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San Francisco Cinematheque
1995 Program Notes

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From the collection of the

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San Francisco, California
2007

EDITOR

C Whiteside
Irena Leimbacher

Cover Art:

Program Notes Written and Researched By

Danielson, Rick
Etonenghini, Geoffe
Frye, Brian
Golembiewski, Emily
Lambert, Jeffrey
Leimbacher, Irina
Minh-ha , Trinh T.
Shepard, Joel
Terry, Chryss
Wagner, Todd
Whiteside, C

Program Curators/Presenters:

Ahwesh, Peggy
Anker, Steve
Gertiz, Kathy
Handeiman, Michelle
Leimbacher, Irina
Shepard, Joel
Wallin, Michael

© Copyright 1996 by the San Francisco Cinematheque. No material may be reproduced
without written permission from the publisher. All individual essays © to the individual
authors.

San Francisco Cinematheque, Sept. 1995 - Aug. 1996:

Steve Anker, Artistic Director

Joel Shepard, Associate Director

Irina LcimbsichcT, Administrative Manager

Board of Directors

Stefan Ferreria Culver

Linda Gibson

Sharon Jue ^ .

San Francisco Cinematheque

Wendy Levy
Ariel O'Donnell
Sandra Peters
Laura Takeshita
Michael Wallin

480 Potrero Aveneue

San Francisco, CA 94110

Phone: (415) 558-8129

Fax: (415) 558-0455

Table of Contents

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDEClNEMA-l 1

MATERIAL& SENSATION

AUSTRIAN AVANrr-GARDEClNEMA-2 2

THE FILMS OF PETER KUBELKA

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE ClNEMA-3 2

CULTUREANDlTS DISCONTENTS

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA^ 3

BODY AS MATERIAL

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE ClNEMA-5 5

PLACE/ REPLACEMENT

NIGHT OF UVING COLOR

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE ClNEMA-6

INTTIMATEINVASIONS

EXQUISri'bFRAGMENTS

NEW FILMS BY ROSSLIPMAN

Parents

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE ClNEMA-7

INTERIOR SPACES

THE FILMS OF YOKO ONO

DORIS WISHMAN

EASTERN EUROPE

ALVARFZ& POVEY

NOT BEIRUT: BY SALLOUM& TOUHC 25

NEW YORK SCUM 26

Caitun Manning's Personal Witness 27

STANBRAKHAGE: SONGS PROGRAM 2 29
Song XII, Fifteen Song Traits-Song XXII

TEENAGETRASHBASH! 31

Canyoncinema Nights 33

stanbrakhage: songs program 3 34

Song XXIII (23rd Psalm Branch Part 1 & 2)

CINEMA VERFTE: JEAN ROUGH 36

open s greening 40

ErnieGehr: adeuneKent Award 40

NELSON & WILEY Before Need Redressed 43

SIMPLE BEAUHES: THE ART & LIFE OF 45
BRUCE BAILUE (April 17, 20 & 21)

imaginary light 49

achtungBaby ! —Media snatchers 52

LoveandDingleberries 54

The Mammals OF Victoria 56

THEFiLMsoF YOKO ONO— Program 2 57

Canyoncinema NIGHTS 59

RB3. 8mm Savedfrom Extinchon 61

THE Story lived by atraud-M6mo 62

Exploring Raqsms 63

Marqa Brady andMen^ruation 64

alexanderkluge's s hort films 65

ALEXANDERKLUGE: The Blind Director 66

WONT YOU OOMEOUT AND PLAY... 67

BEAUTIFULPBOPLE/BEAUTIFULFRIENDS 69

lynnhershman+ friends in person

Bay area Women at Work 70

time bomb! 73

IN MEMORIAM: WARREN SONBERT 74
A TRIBUTETOHIS LIFE AND WORK

FAQNGEDEN-I 76
SANFRANQSOO'S UNDULATINGSKYLINE

FAaNGEDEN-2
SCALES OFGRANECUR

Facing eden-3 80

light energies: landscapes ofthemind

FACING EDEN^

LIFE FLOWSINTHEMODERN WORLD

WISEMAN: High School & Primate 86

CINEMATHEQUE: BEHINDTHE SCENE 87

. . .and then god became disoriented ... 90

ELLENBRUNO 91

MICHAEL WaLUN'S Black Sheep Boy 92

TRINH T. MINH-HA 'S a Tale Of Love 94

QUEER SHORTSBYFEATUREDIRECTORS 96

FILMS FROM PARIS' LIGHT CONE 97

TERMINAL USA - UNCENSORED! 99

LOOK AND LISTEN: A HLM/SOUNDLAB 101

PaulMcCarthy : Heidi & Painter 103

CULT RAPTURE !wrTH ADAM PARFREY 104

Media Fantasies AND REALITIES 104

A Bruce ConnerCelebration ! 105

Andy Warhol's Vinyl & My Hustler 107

SEASONAL Forces io8

First festivalcelluloidall no

JAMESBENNING'S Deseret 112

STEVEFAGIN'S Memorial Day (Observed) 1 13

MEMORY 1 14

HOMESCREENING 1 15

,¥■

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA: 1955-1993
PROGRAM 1: MATERIAL & SENSATION: AN OVERVIEW

Tuesday, January 17, 1995 — Pacific Film Archive

This stunning overview introduces nine filmmakers whose other films appear in later
programs. Beginning with Peter Kubleka's groundbreaking, beautiful first film, Mosaik im
Vertrauen (1955), the program continues with local premieres of Valie Export's bold
sexual manifesto A/aw & Woman & Animal (1973), Ernst Schmidt Jr.'s Bodybuilding
(1966) (recorded during an Otto Muehl Materialaktion), and films by Martin Arnold, Mara
Mattuschka, Kurt Kren, Dietmar Brehm, Hans Scheugl, and Peter Tscherkassky.

Mosaik im Vertrauen (Mosaic in Confidence) (1955), by Peter Kubelka;
35mm, b/w+color, sound, 16 minutes

2160: 48 Kopfe aus dem Szondi-Test (2/60 48 Heads from the Szondi Test) ( 1960),
by Kurt Kren; 16mm, b/w, silent, 5 minutes

Bodybuilding ( 1965/66), by Ernst Schmidt Jr. ; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes

Hernals (1967), by Hans Scheugl; 16mm, color, sound, 11 minutes

Mann & Frau & Animal (Man & Woman & Animal) (1910-13), by Valie Export;
16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

Manufraktur (Manufracture) ( 1985), by Peter Tscherkassky;
35mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

Kugelkopt (Ballhead) ( 1985), by Mara Mattuschka; 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 minutes

Color de Luxe ( 1 986) , by Dietmar Brehm ;

16mm (S-8mm blow up), b/w, sound 7 minutes

passage a Vacte ( 1993) by Martin Arnold; 16mm, b/w, sound, 12 minutes

•information about the films and filmmakers are excerpted from our catalogue,
Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema 1955-1993 on sale at the Cinematheque*

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA: 1955-1993
PROGRAM 2: THE FILMS OF PETER KUBELKA

Tuesday, January 24, 1995 — Pacific Film Archive

"Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium: and, as 1 honor that
quality above all others at this time (finding such a lack of it now elsewhere),
I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world's greatest film-maker
—which is to say, simply: see his films!"

—Stan Brakhage
Pause! (1977); 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes

"Amulf Rainer himself is an artist of unique originality and intensity. His face art, which
constitutes the source of imagery of Pause!, is a chapter of modern art in itself... both

San Francisco Cinematheque

Rainer and Art disintegrated and became molecules, frames of movements and expressions,
material at the disposal of the Muse of Cinema."

—Jonas Mekas

Mosaik im Vertrauen (Mosaic in Confidence) (1955);
35mm, b/w/color, sound, 16 minutes

"Kubelka's motive for making the film lie in his belief that commercial films do not fully
exploit cinematic possibilities. He declares that the place of the plot and its ostensibly
disparate scenes is the screen, and the time shall be any time at which the film is shown."

—Alfred Schmeller, 1958

Adebmr {\951)\ 35mm, b/w, sound, 1.5 minutes
{Adebar will be shown twice)

"The film's images are extremely high contrast black-and-white shots of dancing figures;
the images are stripped down to their black-and-white essentials so that they can be used in
an almost terrifyingly precise construct of image, motion, and repeated sound."

—Fred Camper

Schwechater {\95^)\ 35mm, color, sound, 1 minute
{Schwechater will be shown twice)

"In 1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Schwechater beer. The
beer company undoubtedly thought they were commissioning a film that would help sell
their beer; Kubelka had other ideas." — FC

Amulf Rainer {\960y, 35mm, b/w, sound, 6.5 minuets

"Amulf Rainer's images are the most 'reduced' of all — this is a film composed entirely of
frames of solid black and solid white... in reducing cinema to its essentials, Kubelka has
not stripped it of meaning, but rather made an object which has qualities so general as to
suggest a variety of possible meanings, each touching on some essential aspect of
existence." — FC

Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa) (1966); 16mm, color, sound, 12.5 minutes

"...relatively conventional 'records' of a hunting trip in Africa. The shooting records
multiple 'systems'— white hunters, natives, animals, natural objects, buildings— in a
manner that preserves the individuality of each. At the same time, the editing of sound and
image brings these systems into comparison and collision, producing a complex of multiple
meanings, statements, ironies. [...]" —Fred Camper

•information about the films and filmmakers are excerpted from our catalogue,
Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema 1955-1993 on sale at the Cinematheque*

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA: 1955-1993
PROGRAM 3: CULTURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Tuesday, January 24, 1995 — Pacific Film Archive

These five films tear at the placid fabric of Viennese domestic life. The beautifully
photographed Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, one of the most inventive and iconoclastic of
the eariy filmmakers, is an unruly, fragmented narrative following the exploits of several
rebellious young people. Redolent with languorous beat energy, it occupies a place oddly

Program Notes 1995

reminiscent of our own The End (Christopher MacLaine). Schmidt, Jr.'s P.R.A.T.E.R. is
an abrasive and witty documentary portrait of activities around Vienna's historic
amusement park; Subcutan by Rosenberger is a sizzling montage portrait of Vienna in
1988, "a glance under the skin of everyday life, searching for the open sores in the soul of
this would-be metropolis" (J.R.); and Scheirl/Schipecks's The Abbotess and the Flying
Bone is cin outrageous fantasy set in a psycho-sexual zone, complete with mythic and
ritualistic mysteries. — Steve Anker

5162 Fenstergucker, Abfall, etc, (5/62: People Looking Out the Window, Trash, etc.)
(1962), by Kurt Kren; 16mm, color, silent, 6 minutes

P.R.A.T.E.R. (1963-66), by Ernst Schmidt, Jr..; 16mm, b/w, sound, 21 minutes

Subcutan (1988), by Johannes Rosenberger; 16mm, color, sound, 20 minutes

.. ..I
The Abbotess and the Flying Bone ( 1989) by Angela Hans Scheirl & Dietmar Schipeck;
16mm, b/w, sound, 18 minutes

Sonne halt! (Sun stop!) (1959-1962), by Ferry Radax; 35mm, b/w, sound, 25 minutes

•information about the films and filmmakers are excerpted from our catalogue,
Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema 1955-1993 on sale at the Cinematheque*

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA: 1955-1993
PROGRAM 4: BODY AS MATERIAL

Sunday, January 29, 1995 — Pacific Film Archive

10/65: Selbstverstummelung (10/65: Selfinutilation) (1965), by Kurt Kren.;
16mm, b/w, silent, 6 minutes

"Kurt Kren's films possess an abstract, serial, musical, structural, and mathematical
quality, showing an objectivisation, an almost documentary quality. In
Selbstverstummelung, Kren gives us a surrealistic drama of symbolic self-destruction,
pacing out each gesture so that one gets a tense, iconoclastic revelation of a man covered in
white plaster lying surrounded by razor blades and a range of instruments looking as if they
have been taken from an operating theatre. The blades, scissors and scalpels are gradually
inserted into him in a ritualistic self-operation."

—Stephen Dwoskin

Filmreste (Film Scraps) (1966), by Ernst Schmidt, Jr.; 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 minutes
Ernst Schmidt's relationship with the world is largely enacted via the medium of film;
cosmos and film cosmos become identical, and moreover, the cosmos acquires a cinematic
order.

Montage of left-over film material from film scraps, amateur films, film leaders, recordings
of material happenings, etc. Edited according to an exact plan (60 blocks of 10 takes each),
then largely drawn over. My most destructive film, the "model for a futuristic newsreel."
(ES)

San Francisco Cinematheque

....Remote....Remote.... (1973), by Valie Export; 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes
"...there is nothing dreadful about a woman trimming her body, especially in the places
where she enhances the glamour imposed on her body by the civilizing influences of the
world around her."

— Renate Lippert

16167: 20. September (16/67: September 20) ( 1967), by Kurt Kren;

16mm, b/w, silent, 7 minutes
"..the camera work is so crass that even hard-baked observers do not react without
embarrassment."

— Theodor Schroder

Der musikalische Affe (The Musical Ape) (1979), by Rudolf Polanszky;
16mm (S-8 blow up), b/w, sound, 5 minutes

In each new work I create a new field of action, I multiply the surroundings of my works,
constantly adding new relations as functions of evolving reflexes and variable standpoints.
(RP)

Die Geburt der Venus (The Birth of Venus) (1972), by Moucle Blackout;
16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes

As I have never worked with a usual script I stay flexible in filming scenes, which I often
shoot out of a certain situation or emotion with a sensation for a special image in my mind.
(MB)

B antes Blut (Colorful Blood) (1985), by Renate Kordon;
16mm (shot on 35mm), color, sound, 8.5 minutes

"As an architecture student, Renate Kordon inclined more to two-dimensional renderings of
her ideas than three-dimensional realizations... Moving, then, from the material permanence
of the building medium to the substanceless ephemerality of projected light was a way to
visualize the invisible, to reflect on the inner lives of things."

— Diane Shooman

Films by Mara Mattuschka:

NabelFabel (NavelFable)(l9S4); 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

Der Untergang der Titania (The Sinking ofTitania) (1985);
16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

Parasympathica (1986); 16mm, b/w, sound, 5 minutes

KaiserschnUt (Ceasarean Section) (1987); 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

Es hat mich sehr gefreut (1 Have Been Very Pleased) ( 1987) ;
16mm, b/w, sound, 2 minutes

"Codes are rule systems which have one thing stand for another. But Mara Mattuschka
wants to get to the things themselves, she wants to reverse the constitutive insufficiency of
language, in order, via pleasure in art, to find pleasure in the body and thence pleasure in
being. To this end, she rebels against the dictates of the world and the rules of
cinematography and gives an exemplary demonstration of her clashes with the prescribed
order of language."

— Peter Tscherkassky

The Murder Mystery (1992), by Dietmar Brehm; 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 minutes

Program Notes 1995

"By frequently using pornographic films as his basic material, Dietmar Brehm reveals their
regressive nature: he turns the desublimized gaze, with simultaneous denial of sexual
satisfaction, into a tension which makes it possible to experience the human drama of
denied satisfaction amid the barred or at least impeded gaze.*'

—Peter Tscherkassky

•information about the films and filmmakers are excerpted from our catcilogue,
Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema 1955-1993 on sale at the Cinematheque*

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA: 1955-1993
PROGRAM 5: Place/Replacement

Tuesday, January 31, 1995— Pacific Film Archive

"The camera has always been used to document particular locations, but the result usually
offers only a stylized and limited experience of the nuances and feeling of place. The films
in this program conceive new formal strategies to express the character and perception of
private and open spaces. Kren's Asyl takes a bucolic country scene and breaks the frame
into several pieces, each recorded in different seasons but juxtaposed so that they appear to
be happening simultaneously. The resulting composite creates a counterpoint that both
reflects and departs from perceived reality. Sunset Boulevard by Korschil offers a view
into the isolated world of commuters as observed through countless passing car cubicles;
Ponger's Semiotic Ghosts knits a tapestry of symbolic images from sources found naturally
in different locations of the world; General Motors by Hiebler/Ertl and Motion Picture by
Tcherkassy both explore the intoxicating flavors of old movie images, one in terms of
aesthetic renewal, the other as cultural critique. Scheugl's The Place of Time is a profound
meditation on the deceptively controlling closed form of cinematic sound and image."

— Steve Anker

AUGeneral Motors, ( 1993), by Sabine Hiebler & Gerhard Ertl;
35mm, b/w, silent 15 minutes

Motion Picture (La Sortie des Ouvriers de VUsine Lumiere a Lyon) (1984),
by Peter Tscherkassy; 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 minutes

31175: Asyl(31/75: Asylum) (1975), by Kurt Kren; 16mm, color, silent, 9 minutes

Sunset Boulevard (1991), by Thomas Korschil; 16mm, color, silent, 8 minutes

Semiotic Ghosts (1990-91), by Lisl Ponger; 16mm, color, sound, 18 minutes

Der OrtderZeit (The Place of Time) (1985), by Hans Scheugl;
16mm, color, sound, 40 minutes

•information about the films and filmmakers are excerpted from our catalogue,
Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema 1955-1993 on sale at the Cinematheque*

San Francisco Cinematheque

NIGHT OF LIVING COLOR
CURATED AND PRESENTED BY ALFONSO ALVAREZ

Thursday, February 2, 1995 — Center for the Arts

This program was developed from a hst of films I put together when I taught a summer arts
class in cameraless filmmaking. My desire was to show films with a wide variety of
palettes and stylistic tendencies. Works by Craig Baldwin, Stan Brakhage, Glenda Egan
and Len Lye were some of the examples I wished to inspire those young minds. From this
list then, and my own leanings as a colorist, I began to consider works that are
sophisticated in execution, unusually colored, have an ironic sense of humor, and are
cameraless or hand made. The films below 2U"e works that have one or all of these elements,
form found footage to lurid color saturation to texturing the film surface with shopping bag
ink or newspaper ink. This is the kind of filmmaking we can do in the comfort of our own
home.

Cha-Hit Frames (1986), by Dirk De Bruyn; 16mm, color, sound, 21 minutes

De Bruyn's meticulously edited film is a testament to hue saturation and color
manipulation. Through the optical illusion of retinal memory, De Bruyn tricks the eye into
seeing tertiary sets of colors from densely edited sequences of positive and negative
frames. Rub-on images appear three dimensional; you won't believe your eyes!

BagUght (1994), by Rock Ross, Michael Rudnick & Friends;
16mm, color, sound, 2.5 minutes

This is the first of three films in tonight's program in which the emulsion is made by the
filmmakers. Elegantly assembled through a sophisticated process that involves ironing
plastic shopping bags to transfer the inky colors onto clear acetate, BagUght is the
politically correct alternative to cutting the wings off moths.

Kaleidoscope {\92>5) and Color Flight (\93H), by Len Lye; color, sound, 8 minutes

Sixty years after their making, Len Lye's unique hand painted films are still delightful
reminders of cameraless cinema's potential.

Tree (1994), by Tim Wilkins; 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes

As the educational film from Hell, Tree is suffused with sardonic humor that is at once
cryptic and lyrical. In less than five minutes. Tree single-handedly undoes years of
educational film codification and brings new meaning to the term truncated.

The E/w/ (1985-86), by Donna Cameron; 16mm, sound, color, 5 minutes

The third film in which the emulsion is made by the filmmaker. End's dancing Benday dots
were created by burnishing double perf splicing tape onto newspaper, magazine photos and
color photo-copies, then pulling away the tape to remove the pigment and paper fiber, then
optical printing the results.

Walking the Tundra (1994), by Jeremy Coleman; 16mm, color, sound, 4.5 minutes

"Starting with footsteps. Walking the Tundra is a rich collage film that uses a variety of
experimental techniques drawing upon the history of American Avant Garde. It captures a
moment in thought, using modem methods of transportation (as) metaphor and ending with
footsteps thus completing a circle."

—Jeremy Coleman

Program Notes 1995

Epilogue (1986-87), by Matthias MUller; S-8mm, color, sound, 16 minutes

Miiller is a master of low tech rephotography. The pulsing images filmed off a textured
surface walk us through a portrait of lush blood reds and blacks that begs us to stay and
play. As if never quite awaking from a dream. Epilogue is a microscopic look at the
burning grain of emulsion that makes the memories of childhood games seem so dark.

CrossRoad ( 1988) and Midweekend (1985), by Caroline Avery;
16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes

CrossRoad is a one-minute polychromatic paint film that sets the stage for Midweekend.
Painted, bleached and heavily edited, Midweekend is a cascade of colored leader and
educational, documentary, travel and unsplit Smnifilms chopped into one to three frame
increments.

Rip (1989), by Joel Schlemowitz; 16mm, b/w, sound, 2 minutes

Rip is part of the school of hand-made films that remind us of the materiality of film itself
and how easily it can be manipulated. It represents a witty look into a liminal realm where
positive and negative imagery vie for frame space. The torn images bring us back to the
tangibility of handcrafted filmmaking.

• program notes by Alfonso Alvarez •

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA: 1955-1993
PROGRAM 6: INTIMATE INVASIONS/SUBVERTING SEXUALITY

Sunday, February 5, 1995 — SF Art Institute

Super-8 Films By Angela Hans Scheirl And Ursula Piirrer

"Playing with monstrosity and taking pleasure in violating taboos are both evident in the
work of Angela Hans Scheirl and Ursula Piirrer. Since the early 1980s, female desire and
pleasure m power form their central themes. With humor and irony, they pursue a break
with tradition and boldly deal with outlawed aspects of feminine identity."

— Elke SchUttelkopf, Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema 1955-1993, Tour Catalogue 1994

Super-8 Girl Games (1985); S-8mm, color, sound, 2 minutes
Intimate and playful, emotion gestures scratch through the celluloid.

Das Schwartz Herz Tropft (The Black Heart Leaks) (1979);
S-8mm, color, sound, 13 minutes

Two women engage in strange, abstracted rituals, punctuated by apparently symbolic
objects, including a black "bleeding heart." These rituals seem obscure and rather comic,
but with repetition each variation takes on significance, as with any ritual. With a sly
tongue-in-cheek, each mask or angle of head might indicate a plot development. The
combination of playfulness and austerity creates an odd intimacy. The audience is part of
this ritual or parody.

Body-Building {19S4); S-8mm, color, sound, 3 minutes

"With rude spontsineiiy... Body-Building... parodiGS and radically upends male dominated
body ritual performance art."

— Steve Anker

San Francisco Cinematheque

Gezacktes Rinnsal schleicht sich schamlos schenkelndssend an

(Jagged Trickle Creeping Shamelessly, Wetting Thighs) (1985)',
S-8mm, color, sound, 4 minutes

A taboo image, not coyly accessorized but ritualized for the camera with a note of mischief
(I dare you to be shocked) — an efficient de-mystification. In exploring "monstrous
femininity" Scheiri and Piirrer are framing the feminine mystique in new terms. Consider
these rare images of socially unwelcome, volitioneil female sexuality — pleasure not in
womanly receptivity, but in shameless, clearly proud catharsis. This can be exhilarating,
strange or kinky. The key to monstrosity as power seems to lie in the film's unapologetic
tone. The audience cannot escape the act of looking.

Valie Export's Feature Length Vnsichibare Gegner
(Invisible Adversaries)

"Export's Invisible Adversaries is an important 'crossover' film combining avant-garde and
theatrical sensibilities, made during the mid-1970s. It chronicles the nightmarish
breakdown of a fashion photographer as she confronts her waning identity and security as
a career woman; blending narrative experimentation, fantasy, fact and theoretical critique, it
has enormous impact on independent features which followed it."

—Steve Anker

Vnsichibare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries) (1977), by Valie Export ;
16mm, color, sound, 1 12 minutes

"Art-making is shown as one way to understand and overcome 'them': this unbearable
disintegration. Invisible Adversaries affirms the act of representation."

—Amy Taubin, Soho News (May 7, 1980)

Invisible Adversaries bears some careful consideration. Each image and interaction has
been given several readings by critics, partly due to the sheer surrealism and exaggerated
metaphor which Valie Export uses to create the strange world of her protagonist's reality.
"Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction—
the Hyksos.' More sophisticated than '50s science fiction heroes, Anna questions whether
the Hyksos exist or whether she is projecting an internal metaphor into a hallucination. She
sets out with still and video cameras to gather evidence. The images she finds point to bad
days ahead but a question remains — does the evidence prove the existence of the Hyksos
or rather the subjectivity of the 'objective' machine?"

—Art/orum (November 1980)

"When the two characters videotape themselves talking, their video images and
voices... gradually overtake them so that the video seems to be generating the 'original' —
the people are the duplicates. With this scene and much else in the movie. Export suggests
a rich set of variations on the meaning of the Hyksos invasion."

—Amy Taubin, Soho News (May 7, 1980)

This video-taping scene also points to the precarious relationship of the recorded image to
the actual event, especially relevant if one needs to document an invasion. The irony of
course is that the invaders are invisible, but the cameras begin to 'pick up' the Hyksos. The
photographic image shifts between roles as Anna's proof of Hyksos, and the source of her
mental breakdown, as they become more bizarre and malignant. The film is full of
surrealistic metaphors for Anna's emotional state and/or for the Hyksos. The flesh, the
photograph, and the Hyksos become inextricable. "Consciously or not. Export's film is
pervaded by an ambivalent critique of representation— it might have been made to support
Susan Sontag's darkest anxieties about the post-modem proliferation of the image" (J.

Program Notes 1995

Terrifying because we've all had those dazed periods, overwhelmed at the horrific by the
mundane in our worid. And funny to see our absurd emotional tangles. When Anna fights
with her lover Peter in an outdoor caf6, it is painful if silly, and leaves you relieved to be
only watching. This scene has been called agonizing, but Amy Taubin found it "...a
brilliant parody of a woman and a man at an outdoor-cafe table discussing their
relationship: Anna's grotesquely nervous gestures distort her body.. .her lover is all
masculine stolidity and annoying calm, with a few simple, punchy politician's hand
movements... all the while the camera isolates each of them in turn... a terrific scene."

"Invisible Adversaries seems made in part to shock the bourgeoisie and, in fact, it did.
Completed in 1976, the film was funded by the Austrian Ministry of Art and Education,
and when newspapers attacked it as 'pornographic,' the ensuing parliamentary debate
insured its succes de scandale. Nudity and sex-play aside, the film includes a truculent
denunciation of its hometown, railing against every thing from the Austrian film industry
and the hard lot of local artists to the pretentious hodgepodge of Viennese architecture and
the hypocrisy of the City's burghers. 'Vienna's history is oblivion and treason,' Widl
asserts. 'Paranoia surrounds me in the form of this city.'"

—J. Hoberman, Village Voice {March 1981)

"Invisible Adversaries is slightly over-long and the last reel loses focus and power, I don't
really care. It makes you reconsider what you and everyone else is doing— in life and in
art."

—Amy Taubin

•program Notes by Maya Allison •

EXQUISITE FRAGMENTS: NEW BY HENRY HILLS
FILMMAKER HENRY HILLS IN PERSON

Thursday, February 9, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Henry Hills has made 18 short 16mm films since 1975. His work has received support
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the
Jerome Foundation, and Hip's Road and is in the permanent collections of the New York
Museum of Modem Art, the New York Public Library, the Archive du Film Experimental
d'Avignon, and elsewhere.

Given the speed of contemporary life and an exponentially increasing mass of information
moving at a constantly accelerating velocity, Hills composes films which present models of
concentration, condensing masses of imagery to their essential moments and radically
juxtaposing these to create pathways for thought. Rapid editing as generally employed in
the mass media presents a mindless profusion of trivialities lulling the viewer into a
semihypnotic state of receptivity. In contrast. Hills' work demands (and creates the
conditions for) intensely directed attention. Rhythmically complex and varied, his films
probe the depths of the topics at hand and expose new ways of seeing; educating the eye
for a more critical viewing of the immense flow of images which assault us daily and
suggesting fresh approaches to looking at the world at large. Closely allied to new
developments in music, dance, and poetry. Hills' work remains fresh over the years. Films
he made over a decade ago seem new today. Their ready accessibility belies their extreme
density, which encourages and rewards multiple viewing.

San Francisco Cinematheque

Bom in Atlanta, Georgia in 1948, Hills received a B.A. in English from Washington and
Lee University in 1970 and a M.F.A. in filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in

1978. He was a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam war, working as an emergency
room orderly for 2 years. He was President and founding board member of the Foundation
for Art in Cinema in San Francisco (1976-1978) and a member of the board of the Film-
Makers' Cooperative (1985-1988). He edited The Cinemanews, a West Coast avant-garde
film quarterly, from 1976-1980. He developed the 303 East 8th Street H.D.F.C, the only
successfully completed Manhattan artists housing project of the 80s, and founded the
Segue Performance Space there. He was Director of the Segue Foundation, a non-profit
literary organization, from 1985-1993, and President of Hip's Road, a non-profit new
music foundation, from 1992-1993. He has edited numerous music videos and has been
active as a curator throughout his career, running a periodic series through Segue since

1979. His book. Making Money (1985), is available from Roof Books. He is married to
Carol Volk, the translator (Renoir on Renoir, the New Ecological Order by Luc Ferry,
etc.). He is currently editing Shakespeare's Richard III, a documentary by Al Pacino.

George {1916, 1990); 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes

A portrait of George Kuchar composed on a J-K optical printer with 4 scenes always
running simultaneously through frame alteration (frame 1 = frame 1, scene 1; frame 2 =
frame 2, scene 2; frame 3 = frame 3, scene 3; frame 4 = frame 4, scene 4; frame 5 = frame
5, scene 1 ; frame 6 = frame 6, scene 2; etc.).

Kino Da! (1981); 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes

A portrait of North Beach communist cafe poet Jack Hirschman, cut after the manner of
radical Russian Futurist poetry.

