PROGRAM NOTES 1988 San Francisco Cinematheque A Project of the fioartf o/ Directors Start The Foundation for Art in Cinema 480 Potrero Avenue Foundation tor Art in Cinema Scolt Slark Steve Anker is supported in part with lunrjs horn: San Francisco CA 941 10 President Program Director National Endowment lor the Arts (415)558-8129 Lon Argabrighl David Gerstein California Arts Council Lynn Kirby Administrative Director San Francisco Grants lor the Arts Diane Kitchen Caroline Savage Lee The San Francisco Foundation Jams Crystal Lipzin Operations Coordinator William & Flora Hewlett Foundation 1 From the collection of the n m PreTinger v Jjibrary t p San Francisco, California 2007 NEW VOICES, NEW FILMS September 22, 1988 I Can Never Be You, You Can Never Be Me by Cindy Greenhalgh, 1988, 8^5 min., 16mm, sound, "A collage (patchwork) film which considers subject/object duality, the politics of speech and gesture, and the refefinition of the space which sits between us. The film was made by carving out individual frames of film with an exacto knife, and rephotographing 2 lacy strips of positive/negative (foreground/background) together." - Cindy Greenhalgh Turner by Mary Serra, 1987, 3 min., 16mm, sound. "The film Turner was shot in Los Angeles and uses that city's urbanscape to emphasize the timelessness, fluidity and ethereal qualities of a sensual dreamscape." - Mary Serra Chromesthetic Response by Scott Stark, 1988, 9 min., 16mm, sound. "The film was created by putting 16mm movie film into a still camera and shot as if 35mm still photographs. When projected, portions of each image flicker by in a rapid, mesmerizing rhythm. The sound is created by the nuances of visual imagery: due to the unusual technique, the picture also overlaps the optical soundtrack area of the film, so that as the images pass through the projector they actually generate their own peculiar sound. " 'Chromesthesia' is a condition whereby a person sees a color and imagines he or she hears a sound associated with the image. The technique described above is a metaphor for that condition, and is an exploration of a sensory response that is beyond the realm of human intellect and emotion." - Scott Stark The Poet's Veil by Peter Herwitz, 1987-88, 13 min., 16mm blown up from Super-8, silent. "I'm fascinated by veils, surfaces, anything that obstructs a clear view. These veils, of color, distance, detached symbols, are both painterly in form and related to the acts of reading and writing seen throughout the film. The obscuring of the word represents my struggle to create an unnameable world of poetic mystery and nuance." - Peter Herwitz -INTERMISSION- End Over End by Konrad Steiner, 1988, 12 min., 16mm, silent. "End Over End is a tumbling, falling, ecstatic movement you might experience as delight on a ride at an amusement park or as terror during an earthquake. Some of the kinetic effects were produced by rapid montage and low quality home-processing of the film. The film is basically a sequence of shots, like any other film, and is motivated, like many other films, by a desire to fly -OVER- 7 :: <;':'. w-fr :-'- ".':"-.." y-.-'.-: 'V:>--^-:'>o : "OC' ' ' SECOND SIGHTS - Highlights of the Year III Sunday, June 19, 1988 1) Field Study by Gunvor Nelson, 1988, 16mm, 10 min. 2) Slant or Slumber by Chika Ogura, 1987, 16mm, 8 min. 3) Untoward Ends (Observing Religion) , Parts 1 & 2 by Daniel Barnett, 1970-73, 16mm, 20 min. 4) The Mysterious Barricades by Peter Herwitz, 1987, Super-Smm, 8 min. 5) 17 Reasons Why by Nathaniel Dorsky, 1985-87, 16mm, 20 min. San Francisco Cinematheque A Protect ot the Boartl ot Directors Staff The Foundation lor Art in Cinema 480 Potrero Avenue Foundation lor Art in Cinema Scott Stark S'eve Anker is supported in part with lunds from: San Francisco. CA 94110 President Program Director National Endowment lor the Arts (415)558-8129 Lon Argabnght David Gerstein California Arts Council Lynn Kirby Administrative Director San Francisco Grants lor the Arts Diane Kitchen Caroline Savage Lee The San Francisco Foundation Jams Crystal Lipzin Operations Coordinator William & Flora Hewlett Foundation 3) Medical Research/Special Report (1987) by Robert Fox. 16mm/color/sound/30min. Thrown inlo thf mi I "s tarv i ion, m-, , hysterical, naked." Illness as metaphor, reflections on life /death and the creative process. Sound arid image stitched together to form a I'romethean vision. Robert Fox - 4) The Secret Garden by 1'hil Solomon, Color/Silent, 23 minutes. 