. -CH
26 Pulse Wrought - (Film for Rewinds) Vol. II Exceptional Violents
Andrew Busti
2017 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm scope/anamorphic | b&w | sound
These are the ordinary and daily hands. Spelling in signs. Reverse engineering rituals, performed on a stage, which was once referred to as "the world." -AB
Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin
Mariah Garnett
2012 | 14 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, the pervasiveness of this practice is highlighted alongside its ultimate, inevitable failure. The viewer moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 70's gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden. The film guides the viewer through the process of making contact with a figure who exists only in his own photographs. The film culminates in an interview with Peter Berlin in his apartment, describing a moment of exchange that crosses lines of gender and generation, a moment where the identities of two filmmakers briefly coalesce. -MG
A Black Screen Too
Rhayne Vermette
2024 | 2 minutes | Canada | 16mm | color | sound
The sequel to Black Rectangle. Acts of discipline in celebration of destruction. -RH
A Man Playing Movie
Jun'ichi Okuyama
1986-1987 | 10 minutes | Japan | 16mm | color | sound
"Jun'ichi Okuyama plays at making a film from the material and the accidents that gradually disrupt the natural recording of the camera. Everything begins and ends with the noise of the projector. Landscape sequences gradually undergo the interferences and rhythmic interruptions of a hand, a moving reel and then a crack crossing the frame from one side to the other, these are all tangible signs of the filmmaker's presence. The universe disintegrates and recomposes itself in this back and forth between reality and its reflection 'in the movie'." -Light Cone
No. 10
Madison Brookshire
2024 | 13 minutes | USA | 16mm expanded | color | sound
The Number Series uses double projection to create an uncanny experience of color as both presence and absence, a negation that is generative. In No. 10, symmetrical films emerge from and return to gray in an offset pattern. -MB
Diane Kitchen is an experimental filmmaker. Her work in film bridges documentary, personal expression, and cultural commentary.
Rhayne Vermette was born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba. It was while studying architecture at the University of Manitoba, that she fell into the practices of image-making. Primarily self-taught, her work emphasizes an interruption of image through collage, photography and analog filmmaking. Themes of place, time and memory are expressed through opulent layers of fiction, animation, reenactments and divine interruption. Her works and films have been exhibited internationally and highlights presentations at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Walker Art Center, New York Film Festival, the Remai Modern, Jeonju International Film Festival, Mar del Plata Film Festival, Valdivia International Film Festival, DocumentaMadrid, Platform Center for Photographic and Digital Arts, and Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.
Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences—among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embodies the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the U.S.
Andrew Busti is a Colorado-based filmmaker, educator, preservationist, and analogue film facilitator who has been making process-based films for 25 years. He has taught analogue and alchemical cinema since 2005 and continues to support analogue filmmaking and artists through his company Analogue Industries Ltd. His film series 26 Pulse Wrought - Film for Rewinds is a series of films utilizing polyphonic data structures and coded languages to engage viewers in both active and passive modes of data interpretation and translation.
Mariah Garnett mixes documentary, narrative and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. Using source material that ranges from found text to iconic gay porn stars, Garnett often inserts herself into the films, creating cinematic allegories that codify and locate identity. She holds an MFA from Calarts in Film/Video and a BA from Brown University in American Civilization. She has received awards from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Sarah Jacobson Film Grant, California Community Fund and Artadia Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally including at the following venues: The New Museum, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Hammer Museum, the Metropolitan Art Center (Belfast, UK) and her exhibiting gallery, ltd los angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Jun'ichi Okuyama (1947, Tokyo) graduated from Tamagawa University. He consistently offers a radical expression of cinema itself, using diverse and wide-ranging techniques.
Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience of time. He frequently collaborates with musicians and composers, including Ezra Buchla, LCollective, Laura Steenberge, Mark So, and Tashi Wada.