Heretic (1994); 16mm, color, sound, 22 minutes

Heretic, or The Genius Preview, is composed from outtakes from the 1992 Joe
Gibbons/Emily Breer feature The Genius, starring Gibbons, Karen Finley, Adolphus
Mekas, Henry Hills, Mark McElhatten, Tony Oursler, Keith Sanborn, and Jennifer
Montgomery. Original music by Naked City {Heretic, the original movie soundtrack,
available on AVANT Records, disk UNION R-250225). Original titles, some
rephotography off the original videos, and original narration performed by Frank Snider. A
study of editing and its relation to the mechanics of the brain. Heretic initially poses as a
preview to the Gibbons' film which it then deconstructs and reforms into a satire on
psychotherapy.

SSS (1988); 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes

Composed from footage of movement improvised on the streets of the East Village by Sally
Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Henry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano,
Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others, painstakingly synched to music previously
improvised for the project at Noise New York by Tom Cora (cello). Christian Marclay
(turntables), and Zeena Parkins (harp).

Gotham {1990)', video, color, sound, 3 minutes

A music video commissioned by Elektra Records to the Naked City song "Batman." Naked
City is John Zorn (alto). Bill Frissell (guitar), Wayne Horvitz (keyboards), Fred Frith
(bass), Joey Baron (drums), and Yamatsuka Eye (vocals). Taking the band's name and
first album cover as a clue, I drew heavily on themes in WeeGee's photographs (his major
collection. Naked City, inspired the title of Jules Dassin's great 1950s film noir classic
which inspired the TV show of the same name, of which I employed a portion of an

Program Notes 1995

episode). Recreating many of his pictures in their actual Lower East Side/Little Italy
locations (a rare home movie shot of WeeGee— smoking a cigar— is also included) I shot
much of the footage on grainy 4X and transferred off a workprint which I intentionally
scratched up, to give an archival appearance. I also included archival footage (special
thanks to Bill McCahey), Hollywood gangster movie outtakes and documentary excerpts
(including actual morgue shots of John Dil linger— note the fly buzzing around his nose—
and Baby-Face Nelson— with the police pointing out the fatal gunshot entry points).

Bali Mecanique (1992,1993); 16mm, color, sound, 17 minutes

Edited in two separate parts: a recreation of a Legong performance and a more airy,
somewhat comical, music-video-style coupling of National Geographic-is landscape
footage with the original Broadway production recording of "Bali-Hai" from South Pacific.
The "Bali Hai" piece was made to counterbalance the almost academic precision of the
Legong section— for myself in the long process of making, for an audience in the perhaps
difficult process of viewing, for fun, and also to place myself in the picture. This song (the
recording I used was the actual scratched-up LP that I had grown up with and recently
found on the floor of a closet at my parent's house) with its dream of a paradise island
away from all the cares and woes, and pictures of beautifully sculptured rice terraces that
appeared at intervals over the years in National Geographic, were the material out of which
my sustaining dreams of Bali sprouted. I combined the two sections at the very end of the *^
editing. Originally I put the Legong first, assuming this would be the more difficult section
for the viewer— work first, then play. Some viewers, however, took the second part as a v
commentary on the first section in a manner different than I intended, feeling that I was
mocking or ridiculing the Balinese and their culture. This is absurd considering the
hundreds of reverential hours I spent attempting to recreate the devastatingly lovely Legong
for film. I have since reversed the order of the first and second sections, yielding more
satisfactory results. The dance footage in the (now) opening section (briefly reprised at the
end with its proper music) is from the "Oleg Tambulilingan" (or "erotic bumblebee").

The (now) second section presents a complete Legong dance, intercutting performances of
three popular Peliatan dance companies with footage of sacred architecture and several
Odalan temple celebrations. The casual documentary-style cinematography combines with
an intricate jigsaw-puzzle-style of music-driven editing to create a sense of being in the
center of the action. Perhaps the most popular dance in Bali, the Legong is always
performed by three young girls, two dressed identically in green representing King Lasem
and Princess Rankesari and the third dressed in red opening the dance as a servant, the
Condong, and later reappearing as a Garuda. This is set to a precise accompaniment of a
full gamelan orchestra. The dance is in four parts, each with substantially different (though
internally repetitive) musical accompaniment: 1. the dance of the Condong; the longest
section begins as an extended solo, changes in rhythm with the entry of the two legongs,
and culminates in her handing them each a fan; 2. the Bapang: an angry fan dance, with the
legongs moving "like twin breasts," ending with the Condong's exit; 3. the Penipoek: an
increasingly erotic duo, abruptly terminated with Rankesari rebuffing Lasem and escaping; I
4. the unheeded and unappreciated warning of the Garuda. In the 4th section imagery '
intercuts to emphasize and elucidate the structure of the music (and the manner in which
rhythms of life and celebration in Bali inform rhythms of their music) building to an
increasingly frenetic collage as the dance reaches its crescendo. The film ends with the
famous Kris dance of Batubulan as it is performed today.

Little Lieutenant (1993) , co-directed by Sally Silvers; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes

A look back at the late Weimar era with its struggles and celebrations leading up to the
world war, a period piece. Scored to John Zorn's arrangement of the Kurt Weill song,
"Little Lieutenant of the Loving God," and drawings its imagery from both the original

San Francisco Cinematheque

song and its somewhat idiosyncratic rearrangement. The film presents an internal reading
of Silvers' solo scored to the same musical piece, "Along the Skid Mark of Recorded
History." Closely following the Zom arrangement, the film was storyboarded in 30 scenes
(the arrangement changes approximately every 4 measures). Principally shot in a small
studio employing rear screen projection, with foreground movement choreographed to
interact with the projected imagery which reflects themes apparent in the song and its
arrangement. Scenes range through a Citizen Kane-esque pan up a foreboding structure,
idyllic lovers in both pastoral and industrial settings, labor marches, a lonely walk down a
deserted alley, a bar brawl, a Motown-ish girl group, a dream sequence, and a giddy
animation, up to the terrors of war and a bittersweet conclusion: an elaborate music video.
Silvers and Cydney Wilkes portray dual aspects of the Salvation Army Lieutenant who
sang the song in the Brecht/Weill play Happy End, with Kumiko Kimoto and Leonard
Cruz as the lovers and Pilar Alamo and Toby Vzuin filling our the group.

HENRY HILLS FlLMOGRAPHY:

Films: Nobody Knows What's Going On In My Mind But Me (w.i.p.); Heretic (or the
Genius Preview) (1994); Uttle Lieutenant (\993)\ Bali Mecanique (1992, 1993), Goa
Lawah (1990, 1992); SSS (198S)\ Money (19S5)\ Radio Adios (1982); Kino Da/ (1981);
Plagiarism ( \9S\y, North Beach 2 ( 1979); North Beach ( 1978); Joe/ ( 1977); Porter
Springs J (1977); George (1976, 1988); Porter Springs 2 (1916) \ Balieire (1975); Porter
Springs (1975). Videos: Elektra 40 years (1990); Naked City Series: Osaka Bondage
( l992),Gotham (1990),Igneous Ejaculation ( 1990).

•program notes by Henry Hills*

Now in its thirty-fifth teatoii, the Cinpmatheque is
better than ever. We are among the oldest presenters of
non-commerdal film and video in the world. The San
Frandsco Cinematheque renuins a vital part of one of
Ihi* country'i hottest art scenes.

\Mth as many as six dozen shows and five hutulred works
•nmiaUy, the Cinematheque is the chief West Coast
piCKnter of work by artists from our own area. In addition,
«e bring to the Bay Area an incredible range of important
new work from across the country and around the world.
The Cinematheque has something for everyone.

The San Franc

Much of what we present goes on to signiflcani natiotui
and international accbim. Have you noted how much of
what is shown in important venues like New York's
Whitney Biennial was seen much earlier at the San
Francisco Cinematheque? It's true. So become a member
now and be among the first to see an amazing variety of
non<ommercial, experimental film and video right hete
in San Francisco.

Freedom of expression in the arts depends on the Rnan-
cial independence of a ground-breaking organization like

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takes risks
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Become a Cinematheque member now and lake part in
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ematheque is recognized worldwide.

port the presentation of leading-edge film and video

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Program Notes 1995

FILMS BY (AND SELECTED BY) ROSS LIPMAN:
Ross LIPMAN IN PERSON

Sunday, February 12, J 995 - SF Art Institute

FILHS BY ROSS LIFHAN

plus acleeted other works

MUNICHBERUN WALKING TRIP
(MONCHENBBRUN WASDERUSG)

1927.

4 min. B&W.

OSKAR FISCHINGER

WTCI NDTm (1971)

MmnUh-Berlin Wathing Trip wai made
in the lummer of 1927 when, because
of (Inindal and legal difricultiei, Fis-
chinger moved to Berlin, where the film
busineM waj more profiuble. He walked
10 Berlin from Munich and recorded hii
Journey in a vijual diary composed of
tingle-frame imagei of people and
icenes. 1 he film it both comic and a
faidnating document of pre-World War
il rural Germany.

7-1/t alfi. MM. Slltfit (MFFS).

r1 *

Citertooraphed and pcrfonatd by Tritha Brown.

film by Babette Hangolte

*Tht Ifiagc fadci In. For two tccondt Trttha It there itandlng mottonlett , and the ttartt to dance
her tole 'Water Hotor,' Indeed atovlng at quickly at water. The movementt arc to fatt and
Intricate that yov feci yoa arc alttlng hair of It. When the dance It finlthcd Tritha It ttandinf
a* In the beginning, but clotcr to the camera and the Image fadct to black. Tlie Image fadet In
again on Tritha doing the tame dance, but thit time In tlow motion (It wat thot at 4BFPS) and tht
■ovaacnt ttkci en a 1vte1e«» quality which glvai you mere than what you have mlitcd btrert.***I.H.

iClno.1

1 6mm, B/W, experimental. 9 minutet.
Balaxi Bela Studio, Budapest, 1 99 1 .

ThIt H a cinematic teK-portratt. In the ftlm't (Irti half.

a tnntparent glati was placed between the camera and the tubjecL

TMt served at a makeshift mirror at the camera't plane.

The filmmaker looked In to tee what he could tee.

The tecond half depicts the flkrwnaker, under scrutiny of naked
lent, in varlout tatet and degrees of seH-consclousncss and
pertentoutneti.

4. Dawn Andraa Szirtes

1973 -1978 16mm

- B/W, sound. 21 mln.

The film was made dorlng the
couf M of (\rt ye VI, and It con-
lifts of three pirts In the flrit
pan we penetxite Into the In-
dtntrlal nbarb'i miterlil lind-
icape, right down to lu micro-
icopk itriKfore. The Iniges are
burning In pubttlng loltrit*-
llon The letontptnylng sound
h the lonnd of the beating
heart, and the tound of bk>od

film by Ross Lipman

In the veins. The second part h
a model of revohilk>n, using the
esample of the physical trans-
formation of a natural phenom-
enon, that of bolHng water, r^
corded on film In micro and
mtcro scales. The formatk>n of
bubblet on the surface b Hk-
ened to the behavh>ral patterns
of people participating In a rev-

Laszlo Hoholy-Nagy
6 min.

ohillonary process. When the
anttgrt Wtatkmal force ceases,
the agitation stops, giving way
to a new evohiUonary period.
The music Is a mixture of con-
crete sottiids edited to accompa-
ny the Images. The third pari Is
one k)ng shot, a 360degree
revohiUon of the camera, dur-
ing which dawn arrives. The
last Image It the freeie frame of
I worker on the way to work.
The sounds accompanying this
tk)w panoramic shot are those
of bbwing wind and of norte-
cedetransmlttioni.

1930

5. Lightplay, blacK-white-grey
16iim B/W, silent apr

This simple film it composed
of aequeneet of a Moholy-Nagy kinetk: acolpture. thot hi various
degrees of close-op The sculpture is conceived In lermi of shadow and
refteclion on various rotating metal planes and discs, tome of which are
perforated allowing light to pass through. The film explores the visual
experience of this work in a way which ellminalct the disturbance of its
malerial nature on .the olav of liiht. ihade and rhythm. Malcolm Le Grice

— £ £

a I
• I

San Francisco Cinematheque

PARENTS

NIGHT CRIES AND iN SEARCH OF OUR FATHERS

Thursday, February 16, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Parental-filial bonds have become fertile ground for exploration in recent independent
filmmaking. This evening's program includes two extremely different films— in approach,
style, tone, and culture of origin— but both are unusual and provocative looks at the family.
Defining and evaluating 'family' is an issue of vital political, cultural and economic
importance today; one of things that Marco Williams' In Search of Our Fathers and Tracey
Moffatt's Night Cries: a rural tragedy have in common is that they both question and
challenge normative notions of what the family is. While Williams' film is a diaristic,
documentary recording of both a personal and community-wide quest, Moffatt's piece is a
hallucinatory re-creation of painful emotional experience. Both, however, are vivid and
compelling portraits of the self and inquiries into the nature of identity with its sometimes
troubled, sometimes empowering connection to "family" and to a larger community.

— Irina Leimbacher

Night Cries: a rural tragedy (1990), by Tracey Moffatt; 16mm, color, sound, 19 minutes
distributed by Women Make Movies

"A dazzling grand opera of silence and maternity, as opulent as Robert Wilson, as soulfully
anguished as Fassbinder." — Manohla Dargis, Best of 1990 Village Voice
On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her
dying white mother. The adopted daughter's attentive gestures mask an almost palpable
hostility. Their story alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be
raised in white femiilies. The stark, sensual drama unfolds without dialogue against vivid
painted sets as the smooth crooning of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic
counterpoint. Moffatt's first 35mm film displays rare visual assurance and emotional
power.

'"Night Cries: a rural tragedy - is breathtaking. A highly-disciplined 'Alain Resnais'-type
journey into the psyche and beyond. Night Cries is a 'dream film' reflecting Tracey
Moffatt's reminiscences of her own childhood. It's also a hallucinatory anticipation of a
worid that represents the reality of the artist's inner life. In other words a true self-portrait."

— Paul Cox, Art Monthly Australia (August 1990)

Tracey Moffatt, an Australian filmmaker, has written and directed Nice Colored girls
(1986), Night Cries (1990) and Bedevil (1993), her first feature. Moffatt studied Film and
Video Production at Queensland College of Art. Based in Sydney, she has worked in many
Aboriginal communities throughout Australia as an independent film and video maker and
photographer

In Search of Our Fathers (1992), by Marco Williams; 16mm, color, sound, 70 minutes
distributed by Filmmaker's Library

"Emotionally and cinematically raw, Williams' film works as a meditation on his personal
experience as well as a provocative social-science discourse."

— Carrie Rickey, The Philadelphia Enquirer

Personal odyssey intersects with social expose in this 70-minute documentary of the 24
year old filmmaker's search for this father. The film follows Williams for over seven years,
from the first phone call in his college dorm room to an emotional climax in the heartland of
America; from Boston to Philadelphia to Paris to Springfield, Ohio, Williams travels into

Program Notes 1995

the homes and memories of his extended family seeking to learn about his absent father and
to understand the dynamic of single mothers in the African American community. As
Williams p>eels away the layers of mystery that surround his father's absence, viewers will
be moved and engaged by his single-minded determination. A riveting account of a son's
search for identity and an affirmation of family ties in non-nuclear families, this film raises
significant issues about relations between women and men, single-parent families in the
African American community, and of course, fathers and sons.

Marco Williams received a B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard
University. He received dual degrees from U.C.L.A.: an M.A. in Afro-American Studies
and an M.F.A. in their Producer's Program. In September 1994, Williams joined the
faculty of the North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking. In addition to his
documentary filmwork, Marco has also directed fiction film. His dramatic short Without a
Pass (1992) was nominated for three CABLEACE Awards. His award winning
documentary film credits include: co-producer/director From Harlem to Harvard,
producer/director oi In Search of Our Fathers (1992), and co-producer of Uncommon
Ground (1994). Williams is currently working as writer-director on an ITVS funded
project. Making Peace, a documentary about violence in America.

• program notes by Emily Golembiewski, C Whiteside, and Irina Leimbacher •

AUSTRIAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA: 1955-1993 :A

PROGRAM 7: INTERIOR SPACES f

MARC ADRIAN IN PERSON <^ ^

Sunday, February 19, 1995 — Pacific Film Archive -^

Investigating the personal through a mechanical medium is a paradoxical challenge for an
artist, but it is one which has appealed to independent filmmakers in this country for the last
fifty years. The films in this program reflect upon, rather than construct the personal
through objects, images, pre-existing footage, texts and various techniques of image
distortion.

Eight of the films on this evening's program are by Marc Adrian. Bom in Vienna in 1930,
Adrian is best known as the first European filmmaker to use a computer for the random-
generation of text-images {Random, 1964). Adrian was educated at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Vienna and at ITHEC Film College in Paris. From 1965 on he studied perception
psychology at Vienna University and was a professor of Painting and Aesthetic Theory at
the Academy on Fine Arts, Hamburg from 1970-73.

A painter and sculptor, Adrian turned to cinema in the mid-1950s in an attempt to crystallize
his ideas on kineticism and op-art. His earliest film work can be seen as conceptualized acts
of provocation. One of his first films was Black Movie (1958), made with Kurt Kren.
Black Movie, a totally abstract film, consists of monochrome color frames, their length and
sequence stipulated by a mathematically determined system. Black Movie contains in a
nutshell the crux of Adrian's film work: based on strict calculation and invariant principles
of construction, it employs a finite number of formal elements that are structured
rhythmically over time to produce a non-mimetic, transcendent viewing experience. His
longest film, Der Regen {Rain, 1983), is an investigative avant-garde film " that was on
my mind for 25 years. I started working on it in 1957 with Kurt Kren, who did the camera

San Francisco Cinematheque

work and contributed a lot of ideas. The basic text is a play, which was more or less ready
in 1957 and which I started filming at the same time. I tried to relate the texts and the
rhythmic structures to an analogous structural scheme of visual design and to place the
meaning of the pictures- where it could not be avoided- in a contrastive context with the
sp>oken text. .Der Regen is probably my most personal film to date."

— M. Adrian interviewed by C.C. Eisendraht

"Marc Adrian*s films cogently lead to a confrontation with prevailing ideologies and the
sense or meaning they construct. This confrontation is not only confined to Adrian's films
but also necessarily embraces his writings, kinetic objects and glasscapes. Marc Adrian
sees the task of art as being the visualization of problem-awareness, the articulation of
taboos and the expression of myths. Language has for him an essential role in the
conditioning of social awareness, which explains his passionate interest in semantic
structures and their optical manifestation. What he aims at is to challenge this deterministic
role, to question its validity and, where possible, to offer other options."
^ — Martin Prucha

Films By Marc Adrian:

Black Movie II{\959)\ 16mm, color, silent, 198 seconds

1. Mai 1958 (May 1, 1958) (1958); 16mm, b/w, silent, 165 seconds

Wo'da-vor-hei {\9^)\ 16mm, b/w, silent, 70 seconds

Random (1963); 35mm, b/w, sound, 285 seconds

Text / (1963); 35mm, b/w, sound, 154 seconds

Orange (1962-64); 35mm, b/w, sound, 3 minutes

Der Regen (The Rain) (1983); 16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes

92 Avignon (1994); 16mm, color, sound, 7.5 minutes

Parallel Space: Inter-View {1992), by Peter Tscherkassky;
16mm, b/w, sound, 18 minutes

What always matters to me is an intensive visual quality. That's the doorway to a film, and
everything else comes later. In Parallel Space: Inter -View too, I'm working on this dense,
sensual level. And if anyone sees the drama of Oedipus represented in it, likewise forming
a theme occupying these parallel spaces on a metaphorical level, then so much the better.
(PT)

"Parallel Space: Inter-View was made using a still camera. The photograph produced by a
35mm camera corresponds exactly to the size of two film frames, and if the negative of a
photograph is projected, two film frames are seen. With a photograph taken in a vertical
frame position, first the upper and then the lower half of the image is projected."

— GabrieleJutz

walk in (1969), by Moucle Blackout; 16mm, color and b/w, sound, 6 minutes

The primary film consists of a scene of 720 frames.. .This scene is divided consecutively
into 6 parts, T1-T6. The addition of these parts follows the scheme mentioned below.
A=T1, B=A+T2, C=A+B+T3, etc. A+B+C-i-D+E+F= total length of the film. (MB)

Zum Geburtstag (For Your Birthday) (1991), by Linda Christanell;
16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes

Program Notes 1995

"Linda Christanell never uses the body to create direct reproductions of female
physiognomy as a whole but relies on ersatz objects in such a way as to turn them into
erotic signals of polymorphous origin. ... All these objects are in a functional relationship
to the central narcissistic self-presentation of the eirtist, permitting her to project her own
personality onto objects of a clearly libidinous character while at the same time avoiding the
total exposure of her own body."

— Katharina Sykora

piece touchee {\9W), by Martin Arnold; 16mm, b/w, sound, 16 minutes

*'FoT piece touchee . . .Arnold used a homemade optical printer to analyze the visual motion
in an 18-second shot from The Human Jungle (1954, directed by Joseph M.
Newman)... A mold uses his optical printer to lay bare the gender-political implications of
the husband's arrival and to transform this gesture, which has become nearly invisible to
most viewers, into a phantasmagoria of visual effects that would make any trick film
director proud."

— Scott MacDonald

After the show, the audience is invited to an informal gathering with the filmmaker.

•information about the films and filmmakers are excerpted from our catalogue,
Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema 1955-1993 on sale at the Cinematheque*

THE FILMS OF YOKO ONO

Thursday, February 23, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Yoko Ono's status as a popular figure tends to eclipse her achievements as an artist,
especially with regard to her activities as a filmmaker. Especially prolific as a filmmaker
between the years 1966 and 1971, Ono made her films in the context of the Fluxus
movement under the auspices of George Maciunas. She also produced "film scripts", or
descriptions of conceptual, viewer-specific "films", many of which could not exist as actual
film works. Concerned with the formal qualities of the cinema and the experiential aspects
of cinema spectatorship (especially time and movement), Ono played a significant role in
the articulation of the Fluxus aesthetic, inflecting the terms by which filmmakers
understand the structural material elements of the cinema.

Yoko Ono studied poetry and music at Sarah Lawrence College during the 1950s, after
which she moved to New York City and became involved with a group of avant-garde
musicians and performers, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham and LaMonte Young,
who presented his "Chambers Street Series" at Ono's loft at 1 12 Chambers Street. Ono's
early compositions include A Grapefruit in the World of Park, and A Piece for
Strawberries and Violins, performed by Yvonne Rainer.

During the early 1960s, Ono became heavily involved with the Fluxus movement,
participating in performances and creating installation/sculptural works. Ono's work tends
to directly address its audience, foregrounding the dialectical relationship between work
and subject and explicitly implicating the viewer in the act of aesthetic consumption. This
quality is evident in both her films and those of the other Fluxus artists, which often
function less as films than as meta-films, identifying the structural assumptions of
institutional cinematic form and recontextualizing the relation between subject, image and
film-object (material).

San Francisco Cinematheque

The Museum of Modern Art Show ( 1971); 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes
"In 1971 Yoko Ono placed advertisements in New York City newspapers announcing her
upcoming one- woman retrospective at the Museum of Modem Art — a fabrication, much
to the displeasure of the museum. But when people arrived to see the show, Ono had a
cameraman waiting to interview them; their opinions, ranging from angry to amused, make
up this film."

—Tom Smith, New York Museum of Modem Art

No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966); 16mm, b/w, sound, 80 minutes

"Take any film and bury it underground for fifty years. Its like wine.. Any film, any cheap
film, if you put it underground for fifty years becomes interesting [laughter]. You just take
a shot of people walking, and that's enough: the weight of history is incredible."

—Yoko Ono, Film Quarterly interview (Fall 1989)

Produced by George Maciunas, and part of his RuxFilms series, this is the second version
of her shorter (5 1/2 minute) silent film of the same title. No. 4 (Bottoms) encapsulates the
gestalt of her filmmaking enterprise. Described by Ono as "an aimless petition, signed by
people with their anuses," the film consists entirely of sequential images of human
buttocks, close-cropped in order to fill the frame, shot with the aid of a special machine
which enabled the camera to follow the subjects as they walked about a room. Unlike the
earlier film, this version includes a soundtrack, comprised primarily of the reactions of the
film's unwitting subjects to the nature of their "role" in the production and the premise of
the work itself.

Often understood in terms of the structural cinema contemporaneous to it, this film
nonetheless occupies a distinct point of tension between purely formal and representational
imagery. Although exhibiting many of the hallmark characteristics of the stmctural cinema
(serial images, an emphasis on formal and rhythmic qualities, and a radical schism with the
narrative codes of institutional cinematic language), the specific referential ity of the image is
never wholly subsumed within the project of the deconstmction of the cinematic signifier.
Formally reminiscent of, albeit wildly politically divergent from, Anne Severson's Near the
Big Chakra, the element of humor inherent to No. 4 (Bottoms) stems from the ridiculously
unrepresentable nature of the profilmic. This sense of a subject both beyond film and yet
unfilmable differentiates No. 4 (Bottoms) from the more purely formal structural cinema
and imbues it with a brand of unassuming humor particular to the Ruxus movement.

YOKO ONO FILMOGRAPHY

Eyeblink (1966) (AKA One, One Blink, RuxFilm #15 and #19); No. 1 (1966) (AKA
Match, HuxFilm #14); No. 4 (1966) (AKA HuxFilm #16); No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966); Film
No. 5 (Smile) (1968); Two Virgins (1968) with John Lennon; Bed-In (1969) with John
Lennon; Rape (1969) with John Lennon; Apotheosis (1970) with John Lennon; Fly
(1970); Freedom (1970); Up Your Legs Forever (1970); Erection (1971) with John
Lennon, Imagine (1971) with John Lennon; The Museum of Modern Art Show {1911); Ten
for Two: Sisters, O Sisters (1972) with John Lennon; Walking On Thin Ice (1981);
Woman {\98\y. Goodbye Sadness (1982).

• program notes by Brian Frye •

Program Notes 1995

WHO IS DORIS WISHMAN

AND WHY ARE HER SEXPLOITATION FILMS SO ODD AND ORIGINAL?

CURATED AND PRESENTED BY PEGGY AHWESH

Friday, February 24, 1996—Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th St.

Nude on the Moon ( 1 962)
Double Agent (1914)

Saturday, February 25, 1996— Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia

Bad Girls Go To HeU ( 1 965)
A Taste of Flesh (1967)

"Doris Wishman made 25 films for the soft core porn circuit all of which are a rare blend of
the prurient, the tacky, and the bizarre. Starting in 1960 with nudist camp pictures,
Wishman proceeded with rough sex play an lots of lingerie, then in the 1970s used
gimmicks such as killer breasts, penis transplants and transgender operations as vehicles
for her films. The stories are wacky and weird with a seedy underlining of the true fear of
and hostility towards women."

—Peggy Ah wesh

poSSt5SEt> VV»TH SEX. . V

San Francisco Cinematheque

EASTERN EUROPE: OPPOSITIONAL MEDIA 1989-92
CURATED AND PRESENTED BY CHRIS HILL

Thursday, March 2, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Video news magazines produced with consumer camcorders by citizens' groups in
Hungary (Black Box) and former Czechoslovakia (Original Video Journal) were part of
vital underground news networks prior to government reforms in 1989-90. Black Box
documented 60,000 people demonstrating in front of the Magyar TV building in Budapest
in 1992 because the Media Law, a national telecommunications act establishing that TV and
radio be free from government interference, was (and remains) threatened by conservative
leadership. Citizens' camcorders documented citizens and soldiers battling for the control
of television studios and radio transmitters in Romania in 1989 and in Lithuania in 1991.
And government-controlled TV crews decided in 1989-91 to broadcast reports on strikes
and mass demonstrations against censoring authorities in former Czechoslovakia, Romania
and the former USSR, signaling to their fellow citizens that a democratic media would be
an essential public stage for setting new political and cultural agendas in Eastern Europe.

In examining tapes produced during this period of dramatic reform in Eastern Europe, it is
clear that camcorder documentation of public dialogue and active resistance, the timely
copying and wide distribution of videotaped evidence of activism, and the control of TV
and radio broadcast studios and transmitters were strategic challenges to centralized
communications systems which controlled access to the means of production and
distribution of information.

Independent work from 1989-91 not only testifies to a public's passionate desire for free
speech and creation of open channels, it additionally challenged the often decades-long
inability of most of the citizenry in eastern Europe to simply access duplication
technologies- printing presses, xerox machines, tape dubbing, making prints of films.
When speaking to people about media and information exchange before the reforms of
1989-90, most describe gossip and samizdat— illegal printed materials and most recently
illegal video— as the primary channels of opposition.

Many Americans would find life without copiers virtually inconceivable and would voice
solidarity with media activists in Eastern Europe, understanding that challenging their
monolithic media apparatus would be fundamental to establishing new and democratic
societies. Of course, our own self-congratulating democratic society reflects the deadly
injustices of keeping certain communities virtually invisible within mainstream media, of
reducing the articulation of important issues to sound bites, and of limiting the access of a
diverse spectrum of speakers to a public stage.

During the past year I collaborated with Keiko Sei, a journalist working since 1987 with
independent media makers in Budapest, Prague and Bucharest, to organize for U.S.
audiences a program of video-tapes made by citizens' video collectives, independent TV
producers and artists in Eastern Europe, most of them using camcorders and simple off-line
editing such as is commonly available through public access centers.