1986 87. "a. When I was young, my older sister invented games of imagination in order to assert and enforce her sibling authority. One of these was a trance game in which she would induce me to stare into the textured window in our bathroom and move ray head slowly from side to side so as to create moving patterns from the light refractions. She would call this 1 space the entrance to the 'Magical World of Paloopa . b. I used to have a recurring nightmare of running on a beach as a tidal wave was about to overwhelm me as it blackened the sky. c. I always thought the WIZARD OF OZ was a terrifying expose revealing God the Father to be a phony from Kansas. The Secret Garden is an attempt at a child's fever dream, within the dark walls of a radiating 'nuclear 1 family. Its theme: Trouble in 1'aradise." SECOND SIGHTS - Highlights of the Year - II_ Eye Gallery, June 18, 1988 1) Coming Up For Air (1986) by Chick Strand, 26% min. , color, sound. One year I had a show in New York and a friend in Vermont who suggested that I visit her as long as I was coning East. I had wanted to make a film with her for years because she had been part of my Mexican life before her move to Vermont. So, I brought along my camera with no idea of what I wanted to do except that I had seen a film called "THE SON OF AMIR IS DEAD," a French/Algerian feature which I liked a lot. I really couldn't figure out much about avant garde film, or even if I wanted to go on pretending that that's what I did, so I was thinking about some sort of narrative thing back there in 1976 when I started shooting it. Well, the show was in Rochester and I was beginning to think that I was having some flashbadcks from the days in the 60 's when you could order pure LSD from the Light Company in England, because there was something wrong with the trees. By the time I got to Vermont in my rented car, I felt that maybe I was really on a trip to Disneyland, because the trees all looked fake... the fall color was absolutely staggering. Well, I could hardly think very much about this narrative thing... the only thing I wanted to do was to get all of that color onto film.... Mean- while, for years I'd been collecting bits and pieces of prose and poetry that I like.... a sentence or two from a novel, maybe, and stuff that I'd written. So, I patched it all together and made some kind of a narrative.... For a long time, I'd been interested in having a prose track, which might or might not relate to the visuals, so I played with that idea, too. I haven't the least idea what this film is arxxat ex- or cept perhaps it has to do with loss of identity, horror, and dreams, maybe it has to do with some sort of giant memory bank and we are all clients. We deposit and withdraw, maybe at random, but with some sort of feeling of deja vu. I'm sure that by the time you see this film, my ideas about what it is will have changed, or maybe I won't have thought about it at all. Chick Strand 2) MAYHEM (1987) by Abigail Child, 20 min., b&w, sound. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade's Justine and Vertov's sentences about the satirical detective advertisement, MAYHEM is my attempt to create a film in which Sound is the Character and to do so focussing on sexuality and the erotic. Not so much to undo the entrapment (we fear what we desire; we desire what we fear) , but to frame fate, show towards up the rotation, upset the common, and incline our contradictions satisfaction, albeit conscious. Abigail Child INTERMISSION (over) life by depicting higher orders of experience. We find such an archaically ordained healing process lodged in the viewing of this film as well. This is an age which is starved for imagina- tions, which can be realized now only in the fenced-off world of art, a realm quite separate from the one we customarily inhabit. "THE LIGHTED FIELD" shows us to what extent it is critical to allow one's verbal left brain to go into retirement so that the imaginative right brain might seek and help us to experience ecstasies that can be savored and shared, here brought to fulfill- ment in a chosen medium. That this medium is cinema reminds us that we far too rarely encounter true embodiments of light and shadow dramas. '.7e need bring to every viewing situation a will- ingness to forego demands for slick products and instead reflect on whether a genuine poetic case is being generated for life- sustaining, faith-sustaining resolutions. Our need for new sustaining myths has never been more acute. At the forefront of dualities and even new triplicities of living, the artist has lived postmodeafnly and has brought back from our fractured- seeming world a cloth describing brand-new transmutative dreams for us to gratefully inhabit.