Like public access producers here, citizens' groups in these countries were producing video
documentation of unreported political and cultural events. Underground video news
magazines by the Czech Original Video Journal (OVJ), for example, show East Germans in
August 1989 (three months before the Berlin Wall fell and the Velvet Revolution resulted in
major reforms in former Czechoslovakia), demanding temporary asylum in Prague and
finally emigration to West Germany. These desperate asylum-seekers who occupied the
city center for days provoked what was later described as the beginning of the dissolution

Program Notes 1995

of existing governments. The OVJ tapes are fascinating because, as with a good pubic
access show, the producers demonstrate a commitment to participate actively in a public
dialogue enriched by independent points of view.

Without access to any legal public exhibitions or channels, however, these tapes-
important evidence of active opposition to existing policies and governments— were
screened in private apartments or storefronts and bicycled to other towns, often at great
personal risk. The Hungarian Black Box collective began in 1987 to create an independent
underground video archive and circulate news reports. Through the reform period of 1988-
90 they documented landmark political meetings, late night shredding and dumping of
official records, rallies of emerging nationadist groups, interviews with disenfranchised
ethnic minority communities. Their illegal tapes became widely distributed public evidence
that official authorities were being challenged by citizens in different parts of the country.
Hungarian writer Marianna Padi remarks: "The force and potential danger the Black Boxes
represent against power abusers in Hungary lies in the mere existence of their compilated
material. The obese Black Box archives (the result of their indefatigable, constant presence
virtually everywhere where the 'flow' is likely to become an 'event') form not just a
collection of news items. They constitute a fragment of the hidden conscience of the
country" (from "Black Box," in Next 5 Minutes Zapbook; 1992).

After the 1989-91 reforms, the reconstruction of national media resources became highly
contested territory. Decisions around (de)centralization of resources and access to
production and distribution directly impacted political, social, and cultural agendas in
nation-building. Furthermore, media channels and viewers/consumers constituted an
economic asset which could function as part of some government's construction of the
public good or be exchanged for much needed cash in times of extreme economic hardship.

In Lithuania in 1992, one year after declaring independence from the former USSR,
evening television offered hours of national debate on restructuring housing policies,
modestly produced by local crews, as well as imported entertainment and the world news
from satellite— music videos from Moscow, films from Poland, international news from
Great Britain. In a recent interview, independent Hungarian TV producers Judit Kopper
and Andras Solyom estimated that 40% of Hungarian television is imported, much of it
from the U.S. While Americans become xenophobic over foreign investors buying up
U.S. urban real estate, farms and businesses, there is little information presented to the
public here about how the second largest net U.S. export, entertainment media, functions
as part of the cultural diet and national economy in developing countries.

Produced for television from 1988-93, Kopper' s encyclopedic series Videoworld
addressed the enterprises of mass and personal media making in both Eastern and Western
Europe... Their program TV Boris and Video Misha studied the struggle on Soviet
television between what was described as Eastern word-dominated and Western image-
based media cultures. Kopper remarked, "We are involved with Videoworld and still ask
ourselves the question over and over again: what really is video?.. .an art which works like
narcotics and is a drug to both young and old?.. .a weapon of politics?.. .a misused means
of communication in international and national television?" Kopper and Solyom 's incisive
media analysis and sincere questioning of both media consumption and media making by
amateurs, artists and television professionals is unlike any U.S. commercial television I am
aware of. In its attention to heartfelt local cultural concerns and the development of public
dialogue it is much more akin to public access programming. In December, 1993,
Videoworld was canceled by the newly empowered conservative national leadership.

San Francisco Cinematheque

Other remarkable documents from this period include Gusztav Hamos' tape 1989— the
Real Power o/ TV featuring his grandmother shopping, making soup, watching television,
news of demonstrations and government changes in Romania, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in 1989. Hamos, who is visiting Budapest after a 10 year
absence, analyzes archival television news footage from 1956-89, and interviews
Hungarian news anchors and managers.

In recent years as political and economic instability continues throughout the region, much
of what was originally claimed by demonstrative citizens as public space has been contested
or taken back by ruling elites. We, too, have seen an erosion of public space in the U.S. in
recent years, and democratic access to the expanding information superhighway will surely
be an ongoing struggle. But an oppositional voice did emerge in Eastern Europe as
Hungarians, Czechoslovaks and Romanians in 1989-90 were able to focus available media,
the modest camcorder productions bicycled through the city as well as the cameras and
microphones tethered to the broadcast towers, to disseminate information and establish new
electronic forums, however fragile, where public agendas could be debated.

—Chris Hill, "Citizen Producers in Eastern Europe, 1989-1991,"

Community Media Review (April 1994)

1989— The Real Power of TV (1990) by Gusztav Hamos (Hungary);
video, color, sound, 58 minutes

TV Boris and Video Misha (1992) by Judit Kopper/Friz Productions with Andrds Solyom
(Hungary); video, color, sound, 45 minutes

Temetes (Funeral) ( 1992) by Judit Kopper/Friz Productions with Andrds Solyom
(Hungary); video, color, sound, 7 minutes

History condensed into seven minutes. The assembly of mythical documentary shots for
the soviet funeral cult from 1924, from the burial of Lenin to the burial of the three general
secretaries in the eighties in explosive rhythm. The film funeral of the failed system. The
pictures are built on the spoken poetry of Akos Szildgyi, with the mystical ritual quotation
from Istvan Martha interchanged with dramatic music (performed by Amadinda) a
recollection of the Soviet Union like a smash in the face. (—Friz Productions)

Perumos {Bombs in Czech; Lightning in Romany) (1992) by Petr Vrana (Czech);
video, color, sound, 5 minutes.

Conception:

to be more intense and destructive in A/V than all nationalistic agitators;

a visualization of nationalism and racism in the CSFR.
Soundtrack:

slsing/swearwords of all the ethnic groups (Slovaks, Moravians, Bohemians,

gypsies) contesting for recognition in post-Communist governments
Music:

scratch version of Czech and Slovakian hymns. (PV)

Chris Hill has served on the Board of Directors of BCAM, Buffalo's public access
operator, since 1990, and is video curator at Hallwalls, an artists-run center in Buffalo,
New York. She currently teaches at SUNY Buffalo's Department of Media Studies and
produces videotapes.

Program Notes 1995

AN EVENING OF RELENTLESS FUN i

SOME FILMS BY ALFONSO ALVAREZ AND THAD POVEY

Sunday, March 5, 1995— SF Art Institute

Indelible fixtures of the Bay Area film landscape, Thad Povey and Alfonso Alvarez tonight
present a joint retrospective of their work. While Povey's wry use of found footage creates
a landscape littered with strangely familiar faces that become silent images in the mirror
held up to ourselves, Alvarez' brilliantly hued optical manipulations lead us back to some
of our childhood dreams. Their work alternately delves into the psyche of identity, searches
for spiritual redemption in a war-loving society, celebrates centennials, and discovers the
Virgin Mary hidden within the optical printer. _ _

Un Film Terrible (1985), by Alfonso Alvarez; S-8mm, color, sound, 2.5 minutes

A first film effort. My desire was to create a film that examines the end of the filmmaking
spectrum as far from the "perfect narrative film" as possible. In it I've combined a set of
elements that I can't seem to get away from: scratched leader, hand coloring and found
footage.

Ahem (1994), by Thad Povey in collaboration with Susan Dory;
S-8mm from 16mm, color, sound, 2.5 minutes

Popcorn. Chase Sequence. Special effects. Two sex scenes. This film has got it all without
the burden of a camera.

Memory Eye (1988), by Alfonso Alvarez; 16mm, color, sound, 4.5 minutes

A look at the process of remembering: a flickering memory, images emerging from
childhood, glimpses of place and the sounds of familiar voices. This is an exploration of
the places memory is held.

/ Smell the Blood of an Englishman (1995), Thad Povey;
16mm, color, sound, 17.5 minutes

A suite of four films dealing with two words: "human" and "being"— order of the two

words is not important. The four films, following the sequence of FEE F\ FO FUM, are as

follows:

"Thine Inward-Looking Eyes"

Possibly a talk show for the telepathic. Relax. Take a deep breath. . ...-.?

"The Sweetest Sandwich "

Dry and crusty on the ends, full of chicken, tomatoes, honey, and com in the

middle. Music by Soul Coughing with lyrics inspired by an encounter with a drunk

man at the comer or Second Avenue and Third Street in New York.
"Learning to Slump"

An info-tone-poem.
"On Any Given Thursday"

The things we do. In the words of Bokonon: "Tiger got to hunt. Bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep. Bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand."

Quixote Dreams (1990-91), by Alfonso Alvarez; 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

We visit unresting Don Quixote, directed by God to right all wrongs and who has found
himself in a landscape of broken dreams and useless wars. Spent and collapsing, the Don
enters a dream world.

San Francisco Cinematheque

A Different Kind of Green {\9S9), by Thad Povey; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes
Gazing back at the child watching me I glimpse a sense of the nonsense that defines me
currently.

motel six (1988), by Alfonso Alvarez; 16mm, color, sound, 4.5 minutes

Coming back from a Dead show in Ventura, Ca., our '68 Volkswagen decides to opt for an
early retirement. Stuck 30 miles north of Bakersfield, we embark on an adventure saturated
with boredom, heat, and dust.

Media Darling ( 1991), by Thad Povey; 16mm from S-8, b/w, sound, 8 minutes

A macabre post-quake reflection on the American Media Machine as vampires in search of a
bloody sound bite.

Film For,.. (1989), by Alfonso Alvarez; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes

A collection of found and original footage as well as dialogue and statements, documenting
gender politics and the seeming lack of a substantial change in spite of our feeling to the
contrary.

Duermete Ninita (1994), by Thad Povey; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes
A lullaby for a grandmother on the first birthday of her second century.

La Reina (1993), by Alfonso Alvarez; 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

Some cool optical printing of luridly saturated colors, matched with subtly layered audio
tracks to create a cinematic experience not unlike being visited by the Virgen de Guadalupe.

Open for Business (Work-in-Progress, 1995), by Thad Povey;
16mm, color, silent, 2.5 minutes

A visit to the new museum for an opening... what was in that friendly Chablis?

Your Mom (Work-in-Progress, 1994-95), by Alfonso Alvarez;
16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes

Revisiting filmmaking elements I just can't seem to get enough of— groovy optical
printing, hand colored leader, found footage and scratched black leader.

Thad Povey was bom in Red Bluff in 1959, went to college in San Luis Obispo, and has
lived primarily in San Francisco since 1982. In his early twenties he began to toy with
Super-8 film and cameras, but was mostly involved with the guitar and musical
composition. After catching the film bug while hanging around NYU in the mid-eighties,
he came back to San Francisco in 1986 and has been working on short independent
projects ever since.

Alfonso Alvarez: After seeing Un Chien AndaloUy I realized you could only trust
surrealists when it comes to all the formal aspects of filmmaking. So I thought I would try
my hand at making film. After 10 years, I'm stiH trying. I completed my B.F.A. in 1990 at
the California College of Arts and Crafts, under the direction of local filmmakers Lynn
Kirby, Barbara Hammer and Donald Day. My M.A. was completed in 1994 at the Cinema
Department at San Francisco State University... I can't tell yet if I learned anything in film
school, except how to write checks to film labs. (AA)

please join the filmmakers for a reception after the show

Program Notes 1995

NOT BEIRUT: VIDEOS BY JALAL TOUFIC & JAYCE SALLOUM

JALAL TOUFIC IN PERSON

Thursday, March 9, 1995 — Center for the Arts

In these two works about, yet not 'about', Beirut, video essayists Jalal Toufic and Jayce
Salloum engage in provocative meditations on a problematized and constantly re-
constructed Lebanon.

Credits Included : A Video in Red and Green (1995), by Jalal Toufic;
video, color, sound, 50 minutes

Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green registers the withdrawal of tradition past a
surpassing disaster (the fifteen-year Lebanese civil war); produces completed crossword
puzzles with subsisting blank spaces in a country of shattered shop signs; documents the
rise in the 1992-Beirut of an anomalous and sublime architecture of bricks in a period
where it seems Arabs are being driven to the Stone Age (Palestinians throwing stones at the
Israeli army in the Occupied Territories, etc.); and uses fiction to document in an aparte the
eruption outside mental hospitals of either diagrammatic or psychotic effects. (JT)

This Is Not Beirut : There was and there was /lo/ (1994), by Jayce Salloum;
video, color, sound, 48 minutes

This tape is at the most fundamental level, a personal project: i) examining the use of
images/representations of Lebanon and Beirut both in the West and in Lebanon itself; ii)
recording the interactions and experiences while working in Lebanon, focusing on the
undertaking of this representational process as a Lebanese and a westernized, foreign bom
mediator with cultural connections and baggage of both the West and Lebanon and some of
the disparities and disjunctions arising in each; and iii) situating the work between genres
looking from the inside out at each and engaging critically... the assumptions imposed and
thus broken. [I]n this site of complexity one's identity is found and constructed... (JS)

Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and video artist. He is the author of Distracted
(Station Hill Press, 1991) and (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
(Station Hill Press, 1993), and the video maker of Credits Included: A Video in Red and
Green (1995). He left (did he leave?) Beirut— a city where "nothing [is] left. Not even
leaving"— to New York in 1984. He currently teaches cinema at San Francisco State
University.

Jayce Salloum is a Canadian/Lebanese artist who has been working in video since 1984
and whose recent work includes (Talaeen A Junuub)/ Up to the South (1993, co-directed
with Walid Ra'ad). An extension of his involvement in installation, photography and mixed
media during the mid-seventies, Salloumn's video work deals with a variety of contexts,
critically engaging questions of representation and cultural manifestation. Through
collaboration with Lebanese filmmakers and extensive interviews with a broad cross-
section of people affected by the Middle East crisis, Jayce continually questions media's
construction of culture and its pervasive influence in the political and personal realms of
one's life. Since completion of his last work, Jayce has been focusing on the establishment
of a permanent media center in Beirut to increase the opportunity for the Lebanese people to
tell their sides of the story.

• program notes by Todd Wagner •

San Francisco Cinematheque

NEW YORK SCUM :

NEW FILMS BY RICHARD KERN, BETH B., AND OTHERS

RICHARD KERN IN PERSON

Sunday, March 12, 1995 - SF Art Institute

Tonight we present a sampling of Bay Area premieres of new film and video from the
slimy streets of New York City, including a rare appearance by legendary underground
filmmaker Richard Kern. Beyond the NYC connection, there isn't really a theme to
tonight's program, though if the works have one thing in common, it's obsession— all of
tonight's films and tapes deal directly with the nature of obsession in varying degrees of
intensity... Enjoy the show!

From Beijing to Brooklyn ( 1994), by Arlene Sandler and Anie Stanley;
video, color, sound, 15 minutes

One of the audience favorites of Mix '94 (New York Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film
and Video Festival)... this fake movie preview sets up the story of Oriental sex goddess
Fuk So Much and her battle with the evil forces of anti-pom feminism as embodied in the
character of Bemice B. Good. Featuring the members of Thrust, NYC's preeminent dyke-
slut-pom- punk- garage band. Lesbian smut was never this obnoxious!

High Heel Nights (1995), by Beth B; video, color, sound, 10 minutes

Beth B. (Two Small Bodies) shot this compassionate portrait of drag queens as part of
"NYC Postcards", a series of 10-minutes glimpses of New York City commissioned for
European television.

24 Hours a Day (1994), by Jocelyn Taylor; video, color, sound, 9 minutes

Two women eat some mangoes in this gender-bending lesbian erotic daydream with quietly
blistering funk undertones. 'The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice".

Dirty (1994), by Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Annabel Lee;
S-8mm, color, sound, 15 minutes

Tessa Hughes-Freeland was/is one of the most active (yet under-recognized) pioneers of
the "Cinema of Transgression" movement. Co-directed with San Francisco-based artist
Annabel Lee (The Bitches, Red Spirit Lake), Dirty is based on a short story by Georges
Bataille.

-intermission-

New Films (And An Oldie) By Richard Kern

Richard Kern's films have been consistently offending people for the last decade. Kem is
the most infamous filmmaker of New York's "Cinema of Transgression" movement; a
mid-80's underground Super-8mm movement which tumed it's back on the rigidly defined
art school "avant-garde" in favor of a raw punk aesthetic. His earlier films featured a
cavalcade of Lower East Side celebrities; Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Sonic Youth, Karen
Finley, etc...., and his notorious 1986 film Fingered defined the notion of "shock value"
for the 80' s. Lately, Kern has been concentrating his efforts on photography, and two
monographs of his stunning S/M pin-up portraits will be released soon. Tonight's program
focuses on Kern's most recent films, including a cherished oldie (Manhattan Love
Suicides), and two Kem-directed music videos.

:? Program Notes 1995

"Richard Kern is a pomographer by default. His intention is not to make porno movies so
much as it is to make movies about what people do when unleashed and left to their own
devices. People unbridled want sex, and they express that desire one way or another. Make
a movie about what people want, and you've made a porno movie."

—George Petros, Screw Magazine

"The last narrative that totally interested me was a story in which G.G. Allin was going to
play the father. He would've been this rock star dad who comes home and his wife fist
fucks him at the dinner table, then he'd go into his daughters room 2ind fuck her, then he'd
go to the son's room and fuck his son and his friends in a big gay orgy scene.. .So I had
this story worked out and then G.G. overdosed on the day we had set to start filming. To
me, that would've been an interesting film because itwpuld have had a lot of what I guess
you'd consider shocking stuff."

—Richard Kern, 1994

Manhattan Love Suicides (1985); S-8mm, b/w, sound, 35 minutes

Featuring David Wojnarowicz, Bill Rice, Nick Zedd, and others. Music by JG Thirlwell
and Dream Syndicate.

Horoscope (1991); S-8mm, color and b/w, sound, 5 minutes

Featuring Holly Adams, Bob Drywall and Squeak Wilentz. Music by Joe Budenholzer.

Nazi (1991); S-8mm, color, sound, 2 minutes
Featuring Annabelle Davies. Music Budenholzer.

The Sewing Circle (1992); S-8mm, color, sound, 7 minutes ¥■

Featuring Kembra Phfaler, Lisa Resurrection and Carrie.

My Nightmare (1993); S-8mm, color, sound, 5 minutes
Featuring Susan McNamara and R. Kern.

The Bitches ( 1992); S-8mm, b/w, sound, 10 minutes i^ .

Featuring Linda Serbu, Annabelle Davies and Charles Wing. Music by Budenholzer. ' ;

Body Bomb ( 1993); video, color, sound, 5 minutes
A rock video for UNSANE.

Lunchbox (1994); video, color, sound, 5 minutes
A rock video for Marilyn Manson.

PERSONAL WITNESS:
NEW FILMS BY CAITLIN MANNING

Caitlin Manning In Person

Thursday, March 16, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Caitlin Manning has been making fiction films and documentary videos continually since
she finished her first video, the award- winning Stripped Bare, in 1988. Before this she
had been writing articles on sexuality, feminism and the sex industry, mostly for
Processed World magazine which she had co-founded in 1981. One night a friend in the
sex industry suggested they do a video on the subject. "I had no idea what I was getting

San Francisco Cinematheque

myself into, but two years and a video later I was completely enthralled by this form of
expression, and I knew that I had somehow found my creative niche."

There is a striking contrast between Manning's formal style as a video-documentary maker
and as an experimental or narrative filmmaker. The content clearly affects her choice of
medium: "After Stripped Bare I turned to film. Because the medium is more sensual,
immediate, dream-like, it seemed like the ideal form to explore those complicated, difficult
psychic spaces in a more raw, intellectually unprocessed way." Her later documentaries
take on a more overtly political tone, with Mexican and South American politics as the
subject. These documentaries (Brazilian Dreams and Noah's Ark) were made in
collaboration with Chris Carlsson, Manning's mate of 16 years. Manning feels that her
work, documentary and fiction has a common context: "the global, patriarchal, capitalist
culture... ties us all together in spite of ourselves, and creates similar situations in vastly
different circumstances... The attempt at self-realization of a woman in the slums of Sao
Paolo (recounted in the documentary Brazilian Dreams) resonates with similar attempts of
a middle-class woman in the U.S. (Prelude).''

Prelude, Manning's most recent work which is being premiered tonight, is a half hour
dramatic narrative which marks the completion of her M.F.A. in San Francisco State
University's Cinema Department. Aside from making her own films, Caitlin has worked
and continues to work as a cinematographer and director of photography on numerous Bay
Area film and video projects including documentaries, experimental shorts, and feature
length films.

When The Bough Breaks (1989); 16mm, color, sound, 2 minutes

My first 16mm film. When the Bough Breaks comes from a recurring dream. Many
women who see this piece have recounted similar dreams they have had, so I think the film
taps into a kind of archetypal female experience. (CM)

...Threej Four, Shut the Door (1991); 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes
In a sequence reminiscent of Maya Deren's films, a woman encounters herself in many
forms, and in each situation she is performing a role. Each role uncovers a different aspect
of anxiety for approval which stretches from intimate, romantic expectations of a potential
lover to those of an adoring audience. In putting the same woman in a range of stereotyped
female positions. Manning makes us aware not only of the flexibility of the actress, but of
the artifice involved in living each role. She describes this piece as "...a kind of trance film
that reproduces psychological states (fear of exposure, fear of abandonment, need for love
and admiration, sense of alienation, of being outside one's own body). In some way I
think they represent almost archetypal female moments, which condense a whole
psychological history."

Prelude (1995); 16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes

In Manning's most recent work she continues in the vein of investigating the internal paths
of a woman's experience. Here she traces the conflicts and achievements of a woman
attempting to actualize her creative potential, to solidify her individual identity in
conjunction with her roles as a wife and mother. This conflict continues to create tension
for many real-life women, and unlike a Hollywood ending, the first great creative
achievement doesn't ensure one won't fall back into the same internal struggle, repeatedly.
As in aspects of all of her work. Manning here addresses the need for women to act, to take
responsibility for their happiness, for the possibilities for creative fulfillment.

Program Notes 1995

Sonhos Brasileiros ('Brazilian Dreams'): Visiting Points of Resistance (1990);
video, color, sound, 16 minute excerpt of a 54 minute piece

When Manning and Carlsson pick up and go to Brazil with their camcorder, the resulting
video gives us the sense that we are watching a strange hybrid between a documentary and
a political home movie. They follow a path from the Camivale to the depths of the rain
forest, interviewing the individuals who make up the grassroots of South American culture.
These are the people who, as Manning puts it, present "exemplary, but 'ordinary'
individuals on the social margins whose lives embody resistance to the global capitalist
culture. Their stories expose the values and priorities of the killing culture we live in, and
call for social transformation."

Noah*s Ark... a Neompatista Delirium (1994); video, color, sound, 24 minutes

In this mini -documentary we find ourselves suddenly in the heart of the jungle, at an
unusual Mexican democratic convention. There are crowds everywhere, and a man wearing
a ski mask is speaking to an enthusiastic audience. From this single eloquent speech, a
U.S. audience gets a glimpse of the complex politics in our neighboring nation, which is in
an upheaval with enough intrigue, adventure, human drama and suspense to rival any
sensationalist news about murderous football stars.

Stripped Bare (1988); video, color, sound, 30 minute version

An exploration of the subculture of erotic dancing via five women who work as strippers in
San Francisco. "Without mythologizing the sex industry after the manner of some
postmodern hipsters or concealing its squalid ruthlessness, these testimonials challenge
one's preconceived notions of its female workers as victims."

—Andrew O'Hehir, S.F. Sentinel (June 17, 1988)

please join the filmmaker for a small reception after the show
• program notes by Maya Allison •

STAN BRAKHAGE: SONGS PROGRAM 2
SONG XII , FIFTEEN SONG TRAITS THROUGH SONG XXII

Sunday, March 19, 1995, 6:00 PM
Special Program — SF Art Institute

The running times of all Songs are necessarily approximate as the works are created for the
medium of 8mm and therefore projected, for the most part, by machines with variable
motors. They are intended to cohere rhythmically at speeds ranging from 8 frames to 24
frames per second. The approximate times indicated are based on an average speed midway
between these two extremes. The running times listed in the catalogue for Songs 1-10 are
perhaps more indicative of 12 frames per second than of 16 frames per second average
given below, because at the time I submitted length approximates for the first ten Songs I
was more interested, as viewer of my work in that slower speed.— Stan Brakhage, from
Filmmakers' Cooperative Catalogue No. 4

Song A'// (1965); 8mm, color, silent, 5 minutes
Verticals and shadows — reflections caught in glass traps.

San Francisco Cinematheque

Song XV : Fifteen Song TraUs{\965)\ 8mm, color, silent, 38 minutes
A series of individual portraits of friends and family, all interrelated in what might be called
a branch growing directly from the trunk of Songs I-XTV. In order of appearance: Robert
Kelly, Jane and our dog Durin, our boys Bearthm £ind Rare, daughter Crystal, and the
canary Cheep Donkey, Robert Creeley and Michael McClure, and the rest of our girls
Myrrena & Neowyn, Angelo di Benedetto, Rare, Ed Dom and his family, Myrenna,
Neowyn, and Jonas Mekas (to whom the whole of the XVth Song is dedicated), as well as
some few strangers, were the source of these Traits coming into being— my thanks to
all . . . and to all who see them clearly.

Song XVI (1965); 8mm, color, silent, 8 minutes

A love song, a flowering of sex as in the mind's eye, a joy.

Songs XVII & XVIII ( 1965); 8mm, color, silent, 8 minutes

Cathedral and movie house— the ritual memories of religion— and then (in Song XVIII ) a
portrait of a singular room in the imagination.

Songs XIX & ^A^ (1966); 8mm, color, silent, 8 minutes

A dancing song of women's rites, and then (Song XX) the ritual of light making
shape/shaping picture.

Songs XXI & XXII (1965); 8mm, color, silent, 10 minutes

Transformation of the singular image was the guiding aesthetic light in the making of these
two works. Song XXI works its spell through closed eye vision, whereas Song XXII was
inspired by approximates of "the dot plane" or "grain field" of closed-eye vision in textured
"reality," so to speak. You could say that XXI arises out of an inner- and XXII into an
outer-reality. These two works are particularly exciting to me because I at last accomplished
something in the making of them that I had written hopefully to Maya Deren about years
ago: films which could run forwards and backwards with equal/integral authenticity— that
is that the run from end to beginning would hold to the central concern of the film. . .rather
than simply being some wind and/or unwinding of beginning-to-ending's continuum. Song
XXII, additionally, can be run from its mid-point— the singular sun-star shape on water— in
either direction to beginning or ending. . .thus film inherits the possibilities Gabrieli gave to
music with his piece "My beginning is my ending and my ending is my beginning."

•Film descriptions by Stan Brakhage, Filmmakers' Cooperative Catalogue*

"Hypnagogic vision is what you see with your eyes closed— at first a field of grainy,
shifting, multi-coloured sands that gradually assume various shapes... It's also called
closed-eye vision. Moving visual thinking, on the other hand, occurs much deeper in the
synapsing of the brain. It's a streaming of shapes that are not namable— a vast visual
'song' of the cells expressing their internal life."

—Stan Brakhage, "All that is Light Brakhage at 60," interview by Suranjan Ganguly,

Sight and Sound (October 1993), 21

Stan Brakhage was bom in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933. His life journey crosses the
country: from the outskirts of San Francisco's Beat Generation to New York's
underground art scene, to the mountains of Boulder, Colorado. In 1958 he married Jane
Collum. Their lives, love and the childhoods of their five children became the principal
elements of Brakhage's films. During the years 1969 to 1981 Brakhage taught film histor>'
and aesthetics at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1981 he has been teaching film at the

rj# Program Notes 1995

University of Boulder. Brakhage now lives in Boulder with his second wife Marilyn and
their two children.

"... the so called mundane, which people use as a word of contempt when they really mean
'earth'. What they don't see is the potential for glory, for envisionment that's inherent in
even doing the dishes, in the soap suds. . .All they have to do is close their eyes and look."

—Stan Brakhage, Sight & Sound (1993)

At age 19 Brakhage made his first film Interim (1952). At age 62 Brakhage continues to
add films to his extensive oeuvre of nearly 250 films. The films of Stan Brakhage are
diverse: psychodrama, trance films, autobiographical films, birth films, cosmological
epics, "song" cycles inspired by lyric poetry, and most recently, hand-painted films.
Equally expansive is Brakhage's use of the cinematic medium: 8mm to 65mm Imax,
standard chemical processing to unphotographed films — Mothlight (1963) was made by
pasting flower petals and moth wings on film stock. In 1989 Brakhage, the first filmmaker
thus honored, received the MacDowell Medal. This prestigious award is given annually to a
writer, composer or visual artist who has made an "outstanding contribution to the nation's
culture." In 1992 the U.S. Library of Congress selected Dog Star Man (1962-64) for
inclusion in the National Film Registry.

"If you're writing a poem every single word counts. With filmmaking every l-48th of a
second counts."

—Stan Brakhage quoted in Manchester Union Leader,
New Hampshire (August 21, 1989)

• program notes by C Whiteside • , i '

TEENAGE TRASH BASH!
LINDA BLAIR AND BEYOND

Sunday, March 19,1995 — SF Art Institute

Tonight's program begins with a selection of extremely rare educational films made for
teenagers in the 1970's, highlighted by In a Quiet Place, a short made for the church
market starring David Cassidy. After a short intermission we'll roll into Born Innocent, the
feature-length film starring Linda Blair. We hope you enjoy the show!

Getting Closer (1975) ;l6mm, color, sound, 15 minutes

"Greg, shy and self-conscious, wants to take Laura to the Autumn Daze dance at school,
but he can't bring himself to ask her. His friend Louie, an outgoing self-styled "lover",
doesn't help matters by kidding Greg. He finally makes up his mind to go to the dance. As
he starts toward Laura to ask her to dance, Louie whisks her away to the floor. Greg is left
alone amid the dancers, embarrassed and disappointed. This program is intended to help
young people understand feelings of anxiety and concern about interacting with persons of
the other sex and to stimulate learning experiences that will help them cope successfully
with those feelings"

Decision: Alcohol (c. 197?); 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes

"This is the story of a high school student who is seriously injured in a car accident caused
by a drunk driver. Whether to drink or not to drink is left up to the viewing audience"

San Francisco Cinematheque

Remember Eden (1971); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

"Expresses the deep moral values of the interpersonal relationship between a man and a
woman. Against the moods and colors of the changing seasons, young adults express a
variety of viewpoints related to the man-woman relationship. Their stream of
consciousness explores values which range from exploitation and conquest, to a
meaningful relationship of life-long love and fidelity"

Janie (1977); 16mm, color, sound, 2 minutes
A teenage girl at a party is entranced by a beer can.

In a Quiet Place (1971); 16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes

"Gene's teenage pals needle him into making a play for Mary Ann. To them, sex is a game,
and they talk big. Later, struggling with his guilt, he confesses to his father who then
offers his son Christian guidelines for living and discusses with him the beauty of sex - but
only within marriage" Starring David Cassidy.

Girls Beware (c.l97?); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

The safety of young girls is presented with several short vignettes, ranging in tone from
kind of creepy to truly terrifying.

-intermission-
Born Innocent {\91 5), by Donald Wrye; 16mm, color, sound, 99 minutes

With Linda Blair, Joanna Miles.
When I was 9 years old, I was completely obsessed with actress Linda Blair. Consumed
with the release of the film The Exorcist, I kept an ExorcistlBXdiw scrapbook, stuffed full
with clippings from bad 70's movie magazines and Blair puff pieces from Tiger Beat. My
obsession with The Exorcist got so heavy it began extending into darker realms, I truly
wanted to be possessed. I scoured vanity press 'occult' paperbacks looking for rituals to
raise the Devil. It never worked. I wasn't allowed to actually see the film until a year after it
came out and then I had nightmares for 4 months.

Linda Blair's first release after The Exorcist, Born Innocent was made for television and
broadcast in 1974. Marketed enthusiastically toward very young viewers, the barrage of
previews promised a steamy, harsh teenage-girls-in-prison shocker and didn't disappoint.
Then Born Innocent caused a sadly now familiar controversy, though I don't remember
hearing about until long after the fact. In a depressing tragedy, three pre-teen girls allegedly
acted out a rape scene depicted in Born Innocent on a 9 year old girl, on Baker Beach in
San Francisco. The girl's mother sued NBC and SF affiliate KRON for 1 1 million but the
suit was eventually thrown out of court... Blair's next release was another made-for-tv
epic, the unforgettable (though not as sleazy) Sarah T: Portrait of Teenage Alcoholic. In
this one, Blair played a teen lush, drinking constantly, staggering around high school,
singing a Carly Simon song and riding a horse onto the freeway. It must have made a big
impression on me, as I later had to overcome my own raging problem with alcohol.

Blair went on to make a million pretty forgettable films, and she continues to do the same to
this day. Unsurprisingly, she's had a bizarre, scandal -ridden career; several coke busts.
Chained Heat, a tawdry, strange relationship with 80's funkster Rick James
CSupeiireak"), the miserable Exorcist satire Repossessed... Recently she's been sighted as
a "special guest celebrity" on the Halloween 'Haunted House' circuit, kind of like the guy
with 3 arms and the screaming fat lady.

Program Notes 1995

21 years later, here's the dusty and dated Born Innocent again, perhaps for the last time.
Blair and I continue to collide in mysterious ways-my sister waited on her in a restaurant a
few years ago I know there's a Linda Blair cult out there, waiting patiently, like me, for her
inevitable, perfect shining comeback.

Tonight's program was co-curated and co-presented by San Francisco Cinematheque
and David Naylor of Alpha Blue Archives.

•program notes by Joel Shepard •

CANYON CINEMA N I G H T S : M E C H A N I X OF NATURE

CURATED BY DIANE KITCHEN

Thursday, March 23, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Tonight's show is the second in our series of guest-curated programs selected from
Canyon Cinema, the Bay Area's premiere distributor of alternative film. Diane Kitchen
managed Canyon Cinema during a turbulent period in the late 1970s and helped guide and
stabilize it into its position as a important artists' organization. A maker of experimental
films and lyrical, ethnographic documentaries. Kitchen has screened several of her
works— including Basic Elements, Before We Knew Nothing, and Roots, Thorns— dX the
San Francisco Cinematheque. Kitchen is now on the faculty at University of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee. She has selected eight films from Canyon's catalogue— favorites, unknowns
and a wild card— which draw their images from natural settings.

Six Windows ( 1979), by Maijorie Keller; 16mm, color, silent, 7 minutes *^

A pan and a dissolve make a window of a wall on film. A portrait of the filmmaker in a
luminous space, synthetically rendered via positive and negative overlays. (MK)

Windowm,obile (1977), by James Broughton and Joel Singer;
16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes

The film is shot both through and at a window, superimposing and conjoining, thereby
elaborating events on both sides of the glass. Broughton's accompanying poem sings the
same song as the images, sounding from an Eden of the golden passing of days: "They
were seeing the light every day then.../ They were looking and they were seeing/ They
were living there in the light at that time." —Robert Lipman

Fuji (1974), by Robert Breer; 16mm, color, sound, 8.5 minutes

"The classic outline of Mount Fuji, filmed by Breer from a train, then rotoscoped, becomes
involved in an extended speculation on the boundaries between representation and
abstraction. Is it a mountain, or just another of Breer's geometric obsessions?"

—David Curtis
Seven Days (1974), by Chris Welsby; 16mm, color, sound, 20 minutes

The location of this film is by a small stream on the northern slopes of Mount Camingly in
south-west Wales. The seven days were shot consecutively and appear in that same order.
Each day starts at the time of local sunrise and ends at the time of local sunset. One frame
was taken every ten seconds throughout the film. The camera was mounted on an
Equatorial Stand which is a piece of equipment used by astronomers to track the stars. In
order to remain stationary in relation to the star field the mounting is aligned with the
Earth's axis and rotates about its own axis approximately once every 24 hours. A rifle

San Francisco Cinematheque

microphone was used to sample sound every two hours. These samples were later cut to
correspond, both in space and time, to the image on the screen. (CW)

The Red Mile (1973), by Le Ann Bartok; 16mm, color, sound, 9.5 minutes

Documentary of conceptual artist Le Ann Bartok Wilchusky's "Skyworks, The Red Mile,"
dropped from 7,500 ft altitude with skydivers, kinetically danced over the Pennsylvania
countryside. This "Dropped Object" unrolled in free fall creating a line one mile long which
altered the sky space dramatically. Shorter red pieces, held by the skydivers in free fall,
spiral in and out as the skydiver as performer is held in G force. A visual symphony of
falling lines. (LAB)

Fog Line {1910), by Larry Gottheim; 16mm, color, silent, 1 1 minutes

Fog Line is a wonderful piece of conceptual art, a stroke along the careful line between wit
and wisdom. On a certain objective level it is a film made from one 400 foot magazine
exposed from a fixed position as the fog lifts in a valley. But, of course, it is impossible to
equate that "objective" description with the film. For the result is a melody in which literally
every frame is different from every preceding frame (since the fog is always lifting) and the
various elements of the composition— trees, animals, vegetation, sky, and, quite
importantly, the emulsion, the grain of the film itself— continue to play off one another as
do notes in a musical composition. The quality of the light— the tonality of the image
itself— adds immeasurably to the mystery and excitement as the work unfolds, the fog
lifting, the film running through the gate, the composition static yet the frame itself fluid,
dynamic, magnificently kinetic. — Raymond Foery

Still Life {197 5), by Bette Gordon; 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes

A meditation on the American rustic. Various objects within the composition are re-
presented in unnatural colors and unusual spatial arrangements, emphasizing the illusion of
movement while exploring film grain and graphic nature. The image of foreground and
background becomes reversed, and through that process we lose sight of three-dimensional
space representation. (BG)

Time and Places (1982), by Art Zipperer; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes
In an evocative, personal journey, images of the phenomenal world are woven with those
gathered during the Vietnam War as the former triggers the latter. For many, there is a
singular event or experience where one crosses the point of no return and the world is
never quite the same. This film shares such an experience. (AZ)

• program notes by Rick Danielson •

STAN BRAKHAGE: SONGS PROGRAM 3
SONG xxra (23rd Psalm Branch Part l & 2)

Sunday, March 26, 1995, 6:00 PM
Special Program — SF Art Institute

Song XXIII: 23rd Psalm Branch {\966-61)\ 8mm, color, silent, circa 100 minutes

''Song, my song, raise grief to music''
— Louis Zukofsky, "A"

Program Notes 1995

"The mood throughout is alternately Invocation and Exorcism. The film has a strict, and as
I see it, musical form. Only by the broadest possible stretch of definition can this 23rd
Psalm be called a 'song'— but it assuredly can be likened to a symphony, or better still, an
extended rhapsodic tone poem of epic proportions."

—Jerome Hill, ''23rd Psalm Branch(Song, XXIII): A Film by Stan Brakhage,"

Film Culture 46 (Autumn 1967), 14.

Parti

"A study of war, created in the imagination in the wake of newsreel death and destruction."

"...We had moved around a lot and we had settled down enough... so we got a TV. And
that was something in the house that I could simply not photograph, simply could not deal
with visually. It was pouring forth war guilt, primairily, into the household in a way that I
wanted to relate to, if I was guilty, but I had feelings. . .of the qualities of guilt and I wanted
to have it real for me and I wanted to deal with it"

"And I mean, it was happening on all the programs— on the ads as well as the drama and
even in the comedies, and of course the news programs. And I had to deal with that. It
finally became such a crisis that I knew I couldn't deal directly with TV but perhaps I could
make or find out why war was all that unreal to me. . . "

— Stan Brakhage, Filmmakers' Cooperative Catalogue

"Images of a Colorado landscape are juxtaposed with views from Nazi Germany. "Take
back Beethoven's 9th, then he said," is scratched on film stock. Images of a man blowing
up a hill and Colorado landscape are juxtaposed with black-and-white leader. Shots of Jane
are intercut with camera movement over a letter to Jane. Juxtaposed images of Nagasaki
and New York are followed by a poem by Louis Zukofsky, visions of war from classical
antiquity, and Brakhage near a poster of [a] gun pointed at the audience. After Zukofsky's
face is juxtaposed with scenes from a concentration camp, he and his wife are seen in the
present. "I can't go on," is written on the stock, interrupting images of war. Black leader.
After a recapitulation of images, the camera follows Brakhage's hand as it writes: 'I must
stop! the War is as these thoughts (IDEAS, IMAGES), patterns... (RHYTHM) are — as
endless as. . . precise as eye's hell is ! '"

— Synopsis by Gerald R. Barrett and Wendy Brabner,
Stan Brakhage: A Guide to References and Resources ( 1983), 110-111.

Part II

"A searching into the 'sources' of Part I."

—Stan Brakhage

"Peter Kubelka's Vienna" is the title of the initial section of 'Part II to Source.' Scenes of
modem Vienna are intercut with shots of filmmaker Kubelka playing the recorder. "My
Vienna" juxtaposes views of Brakhage seated at a table with shots of activities back home.
Walkers in Vienna are intercut with marching soldiers, as are art objects and prisoners in
concentration camps. "A Tribute to Freud" features images of his home, while "Nietzsche's
Lamb" combines a skinned lamb over high angle views of the city; "East Berlin" combines
lights, a city street at night, and patterns of dots. In the 'coda,' a woman playing a harp in
the woods is doubled-exposed with a man repairing an instrument; children hold sputtering
fireworks.

—Synopsis by Gerald R. Barrett £ind Wendy Brabner.

"The 'coda' begins with a complete rupture from the images and techniques of the rest of
the film and ends with a disquieting metaphor for the undefeatable impulse to war within
the human spirit.... Thus this film which has made an equation among parades, victory

San Francisco Cinematheque

celebrations, street fights, and rallies, culminates in a cyclic vision and a discovery of the
seeds of war in the pastoral vision."

— P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film (1974), 216.

"Brakhage brings the war home into the most literal sense imaginable, forging a geography
of feeling that assigns every reference in this film a crystalline relation to the patterns, as he
sees them, of the making and experiencing of war. As a disease that has entered the blood
stream and is already a dynamic that one suffers, Brakhage's view of war "as a natural
disease" finds resonance in a myriad of instances where through collective tools of
montage, paint, and, in several instances, insertions of language..."

— Gail Camhi, "Notes on Brakhage 's 23rd Psalm Branch,"

Film Culture 67-68-69 (1979), 97.

"...one must assume that only very special pressure could have forced him to insert words
into his 'war film,' 23rd Psalm Branch [speaks in handwriting and in print; in ink on
paper, in scratched emulsion and in engraved letters on a book cover; in a television news
graphic and a fragment of Latin manuscript; in words from Thomas Mann, Louis
Zukofsky, and Charles Olsen; and in the filmmaker's own words in a letter to his wife and
diarylike notes to himself]... Brakhage's venture into the visual dimension of verbal texts
was forced upon him by a personal and aesthetic crisis produced by public, political events.
In the heat of his engagement with images of war, Brakhage had to give words to his film.
He let them say things that the purely visual images could not say because as iconic
representations, they were inseparable from the "thought/patterns" that the film was
intended to be about; whereas words, as arbitrary verbal constructs, could communicate at
a more abstract level where they could escape 'eye's hell.'"

—William C. Wees, "Words and Images in Stan Brakhage's 23rd Psalm Branch,''

Cinema Journal (Winter 1988), 40-48.

• program notes by C Whiteside •

FILMS BY JEAN ROUGH:
Les maItres fous + Chronicle of a Summer

Sunday, March 26, 1995, 8 p.m. — SF Art Institute

"The truth will not give its lifeto dead wood. "— Songhay proverb
"Not to film life as it is, but life as it is provoked. "—Jean Rouch, 1963 interview

Ethnographic film, cin6-trance, cin^ma-vdritd, participatory cinema, ethno- fiction, truant
ethnology, contraband cinema— such are some of the labels that have been applied to the
various films of Jean Rouch. In the words of Jean-Andr^ Fieschi (in Eaton, 1979), "What
is exploded by Rouch's work (with the result that, rather as Boulez said of music after
Debussy, the entire cinema now 'breathes' differently) is the whole system of statutory
oppositions whereby starting from the original Lumi^re-M^li^s axis, categories were
conceived of as documentary /fiction; style/improvisation; natural/artificial; etc."

At seventy seven and with over a hundred films to his credit (ranging from several minutes
to several hours in length), Rouch continues to make films and to play an active role at the
Mus^e de I'Homme and the Cinematheque Fran9aise in Paris. Only five of his films are
distributed in North America. Tonight the Cinematheque presents two of these, probably

Program Notes 1995

his best known in this country. Both Les maitres fous (1955) and Chronicle of a Summer
(1961), while clearly anchored in the domain of documentary, are seminal works in
Rouch's oeuvre and development. In them one can see the seeds of several subsequent
films where the lines between fiction and documentary, the imaginary and the factual, the
self and the potential selves, are increasingly blurred {Jaguar, Moi Un Noir), or where the
anthropological gaze is mockingly turned around {Petit a Petit).

Rouch began his career as an engineer, building and blowing up bridges in occupied
France and then overseeing the construction of roads in the French Colonies in what is
today Niger. It was there in his mid twenties that he first witnessed a Songhay possession
ceremony and developed his lifelong interest in Songhay culture. After returning to France
to fight in the war and study anthropology, Rouch went back to Africa on a nine month
exploration of the Niger river with two friends and a Bell and Howell camera. During this
trip he was asked by some Nigerien acquaintances to film a hippopotamus hunt. A silent
version of this film premiered at an avant-garde club in Paris, and a few years later Rouch
brought a subsequent version back to the village in Niger where he had filmed. The
comments and criticisms of the Nigeriens led Rouch to change parts of the soundtrack and
to be asked to make other films in collaboration with his Nigerien friends. Thus was bom
the 'participatory cinema' which to a greater or lesser degree characterizes most of Rouch's
film work.

Rouch's fascination with trance (as in Les maitres fous and other ethnographic pieces),
with truth revealed through provocation and interaction (as in Chronicle of a Summer and
La Pyramide Humaine), with the complex and revealing collaborative inventions of self
and reality {Jaguar, Moi Un Noir, Petit a Petit) implies a multifaceted notion of reality "in
which the part played by the imaginary is no longer merely ornamental or subordinate, but
genuinely basic" (Fieschi, in Eaton, 1979). In this sense, Rouch's love of and dedication lo
thecinema— another imaginary— is not at all surprising. "For me, as an ethnographer and
filmmaker, there is almost no boundary between documentary film and films of fiction. The
cinema, the art of the double, is already a transition from the real world to the imaginary
world, and ethnography, the science of the thought systems of others, is a permanent
crossing point from one conceptual universe to another; acrobatic gymnastics where losing
one's footing is the least of the risks."

—Rouch, 1989 interview, quoted in StoUer, 1992

Les maitres fous (The Crazy Masters; Mad Masters; Master Madmen) {1955)',
16mm, color, sound, 36 minutes

Les maitres fous is Rouch's most controversial film. It has been accused of reinforcing
racist myths and perpetuating a pernicious exoticism. In a discussion with Rouch,
Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene said of Rouch's purely ethnographic films,
including L^5 maitres fous, "...you dwell on reality without showing its evolution... you
observe us like insects" (Stoller, 1992). Others have lauded the film for challenging
viewers to confront their own ethnocentrism, their repressed racism, their latent
primitivism. The unsettling images seek to transform the audience psychologically and
politically without the imposition of any comforting or reductionist interpretative schema.
In the words of Paul Stoller (1992), "The reason Les maitres fous is one of Rouch's
masterworks is that it ingeniously brings together the complex themes of colonization,
decolonization, and the ontology of trance, in thirty-three minutes of extraordinary cinema.
In a direct manner, Rouch thrusts the 'horrific comedy' of Songhay possession up)on his
viewers, challenging them to come to grips with what they are seeing on the screen... Les

San Francisco Cinematheque

mattres fous, like Rouch's Songhay ethnographies and some of his other films [...]
documents the existence of the incredible, the unthinkable. These unexplicated scenes
challenge us to decolonize our thinking, to decolonize ourselves." Due to the controversy
surrounding the film, Rouch decided to limit its distribution..

"This film, crucial to the development of Rouch's work and later ethnographic film
practice, concerns the annual ceremonies of the Hauka cult which started in the late '20s in
the Upper Niger region. Persecuted by the French colonial administration and denounced
by orthodox Islam, many of its practitioners moved to Ghana in the thirties, working as
migrant labourers throughout the Gold Coast region. The Hauka are *the new Gods',
spirits of power and of the winds. During the ceremonies the initiates become possessed by
these powerful spirits which take the form of figures of authority in the Western colonial
administration (the Governor-General, the Admiral, etc.). In a state of trance the
possessed take on these roles and act like the white figures of authority. [...] The film is a
record of a Hauka ceremony during which the participants become possessed, a dog is
ritually sacrificed and eaten. The film also includes footage of the Western figures whose
power the Hauka spirits personify. The thesis of the film advanced by Rouch in the
commentary is that the ritual plays a therapeutic role in the lives of the marginalised and
oppressed people, allowing them to accommodate to the psychological disjunctions caused
by colonialism. At the end of the film we are shown the Hauka priests back at work on the
roads or in the markets of Accra. The commentary is an attempt to provide an
anthropological explanation/rationale for the 'bizarre' or 'exotic' nature of much of the
footage, shifting the terms of emphasis so that it is the colonial administration which
emerges as bizarre and irrational.

"Rouch was asked to make the film after he and his wife, Jane, had given a lecture at the
British Council in Accra. In the audience there were several Hauka priests and initiates,
many of whom originally came from the area of Upper Niger where the shorts shown by
Rouch at that lecture had been filmed. He was approached by them and asked to make a
film of their annual ceremony. The priests wanted a film not only a s a record of the
ceremony but also so that it could be used in the ritual itself. Whilst in Accra, Rouch
attended many of the smaller Hauka ceremonies and was cabled by the priests on 15
August, 1954, in Togo, where he was traveling, to return as the big ceremony was about to
be held.

"The film was shot on a hand-cranked 16mm Bell and Howell camera which allowed for
25 sec. shots, but it was edited in the camera as much as possible and the eventual shooting
ration was only about 8-10. The sound was recorded by Damourd Zika, one of the first
Africans Rouch had got to know well on his first trip during the war, using a Scubitophone
which is a portable though heavy tape-recorder with a clockwork motor that had to be
wound up between takes.

"When shown in Paris, the film was widely criticised. Black students in the audience
accused Rouch of reinforcing stereotypes of 'savagery', and the film was banned
throughout Britain's African colonies because of its 'inflammatory' content. Jean Genet's
play The Blacks— in which colonised people acted out the roles of the colonisers was
heavily influenced by it and Peter Brook used it as a model for his actors during the
rehearsals o( Marat/ Sade. Rouch has always defended the film, not only on the basis of its
ethnographic veracity and his commitment to the use of film in 'describing' a ceremony
(where there are ,many simultaneous events which are impossible to convey adequately
through the medium of print) but also, and more significantly, in relation to his later film
practice, because the content of the film is concerned specifically with the intermingling of
cultures and the effects— particularly the psychological effects— of colonialism. Unlike the

Program Notes 1995

vast majority of ethnographic films, including Rouch's early shorts, Les maitres fous does
not construct African culture as somehow occupying a sphere discrete in itself and
unaffected by Western contact."

—Mick Eaton, "Chronicle", in M. Eaton, Ed. (1979),

Chronique d*un ete (Chronicle of a summer ){196\), in collaboration with Edgar Morin;
16mm, b/w, sound, 90 minutes

"Rouch was approached by the sociologist Edgar Morin to make a film about Paris. Morin
had long been interested in the cinema (he wrote Le Cinema, ou I'homme imaginaire and
Les Stars) and had praised Rouch's work in an article Pour un nouveau cinema-verite in
France Ovservateur, 14 January, 1960. Morin had been a member of the resistance during
the war and was expelled from the Communist party in 1951 for his opposition to
Stalinism. At this time he was also editor of the review Arguments. Morin's idea was to
make a 'sociological fresco' (Rouch: 'je ne suis pas fresqueur.') about Paris in the summer
of 1960, when it was thought that the Algerian war was going to end. Rouch was
interested but admitted to knowing very little about what was happening in Paris at that
time. . . [M]ost of the people involved in Chronique were Morin's friends, many of them
member s of a leftist group, Socialisme ou Barbarie, who had left the French Communist
Party after the events in Hungary. Rouch has since talked of the difficulties of working
with a collaborator "Working with Morin was exciting during the planning, but annoying
during the shooting.' Rouch and Morin were given an entirely free hand by the producer
and worked with the participants over several months without interference. The film was
subtitled 'une experience de cinema-verite ' (apparently in hommage to Dziga Vertov...)
and whilst it was in no sense a 'psycho-drama' like La Pyramide Humaine, the founding
ideas were very similar: the camera was to act as a 'catalyst', and 'accelerator' making
people reveal themselves. However, it is worth mentioning that Rouch found the French
much more camera shy than the Africans he had been filming for so many years.

"In many respects the importance of his film lies in the way it was made and the
technological innovations that accompanied it. Shooting started with the standard Arriflex,
which although reasonable light at 10 kgs, was noisy. Rouch's French camera man was
not prepared to walk with it in the street sequences. [...] Rouch was in contact with Andre
Coutant, who worked at the Eclair factory, and who [...] introduced him to a new camera
which was being developed for use in a space satellite for purposed of military
surveillance. This camera was light (6 kgs), dependable, and virtually silent, but it had only
a magazine of 3 minutes worth of film. Coutant worked on the camera as the film
progressed in an attempt to extend the capacity of the magazine[...]This camera was the
prototype of the KMT Coutant-Mathot Eclair, the first light, silent portable 16 mm camera
with sync-sound. [...] The development of the camera freed the crew to get out into the
streets and move about holding the camera, and the new possibility of sync-sound had its
effect on the film, making it much more a film 'about' people taking, rather than them
acting out their lives in front of the camera.

"[...]The film again raises the questions of what happens to 'ordinary people' after Rouch
has given them the possibility of being, for a few short months, movie stars. Marceline
(Loridan) married Joris Ivens and has worked throughout the world with him; Jean-Pierre
(Sergent) made movies in Algeria and Colombia; Regis (Debray) went to Cuba to make a
film about Che Guevara. He subsequently went to Colombia, where he was arrested and
imprisoned for revolutionary activity; he is the author of 'Revolution in the Revolution ' and
other books about revolution. Mary-Lou became a stills photographer who worked with
Bertolucci and Godard. There were more problems with Angelo, the worker in the Renault
plant. He was fired because of his involvement in the film and got work at the Billancourt

San Francisco Cinematheque

Studios where he was fired for his political activity. Morin pulled strings to get him a job at
the publishing firm. Editions du Seuil, but when he tried to organise a union there too,
there was a certain amount of embarrassment caused, so 'we gave him money to buy a
small workshop in Levallois where he worked as a mechanic'.

"There were 21 hours of rushes from which the finished film was edited. The immense
difficulty of cutting led Rouch to consider making another film in Paris where the action
would take place in a single day. Although the film was released around the world, and
was well received critiailly, it was not a success commercially."

—Mick Eaton, "Chronicle"

• program notes by Irina Leimbacher •

OPEN SCREENING
HOSTED BY ERIN SAX & STEVE ANKER

March 30, 1996 — Center for the Arts

Mad Poets of Frisco, by Cine Lourdes; video, 10.5 minutes

Chaos, Chaos, by Ralph Ackerman; video, 4 minutes

/ am a Mechanic, by Dan Janos; S-8mm, 5.6 minutes

gajol-gusal , by Judith Pfeifer; video, 5.5 minutes

TV I, by Duane Ackerman, video, 7 minutes

Second Persons, by Steve Packenham; video, 14.3 minutes

Brothers & Sisters, by Terry Hatfield; video, 7 minutes

Deep Peep & Love Controls Time, by Laura Klein; video, 10 minutes

2.95 Untitled (m), by B. Frye, 16mm, 3 minutes

Kilometer 123.5, by R. Mader; video, 12 minutes

ERNIE GEHR: ADELINE KENT AWARD SCREENING

ERNIE GEHR IN PERSON

Sunday, April 2, 1995 - SF Art Institute

"In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic
entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and
established avant-garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real
thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of
the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence
as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement
within a given space."

— Ernie Gehr, January 1971

Ernie Gehr began making films in the regular 8mm format in the 1960s and has worked
steadily since then, completing more than 24 films. A self-taught artist, Gehr has
established himself as one of the true masters of film form, and his graceful sense of style
and subtle, poetic sensibility have deeply affected the cinematic avant-garde. His films have

Program Notes 1995

established himself as one of the true masters of film form, and his graceful sense of style
and subtle, poetic sensibility have deeply affected the cinematic avant-garde. His films have
screened internationally, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modem Art in New
York, The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Mus6e du Cinema in Brussels and at the
San Francisco Cinematheque, and he has received awards and grants from numerous
institutions, including the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim
fellowship and the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute. Currently a
faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute, Gehr has also taught and lectured at the
University of California at Berkeley, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the
Deutcher Akademischer Austauschdienstin Berlin. This screening is presented as a part of
the 1995 Adeline Kent Award Exhibition, an award presented annually to a California
artist. Ernie Gehr and Bruce Conner are the only two filmmakers to have received this
prestigious award, which includes an honorarium and a solo exhibition in the San
Francisco Art Institute's Walter/McBean Gallery.

Untitled: Part One (1981); 16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes

"The telephoto lens in Untitled: Part One (1981) provides an extraordinary sense of both
observation and distance in perhaps Gehr's most subtle and moving city film. Whereas
Gehr frequently records the more impersonal aspects of the city, here he focuses on the
gestures and circulation of human figures. The magnification of the lens allows him lo
register the intimate details of the texture of skin or the uncertain tread of an elderly foot,
while remaining somewhat outside the scene. In documenting the streetside acts of
exchange and encounter in a neighborhood dominated by recent immigrants (largely Jews
from Russia), Gehr captures a history of circulation and exile written in the bodies of the
city's inhabitants."

—Tom Gunning, Perspective and Retrospective: The Films of Ernie Gehr

Signal— Germany on the Air( 1982-85); 16mm, color, sound, 37 minutes

"The artifice of the film image stands in stark contrast to the 'reality' of the scene— one is
highly conscious of the frame outlines— of what's in and what's out. The color is almost
always 'unreal'— some artifact of photographic depiction. The spaces and sounds between,
behind, and above the image comes through, we fill out the scene. The mind permeates the
space and we become highly aware of the processes used for this inspection. While
watching you become aware of your own space, your own patterns of movement.
Common ground and individual experience are the fX)les here, and the active mind shuttles
between them in the duration. The recalcitrant world, once it is depicted and articulated, can
be peeled back like an onion, revealing constituent layers. In Signal— Germany on the Air
it is history that's in the air, behind the mask of every face, every facade, every street
sign."

—Daniel Eisenberg, "Some Notes on the Films of Ernie Gehr"

"A long sequence at the end of Signal was shot in the rain. This is almost comforting. The
subdued colors of an overcast day seem more appropriate than the bright, saturated colors
of the storefronts earlier in the film. It seems for a while as though the rain can wash away
all traces of the past. But, when a bright orange flare-out signals both the end of a camera
roll and the end of the film, the steady hiss of the rain reveals itself as the end of a
conflagration."

— Harvey Nosowitz in Film Quarterly

Rear Window (1986/91);16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

"Images were recorded in 1985/86 from the rear window of what used to be our apartment

in Brooklyn. The death of my father and an earlier work of mine. Signal— Germany on the

San Francisco Cinematheque

front of the camera lens and attempted to make tactile light, color and image. The work
shifts from a play between the 'elements' to whipping up a 'storm' out of thin air."

— Ernie Gehr, January 1993

ERNIE GEHR FILMOGRAPHY

Morning (1968); Wait (1968); Reverberation (1969); Transparency (1969); History
(1970); Field (1970); Field (short version) (1970); Serene Velocity (1970); Three (1970);
Still {\969-liy. Eureka (1974); Shift {1912-1 4)\ Behind the Scenes (1975); Table (1976);
Untitled {\9riiy. Hotel (1979)] Mirage (1981); Part One (1981); Signal- Germany on the
Air (1982-85); Listen (1986-91); Rear Window {\986-9iyjhis Side of Paradise (1991);
Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991); Daniel Willi (work in progress)

• program notes by Brian Frye*

San Francisco Cinematheque
Publications

pinematQgraph Each (a) $12 individual $25 institution\ foreign

Volume 1 (out of print)

Volume 2

Volume 3 (Guesl Editor: Christine lliniblyn)

Volume 4 (Guesl Editor: Jeffrey Skollcr)

Volume 5 (Guest Editor: Peter Herwitz)

Volume 6 (Special Small Formal Film and Video Issue, to be published 1/96)

Program Note Booklets Each @ $10 individual $20 institution\ foreign

1984-1994 available

The San Francisco Cinematheque Program Note Booklets contain the collected program notes
that accompanied the Cinematheque's film and video exhibition of thai year. The notes include
critical essays, historical background, and technical information about works ranging from lurn-
of-the-cenlury films to the newest contemporary personal and experimental films and videotapes.

Monographs

Yvonne Rainer: Declaring Slakes

The Films of Andy Warhol: A Seven-Week Introduction

Films of Ernie Gehr

Inciting Big Joy: James Broughlon al 80

Austrian Avanl-Garde Cinema 1955-1993

Bruce Baillic: Life and Work

$5 domestic

$8 foreign

n $5 domestic

S^foreign

$12 domestic

$ 1 5 foreign

$5 domestic

$8 foreign

$7 domestic

$10 foreign

$5 domestic

$8 foreign

Program Notes 1995

NELSON & WILEY'S BEFORE NEED REDRESSED
GUNVOR NELSON AND DOROTHY WILEY IN PERSON

Thursday, April 13, 1995 - Center for the Arts

This evening's program is the first time the Cinematheque has screened Gunvor Nelson's
films since the fall of 1992, when a full retrospective entitled Gunvor Nelson: A life in film
was organized on the occasion of her return to Sweden. After thirty-two years of living,
teaching (at the San Francisco Art Institute) and working in the Bay area. Nelson returned
to her native country. The retrospective was a way of saying goodbye to a wonderful
filmmaker and teacher and we are very pleased to welcome her back.

"For me, the intention is trying to dig deep and find those images, to find the essence of
your feelings. I guess about a year ago it just struck me that the outside world for me, all
things that are there, are symbols for what I feel. Trying to use film as a medium to express
what's inside you, you have to use those symbols."

—Film Quarterly, Fall 1971 interview with Gunvor Nelson

The symbols Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley choose to express these interior states are
as varied as the many writings about their films. Nelson and Wiley's work has been
claimed as feminist while also being seen as formalist: working within the school of light
and dark, shape, color, application, texture or line. Certainly these are all at issue in their
work, but they are explored in such a complex manner and with such vivid emotion that the
resulting cinema can equally be claimed as feminist, formalist and experimental. At
screenings of Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley's work the audience's reaction, and the
depth of response that is expressed is very striking. In one interview, when asked about the
climate of her Swedish culture. Nelson said that she found it difficult to express some
emotions and that perhaps these feelings came through her films. The films do speak to the
viewer, whether through form, or content, or subject. This is truly a human cinema.

Before Need Redressed (1994); 16mm, color, sound, 75 minutes

We think a lot of the film is absurd. . .It is on the brink of being too serious and too stupid.
It's complex. There are all these unexpected things. Things are multi -layered. That's our
point of view. The beauty the woman sees in the different roles she's taken in her life and
looking back on those states of being is both beautiful, pathetic and absurd. (GN)

Light Years Expanding (1987)', 16mm, color, 25 minutes
A collage film. Traversing stellar distances continues. "(GN)

A further development of elements seen in Light Years (1987), Light Years Expanding
extends the first film's themes and techniques. . . "All her recent films suggest that while the
distance of time makes home further, the intensity of memory makes it richer. "

—Parabola

Dorothy Wiley was trained as a High School English teacher, and as a wife and mother
she brings a practical love of film, and an attention to life's details to their work. Her first
film was made with Gunvor Nelson out of their homes after Wiley's husband gave a half-
hour lesson on how to use a camera. Ernest Callenbach of Film Quarterly wrote of
Schmeerguntz (1965), "A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public
surface deserves to have such films as Schmeerguntz shown everywhere— in every PTA,
every Rotary Club, every club in the land." The film won prizes at the Ann Arbor, Kent
State University and Chicago Art Institute Film Festivals of 1966, was discussed in

San Francisco Cinematheque

feminist contexts in the early seventies and is still widely seen. Wiley and Nelson made
several other films together, and Wiley went on to do a series of short 8mm films best
described as filmic prose poems, using domestic familiars (red cabbage, coffee grounds) as
materials. When Wiley was asked why she turned to film, she talks of new creative
frontiers, and reflects..."! find my interest in films peculiar because I'm not interested in
machines, and there are an awful lot of machines involved in making films... But it was
such a new medium. The possibilities that hadn't been explored were tremendous."
(Independent Journal, 8-3-79). Wiley continues to work with film in these projects with
Gunvor Nelson as well as experimenting with video, music and writing.

Gunvor Nelson was trained as a painter, receiving a BA from Humboldt and an MFA.
from Mills College. Coming from painting she brings a refined sensibility of color, an
amazing sense of form, an exposing of texture, and the possibilities of the medium.
Working frequently with an animation stand. Nelson paints directly on to moving or still
images, allowing the viewer to watch the frenetic paintbrush and the creation of the image.
Her films often experiment with light and dark, playing a sort of hide and seek with the
viewer or with the dimensions of possibility. The title Frame Line (1983) evokes ideas of
the frame, the space within the frame, the flatness of the screen, the image that comes out to
the viewer (Russian perspective) or the image beyond the frame (Bazin's frame as window
to the worid). Red Shift (\9S3), Time Being{\99l) and many others are fascinated with the
body, flesh and blood (whether material or familial), age, youth, decay and beauty. For
Nelson, the attraction to the medium of fil was "a combination of the visual— within that
the use of color and black and white— with the timing, the dance, the motion, plus
whatever else there is— the story, sound. It's so multi-media it's almost too
overwhelming." (Independent Journal 8-3-79)

DOROTHY WILEY FiLMOGRAPHY

Schmeerguntz (1965), With Nelson; 15 Mm.;Fog Pumas (1967), With Nelson; 25 Min.;
Five Artists Billbobbillbillbob{\91\), With Nelson; 70 Min.; Cabbage (1972); 9 Min.;
Letters (1912); 11 Min.; The Weenie Worm Or The Fat Innkeeper{\912)\ 11 Min.; Zane
Forbidden (1972); 10 Min.; M55 Jesus Fries On Grill (1973); 12 Min.; The Birth OfSeth
Andrew Kinmont (1977); 27 Min.; Before Need (1979), With Nelson; 75 Min.; Before
Need Redressed {1994), With Nelson; 75 Min.

GUNVOR NELSON FiLMOGRAPHY

Schmeerguntz (1965), With Wiley; 15 Min.; Fo^ Pumas (1967), With Wiley; 25 Min.; My
Name Is Oona(l969); 10 Min.; Kirsa Nicholina{\910)\ 16 Min.; Five Artists
Billbobbillbillbob (1971), With Wiley; 70 Min.; Muir Beach (1970); 5 Min.; One <& The
Same (1973), With Freude; 4 Min.; Take Oft[\972)\ 10 Min. • Moons Pool (1973); 15
Min.; Trollstenen (1976); 125 Min.; Before Need (1979), With Wiley; 75 Min.; Frame
Line (1983); 22 Min.\ Red Shift (19^3); 50 Min.; Light Years (19^); 28 Min.; Light Years
Expanding (1987); 25 Min.; Field Study #2 (1988); 8 Min.; Natural Features (1990); 28
Min.; Time Being (1991); 8 Min.; Kristina's Harbor And Old Digs (1992); Part I, 50
Min.- Part li, 20 M\n.\Before Need Redressed (1994), With Wiley; 75 Min.

•program notes by E. Golembiewski«

Program Notes 1995

SIMPLE BEAUTIES:

THE ART AND LIFE OF BRUCE BAILLIE

BRUCE BAILLIE IN PERSON

Monday, April 17, 1995- SF Art Institute

Thursday, April 20, 1995 - Center for the Arts

Friday, April 21, 1995 - SF Art Institute

7 was only ever interested in making openings, not closings. "— Bruce Baillie

"In my filmmakers' pantheon, Bruce Baillie takes a shining place. His work I can see again
and again. There is in Bruce Baillie something that remmds us of the wide country, of the
spaces of America...! remember Baillie for certain images that keep reappearing in my
mind. Curiously enough, those images have always to do with travel, with cross country
rides, with wide spaces, with the huge American continent being crossed. . .In the images of
his films, he seems to be very stable and very sure and always going after some definite,
and probably always the same, image. With each film one feels maybe he found it. But no,
the image of the dream is not yet caught, still somewhere else— so he makes another film,
trying to come closer to it, from some other cingle."

—Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal

Canyon Cinema founder Bruce Baillie has remained true to his art, life and vision of
community for over 30 years. A profoundly spiritual man, Baillie seeks beauty in simple,
honest moments and truths behind calcified habits. The films he has made are cherished
throughout the world for their sensual lyricism and social critique, and in the last several
years he has expanded his artmaking to radio, video, and literature. The Cinematheque
proudly presents a seek of Bruce Baillie events, his first public presentation in San
Francisco since 1983, as a welcome antidote to this stuffy, fearful conservative time. Each
evening Baillie will show films and videotapes (listed below), as well as play selections
from his radio series Dr. Bish's Remedies and read from his fictional autobiography
Memoirs of an Angel.

Program 1: Monday, April 17, 1995— San Francisco Art Institute

Mr. Hayashi (1961); 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 minutes

"[Mr. Hayashi] was made as a newsreel advertisement to be shown at Baillie's film
society. Canyon Cinema, in the second year of its existence. It shows a Japanese gardener,
Mr. Hayashi, performing his daily tasks in a few black and white shots. The form is
intentionally brief, minor, and occasional; although there is no metaphor or conflict of
images, it reminds one of the aspiration first voiced by Maya Deren and later echoed by
Brakhage to create a cinematic haiku."

— P. Adams Sitney, Montreux Exhibition Catalog, 1974

To Parsifal (1963); 16mm, color, sound, 16 minutes

"You're given a certain responsibility and a gift or grace, a certain unique capability, which
can turn against you if it's not attended to properly. Even the king who possessed this
emblem of purity or perfection, this divine weapon, was heir to temptation, and the weapon
fell into the hands of his nemesis. The wound was ultimately mortal. Though he was still
alive, still functioning, he was incapable of carrying on this essential divine mission to
celebrate Universal Truth, embodied in the Holy Grail, so it was foretold that there would

San Francisco Cinematheque

be a successor who would come along, a "pure fool" as Wagner called him — whether the
original name was Parsifal or Percivil, it really meant "pure fool." ...Parsifal was object
and subject all at once, an objectified depiction and a reflection of my subjective pursuit of
an identity, my recognition of myself. To try to make my own films against enormous
resistance was perhaps Parsifal -ian: to be out there in the woods and on the ocean with a
movie camera, unemployed, not doing the usual things— marrying, making children,
setting up the pension plan, carrying the mail."

— Bruce Baillie, interview with Scott McDonald in A Critical Cinema 2

Mass For the Dakota Sioux (1963-4); 16mm, b/w, sound, 24 minutes

"A film Mass, dedicated to that which is vigorous, intelligent, lovely, the-best-in-man; that

which work suggests is nearly dead.

"Synopsis: The film begins with a short introduction— 'No chance for me to live. Mother,
you might as well mourn.' Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux Chief. Applause for a lone figure
dying on the street. INTROIT. A long, lightly exposed section composed in the camera.
KYRIE. A motorcyclist crossing the San Francisco Bay Bridge accompanied by the sound
of the Gregorian Chant, recorded at the Trappist Monastery in Vina, California. The
sounds of the 'mass' rise and fall throughout. GLORIA. The sound of a siren and a short
sequence of a '33 Cadillac proceeding over the Bay Bridge and disappearing into a tunnel.
The final section of the Communion begins with the OhhtRTORY in a procession of lights
and figures to the second chant. The anonymous figure from the introduction is discovered
again, dead on the pavement. The body is consecrated and taken away past an indifferent,
isolated people, accompsuiied by the final chant. The Mass is traditionally a celebration of
life; thus the contradiction between the form of the Mass and the theme of death. The
dedication is to the religious people who were destroyed by the civilization which evolved
the Mass."

— Bruce Baillie, Filmmaker's Cooperative Catalog # 7

All My Life (1966); 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes

"...it was the quality of the light for three summer days in Casper, California, up the coast
where Tulley lived. It looked like Cork, Ireland used to.... It was inspired by the light
(every day is unique as you know), and by the early Teddy Wilson/Ella Fitzgerald
recording, which was always playing in TuUey's little cabin, with its condemnation sign on
it."

— Bruce Baillie, interview with Scott McDonald in A Critical Cinema 2

Castro Street ( 1966); 16mm, color and b/w, sound, 10 minutes

"1 liked the assignment in form that I gave myself. To use a street as a basic form rather
than a narrative or any kind of storyline. And so I really did start the film out at the
beginning of the street, and ended it on the red barn at the end. Then, in terms of
discovering an idea, it came right in the middle of a severe period of my life, where I felt I
was being bom actually. Or becoming conscious is the way I put it at the time. And the
whole film is the shape of being bom or becoming conscious."

— Bmce Baillie, in Film Culture, 1969

Valentin de las Sierras (196S); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

"One of Baillie's very greatest works. The location: a Mexican village. Baillie's description:
'Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun earth.' The camera concentrates on individual details,
but there are none of the abstracting techniques of Castro Street. The images are hard and
clear, the cuts sharp and abmpl in both image and sound. More strongly than in any other

Program Notes 1995

Baillie film, this work puts the viewer in a state which is very difficult to explain or account
for in terms of the specifics of the film."

—Fred Camper, Audio-Brandon Catalog, 1978-79

"...it doesn't look at all like an Avant-Garde, Experimental, or even Art movie. [...] it does
speak, to me at least, from the beginning in the language of film without feeling the need to
speak for itself as film, if you know what I mean, and it exists very simply on many
different levels of meaning."

—Stan Brakhage, Cinema News #78, 3 & 4

The P-38 Pilot ( 1990) ; video, color, sound, 15 minutes i

"For the dispossessed, the excluded, the condemned. . .exiled by our own preferences. "

A work from the darkness of winter, a kind of pre-Paradiso which parallels by chance, '<
Dante's Purgatorio— my own confessions and clues to ascent, life and Light.

Abstract imagery from my home, winter rain, WW II paraphernalia, etc., along with an
audio monologue recorded years ago and carried back and forth across the country, living
out of my VW. Made with simple home equipment no budget, 6 - 7 months time and toil.

As all art is made from some particular sort of sticks and stones, this piece happens to be
formed from the words of a war hero who suffers his own particular "habitante", as this P-
38 pilot would have it. The (film) is not, however a documentary about— in this case-
alcoholism.

Note from the conclusion: "Te lucis ante terminum" (Thy Light before the end— or, before
the darkness), taken from the traditional Compline service at the end of the day, sung by
Christian religious through the centuries. The image of beloved (my family) at the very end
of the work is the final, perhaps essential clue, given also of course by Dante Alighieri in
his 14th century classic, by way of Beatrice: i.e., the way beyond inevitable suffering,
transcending individual intellect, is only through (pure) love and loving. (BB)

"A cohesive Baillie song of sound and sight, a flowing visual essay. Bruce has made the
transition from the film to the video format without compromising the beauty of the
image..."

—Kathleen Connor

Program 2: Thursday, April 20, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Still Life (1966); 16mm, color, sound, 2 minutes

"Summer, 1966; coming out of the artist's period of life at Graton— a communal venture in
the woods north of San Francisco. A film on efforts toward new American religion."

—Bruce Baillie, Filmmaker's Cooperative Catalog # 7

rung (1966); 16mm, color and b/w, silent, 5 minutes

"Portrait of a friend named Tung, deriving directly from a momentary image on waking.
Seeing her bright shadow I thought she was someone I you we had known."

—Bruce Baillie, Filmmaker's Cooperative Catalog # 7

Quixote (1964-1965); 16mm, color and b/w, sound, 45 minutes

San Francisco Cinematheque

Quixote is a kind of summary and conclusion of a number of themes, etc., especially that
of the hero ...depicting Western orientation as essentially one of conquest. The film is
conceived in a number of different styles and on a number of simultaneous levels. (BB)

"In Quixote Baillie uses the techniques of underground film to explore the inflections of a
personal vision with a subtlety and precision equaled only by the work of his film
correspondent, Stan Brakhage, but his explicitly political inflection of those techniques was
radically innovative. His orchestration of a film vocabulary in which sensuous attention to
minute local textures is combined with an overall rhythmic sweep, and his use of this
method to register the world of public affairs, is on the one hand testament to the flexibility
and resourcefulness of that underground cinema, its providing the individual with access to
the arena of social commentary. It also marks, on the other hand, a limit noticeable initially
in the very virtues of the 'poetic' method, for the obverse of its subtlety and indirection is
its inability to speak explicitly about the role of Hollywood, of Wall Street, of Vietnam
...The significance of Baillie's style is thus double: it is a means of marshaling images to
articulate a critique of a social degeneration, and its own formal properties represent values
alternative to that degradation. The precision of his perception, the subtle analytic cues of
his rhythms, and the virtuoso orchestration of an extended register of sensual tonalities of
film not only stand against the commercial film and television and their political complicity,
but also stand with the counterculture and its representative, here the American Indian. The
aesthetic qualities of Quixote thus allegorize social values, mythic richness, ecological
sensitivity, even technological primitiveness; its aesthetic is completely a politics and vice
versa. Its method is that of the poet— of associational implications, of connotation, of the
play of significance, sensitivity, and seriousness... 'a cinema which... has been liberated by
poetry'.

— David E. James, Allegories of Cinema

Roslyn Romance (Is It Really True?) (1974); 16mm, color, sound, 17 minutes

"My Romance is intended for something like 'broadcast' form, or like a
correspondence... not so much for showing a big batch of it at one sitting. Eventually, it
should be in both film and video tape form. The Introduction, Intro. 1 & 2 , is finished
now. I will send rolls from time to time and hope one of these days to put the rest of it in
shape for you to see. Meanwhile, I'll be continuing to record the Romance wherever I am.
The work seems to be a sort of manual, concerning all the stuff of the cycle of life, from
the most detailed mundanery to. . . God knows."

— Bruce Baillie, Filmmakers Cooperative Catalog # 7

Program 3: Friday, April 21, 1995, — San Francisco Art Institute

Quick Billy {1967-70); 16mm, color and b/w, sound, 56 minutes

"A personal record of the author's psychic journey and physical recovery during a period
of his life which might be described essentially as one of transformation. . . 'the dark wood
encountered in the middle of life's journey' (Dante)... As poetic cinema, its significance to
the world is perhaps in its narration of a singular phenomena of our time, implicitly
revealing those ancient 'rules' of transit evolved over the centuries; e.g., the Bardo Thodol
{The Tibetan book of the Dead) , as well as Dante Alighieri's own discoveries in the time
of the Fourteenth Century Europe, etc. The Bardo Thodol, from which parts I— III are
adopted structurally, admonishes (the deceased)...' a time of uncertainty, undertaking
nothing-fear not the terrifying forms of your own psyche...' Mankind deceased
encountering a spectacular stream of images it once viewed as Reality. The film concludes
with Part IV, a western one reeler, which dramatically summarizes the material of parts I, II

Program Notes 1995

and III, in abstract form. All the film and tape was recorded in Fort Bragg, California, next
to the Pacific Ocean. A final subtitle reads 'ever westward eternal rider'. Is it the image of
Sisyphus or of Buddha? A beautifully incoherent work or art! A journey towards unity
with this recent American film, both macroscopic and universal in its view."

—Hans Helmut Rudele, Die Zeitung, 1970

"This is Baillie's most complex, and probably his greatest, film. [...] The first part carries
elements of Tung and Castro Street to a very pure extreme.. Images of nature, the sun and
moon, of light, lead into one another with a smooth, but often disturbing, flow. One can
readily see the connection to notions of life after death; even more than in Tung, these are
not images presented in a manner that relates to ordinary, daily seeing. As the film
progresses through its parts, a movement toward what seems to be a greater exteriority, a
less subjective vision, seems apparent; the last part is a staged western-parody,
photographed relatively conventionally. On closer examination, however, the film's
progression becomes more ambiguous , and the final section can be seen as being more
'artificial' (it is staged) than the first. The film's various sections and various styles can be
seen as extensions of the different modes of filmmaking of Baillie's earlier films; they also
relate to the varieties of states of consciousness which we experience in our own lives."

—Fred Camper, Audio-Brandon Catalog, 1978-79

^camera rolls* (1968-69); 16mm, color and b/w, silent, 16 minutes

"The rolls', silent 3 minute rolls of films that came after the film itself, like artifacts from
the descending layers of an archeological dig... numbered 41, 43, 46, and 47. [...] 'The
rolls' took the form of a correspondence, or theatre, between their author and Stan
Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69. . . -Bruce Baillie

"And you're doing it ART (and 'beyond art', if you like to put it prayerfully that way) all at
once. I never saw a tighter knit bag of aesthetical tricks transcending their history— you got
Baroque & its Coco balanced near perfectly... and you got the whole Netherlandishes and
cups, including the entire Dutch kitchen, carrying your absolutely specific yearning into
some new realm of feeling (that I suppose'll someday be cdled American): and you got the
clear sense. . .and a blessing to all those enabled to see it— thank you."

—Stan Brakhage, letter of February 2, 1969

• program notes by Brian Frye, Rick Danielson, Irina Leimbacher*

IMAGINARY LIGHT
CURATED BY KATHY GERITZ AND STEVE ANKER

Sunday, April 23, 1995 — Kabuki Theatre
Wednesday, May 3, 1995 — Pacific Film Archive

This program of new films by American filmmakers exalts in the sensual qualities of
cinema, mining the unconscious through lush explorations of created and uncovered
images.

Premonition (1995), by Dominic Angerame; 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 minutes

"The concrete world of the American infra-structure and its demise are made strangely
poetic in this expressionist documentary which shows the vacant San Francisco

San Francisco Cinematheque

Embarcadero freeway after it has outlived its usefulness, before its destruction. In an
atmosphere of daylight mystery, Angerame sows inklings and reveals the past encircled by
the future. Lyrical, ominous, comic. Premonition works on the attentive viewer like a
remembrance of something that is yet to happen, silent, telling daydream."

—Barbara Jaspersen Voorhees

San Francisco filmmaker Dominic Angerame began making films in the 1970s and has
studied and taught in Chicago and throughout the Bay Area. Many of his films are largely
poetic studies of urban life. For the past several years he has been Director of Canyon
Cinema, the Bay Area's internationally renowned distributor of independent and alternative
film.

The Red Book (1994) y by Janie Geiser; 16mm, color, sound, 1 1 minutes
Janie Geiser is a New York filmmaker/performance artist who specializes in puppetry in
addition to filmmaking. Her previous Babel Town creates a bizarre dream-like world using
puppets and collage techniques.

Figure/Ground (The Snowman) (1995), by Phil Solomon;
16mm, color, silent, 10 minutes

A meditation on memory, burial and decay. . .a belated kaddish for my father. (PS)

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow.

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

— Wallace Stevens

Phil Solomon has worked as a filmmaker for almost twenty years, and as a teacher at many
important universities. Since 1991, Solomon has taught film production at the University
of Colorado at Boulder.

The Color of Love (1994), by Peggy Ahwesh; 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes

""The Color of Love binds the fetishism of Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart to the sexual

transgressions of Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth, to name a couple of classics of

Program Notes 1995

American avant-garde film. In 1964, whenever Christmas on Earth was screened, one
expected the police to close the theater— and sometimes they did. I doubt the NYPD is
going to invade the Whitney, but when I saw The Color of Love there at a press screening,
I had the old familiar feeling— that I better watch my back."

—Amy Taubin, The Village Voice (April 18, 1995)

Peggy Ahwesh has over the last decade become one of America's most controversial and
original personal filmmakers. Currently teaching filmmaking at Bard College in upstate
New York, Ahwesh's films include Martina's Playhouse, From Romance To Ritual and
The Deadman (with Keith Sanborn).

In Consideration of Pompeii (1995), by Stan Brakhage;
16mm, color, silent ( 18 fps), 4 minutes

Since age 17/18 I've been haunted by the catastrophe of Pompeii— beginning with
photographs (sold as pornography in high school) of the mummified lovers caught in coitus
preserved by the volcanic ash, revivified by many ghostly photographic books, but
especially illuminated by Donald Sutherland's accounts are images from 1st- hand
experiences of the ruins. Finally my homage in 3 parts: "The Lovers of Pompeii," "Ashen
Snow," and "Angelus". (SB)

One of the most influential and prolific American avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage
has made hundreds of films. Some of his most recent— 77i^ Mammals of Victoria, Black
Ice, Stellar, Cannot Not Exist, and Three Homerics— will all premiere on May 7, 1995 at
the San Francisco Cinematheque.

Imaginary Light {1994), by Andrew Noren; 16mm, b/w, sound, 31 minutes

"Scarcely half an hour long, as much object as it is movie. Imaginary light is more
stripped down and intensely focused than Noren's last piece. The Lighted Field. Simply
described as a time-lapse recording of the filmmaker's house and garden (Noren calls it his
"backyard Buddha-impersonation, watching 'it' flow), this new works looks a century old
—and it could be. In the service of his dynamic contemplation, Noren maximizes two basic
devices— high-contrast black-and-white film stock and time-lapse pixelation, laboriously
clicking off one frame at a time as he documents the shifting patterns of light on his shady
lawn or ivy covered (ence... Imaginary Light is as pagan in its way as Noren's youthful,
sexually explicit self-portraits. It's a hymn to the sun— simultaneously burning and bathing
everything on the screen."

—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (April 11, 1995)

This film is Part 6 of New York filmmaker Andrew Noren's cycle The Adventures of the
Exquisite Corpse, which began in the 1960s with Kodak Ghost Poems, and now also
includes The Lighted Field and Charmed Particles.

San Francisco Cinematheque

ACHTUNG BABYI-MEDIA SNATCHERS OF THE 90S

BALDWIN'S SONIC OUTLAWS AND NEGATIVLAND'S VIDEOS

CRAIG BALDWIN AND NEGATIVLAND IN PERSON

Sunday, April 30, 1995 - SF Art Institute

I Still Haven't Found What Vm Looking For (acapella video mix, w.i.p.)
by Mark Hosier; video, color, sound, 5:20 minutes

/ Still Haven't Found What Vm Looking For (radio mix) by Mark Hosier;
video, color, sound

^Negadvland mixing U2 " by Mark Hosier; video, color, sound, 7:45 minutes

Sonic Outlaws (1995) by Craig Baldwin; 16mm, color, sound, 87 minutes
From the early-Modernist experiments of the Cubists in the first part of this Century to
these final years of overwhelming mass-media influence over the Arts, the prototypical art-
practice now recognized as most representative is collage. Legal provisions about
copyright, about cultural property, even about authorship itself, mainly based on pre-
technical 19th Century conceptions have hardly been able to keep up with revolutions in
technology and art-making. These ever- sharpening aesthetic, cultural, and ethical
contradictions have broken out into a fascination with real-life melodrama in the
Negativland/U2 case, and my film Sonic Outlaws sets up an energized discursive platform
where they may play themselves out. (CB)

"Negativland is a small, dedicated group of musicians who, since 1980, have released 5
albums, 4 cassette-only releases, 1 video, and now a single. This single, which is entitled
'U2', was created as a parody, satire, social commentary, and cultural criticism. As a work
of art, it is consistent with, and a continuation of, the artistic viewpoint we have been
espousing toward the world of media for the last ten years.

"Island Records and music publisher Wamer-Chappell Music, presumably acting on behalf
of their group U2, have instigated legal action against our single and have succeeded not
only in removing it from circulation, but ensuring that it cannot ever be released again. It is
clear that their preference is that the record never even be heard again. The terms of the
settlement that was forced on us include:

• Everyone who received a copy of the record— record distributors and stores (6951
copies), and radio stations, writers, etc. (692 copies)— is being notified to return it,
and that if they don't do so, or if they engage in 'distributing, selling, advertising,
promoting, or otherwise exploiting' the record, they may be subject to penalties
'which may include imprisonment and fines.' Once returned, the records will be
forwarded to Island for destruction.

•All of SST's on-hand stock of the record, in vinyl, cassette, and CD (5357 copies
total), is to be delivered to Island, where it will be destroyed.

•All mechanical parts used to prepare and manufacture the record are to be delivered
to Island, presumably also for destruction. This includes 'all tapes, stampers, molds,
lacquers and other parts used in the manufacturing', and 'all artwork, labels,
packaging, promotional, marketing, and advertising or similar material.'

Program Notes 1995

•Our copyrights in the recordings themselves have been assigned to Island and
Wamer-Chappell. This means we no longer own two of our better works.

•Payment of $25,000 and half the wholesale proceeds from the copies of the record
that were sold and not returned. We estimate the total cost to us, including legal fees
and the cost of the destroyed records, cassettes, and CDs, at $70,000— more money
than we've made in our twelve years of existence."

— Negativland Press Release (November 10, 1991)

"Artists have always approached the entire worid around them as both inspiration to act and
as raw material to mold and remold. Other art is just more raw material to us and to many,
many others we could point to. When it comes to cultural influences, ownership is the
point of fools. Copycats will shrink in the light of comparison. Bootlegging exact
duplicates of another's product should be prosecuted, but we see no significant harm in
anything else artists care to do with anything available to them in our 'free' marketplace.
We claim the right to create with mirrors. This is our working philosphy."

—Negativland PR

"Plagiarism in late capitalist society articulates a unique contemporary cultural condition:
namely, that there is 'nothing left to say,' a feeling made more potent by the theoretical
possibility of access to all knowledge brought about by new technologies. The Tape-beatles
understand the nature of 'participation' in the total reign of the commodity fetish wherein ,
consumption is the prime sacrament. We attempt to counteract in some small way the
apparent hegemony of this set of attitudes by staking a claim to all received culture as
conundra to be teased apart and reintegrated into new contextual millieux. In doing so, our .
work wrings fresh content from works that are on the surface so beguilingly empty and yet
somehow incredibly vital to our existence as participants in culture. In the end, the listener
must judge, but these few words might serve as a guide."

—The Tape-beatles

In a 1992 FilmMalcer interview with Beth Cataldo, Baldwin discusses some of the impetus
behind the making of Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies in America; "That's why I'm
making revisionist histories. Power is the ability to attach meaning to an event. And history'
is written by the victors. The least I'm asking is that you are aware of the fact that history is
written by people who have a vested interest." In a similar vein, much of Sonic Outlaws
and the associated controversies are played across the body of history, and the art tradition
which makes it into the history books, and in this sense who has access to the writing of
history, the specific image, name, copyright.

In formal terms of style and technique. Sonic Outlaws is not only about appropriation and
collage aesthetics, but is an illustration of these very methods. As with Baldwin's earlier .
work, the film is filled with priceless found footage and daft dialectics, but departs in
Baldwin's use of on-camera interviews, whether in a straight style, low-angle hand held
camera, or on Pixel vision. Baldwin also wrote that another organizing principle behind :
Sonic Outlaws was "a creative/nihilistic metamorphism of language itself. The epistemic
displacement of received meanings that, beneath the topical, is the 'latent' project of the
film finds playful expression through attacking/exploiting two linguistic features: Much of ^
the 'found' footage is sub-titled (or inter-titled), so my recombinant experimentation may
also intervene at the text/sound/image nexus. Likewise, the sampling of 'described'
versions of motion pictures (i.e., narration added to track to codify the visual into words
for the blind audiences) will re-double and complicate the word/image relation. From The
Art of Noise' tracts to a noise-art explosion of written, verbal, and visual languages. Sonic

San Francisco Cinematheque

Outlaws reflects a sub-cultural quest for new creative forms and freedoms in the media-
arts."

CRAIG BALDWIN FiLMOGRAPHY

Wild Gunmen (1978); 16mm, color, sound, 20 minutes: RacketKitKongoKit (1986);
16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes: Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991);
16mm! b/w/color, sound, 48 minutes: /O No Coronado! (1992); 16mm, color, sound, 40
minutes: Sonic Outlaws (1995); 16mm, color, sound, 87 minutes

•program notes by E. Golembiewski*

LOVE AND DINGLEBERRIES:

ALYCE WITTENSTEIN & GEORGE KUCHAR

CURATED BY JOEL SHEPARD / GEORGE KUCHAR IN PERSON

Thursday, May 4, 1995 - Center for the Arts

As a child bored with the New York public school curriculum, Alyce Wittenstein spent time
accumulating drawings in her noteb<x)k, a habit discouraged by her teachers and parents
alike. Alyce went on to attend Boston University with a double major in Film and Political
Science. Returning to New York, Alyce began working on a documentary, later to become
the narrative film Betaville, in response to the creeping gentrification of the city she loved.
Exclaiming that "to provoke, films must also entertain!", she pursued film as a way to
combine her interests in visual art and political activism. Alyce elaborates, "I became
interested in Science Fiction, emulating how the medium was used in the fifties— as a way
to imbed a serious message and stealth it through. Science Fiction at its best, is an exciting
literature of speculation, but like other 'genres', such as horror, quite a bit of it is garbage."
The Deflowering is Alyce's third film and the capstone to a project she began in 1985, The
Deflowering Trilogy, which includes her earlier films Betaville, a takeoff on Godard's
Alphaville, and No Such Thing as Gravity (1989), a black comedy about capitalist fascism
in which all non-consumers and those charged with 'uselessness' are exiled to an artifical
planet.

The Deflowering (1994); 16mm, color, sound, 43 minutes

Written and Directed by Alyce Wittenstein. Production design by Steve Ostringer.
Produced by Alyce Wittenstein and Steven Olswang. Music by David Weinstein. With
HollyAdams, Burkhard Kosminski, Emmanuelle Chaulet, Taylor Mead, Bill Rice, and
Screamin' Rachel.

AIDS has mutated. Skin-to-skin contact is deadly. Fortunately, technology has come to the
rescue. Genetically engineered "designer" children are delivered "out-of-body" and
Victorian inspired full-body condoms are the rage. But, a flaw in the genetic engineers'
attempts to boost immunity has had the side effect of escalating allergic reaction to pollen.
Systematic attempts at mass defoliation are failing to control the rising death rate. People
are itching for a solution! Despite a booming economy, funding for allergy research is
scarce. A rogue genetic engineer solicits the aid of a disgruntled defoliator, and proposes a
dangerous exj^eriment ..

This film is dedicated to the idea that the future will not necessarily be better or worse than
the present. As Ray Bradbury has said, '1 don't try to predict the future, I try to prevent it.'

Program Notes 1995

Science Fiction serves the goal of extrapolating current events into the future, in the hope
that we can learn from history and avoid the errors of the past. We must be humble enough
to admit and recognize our mistakes because to neglect this responsibility leads to decline.
(AW)

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— From the hand of George Kuchar

San Francisco Cinematheque

"For 30 years, working several economic rungs below low-budget, Mr. Kuchar has
reached for the glamour of Hollywood and pulled it right down to street level, where
ordinary mortals with weight problems and bad skin wage unequal battle with their tawdry
surroundings... Mr. Kuchar produces, directs and edits his films. He does the sound and
the lighting. He writes the scripts, quickly. 'I work best under terrible pressure,' he said.
'Usually, I write as the actors are getting ready for the scene.' In a Kuchar film, there is no
such thing as a second take. Or rather, the second take is simply added on to the first take
and becomes part of the film.. ..In the last decade Mr. Kuchar has made video dramas with
his students at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he has taught film and video since
1971, and a series of video diaries, which deal with various personal torments, his psychic
development and his pet obsessions, especially weather."

—William Grimes, NY Times (August 10, 1993)

The Gifted Goon (1994), by George Kuchar; video
Portraiture in Black (1995), by George Kuchar; video
Nirvina of the Nebbishites (1994), by George Kuchar; video

THE MAMMALS OF VICTORIA
AND OTHER NEW FILMS BY BRAKHAGE

Sunday, May 7, 1995 — SF Art Institute

Last calendar we presented Program 2 and 3 of Stan Brakhage's 1960s 8mm Songs cycle.
Tonight the Cinematheque premieres several of the newest films selected from a group of
over a dozen released within the past year.

Stellar {\993)\ 16mm, color, silent, 2.5 minutes

"This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve
various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted
frames in repetition (for 'close-up' of textures). The tone of the film is primarily dark blue,
and the paint is composed (and rephotographed microscopically) to suggest galactic forms
in a space of stars."

Black Ice (1994); 16mm, color, silent, 2.5 minutes

"I lost sight due to a blow on the head from slipping on black ice (leading to eye surgery,
eventually); and now (because of artificially thinned blood) most steps I take outdoors all
winter are made in frightful awareness of black ice.
These 'meditations' have finally produced this hand-painted, step-printed film."

Three Homerics (1993); 16mm, color, silent, 2.5 minutes

"This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara
Feldman) on a Homeric poem: (1) 'Diana holds back the night...' is represented by dark
shapes suppressing (almost angulariy interfering with) orange-golden effusions of paint
and the reflective paint-shapes of eariy morning greens (as if silhouettes or arm and bodily
profile were shading the light), (2) Homer's '...rolling sea...' represented by hand-painted
step- printed dissolves of blues in wave shapes, bubbles, and the soft browns and tender
greens of seaweed, flotsam-jetsam, and (3) 'Ah, love again, the light' represented by

Program Notes 1995

painted explosions of multiple hues and lines recurrently interrupted by the "blush" of soft
suffusing reds."

MamnuUs of Victoria (1994); 16mm, color, silent, @24 fps, 30 minutes
"The film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with
mountains in the background, hand-painted patters, sometimes step-printed hand-painting,
abstractions composed of distorted (jammed) T. V. shapes in shades of blue with occasional
red, refractions of light within the camera lens, sometimes mixed with reflections of
water— this "weave" of imagery occasionally revealing recognizable shapes of birds and
humans, humans as fleeting figures in the water, as distant shapes in a rowboat, as human
shadows, so forth. Increasingly closer images of water, and of light reflected off water, as
well as bursts of fire, intersperse the long shots, the seascapes and all the other interwoven
imagery. Eventually a distant volley ball arcs across the sky filled with cumulus clouds; this
is closely followed by, and interspersed with, silhouettes of a young man and woman in
the sea, which leads to some extremely out-of-focus images from a front car window, an
opening between soft-focus trees, a clearing. Carved wooden teeth suddenly sweep across
the frame. Then the film ends on some soft-focus horizon lines, foregrounded by ocean,
slowly rising and falling and rising again in the frame. This film is a companion piece to A
Child's Garden and the Serious Side. "

Cannot Not Exist (1994); 16mm, color, silent, @ 24fps, 10 minutes

"In this non-orange negative of a hand-painted film, a series of luminously pastel shapes—
often patches of color against a stark white background— are interspersed with nearly black
intermittent smudges punctuating white. These visual themes develop gradually into a
series of multi-colored vertical lines which weave contrapuntally in relation to the flickering
(single-frame) point shapes. Twice, a solid (as if photographed) shape is seen receding
from the amalgam of point. Masses of tiny dots and 'curlicue' shapes sometimes interrupt
the thematic progression from irregular point-shapes flickering to fluidity of vertical lines:
this theme eventually resolves itself through the intervention of globular shapes (most
notably, brilliant orange-yellow 'globs') which append themselves over several frames and
prompt the eventual amalgamation of all themes."

—film sysnopsis/descriptions by Stan Brakhage

•progam notes by C Whiteside*

THE FILMS OF YOKO ONO-PROGRAM 2

ERECTION AND RAPE

Thursday, May 11, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Violence is a sad wiud that, if channeled carefully, could bring seeds, chairs and

all things pleasant to us.

We are all would-be Presidents of the World, and kids kicking the sky that doesn't

listen.

What would you do if you had only one penis and a one-way tube ticket when

you wanted to fuck the whole nation in one come?

I know a professor of philosophy whose hobby is to quiedy crush biscuit boxes

in a supermarket.

Maybe you can send signed, plastic lighters to people in place of your penis. But

then some people might take your lighter as a piece of sculpture and keep it up

on their living-room shelf.

San Francisco Cinematheque

So we go on eating and feeding frustration every day. lick lollipops and stay

being peeping-toms dreaming of becoming Jack-The- Ripper.

This film was shot by our cameraman, Nic, while we were in a hospital. Nic is a

gentle-man, who prefers eating clouds and floating pies to shooting Rape.

Nevertheless it was shot.

And as John says: 'A is for parrot, which we can plainly see.'

— Yoko Ono on her film Rape, April 1969 in Film Culture, Winter/Spring 1970

This evening the San Francisco Cinematheque presents its second program in an ongoing
retrospecive of Yoko Ono's films. Ono's status as a popular figure tends to eclipse her
achievements as an artist, especially with regard to her activities in filmmaking. Particularly
prolific as a filmmaker between the years 1966 and 1971, Ono made her films in the
context of the Fluxus movement under the auspices of George Maciunas. She also
produced "film scripts", or descriptions of conceptual, viewer-specific "films", many of
which could not exist as actual film works. Concerned with the formal qualities of the
cinema and the experiential aspects of cinema spectatorship (especially time and
movement), Ono played a significant role in the articulation of the Fluxus aesthetic,
inflecting the terms by which filmmakers understand the structural material elements of the
cinema

Yoko Ono studied poetry and music at Sarah Lawrence College during the 1950s, after
which she moved to New York City and became involved with a group of avant-garde
musicians and performers, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham and LaMonte Young,
who presented his "Chambers Street Series" at Ono's loft at 112 Chambers Street. Ono's
early compositions include A Grapefruit in the World of Park, and A Piece for
Strawberries and Violins, performed by Yvonne Rainer.

During the 1960s, Ono became heavily involved with the Huxus movement, participating
in performances and creating installation/sculptural works. Ono's film work tends to
directly address its audience, foregrounding the dialectical relationship between work and
subject and explicitly implicating the viewer in the act of aesthetic consumption. Rape is
one of Ono's most complex and engaging films and has provoked extensive critical
commentary both when it was released and more recently at the Whitney Museum's
retrospective of her films in 1989.

Erection (1971); 16mm, sound, 20 minutes

(Produced and directed in collaboration with John Lennon.)

"Erection was conceived by Lennon and produced over an 18-month period in 1970 and
1971. Still photographs of a construction site are dissolved into each other to document the
gradual erection of the London International Hotel. Music by Ono and fellow Rusus
member Joe Jones is combined with the sounds of heavy construction on the soundtrack."

— Tom Smith, in "The Films of Yoko Ono",
produced by the American Federation of Arts

Rape {\969)', 16mm, color, sound, 77 minutes

(Directed in collaboration with John Lennon)

Yoko Ono's script for Rape, 1968:
"Film No. 5
Rape (or Chase)
Rape with camera. 1 1/2 hr. color. Synchronized sound.

Program Notes 1995

A cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera persistently until he comers

her in an alley, and, if possible, until she is in a falling position.

The cameraman will be taking a risk of offending the girl as the girl is somebody he

picks up arbitrarily on the street, but there is a way to get around this. ^j

Depending on the budget, the chase could be made with girls of different ages, etc.

May chase boys and men as well.

As the film progresses, and as it goes towards the end, the chase and the running

should become slower and slower like in a dream, using a highspeed camera.

I have a cameraman who's prepared to do this successfully. "

"Shot by Ono's cameraman Nic Knowland in November, 1968, while she was in the
hospital recuperating from a miscarriage, the film features 21 -year-old Eva Majlath as the
unfortunate victim of the camera's assault. Accosted in a cemetery in London and followed
relentlessly for two days, the young woman, who does not speak English, becomes
increasingly frantic in her efforts to communicate with— and then to escape— the
filmmakers. As a statement about invasion of privacy and the media's incessant hounding
of celebraties, the film seems, in retrospect, prophetic of events to follow in Lennon and
Ono's public life." 1

—Tom Smith, in "The Films of Yoko Ono"

"Although Majlath never completely panics or appears to imagine herself in physical
danger, she doen't seem complicit in her victimization— her anger and confusion are
absolutely convincing. This, of course, is much of the fascination. In one sense. Rape is a
particularly brutal dramatization of the Warholian discovery that the camera's implacable
stare disrupts 'ordinary' behavior to enforce its own regime. In another, the film is a
graphic metaphor for the ruthless surveillance that can theoretically attach itself to any
citizen of the modem world. . . '

"Basically, Rape presents a beautiful, extremely feminine woman in peril, her situation
overtly sexualized by the very title. (The opening graveyard provides a suitably gothic
location.) Although this scenario is a movie staple, arguably the movie staple, the absence
of a narrative strongly invites the audience to identify with camera's (unmistakably male)
look and recognize this controlling gaze as its own. In its realization, Ono's script becomes
the purest illustration of Laura Mulvey's celebrated essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,' published eight years after Rape was made."

—J. Hoberman, Village Voice (March 1989)

• program notes by Brian Frye •

CANYON CINEMA NIGHTS:
ECCENTRIC VISIONS

CURATED AND PRESENTED BY MICHAEL WALLIN

Thursday, May 18, 1995 — Center for the Arts

This program is the third in a series of guest-curated programs selected from Canyon
Cinema, the Bay Area's premier distributor of alternative film. Tonight's curator, Michael

San Francisco Cinematheque

Wallin, has been a fixture in the Bay Area's avant-garde film community for over twenty
years, including stints as a film instructor at California College of Arts and Crafts and
manager of Canyon Cinema for most of the 80's. Up until last year, Wallin was a member
of Canyon's Board of Directors. From his earliest days as a prot^g6 to the legendary Bruce
Baillie to his current efforts as a mature artist, Wallin's films have conveyed his direct and
deeply felt involvement with the materials at hand. Tonight's films are some of Michael's
favorites and are characterized by a wild diversity of styles and the single-minded
peculiarity (if not dark perversity) of their vision.

New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a
Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976), by Owen Land (a.k.a. George
Landow);
16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

A reworking of an earlier film. Institutional Quality, in which the same test was given. In
the earlier film the person taking the test was not seen, and the film viewer in effect became
the test taker. The newer version concerns itself with the effects of the test on the test taker.
An attempt is made to escape from the oppressive environment of the test— a test containing
meaningless, contradictory, and impossible-to-foUow directions— by entering into the
imagination. In this case it is specifically the imagination of the filmmaker, in which the test
taker encounters images from previous Land films. . . As he moves through the images in the
filmmaker's mind, the test taker is in a trance-like state, and is carried along by some
unseen force... At the end of the film the test taker is back at his desk, still following
directions. (OL)

Cartoon le Mousse (1979), by Chick Strand; 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 minutes
"Chick Strand is a prolific and prodigiously gifted film artist who seems to break new
ground with each new work. Her ..."found footage" works such as Cartoon le Mousse,
are extraordinarily beautiful, moving, visionary pieces that push this genre into previously
unexplored territory. If poetry is the art of making evocative connections between
otherwise dissimilar phenomena, then Chick Strand is a great poet, for these films
transcend their material to create a surreal and sublime universe beyond reason."

—Gene Youngblood, Canyon Cinema Catalog 7

The Ojf -Handed Jape (1967), by Robert Nelson; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes
I've always felt good about this film because it's beyond criticism. No one can say it's
awful, no matter what elaborate reasons they construct, without talking about what's good
in the film. If it's truly awful, then it's just right, because that's exactly what we had in
mind. If you can't enjoy that kind of awfulness, that's another matter . . .and I'd have to say
"that's your problem because, after all, there are plenty of other kinds of awfulness that
you really do enjoy, and YOU know it!" (RN)

The Mongreloid i\9^S), by George Kuchar; 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes
Not really a poem to God spelled backwards, but more a limerick to a pee-pee licker. The
Mongreloid will leave you with the question of whether the subject of the light verse walks
in this film on four legs... or two. (GK)

Film Watchers (1974), by Herb deGrasse; 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes

DeGrasse's tirade at an audience he'd rather not have. (Remember if you feel insulted those
insults are for you.) (HD)

Breakfast {\912-\976), by Michael Snow; 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes

Program Notes 1995

Shot in 1972 and shelved until 1976, when sound and editing problems were solved. All
the varied and unusual motions visible on the screen are the result of a single camera
movement. (MS)

The Secret of Life {1971), by Victor Faccinto; 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes
The characters populating Faccinto's films are nightmare figures, often with monstrously
distorted bodies, some wearing ominous masks, others part animal, part human. The real
horror results from the swiftness and relentlessness with which a violent fate overtakes
these characters, who despite their grotesquery, display the ordinary human emotions,
weaknesses and fears.

—Barbara Scharres, Trickfilm-Chicago Catalog 1975

Kindering (19^), by Stan Brakhage; 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes
This film presents the voice of a child play-singing in relation to full orchestral 'takes' of
The Times and visually juxtaposed with children-at-play (my grandchildren lona and Quay
Bartek) in Americana backyard. They are seen, as in dream, to be already caught-up-in yet
absolutely distinct-from the rituals of adulthood. The visuals were photographed and edited
to the music collage of Architect's Office performance A0124 by Trevor and Joel Haertling
and Doug Stickler. (SB)

Ronnie (1912), by Curt McDowell; 16mm, b/w, sound, 7 minutes
A naked hustler tells his story nonstop. A real wonder-hunk. (CM)

RabbiVs Moon (1972), by Kenneth Anger; 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes

Rabbits Moon seems to me your finest film, most perfect and, oh all together finest!, of
the sharpest clarity. Beautiful, yet beauty balanced by dreadful necessity, so that it is an
emblem of the soul's experience: signature... And I think my tum-of-mind here especially
appropriate because I also saw this film as your autobiography, all the figures in it aspects
f yourself, its magical progress a kind of "story of your life."

— Stan Brakhage, Canyon Cinema Catalog 7

program notes compiled by Rick Danielson

REGULAR 8MM: SAVED FROM EXTINCTION
PRESENTED BY FLIMMAKER AND 8MM FILM JUNKIE TOM CHURCH

Friday, May 19, 1995 - SF Art Institute

"In January, '93 Kodak 'discontinued' regular 8mm film, a much misunderstood medium,
greatly loved by many, 'due to insufficient market demand. . . ' (their words). That left a lot
of folkd upset. Tonight's program exhibits the entire gamut made, from 'smokers' (c. 200
ft. p)omo reels thousands of which were made during the 60s and 70s) to trailers {Trailer
for the Masterbation Film Festival), documentary {Before Gentrification Hit, soundtrack
by Caroliner), home/travel/vacation movies, abridged versions of classics, and 'personal'
work by auteur/pioneers from the 50s & 60s (Mike Kuchar). Roughly 1 hour with "talk".
Plus, the unveiling of a new local magazine. Marginal Film. Bring down those 8mm films
out of you closet to be shown as part of the program and get in free. Also, we're gonna be
giving way film to the fist 50 customers."

—Tom Church

San Francisco Cinematheque

THE STORY LIVED BY ATRAUD-MOMO
PERFORMED BY BECKETT PLUS ONE PRODUCTIONS

Sutiday, May 21, 1995 - SF Art Institute

The Story Lived by Artaud-Momo

'The Story lived by Ailaud-Momo" takes its title from Antoniii Ailaiid's final
lecture on Jaiiuaiy 13tli, 1947, which is said to have been one of his greatest concrete
manifestations of the niealre of Cruelty. Jean Louis Bairault said of Atlaud that he "made
himself into a theatre - a theatre tiial did not cheat." hi otiier words, his greatest
contribution to theatre was his life itself- the passion with which he lived it, the
uncompromising nanire of his conunilment, and, tragically, the degiee to which he failed.

It is our hope to invert Bairanlt's statement - to bring Artaud into the theatre, and
make of him a mythic, theatrical figure, hispired by his "No More Masterpieces" chapter
from "Tlie Tlieaire and its Double," it occurred to us that thougli many have failed in
attempting to stage or understand Ailaud, it was perhaps because he was tragically
impairecj by his lack of ability to make his ideas functional.

Tlie script's stnictuie consists of tlree parallel colunuis of text, tlie first of which
represents live stage action. Ilie second two columns represent an overla|>ping bairage of
impressions, which will be played over the sound system. We are also using slides of
fixed images, as well as of nairative text, film, puppets, and masks. As a whole, these
images and sounds will hopefully circumvent, in their chaos, the intellect, and drive
directly at the lieail.

We have composed a script unique in that each word can be cited, from Artaud ,
himself and from all those artists whom he knew and influenced. We have cut and pasted ,
his life and words into a show which we hope at once celebrates his passion, and refutes
the above mentioned notion that he was a careless practitioner of violence for its own sake
In doing so, we hope to awaken in an audience the purity of his life and passion, while
shutting away the accoutemients of his failings. Using his methodology, his words, and his
life, we hope to create a theatrical biogia|)hy that is as chaotic, frenzied, and meaningful as

the story he lived.

"^0

^Program Notes 1995

EXPLORING RACISMS:

THE KKK BOUTIQUE AIN'T JUST REDNECKS

PRECEDED BY MATZO BALLS AND BLACK-EYED PEAS

CURATED BY IRINA LEIMBACHER

Daniel robin in Person

Thursday, May 25, 1995 — Center for the Arts

This evening's films are challenging and innovative not only in their choice of subject
matter but also in their original and ecclectic approach to film form. Neither are
conventional documentaries nor even typical essay films; both are extremely personal, in
very different ways, and address issues of social and political relevance. While in Daniel
Robin's film he and his partner Rulette Mapp together explore their relationship and the
impact race and notions of identity sometimes have on it, Camille Billops and James Hatch
unabashedly examine the causes and consequences of racism in American culture and in
their own and their friends' lives. Each of the films combines a rich variety of filmic styles
and ways of telling to convey unique, forceful and thought provoking messages.

Matzo Balls and Black-eyed Peas (1994), by Daniel Robin; 16mm, color, sound, 25
minutes

An intensely personal look into a young couple's interracial relationship. Employing
innovative interviews by close friends, scenes from daily life, personal reflections and
evocative experimental images, this film explores issues of race, cultural identity and love
in the filmmaker and his partner's life together.

Daniel Robin, the son of a Rabbi, grew up in rural Bakersfield, California. The isolation
of being virtually the only Jewish family in town and the experience of anti-Semitism
created an intense awareness of his own Jewish identity. Identity, its definitions and
implication, are recurring themes in his work as a filmmaker. In 1992 Daniel graduated
from San Francisco State University's Film Program where he completed his first two
short films, 722 Webster (1990) and Chasing the Grail (1992). He is now at work on a
feature film.

The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks (1994), by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch;
16mm, color, sound, 75 minutes

The KKK Boutique —a docu/fantasy— intercuts surrealism with talking heads to reveal
racism as a disease of the soul. The storyline models itself on Dante's Inferno— a journey
through hell where punishment fits the crime, and confession is sometimes the only
reward. The descent begins from a field of sunflowers. Our Virgil and guide, Camille,
leads her friends through the underground KKK Boutique— some of its many levels are
comic, some ugly. As the descent deepens, Camille warns her "Bouteekers" not to linger,
because racism is attractive and communicable. Some souls deny ever having had any
racism. Some— frozen by their hatred— are eternally damned to their pain. A few confess
to their own racial madness, and these "Boutikeers" ascend back into the
sunflowers.(CB/JH)

Camille Billops is an acclaimed printmaker, sculptor, muralist and photographer in
addition to being an award-winning director. She grew up in Los Angeles, and learned
creativity and artistic expression from her mother, a seamstress (as well as a maid and
defense plant worker), her father, a chef and merchant seaman, and her stepfather, whose
Bell and Howell camera recorded home movies for more than 20 years. Before becoming a
director (she never went to film school), Billops created sculptures and prints that were

San Francisco Cinematheque

often about her family members. Thus it was no surprise that she also began her
filmmaking career chronicling family stories, beginning with Suzanne, Suzanne (1982),
about her niece's struggle with drug addiction, and leading to Older Women and Love
(1987), exploring the erotic lives of her octogenarian aunt and other older women, and later
Finding Christa (1991), about her own decision to give up her 4 year old daughter for
adoption and their subsequent reunion 21 years later. James Hatch, her co-director and
co-producer, is also a playwright, archivist, professor and scholar. Together they share a
New York loft that is home, office, gallery and studio, and they are now working on and
raising money for their next piece, A String of Pearls.

•program notes by Irina Leimbacher*

MARCIA BRADY AND MENSTRUATION:
CO-CURATED BY JOEL SHEPARD & DAVID NAYLOR

Sunday, May 28, 1995 - SF Art Institute

Tonight's program presents a selection of extremely rare, never-screened "girl's only"
educational films made for the high school market during the 60s and 70s. Issues such as
menstruation, personal safety, sex, and dating were explored with varying degrees of
lyrical sensitivity and sledgehammer exploitation. Some of the films will bring back
memories, some will create new nightmares... And for the very first time, boys will get to
see just what the girls saw behind those locked gym doors. "Marcia Brady and
Menstruation" is co-curated by Joel Shepard, Associate Director of the SF Cinematheque,
and David Naylor of Alpha Blue Archives, a distributor of educational films. Enjoy the
show! There will not be a test.

Changes (1975); 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes

Funny, shiny story of two evil brat boys who terrorize a young girl trying to buy tampons.
Self Protection for Women (1968); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes
Various techniques to ward off male attackers are confusingly discussed in this low-budget
epic from 1968. The information ranges from still-sensible to very odd. Remember how to
hold those keys!

Rape Alert {19^6); 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes

An unnecessarily graphic, terrifying rape scare film, produced with the Los Angles
Sheriffs Department.

When Jenny When (1978); 16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes

Starring Maureen McCormick ("Marcia Brady" from The Brady Bunch) who plays a slut
who has difficulty liking herself, except when turning on boys.

All Women Have Periods (1979); 16mm, color, sound, 10 very long minutes

Produced as an educational film for young girls with Downs Syndrome, the unforgettable
All Women Have Periods is unique in that it stars a young actress who actually has the
disease. "Yes, dear, all women have periods" will ring through your head for weeks.

Pink Slip, a similar but different selection of ''girVs only"" educational films, is available on
videocassette through Alpha Blue Archives, P.O. Box 16072, Oakland, CA 94610.

Program Notes 1995

ALEXANDER KLUGE'S SHORT FILMS

Thursday, June 1, 1996 - Center for the Arts

"In a world in which everyone else conforms to rational reason, someone at least could be ,
unreasonable. Since the totalizing quest for meaning has itself become irrational, literary |
language should be shifted to areas in which it is not totally subjected to the imperative of i
meaning, as it is in its proper field. Language in film may be blind."

—Alexander Kluge, "Word and Form," October 46 (Fall 1988)

Alexander Kluge is one of the most influential and important director/theorists of the
German Autorenfihn or das Neue Kino, which is often referred to as the German New
Wave. Heavily indebted to both the Marxism of Frankfurt school theorists like .
Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adomo and the self-reflexivity and dialectics of Brecht, Kluge *
is most concerned with the specificities of public experience, the act of differentiation
between public and private spheres and the theorization of a proletarian public sphere on the
foundation of the seeds of consciousness extant in the "classical: (bourgeois) public sphere.

One of the few theorists who consistently and effectively attempts the translation of
theoretical ideas into cinematic praxis, Kluge was instrumental to the writing and
implementations of the Oberhausen Manifesto, which outlined a program of critically aware
cinematic practice in Germany. A lawyer by profession, Kluge played a key role in the
democratization of German television instituting a program through which politically aware
(and often Marxist) filmmakers were able to show short worked during prime-time hours
on private television stations.

In his own work, Kluge has cultivated an oblique, pseudo-narrative style, utilizing many *
distancing elements (intertitles, unrelated voice-over, the fragmentation of continuity),
cultivating a contingency and ambiguity that belies easy summation. Always concerned
with the specificities of history and memory, of ideology mediated by experience and
understanding, Kluge's films, as his stories and theoretical work, function as both
document and catalyst, insisting upon critical involvement and resisting the drive to
narrative and ideological closure.

"A rain puddle which no\one needs, which isn't terrorized so that it 'behaves,' may attain a
classical form— the harmony of form and content. We human beings are distinguished by
the fact that form and content wage war with another. If content is a moment in time
(whose duration may be 160 years or one second), then form is all the rest, the gaps,
precisely that which, at this moment, the story does not tell."

—Alexander Kluge, "selections from 'New Stories, Notebooks 1-18'
in "The Uncanniness of Time," October 48 (Fall 1988)

Die Ewigkeit von Gestern (The Eternity of Yesterday) ( 1960/63) ;
16mm, b/w, sound, 11 minutes

An investigation of Germany's Nazi past through contemplation of the ideology expressed
by fascist architecture, Kluge's first film, The Eternity of Yesterday (also known as
Brutalitat im SteinI Brutality Stone in its earlier version), anticipated the dialectical,
composite style of his later works. The formal tension generated though the discontinuity
of sound and image and the overtonal meaning produced through their interaction demands ;
a critical recollection of the historical materiality of fascism and National Socialism and the .
extent to which they inflected not only the political sphere, but also the experience of ]
everyday German life. The stillness and reflective quality of the montage-like form and '
historical resonance of the sound work together to both affirm the physicality and all-too-

San Francisco Cinematheque

easily displaced past and also to expose the extent to which the inflated grandeur and
mythos of that past still functions as the legacy of modem society. As Kluge so adroitly
points out, we are speared from the past not by an abyss, but by the changed situation— the
circumstances may have changed, but the ideologies that inform them remain the same;
those institution responsible for the myth making of Nazism are not so far removed from
those which mark the parameters of the culture industry today.

Frau Balckburriy get. 5 Jan. 1872, wirdgelfUnU (Mrs. Balckburn, born January 5,
1872, isjilmed) (1967); 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 minutes

"A gently comic study of Kluge's grandmother"

—Stuart Uebman, Goethe Institut/Anthology Film Archives Program Notes

Feuerloscher E.A. Wittenstein (Fireman EA. Wittenstein) (1968);
16mm, b/w, sound, 1 1 minutes

Lehrer im Wandel (Teachers Through Change) (1962/ 63) \
16mm, b/w, sound, 1 1 minutes

^'Teachers Through Change is a suite of four short portraits of teachers whose lives have
been profoundly affected by historical events. Each laconic life story is told through a
series of old photographs separated by titles. Some are progressive educators victimized by
the Nazis; one is a vicious opportunist who benefited from the fascist takeover. Their lives
are implicitly contrasted with those of the ordinary, bureaucratized teachers today, whom
we see in cinema- verity footage taken at a teachers' convention, school meetings, and so on
The interruptions in the biographies figure the larger interruptions history makes in the lives
of human beings (this is also the theme of a book of stories, Lebenslaufel Curricula Vitae,
Kluge published in 1962)). The dispersed narrative focus and the formal discontinuities
resist the homogenizing narrative strategies of the culture industry and presage the methos
of 'antagonistic realism' Kluge later formulated in discursive terms."

— Stuart Liebman, "Why Kluge?" October 46 (Fall 1988)

Portrat einer Behwarung (Proven Competence Portrayed) (1964);
16mm, b/w, sound, 13 minutes

"...recounts the fictionalized life of a police officer who loyally served no less than five
very different German political regimes during his years of active duty."

—Stuart Liebman, Goethe Institut/Anthology Film Archives Program Notes

Nachrichten von den Stauffern (News from the Hohenstauffens) (\9ni)\
16mm, b/w and color, sound, 13 minutes

ALEXANDER KLUGE

THE BUND DIRECTOR

Sunday, June 4, 1995 — SF Art Institute

"If you take the plot out of a conventional film the individual images become nonsense. If
you take the narrative from my films, or from the films of Dovzhenko and many others,
however, there will always be a beautiful garden of images. And just as in a beautiful
garden, the images do not have to form a concept. You do not have to understand it; you
only need to walk through it. The garden is not there to be encompassed. Narrated
differences, that is our work. "

—Alexander Kluge, interview by Stuart Liebman, October 46 (Fall 1988)

Program Notes 1995

DerAngriffder Gegenwart aufdie ubrige Zeit (The Blind Director) (1985);

16mm, color, sound, 113 minutes
Composed of a series of fractured, discontinuous, semi -narrative sequences, unrelated in
any literal sense. The Blind Director addresses the passage of time and the tyranny of the
present, and the mark they leave on the synthetic collective consciousness that comprises
the sphere of public experience of contemporary Germany. In Kluge's understanding, the
resolutely ahistorical character of the bourgeois public sphere and its insistence on the
primacy of the "eternal present" marks the effect of capital on the character of "publicity"
(Offentlichkeit), by which he refers to the meaning-productive capacity of the socio-
political institutions which mediate ideology and individual experience. In a fashion similar
to that of other contemporary Marxist critics such as Jurgen Habermas and Fredric
Jameson, Kluge argues that the anti-critical, atemporal function of this alienated bourgeois
public sphere must be engaged through a critical, historically grounded discourse, a
proletarian or plebeian public sphere which functions as a mode of counter-publicity. In
this sense, then. The Blind Director, the German title of which translate literally as the
Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, should operate both as a metaphorical document
of the experience of contemporary German life and as a sort of Brechtian critical text,
demanding critical engagement on the part of its audience through the denial of the
teleological narrative and false transparency critical to the ideological function of the
bourgeois sphere of experience.

ALEXANDER KLUGE PARTIAL FiLMOGRAPHY

Abshied von Ge stern (Anita G.) (Yesterday Girl) (1965-66); Die Artiste n in der
Zirkuskuppel: ratios (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed) (1967); Gelegenheitsarbeit
einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave) (1973); Deutschland in Herbst
(Germany in Autumn) (a collective film) (1977-78); Die Patriotin (The Female Patriot)
( 1 979) ; Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace) (a collective film) ( 1982-83) ; Die Macht der
Gefuhle (The Power of Emotion) (1983); Der Angriffder Gegenwart aufdie ubrige Zeit
(The Blind Director) (1985); Vermischte Nachrichten (Miscellaneous News) ( 1986).

•program notes by Brian Frye*

WON'T YOU COME OUT AND PLAY,MY SEX BITCH GODDESS:
NEW FILMS BY WOMEN

CURATED AND PRESENTED BY MICHELLE HANDELMAN
FILMMAKERS IN PERSON

Thursday, June 8, 1995 — Center for the Arts

RocketUpsbabblon (1995 ), by Annabel Lee; video, color, sound, 6 minutes

A place where lava meets lips; gyrating and microscopic. RocketUpsbabblon is a
transcendental journey through that space between lust and fear.

StelUum in Capricorn (1994), by Georgia B. Wright; video, b/w, sound, 7 minutes

A hauntingly beautiful S/M scene between four women recorded when the star Stellium
was in Capricorn. As knives dissolve into faces and needles dissolve into skin, the pulse
beats and the breath quickens.

San Francisco Cinematheque

What Gets You Oj9?1994), by Danielle Massingale & Grace Giorgio;

video, color, sound, 4 minutes
A collage of answers to a simple question. (DM / SG)

Engorge Gobble and Gulp ( 1994), by Lisa DiLillo; video, color, sound, 5 minutes
A humorous allegory which critiques societal control over the female body; preoccupations
with obtaining unrealistic body weight and the double standard of promiscuity. The
'surprise narrator' discusses her favorite foods which is defy the low-fat diet suggested, in
favor of more pleasurable foods. . .the subtext is clearly sex and guilt-free indulgence. (LD)

Nyphomania (1994), by Tessa Hughes-Freeland with Holly Adams;
S-8mm film (shown on video), b/w, sound, 8 minutes

Everything starts out carefree and beautiful in the land of nymphs; yet evil lurks within the
lust of the beast. A fairy tale where the sprightly nymph meets her match.

Interior Scroll: the Cave ( 1995), by Carolee Schneemann & Maria Beatty ;
video, color, sound, 7 minutes

A recreation of Carolee Schneemann 's performance piece Interior Scroll in a very dark and
moist contemporary world.

Straight for the money: Interviews with Queer Sex Workers (1994) by Hima B.;
video, color, sound, 59 minutes

It is estimated that nearly 10% of women in the US engage in some form of sex work at
some point in their lives. Presented from an insider, pro-sex worker point of view. Straight
for the money: Interviews with Queer Sex Workers is about the observations and
experiences of eight lesbian and bisexual women who work as lap dancers, peepshow
dancers, and prostitutes in San Francisco. Bold and articulate, these women discuss the
impact of sex work on their personal lives, feminist politics regarding the sex industry, and
the need for a broader understanding of a greatly stereotyped and stigmatized occupation.
Also included are "Sexperts" writer Joan Nestle, performance artist Annie Sprinke, writer
Carol Queen, and the prostitutes' rights advocate and videomaker Carol Leigh AKA Scarlot
Hariot. This documentary has been internationally acclaimed and is included in the 1995
Whitney Biennial. (HB)

Michelle Handelman is an award winning film and videomaker whose work has screened
woridwide. Her current feature length film Blood Sisters, an experimental documentary on
the lesbian S/M community, will be premiering at this year's Frameline Lesbian and Gay
Film Festival. Her other titles {Homophobia is Known to Cause Nightmares, History of
Pain, Catscan (with Monte Cazazza), and Sexual Techniques in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction) deal with the forbidden erotic and socio-political confines of our culture. A
writer and photographer, as well as media artist, Handelman has curated and co-curated a
number of programs at the San Francisco Cinematheque.

Program Notes 1995

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE/BEAUTIFUL FRIENDS
LYNN HERSHMAN + FRIENDS IN PERSON

Sunday, June 11, 1995 - SF Art Institute

"Lynn Hershman-Leeson is regarded as the most influential female artist of
new media. As early as the 1970s she worked with context, performance,
public space and interactivity. Her video work incorporates surveillance,
voyeurism and personal identity and her computer installations expand the
possibilities of interactivity in art. "

—Press Release from the Siemens/23CM Media Arts Prize

Last month Lynn Hershman-Leeson received Germany's prestigious ZKM/Siemens
International Media Award, This award is one of the most important in the field of Media
Arts, and other 1995 recipients included British artist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway and
French writer and philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Tonight the San Francisco Cinematheque
is very happy to honor local artist Lynn Hershman-Leeson and to screen her most recent
work. Beautiful People /Beautiful Friends, as well as short pieces by several of her recent
collaborators and friends.

An overview of Hershman's artistic career would fall into a number of distinctively eclectic
categories ranging from photography, site-specific public art (including The Dante Hotel
and 25 Windows: A Portrait of Bonwit Teller), interactive work and, in the last fifteen
years, video. Her work ranges from physical concerns with context, performance, public
space, and interactivity to political issues of surveillance, voyeurism, identity and
"authenticity".

Hershman's early experimental videos included Test Patterns and The Making of a Very
Rough and (Very) Incomplete Pilot for Videodisc on the Life and Work of Marcel
Duchamp, both of which showcased a new, fresh perspective on a relatively new visual
medium. "Video was just being invented. There wasn't a language for it yet, which meant
that there was the opportunity to participate in creating the language for this new form."
(LH) Throughout the '80s Hershman expanded the emerging video form, creating the first
interactive art videodisc LORN A (1979-83) which allowed viewers to access Loma's past
and future by pressing buttons on a remote unit of the videodisc player. Holding that art is
life and life is art, Hershman became the subject of her own work, recording several
personal experiences in The Electronic Diary (1985-89) which includes Confessions of a
Chameleon, Binge, and First Person Plural. This trilogy allowed her to obsessively
analyze her life and provided a way of dealing with fragmented memory, bodily obsessions
and repressed guilt. In her recent video pieces (including her 1989 faux documentary Long
Shot and her 1993 feature-length Virtual Love), she has expanded her field of play to
incorporate a variety of narrative and fictional elements along with her staples of personal
confession and formal experimentation.

Lynn Hershman's body of work includes over 51 videotapes and 4 interactive installations
which have garnered many international awards. Last year she was the first woman to
receive a tribute and retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival. She also
received the Annie Gerber Award, a $50,000 commission from the Seattle Art Museum
given every two years to a contemporary artist. Hershman was a Professor and Acting
Director of the Inter-Arts Department at San Francisco State University for several years.
She is currently a Professor of Electronic Art at the University of California, Davis.

San Francisco Cinematheque

Preceding the screening of Beautiful People/Beautiful Friends, the Cinematheque will show
a number of videos made by some of Lynn Hershman's friends and collaborators from the
past fifteen years.

Case P'200 {\992), by Mia Lor Houlberg; video, color, sound, 1 1 minutes

Case P-200 highlights a few moments salvaged from footage originally recorded at a
Veteran Hospital in the 70s.

Manifestoon (1994), by Jesse Drew; video, color, sound, 8 minutes

Manifestoon is the product of sleepless nights and too much time spent working on
documentary video productions. It explains the subversiveness of children and why editing
is a political act.

Mirror f Mirror (1987), by Paula Levine; video, color, sound 2 1/2 minutes

Shot in Venice, California, Mirror, Mirror is a short vignette about viewing and being
viewed.

Love Between a Boy and a Girl ( 1995) a collaboration between RAP (Real Alternative

Program) Youth, Dr. Francisco Gonzalez and Lisa Swenson; video, color, sound,
20 minutes

This short fictional narrative was designed as an HIV awareness educational video for
youth. Following the lives of a group of Mission District teenagers, this collaborative piece
addresses AIDS, gangs, substance abuse and violence.

Excerpts from works by students at U.C. Davis.

Beautiful People/ Beautiful Friends (1994), by Lynn Hershman;
video, color, sound, 74 minutes
Starring Johanna Schmidt and Colin Hayle, with music by Michael Edo Keane

An idyllic scene of love and tranquillity transforms into a story of domestic violence and
electronic surveillance.

Lynn Hershman's new electronic interactive piece America's Finest is currently on view
at the Paula Anglim Gallery through early July.

•program notes by Geoff e Domenghini*

BAY AREA WOMEN AT WORK

NEW WORK BY LOCAL ARTISTS

CURATED AND PRESENTED BY IRINA LEIMBACHER

ARTISTS IN PERSON

Thursday, June 15, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Tonight's program of new works by emerging Bay Area women filmmakers is an up-to-
the-minute eclectic mix of experimental, documentary and short narrative work all recently
out of the lab and onto the screen. The Cinematheque is honored to premiere several of
these films and videos, and to present work by and to our own diverse and creative
community!

Program Notes 1995

In Passing (1995), by Elizabeth Sale; 16mm, b/w, sound 7 1/2 minutes
What happens when we watch something closely for a long period of time? A static object
seems to move. Something we don't ordinarily see, a very small and subtle movement can
become significant and take on new meaning. (ES)

automatic writing (1995), by Elise Hurwitz; 16mm, b/w, silent, 8 minutes
Several of Freud's early case studies refused to speak under hypnosis. Freud would then
ask then to write, believing this "automatic writing" from the unconscious would yield
entry to his patients' psychological disturbances. The film automatic writing questions '^
whether writing from the unconscious would take on forms of language that exist in '
speech, or whether other symbols would supersede language, creating a writing of visual *
memories. Automatic writing does not set up any code to decipher, just a path to follow.
(EH)

Wanderlust (1994), by Kim Wood; 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes '^

A black and white collage of found footage and self portraiture. Wanderlust follows a
young woman's search for self outside the (self-) imposed archetypes of "Maiden" and
"Madwoman". A woman dangles from a trapeze, dances in a Victorian peepshow, rows
frantically away from or toward an unknown landscape where she finds the imagined
precipice has already been crossed. The act of filmmaking is the catalyst of her
transcendence. (KW)

Revision ( 1994), by Ghana Pollack; 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

Revision is a filmic representation of my struggle to examine my memory of my
grandmother and some of what she represented, against the grain of time. To do this I had
to revise my vision and actively recreate this image of her, hence the title Revision. I had in
mind the visual symbolism of a "yahrzeit" candle, the traditional Jewish lighting of a
twenty-four hour candle to memorialize the death of a family member. I wanted to create
something that would shed some light into the shadows of a faded life, to illuminate and
ponder that existence and my own relationship to it. (CP)

Recollection (1995), by Mary Trunk; 16mm, b/w, sound, 20 minutes

Recollection is a search for childhood memories that are buried or are not often easy to
recall. It is a film about re-collecting one's own memories from the fragments of others.
The film explores the idea of a collective fabric of history from which we all extract our '
own stories and create our individual pasts. By incorporating home movie footage from my
mother's childhood and juxtaposing it with contemporary footage and sound of two
women reminiscing, I constructed a framework from which the viewer can spring. Each
image, work or phrase has the possibility to spark a memory or past experience. And those
individual histories can originate from the same source. (MT)

T.E.M.P.S. (1995), by Jessica Fulton; video, color, sound, 10 minutes

T.E.M.P.S. documents my community. It shows how people normally stereotyped as non-
contributors or "bad" perform an acceptable societal role as the employee. It provides their*

reflections on that role within society while remaining apart from it. (JF) J

Miss Somebody (1994), by Mary Scott; 16mm, color, sound, 1 1 minutes

Miss Somebody is a short, personal documentary film which presents children's views of
their place in the quagmire of divorce and shared custody. All narration is by children who
have experienced divorce in their families, and the film aims to illustrate the range of their
feelings, from sadness to nostalgia to nonchalance. While wishing to make their voices

San Francisco Cinematheque

heard, my own voice is strongly present. The questions asked, the editing and use of found
footage are my way of attempting to make some sense of this difficult subject. I believe that
humor and irony are not only appropriate responses to such a painful subject but logical
ones. (MS)

Mantra (1995), by Sheila Harrington; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes
Mantra explores the terrain where the psychological, spiritual, and political overlap. Its
ultimate conclusion that contemporary pathological and political models are insufficient
descriptive systems for addictive behaviors (which belie both basic human ritualistic needs
and ecstatic spiritual impulses gone awry) contradicts current thinking about the ritual-
fascism connection. (SH)

Crabbing (1995), by Rose B. Martillano; 16mm, b/w, sound, 8 minutes

The subtleties of territorial conflict and racial tension between an old Filipina woman and a

young Caucasian man who simultaneously arrive at the Fort Mason Pier. (RM)

The Angel ofWoolworth*s (1994), by Julie X. Black; 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

The Angel ofWoolworth's tells of the romantic friendship between two women. Playing in
a dimestore photo booth, the two create a hopeful tale about a girl and an angle. (JB)

THE FILMMAKERS
Elizabeth Sale is a filmmaker and installation/performance artist working in the Bay Area
since 1989. She recently received her MFA in filmmaking from the San Francisco Art
Institute, and her work has shown throughout the Bay Area and Santa Cruz County. • Elise
Hurwitz has been making films for six years. She often works directly on the film surface
and reworks those images on an optical printer. When she's not making her own films she
helps everyone else make theirs over at Film Arts Foundation. • Kim Wood is a recent
graduate of CCAC;s MFA program in film and photography. She is currently completing
her second film, an homage to a 1920s daredevil motorcyclist tentatively titled Advice to
Adventurous Girls. • Ghana Pollack is a Montreal bom/ Israel reared/ S.F. based
filmmaker presently studying in the MFA program at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her
film Revision has been screened at several venues and film festivals. • Mary Trunk is the
Artistic Director of Trunk Co. Movement Theatre, which is dedicated to the invention and
exploration of movement as a language and the incorporation of an interdisciplinary
approach to theatre. Her most recent works investigate the movements and gestural
language that exist between people. • Jessica Fulton is a junior at UC Berkeley majoring
in American Studies. T.E.M.P.S. is her first film, made as a final project for her
documentary class. • Mary Scott is a single parent with a passionate interest in film who
turned forty the semester that she started film school. She has finished two films on family
issues and has taught several courses in film production and studies. Zoe, her daughter, is
an immeasurable help, starring in Mom's films, assisting with graphics and credits, and
giving insight into what the work looks like to an eleven year-old. • Shelia Harrington is
currently an MFA student at SFSU and Mantra is her first film. • Rose B. Martillano
recently completed a BA in Cinema at SFSU, with an emphasis in Writing and Directing.
During this one year program, she developed, shot and completed her film Crabbing.
She's now getting ready to relocate to Los Angeles to continue her film education at
UCLA. • Julie X. Black makes films about her three favorite things— girls, kissing and
kissin' girls.

Program Notes 1995

TIME BOMB!
JOHN MUSE AND JEANNE C. FlNLEY IN PERSON

Sunday, June 18, 1995 - SF Art Institute

■%

Conversations Across The Bosphorous ( 1995) by Jeanne C. Finley ;
video, color, sound, 42 minutes

Conversations Across The Bosphorous intertwines the narratives of two Muslim women \
from Istanbul: Gokeen, from an orthodox Islamic family, takes off the veil after years of \
struggle and Min^, from a secular family, discovers the roots of her faith living as an '
immigrant in San Francisco. Through poetic voices they demonstrate how their relationship
to their faith shaped and determined their personal lives.

Set on the banks of the Bosphorous, the narrow waterway that divides the Asian and
European continents. Conversations Across The Bosphorous suggests that the relation of
personal faith to cultural and political structures is one of the most critical issues in both the
Islamic and Christian worlds. Gokeen immigrated with her devout family to Istanbul from
an Anatolian village and reveals how her personal life reflects the larger cultural dilemma of
a city being torn apart in a struggle to maintain its secular government against the rapid
growth of Islamic Fundamental power. Min^, from an established Istanbul family, left
Turkey ten years ago and writes from San Francisco of her memories of growing up in a
city that since her departure has gone through a radical transformation in political structure,
unprecedented population growth and environmental destruction. «

In conjunction with evocative visual imagery, sound and lively debate, these narratives
question the possibility of continued peaceful coexistence between groups of opposing
ideologies in a relentless urban landscape.

Time Bomb{ 1995) by John Muse and Jeanne C. Finley;
video, color, sound 9 1/2 minutes

Time Bomb tells the story of a young girl's experience at a Baptist retreat where she is
called upon to accept Jesus into her life. This piece explores memory, the power of crowds
and rituals of conversion. It is the first segment of a work in progress, O night without
objects, being developed during an artist-in-residency at Xerox's Palo Alto Research
Center. The last two segments, / want to meet you, dear lady, and Blacky 's Day will
follow.

WORK PRACTICE AND TECHNOLOGY GROUP

''Time Bomb will be followed by a brief presentation by Lucy Suchman, Randy Trigg, and
Jeanette Blomberg, members of Xerox PARC's Work Practice and Technology (WPT)
group. The Work Practice and Technology area at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center is
composed of four anthropologists and two computer scientists. We combine studies of
everyday work with experimentation in new approached to technology development. We
take our inspiration from recent directions in science and technology studies and from
participatory forms of system design.

Our presentation questions the relations between our own documentary practice as
researchers interested in the social and material bases of how people work, and the working
practices of Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse. In contract with familiar distinctions of
analyst and subject, our encounter has marked by a reflexive interchange across the roles of

San Francisco Cinematheque

ethnographer and video artist. We illustrate those boundary crossings with a collection of
video sequences drawn from our collaboration to date." (— WPT)

Jeanne C. Finley is an artist who works with photography and video. She is the Associate
Dean of Media Studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Her work has been
exhibited internationally including the Museum of Modem Art in New York, the George
Pompidou Center in Paris, and at the 1993 and 1995 Whitney Biennial. Jeanne's
videotapes have been broadcast on PBS stations in the United States, as well as, on Open
Sky Television throughout Europe, Canadian Television and Japan TV. She has been the
recipient of several grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for
the Arts Fellowships and the Phelan Award in Video.

Jeanne's video credits include: Common Mistakes ( 1986); At the Museum: A Pilgrimage of
Vanquished Objects (1989); Involuntary Conversion (1991); and A.R.M. Around Moscow
(1993).. These tapes have won awards at international festivals and during 1990 Jeanne
received a Fulbright Fellowship to Yugoslavia where she directed programs for Radio/TV
Belgrade, in 1994 she was an artist-in-residence in Istanbul, Turkey through a grant from
the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Foundation.

John Muse is an artist and writer, he has taught at California College of Arts and Crafts
and San Francisco State University. His writings have appeared in Cinematho graph,
Artspace, and the City Lights Review. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center.

IN MEMORIAM: WARREN SONBERT
A TRIBUTE TO HIS LIFE AND WORK

Thursday, June 22, 1995 — Center for the Arts

"It's in time that the structure ofSonbert's 'looking at things' begins to
appear. It's through time that the structure beings to work on our body,
mind, blood, heart, lungs. And then I walk the streets happy, smog or no
smog. A good movie, good art cleans out the smog of our minds. All the
talk today against art is nothing but a social smog and I don 't want any
part of it. You can liberate your pot, if you wish; I get high on music; or on
the clear, unpretentious films of Warren Sonbert; or by looking at a brown
leaf falling from a tree. "

—Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal (NovembeT 19, 1970)

On May 31, 1995 Warren Sonbert died from complications due to AIDS, tragically cutting
short the life and work of one of the Bay Area's most widely celebrated independent film
artists and film advocates. This evening the San Francisco Cinematheque pays tribute to
Warren Sonbert with a screening of three of his rarely shown early films and a reception in
honor of his memory.

For almost three decades, Warren Sonbert has been celebrated as one of the most
innovative and prolific filmmakers of independent cinema. The subject of several Whitney
retrospectives, a lauded educator and recipient of countless festival awards both in the
United States and abroad, Warren Sonbert has fixed his permanent place in the history of
cinema side by side with all the other great works of film art. Together with such artists as

Program Notes 1995

Jonas Mekas, Andrew Noren and Stan Brakhage, Sonbert began his career in the mid-
sixties, with films that reflected the social and cultural lifestyle that accompanied the artistic
breakthroughs of the time. He crafted films that look at the worked with a sensitive,
reflexive eye. Alms that gaze without flinching both at his own daily life and that of his
friends, acquaintances and those who casually pass before his camera's lens. Throughout :
the seventies and early eighties, Sonbert continued to explore this new visual language and
helped forge new relationships between place and time through the properties of the film
medium. Sonbert's ever broadening interpretive vision and reflexive discourse of the diary
has helped to both transform and disrupt our conditioned viewing patterns, creating an
emotional urgency and a need to continually question the relationship of image and
perception, sight and cognition. "As viewers we are carried silently around Sonbert's
country and world, yet the recorded film image transcends the specificity of a moment in
time and becomes part of an aesthetic whole, an interpretation and rendering of out world." ^
(J.G. Hanhardt) --^

Introductory Remarks

Steve Anker, Director, San Francisco Cinematheque
Carla Harryman, Poet and Playwright
Danny Mangin, Critic and Film Historian

Hall of Mirrors (1996); 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes

Made when Sonbert was in his teens. Hall of Mirrors stems from the filmmaker's early =
experiences and involvement within the "Warhol scene". A documentary exploration of
Warhol's famous mirrored room at the original factory, this work utilizes crude, i
underexposed, hand-held portraiture shots of two Warhol "superstars" and rivals them with )
various outtakes from a 1948 Hollywood melodrama.

"In the casual juxtaposition of three distinct sequences Sonbert nails the psychological and ,
historical connection between the solipsistic narcissism of his own generation and the
hysteria and despair of its parents at their dawning recognition of the trap of the nuclear
family. The underpinnings of Sonbert's vocabulary as a filmmaker are all here. Combining
dated with contemporary footage reflects his sense of film as a historic artifact. . .The hall of
mirrors suggests the regression of time— how the immediacy of the recording process is
distance first by editing and subsequently through successively removed screenings so that
today Hall of Mirrors is all of a piece, both prophecy and ancient history."

—Amy Taubin, Village Voice (January 27, 1987)

Truth Serum (1967); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes

Another film from the beginning of his career. Truth Serum is in Warren's words " an :
early teenage weekend film.... From the rock and roll period: 50s girl groups and 'the High >
& Mighty 'theme." (WS)

Carriage Trade {\9n\)\ 16mm, color, silent, 61 minutes

Often cited as one of the most original and beautiful films of the avant-garde. Carriage
Trade is arranged musically with brilliantly framed compositions and swirling camera
movements creating a visual symphony of Sonbert's travels and experiences. In a startling
juxtaposition of familiar and exotic imagery, Sonbert compares the surfaces of his images
and is able to establish a basic sympathy between them. His emphasis on color, light,
texture and movement brings these images together and transcends their diary content,
resulting in an uniquely cinematic forms.

San Francisco Cinematheque

"A 16mm 60 minute six year compilation of travels, home movies, and documents shown
silent. Not strictly involved with plot or morality but rather the language of film as regards
time, composition, cutting, light, distance, tension of backgrounds to foregrounds, what
you see and what you don't, a jigsaw puzzle of post cards to produce varied displaced
effects. Contrapuntal textures in using eight of so different stocks of film— color and b/w,
negative and dyed shots. Film as music without music, each shot a cluster of notes striking
a reaction in the view. Editing does not qualify positions of good or bad; it's all just there.
Although there is both a flow and a contrast between shots, an image may not directly refer
to the shot that has preceded it but rather perhaps to several shots before. Film takes in the
changing relations of the movements of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide
icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing and density of images. All to pull the carpet
out from under you." (WS)

Warren Sonbert filmography

Amphetamine (1966); 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 minutes: Where Did Our Love Go? (1966);
16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes: Hall of Mirrors (1966); 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes:
The Tenth Legion (1967); 16mm, color, sound, 30 minutes: Truth Serum (1967); 16mm,
color, sound, 10 minutes: The Bad and the Beautiful (1967); 16mm, color sound, 35
minutes: Connections (1967); 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes, Ted & Jessica (1967);
16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes: Holiday (1968); 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes:
Carriage Trade (1971); 16mm, color/b/w, silent, 61 minutes: Rude Awakening (1975);
16mm, color, silent, 36 minutes: Divided Loyalties (1978); 16mm, color, silent, 22
minutes: Noblesse Oblige (1981); 16mm, color, silent, 25 minutes: A Woman's Touch
(1983); 16mm, color, silent, 22 minutes: The Cup and the L//? (1986); 16mm, color, silent,
20 minutes: Honor and Obey (1988); 16mm, color, silent, 21 minutes: Friendly Witness
(1989) 16mm, color, silent, 32 minutes: Short Fuse (1991); 16mm, color, sound, 37
minutes.

•program notes by Todd Wagner*

FACING EDEN: BAY AREA LANDSCAPE IN FILM ART-1

San Francisco's Undulating Skyline

Wednesday July 5, 1995 — M.H. de Young Memorial Museum

In conjunction with the San Francisco Cinematheque, throughout the month of July the
de Young museum presents a series of film programs reflecting the personal, poetic and
adventurous ways in which film artists have incorporated characteristics of the Bay Area's
landscape into their creative work over the last forty years.

Tonight's program focuses on the physical and the spatial nature of San Francisco's
skyline. The hills and light of San Francisco create a continuous visual adventure in urban
space; buildings and streets rove in height and depth as the open sky shifts from spot to
spot. Nothing quite stays as it first appears.

Panorama (1982), by Michael Rudnick; 16mm, color, sound by Rick Ross, 13 minutes
"(A) joyous evocation of San Francisco in a 'cinepoetic' essay. Twelve months are distilled
into twelve and one-half minutes through lapse time photography. Billowing clouds and
arching suns are seen in leisurely sweeps of view as the days boil and cool before our eyes.

Program Notes 1995

In speed time, the Goodyear blimp darts over the skyline like a fish buzzing a tropical reef.
Lyrical strength and a sense of wonder lift Panorama above mere trickery."

—Anthony Reveaux, AriWeek

Michael Rudnick is a San Francisco filmmaker and artist who has been making films and
teaching since the 1970s. His multi-media installations have been on display in museums
and galleries throughout the Bay Area and other parts of the U.S. Rudnick currently has a
display on view at the Exploratorium.

Spring (1991), by Thomas Korschil; 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes
To move the world (and thus the mind!) with one's eyes, to put (part oQ it into a box (like
we do) and shake it, gently, as to bring its (the world's, the mind's) particles to life
(again), for the first time, to seek some sense out of it— "all."

A souvenir; capturing (in vain!) time (lost), passing us by like the shadow of a fast moving
cloud. (Inertia!) Still, a "sweet film.'" (TK)

Thomas Korschil is a filmmaker who lives in Vienna, Austria and studied filmmaking at the
San Francisco Art Institute. Korschil curates and lectures on film art at museums and
universities throughout Austria.

Same Difference {1915), by Al Wong; 16mm, color, sound by Terry Fox, 17.5 minutes i

"A film structured around two windows overlooking the changing San Francisco skyline, '
involves different kinds of time lapses and sophisticated juxtapositions of movements such
as the uninterrupted action of drinking a glass of water over dramatically changing skies. At
times the lapses occur in separate windows or even in different areas inside the windows."

— Vincent Grenier

Al Wong is Professor of film-making and inter-disciplinary art at the San Francisco Art
Institute. He has exhibited films throughout Europe and Canada, and has experimented
with environmental art and the borders between projected image, projection space, and the
frame of the frame.

The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, Part V ( 1981) by Peter Rose;

The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough uses literary, structural, autobiographical, and
performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the
limits of perception, and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a
physical almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound
have inspired critics to call it "stunning" and "hallucinatory". The film ranges in subject
from a solar eclipse to an ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the
deeply personal to the mythic. (PR)

Peter Rose was trained in mathematics and is a professor at the Philadelphia College of Art.
His installation, performance, film and video work has shown at the Museum of Modem
Art in New York, and is in the archives of the Australian National Film Library.

SidelWaUd Shuttle (1991) by Ernie Gehr; 16mm, color, sound, 40 minutes

Part of the initial inspiration for this film was an outdoor glass elevator and some of the
visual, spatial and gravitational possibilities it presented me with. The work was also
informed by an interest in panoramas and the urban landscape. In this latter respect Edward
Muybridge's photographic panoramas of San Francisco from the 1870s as well as the over-
all topography of the city itself were sources of inspiration. Finally, the shape and character

San Francisco Cinematheque

of the work was tempered by reflections upon a lifetime of displacement, moving from
place to place, and haunted by recurring memories of other places, other possibly yet
unlikely "homes" I once passed through. (EG)

Ernie Gehr is Professor of filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute whose work
examines playful borders of perception in the unique physical and psychological (s)pace of
cinema. Gehr has shown at the George Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modem
Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and others.

On view in Trustees* Auditorium between 6:15 and 7:00p.m.

Landscape No. 1: Outside the gold frame y Inside the car window (1995)

by Lynn M. Kirby; 16mm film installation with gilt frames, walls and sandbags.
P^ of a series of landscape pieces shot over the last ten years

The following people and organizations have generously helped with this project: Stephen
Rogers, Paul Bridenbaugh, Sarah Filley, Joe Reorda, David Rosburg, The Point and
Monaco Lab.

Lynn Kirby is an installation, film and video artist who is Professor of film, video, and
performance at the California College of Arts and Crafts. She has shown her work widely
throughout Europe and North America. Kirby had a one-person retrospective of her films
at the Museum of Modem Art, New York in February of 1995.

FACING EDEN: BAY AREA LANDSCAPE IN FILM ART--2
SCALES OF GRANDEUR: HUMAN AND NATURAL INTERFACES

Wednesday July 12, 1995 — M.H. de Young Memorial Museum

The visual beauty of the Bay Area's diverse natural landscape ranges from hills to streams,
from cliffs to gentle horizons, and all are impacted by the region's singular light and
atmospheric conditions. Tonight's four films reflect on this natural landscape through the
people's interactions and responses to it.

Span (1968), By William Allan and Bruce Nauman; 16mm, color, silent, 10 minutes

Span is one in a series of several unedited camera-roll films from William Allan and Bruce
Nauman made in 1968 which documented actions growing out of their friendship and
shared concerns. They intended to give '"ugly things, things otherwise overlooked,
importance." (WA)

Here they constmct a simple device— made from wood and painted forest green— to
measure air currents which can't be seen but which coarse over and coincide with running
water.

Bruce Nauman is a widely celebrated American artist, whose many mediums include neon,
sculpture, performance, film, video, and conceptual pieces. He recently had a one-man
retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art.

William Allan is a painter, assemblagist and filmmaker who has lived in the Bay Area most
of his life, attending the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1950s. His work has been

,^j. Program Notes 1995

shown at most major museums of contemporary art in the United States, with a recent one-
man show at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento in 1994.

Seasonal Forces - A Sonoma County Almanac ( 1995) by Janis Crystal Lipzin;
S-8mm, color, sound, 18 minutes

The first section of an ongoing work exploring the conjunction of human and natural forces
being played out in rural areas everywhere, especially in Northern California. In this and
future sections of Seasonal Forces, I allude to current land use controversies such as the
dissonance between agricultural homesteads and tract developments; decades-old gardens
destined to be abandoned to bulldozers, and the transmutation of orchards into vineyards.
In Aldo Leopold's 1949 classic conservationist's memoir A Sand County Almanac, he
posed: ^

We face the question whether a still higher standard of living
is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.

His assertions precede and inform my work in which I attempt to understand what it means
to cultivate a sense of place. (JCL)

Janis Crystal Lipzin is on the film faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently
working on a book documenting women pioneers of independent filmmaking. Lipzin's
film screenings include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Filmforum in Los
Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and her installations have shown widely
throughout the Bay Area.

Survival Run (1978), by Robert Charlton; 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes

Survival Run is the story of two men and an ordeal. It's about Harry Cordellos, a blind
man who runs over Mt. Tamalpas in the 8-mile Dipsea race. One of the most difficult
cross-country courses in the world, the Dipsea weaves precariously up and down mountain
trails and along the edges of cliffs, beginning at Mill Valley and ending at Stinson Beach.

"The Dipsea race is like life.. .you don't win it.. .you survive it."

—Harry Cordellos

"I shall not be overshooting my mark if I say that Survival Run has the deepest symbolic
undertones. It is about humanity, about man's linking up with his fellow being, and it is
about all those qualities which are noble and human."

— Dnyaneshwar Nadkami, The Economic Times, Bombay

Robert Charlton is a filmmaker living in Berkeley. In addition to Survival Run, for which
he received a Best Director Award at LA's Filmex , he has directed the cable television
feature No Big Deal and numerous short films and documentaries, including The Making
ofJedi and Songs of a Distant Jungle.

Running Fence {\97S), by David Maysles, Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin; 16mm,
color, sound, 58 minutes

A portrait of one man's persistence. Running Fence documents the Bulgarian-bom artist's
efforts to build a twenty-four-and-a-half-mile-long, eighteen-foot-high fence of white fabric
across the hills of California. Since the late 1950's Christo's large-scale temporary works
of art have helped change our perception of art and society. In 1962, when the Maysles
brothers first met him in Paris, they immediately recognized a kindred spirit. As David
Maysles said: "Christo comes up with an idea that at first seems impossible, then lets it

San Francisco Cinematheque

grow; so do we." Albert Maysles agrees: "Both Christo's projects and our films are
Outrageous acts of faith."

"The Maysles first collaboration with Christo was Valley Curtain (1974), an Academy
Award nominee. Running Fence followed in 1978. Both dramatic and poetic, this
engrossing documentary tracks Christo's struggles with local ranchers, environmentalists
and state bureaucrats. To some, it sounded absurd: a three-million dollar fence, made of
nylon, designed to be in place for two weeks, then taken down? Despite Christo's
perseverance, opposition seemed insurmountable— until at last the fence was unfurled,
reuniting the community in celebration of beauty."

—Maysles Films (1978)

Christo's most recent work involved the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, in a million
square feet of polypropylene fabric. Steve Weisman remarked in the New York Times that
"Like all of Christo's projects, it is transitory, rendering his vision both arrogant and
modest. The landscape always returns to its original state."

On view in Trustees' Auditorium between 6:15 and 7:00p.m.

Landscape No. 2: Selection from. 36 hours on 24th Street{ 1992/95), by Paula Levine;
video, color, sound, 24 minutes

36 hours on 24th Street is one in a series of twenty-four hour video portraits of time in
place. The subject here is the comer of 24th Street and Folsom, in San Francisco's Mission
District; the view below Levine's studio. Time and place are sampled as the camera records
one second, every minute for 36 hours.

Paula Levine is a Canadian- American photographer and videomaker. Her work has been
seen in festivals and exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada,
including LA Freewaves, SECA Video Invitational at the San Francisco Museum of
Modem Art and the National Gallery of Canada. She will be a visiting artist this fall in
Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago.

•program notes by Jeffrey Lambert*

FACING EDEN: BAY AREA LANDSCAPE IN FILM ART-3
LIGHT ENERGIES: LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND

Wednesday July 19, 1995 — M.H. de Young Memorial Museum

Tonight's program focuses on the relationship between the San Francisco landscape and
the individual psyche. These films offer a timeline of fantasies and reveries inspired by the
Bay Area as a place of discovery.

Four in the Afternoon (1951), by James Broughton; 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 minutes
"Four poetic variations on the search for love; four odd characters living out their
daydreams: Game little Gladys, The Gardener's Son, Princess Printemps, and the Aging
Balletomane. Based on Broughton's own poems, this film blends image, music and verse
in moods from the farcical to the elegiac."

— Canyon Cinema Catalog #7

Program Notes 1995

'Lovely and Delicious, true cinematic poetry."— Dylan Thomas

James Broughton was one of the key figures in the post-war San Francisco Renaissance as
a poet, filmmaker and social force. Broughton has published several volumes of poetry and
has made over 15 films in his 50 year career. His memoirs "Coming Unbound" were
published in 1993.

Beat (1958), by Christopher MacLaine; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes

"MacLaine was known around town and had gained a reputation as San Francisco's
Artaud. He worked with a kind of dedication to madness. How intrinsic this was to his
behavior can be seen in his films...

As one looks at his film Beat, one sees more of the humor in his camera movements.
People are made to walk fast and look jerky in his films, and this is intentional humor; he
was not content to shoot at eight frames per second— he skips frames so that people skip
ridiculously in a way that rhythmically captures their intrinsic self-centeredness...One can
look at this as humorous or as unbearably horrible. If you can regard it as both delightful
and horrifying, you are close to the balance that makes MacLaine an artist. To me Beat
evokes that era to a T— beautifully precisely, wittily and terrifyingly."

— Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit's End {19S9)

Christopher MacLaine was an influential poet, publisher, and filmmaker of San Francisco's
underground Beat era. MacLaine left a legacy of four visionary films, though he dies in
obscurity during the 1970s.

All My Life (1966), by Bruce Baillie; 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes

"...it was the quality of the light for three summer days in Caspar, California, up the coast
where Tulley lived. It looked like Cork, Ireland used to... It was inspired by the light (every
day is unique as you know), and by the early Teddy Wilson/Ella Fitzgerald recording,
which was always playing in Tulley's little cabin, with its condemnation sign on it."

—Bruce Baillie, interview with Scott McDonald in A Critical Cinema 2 ( 1992)

In 1961 Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand founded Canyon Cinema, one of America's
premier distributor/exhibitors of personal film. He has made some of the most widely
admired films of independent cinema and Castro Street has been recognized by the
American Film Institute as a Landmark of American Film History. Baillie continues to
work in film and video.

Looking for Mushrooms (\96l-61), by Bruce Conner; 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes

"Looking for mushrooms in San Francisco and in Mexico and filmed and edited from
hundreds of feet of film multiple-exposed and single-framed inside the camera. Finally cut
to 100 foot length in 1965 to run perpetually in a never-ending cartridge projector. John
Lennon made the music m 1967."

— Canyon Cinema Catalog #7

"Make no mistake, this is not simply a peyote documentary or a travelogue of Conner's
Mexican sojourn; nor is this simply a 'trip' movie. He titles his film accurately, so don't
forget the word 'looking' in the title. It is partly a word of instruction to the audience. We
should be looking for mushrooms, mushroom shapes, references to mushrooms, peyote
buttons, etc., throughout our experience of the film."

—Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit's End (1989)

San Francisco Cinematheque

Bruce Conner is one of the most respected and versatile living American visual artist
working in collage, sculpture, photography, film, and more. Bruce Conner lives in San
Francisco and has been a major influence on filmmakers for the last two generations.

The Great Blondino (1967), by Robert Nelson & William T. Wiley;
16mm, color, sound, 42 minutes

"On a formal level, Blondino is a long, never resolved dialogue between it's protagonist's
inner and outer worlds, between film as a material and film as representation, between art
and entertainment. Like a dream, it continually strives to embody two contradictory
readings within the same composite structure. The recorded image is frequently effaced by
distortive lenses, prisms, and superimpositions, just as narrative is often submerged by
eruptive digressions or suggestions that each film is Blondino's dream."

-J. Hoberman, Nelson/Wiley (19^79)

I was lucky, lived in S.F. during an exciting time.. .met some inspirational artists... had lots
of help... was able to crank out a couple of films that I am very proud of. (RN)

Robert Nelson was one of San Francisco's most daring filmmakers of the 1960's who
worked with artists ranging from William Wiley to composer Steve Reich. Nelson founded
the filmmaking program at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960's and continues
to make films and videos in Milwaukee.

William T. Wiley is known primarily as a painter. Wiley was a long-term resident of San
Francisco and made numerous films, mostly with Nelson in the 60s and early 70s.

/ Change I Am the Same (1969), by Alice Ann Parker(a.k.a. Anne Severson);
16mm, b/w, sound, 40 seconds

"A short, hilarious film of a woman and a man in various states of undress— in their own
and each other's clothing."

— Canyon Cinema Catalog #7

"As a filmmaker, Anne Severson was a product of the sixties, especially the sixties reaction
to an earlier Puritanism about the body. For many sixties artists the body was a territory in
need of liberation."

— Scott McDonald, A Critical Cinema 2 ( 1992)

Alice Ann Parker had a brief filmmaking career in the late 60s to the mid 70s while living in
San Francisco. Parker's work focused on the human body, especially as it relates to gender
and sexuality. She continues to be active as an artist and shaman living in Hawaii.

Women's Rites or Truth is the Daughter of Time (1974), by Barbara Hammer;
16mm, color, sound

"An autumnal celebration of colorful fall leaves, brooks and bathing, chanting circles and
tree goddess rites. Shot on witch's land in Northern California, it is a woman celebrating
woman and nature with the poetry of Elsa Gidlow accompanying."

— Canyon Cinema Catalog #7

Barbara Hammer is one of the most prolific and versatile living independent film and video
makers. Hammer is a long time resident of San Francisco who has completed over 40
works in both mediums, ranging from the experimental to essay. She is a tireless champion
and teacher of personal, independent cinema.

Program Notes 1995

On view in the Trustees' Auditorium between 6:] 5 and 7:00p.m.

Landscape No. 3: C to C— Several Centuries After the Double Slit Experiment (1995),
by Lynn Kirby, 16mm film installation with C stands, gobo arms, flags and
sandbags.

The following people and organizations have generously helped with this project: Stephen
Rogers; Cinematographic Consultant, Joplin Wu; Andy Black; Assistant Camera, Loma
Leslie; Installation crew, Morgan Barnard, Sarah Filley, Judith Pfeifer, and C Whiteside;
sound, David Jaffe.

FACING EDEN: BAY AREA LANDSCAPES IN FILM ART-4
LIFE FLOWS IN THE MODERN WORLD

Wednesday July 26, 1995 — M.H. de Young Memorial Museum

The constant motion of human activity and changing forms creates a visual surface that »
bends and reshapes itself from moment to moment. The films in tonight's program
expressively reveal the fluid quality of San Francisco time and space.

Delugion (1982), by Michael Rudnick; 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes

"Modem day lemmings are unleashed across the screen in a 'stream of unconsciousness.'"

— Canyon Cinema Catalog #7

Last Gasp ( 1981), by Jacalyn L. White; super 8mm, color, sound, 18 minutes

A dusk-till-dawn document of the dying gasp of my beloved Kodak Supermatic 200. (JW) ■

Jacalyn White was on the staff of the San Francisco Art Institute Filmmaking Department
for nearly ten years, and her body of fifteen films have been shown extensively throughout
the United States. She has specialized in films which explore sync relationships between
sound and picture, particularly as recorded on super-8mm and through landscape studies. ^

Visions of a City (1957-1978), by Larry Jordan; 16mm, sepia, sound, 8 minutes

"The protagonist, poet Michael McClure, emerges from the all-reflection imagery of glass
shop and car windows, bottles, mirrors, etc. in scenes which are also accurate portraits of '
both McClure and the city of San Francisco in 1957. At the same time it is a lyric and
mystical film, building to a crescendo of rhythmically intercut shots of McClure's face,
seemingly trapped on the glazed surface of the city. Music by William Moraldo."

— Canyon Cinema Catalog #7 '

Larry Jordan was a central figure in San Francisco experimental cinema in the late fifties^
and throughout the sixties. He worked with Christopher MacLaine, Jordan Belson, and
others in addition to programming films during these years. He has been on the faculty of
the San Francisco Art Institute since the 1960s, and his own film work has contributed *
immeasurably to the art of cut-out animation.

San Francisco Cinematheque

By the Sea (1982), by Toney Merritt; 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes

A film made from my old studio apartment on Telegraph Hill. A portrait of sorts. (TM)

Toney Merritt is a filmmaker, teacher, and script writer who has taught at Humboldt State,
California College of Arts and Crafts, and who has programmed numerous series of films
by independent black filmmakers for theaters throughout California

Pacific Far East Lines (1979), by Abigail Child; 16mm, color, silent, 12 minutes

An urban landscape film constructed from material gathered over two years looking out at
downtown San Francisco. The elements 'folded' and mixed. Time redefines Space: the
erector and the helicopter appear as toys within a schizy motor-oil-ized ballet mechanique.
(AC)

Abigail Child is a poet, composer, filmmaker and theorist whose writings and films have
been represented throughout North America and Europe. Child specializes in new forms of
sound and image editing/collaging, and her major cycle of seven films. Is This What You
Were Born For? is a landmark in creative sound filmmaking.

Crossing the Bar {1992), by Andrew Black; 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes

Crossing the Bar is a portrait of longshoreman working on the docks of San Francisco. It
is that rare film which blends information about people's lives and work with evocative
images which enrich the meaning of what is being conveyed.

Andrew Black is a freelance professional working in the San Francisco film industry who
also makes his own personal films.

Fearfiil Symmetry (1981), by Michael Wallin; 16mm, color, silent, 15 minutes

Uses precisely (mathematically) determined single-framing to give movement to static
space, to give life and energy to solid objects, to duplicate/mimic the eye's true movement
to forcefully bring to consciousness an inherent symmetry and balance in the visual field.
Images: deadened railroad tracks, ice plant fields, Bethlehem Steel smokestack. Canyon
Cinema office, back porch clouds and sky, PG&E plant at Moss Landing. . . (MW)

"Wallin imputes the foundation of an imagistic world through discontinuous static
displacement pans, flash framing the blindness persistent in vision, emptying out the
subject-as-limit into the subjectlessness of seeing."

— Robert Fulton, SFAI Film Festival Judge

Michael Wallin has been a fixture in the Bay Area's avant-garde film community for over
twenty years, including stints as a film instructor at California College of Arts and Crafts
and manager of Canyon Cinema for most of the 80s.

Cable Car Melody {\9S6), by Charies Wright; 16mm, color, sound, 26 minutes
You will look down Hyde Street and see San Francisco Bay in the background. In the
foreground a cable car will move across the surface of the screen, while almost everything
else will change, from shot to shot, to create a melody. (CW)

Charies Wright is a collage artist, graphic artist and filmmaker whose works have been
exhibited in galleries in New York City as well as San Francisco. He has also collected
10(X)s of images taken from catalogues printed over the last 1(X) years, pictures postcards,
and found images.

Program Notes 1995

On view in Trustees ' Auditorium from 6:15 to 7:00 p.m.

East/West ( 1 993-94), by Paula Levine

East/West is a portrait of a hill in Woodside, California made with two cameras— one on
the west side facing east and the other, on the east side facing west— each camera records
one second every minute for 24 hours.

East/West is one in a series of 24 hour portraits of time in place.

INTRIGUE

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piiuidcs o iiiiiiiiic v.xilidii^c of ideas thai is inifiiatchcii finynhcic else in the Ihiileil Stolen. "

(innvof NfWin, FilmmaVrr
Schtttrrrftint: »n<l Rr^ Shift

We believe that art should
be a meaningful part of
everyone's life. and that the
creative experiences offered
by film and video far exceed
ihose available through com-
mercial cinema or television

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viih'ocoinniunily."

the experimental film and video
community is international in
scope, and our responsibility to
the field has greatly expanded
We're sought out by
media professionals
from throughout the
world to help develop
programs of american
films and tapes for

PRESENTATION ABROAD

l)J^i(^( utiH

Film »n<) ViHfo Odicn,

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There are no monopolies on creativity or pre-
scriptions FOR the forms it TAKES. DIVERSE
FORMAL APPROACHES. CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS
AND ARTISTIC VISIONS — ALL ARE WELCOME REPRE-
SENTATIVES OF THE MANY VOICES THAT MAKE UP
SAN FRANCISCO'S VIBRANT CULTURAL LIFE.

"();)(• of the iliin\is I've olwoys
appiecinleil about the
('iin'mallieifiie is the way
that it's open too with
variety of works from the
mariiins, that it's more inter-
ested in ne;,otiatin{^ boinitl-
aries and definitions than in
hardenini' them, that it
aetively strives to he a home to
the "free fortns" of oar
hetero}ieneous soeiety. "

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Niikril ^. r* t nitif h Rmmi ami Shroi ht tU ( O'tintU

PROVOKE

San Francisco Cinematheque

TWO BY FREDERICK WISEMAN:
HIGH SCHOOL & PRIMATE

FREDERICK WISEMAN IN PERSON

Sunday, October 1, 1995 - SF Art Institute
Co-sponsored by Film Arts Foundation and the San Francisco Art Institute

I personally have a horror of producing propaganda to fit
any kind of ideology. ..I like the material to speak for itself I
think the films that I've done, documentaries, all have a very
clear point of view, but it's a point of view that the audience
has to work with.. .in a sense they have to say, 'What the
hell 's he trying to say with this? '
—if indeed I'm saying anything.

—Frederick Wiseman, The Film Journal, Spring 1971

The San Francisco Cinematheque, Film Arts Foundation, and the San Francisco Art
Institute Lecture Series present a rare opportunity to see two early works by acclaimed
documentary director Frederick Wiseman. Since his first work Titicut Follies was made
and then banned in 1967, lawyer-tumed-filmmaker Wiseman has made 28 documentaries
focusing on American institutions and the societal contradictions they embody.

Throughout his heralded and controversial career, Frederick Wiseman has consistently
pushed the boundaries of film art, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, subjectivity
and objectivity, while always managing to keep audiences on the edge of their seats.
Wiseman has taken as his subject American institutions: a mental institution, a correctional
facility, a high school, a police department, a hospital, an Army training center, a
monastery, a primate research center, and a meat packing company among others.
Wiseman illustrates the way that society at large is reflected in these institutions through
stark examinations of power structures and the influence they have on behavior. One
cannot simply watch a Wiseman film and expect to walk away with a little nugget of truth
about the way the world works. Instead, one becomes involved in the process of
exploration and navigation through a complex series of images untainted by voice-over
narration, allowing viewers to recognize the interaction of their own values and belief
structures with the events presented in the film.

Wiseman does not present a cinema of truth in his films. As he pointed out in a 1974
interview discussing Primate: "I filmed events that existed in so-called real life, but
structured them in a way that has no relationship to the order or time in which they actually
occurred— and created a form that is totally fictional. So from a structural point of view,
my films are more related to fictional technique than to documentary technique." With a
fluid camera and rigorous editing Wiseman creates narratives that are associative as
opposed to linear. Throughout it all Wiseman is the one controlling the image flow; the one
creating the complex webs of narrative that hinge on his ability to present scenes that are at
once riveting and surprising, leading his audience through these institutions which seem at
once familiar and foreign. It is in this paradoxical space that we discover the power of
Wiseman's work: the revelation of the hidden tensions that exist behind the facade of
acceptable society.

Program Notes 1995

High School (1968) \ 16mm, b/w, sound, 75 minutes I

A high school, like any institution, is a self-contained society and you have to hunt out the
places where power is exercised. That's where you're going to find the real values of the
institution expressed. In one way the film is organized around the contrasts between the
formal values of openness, trust, sensitivity, democracy, and understanding, and the actual *
practice of the school which is quite authoritarian. (FW) I

Primate (1974); 16mm, b/w, sound, 105 minutes

"Wiseman has called the film a 'science-fiction documentary,' for it is about man's use of
technology to attempt to manipulate the present and project himself into the future... Thus, '
in this institution, what we are seeing is the hunting animal— the tool-carrying killer
primate— experimenting on his relative, the knuckle-walking primate, in order to
understand and control his own evolution. This is the exact reversal of the situation
presented in The Planet of the Apes, and its implications are far more bizarre and chilling."

—Thomas R. Atkins, Frederick Wiseman, 1976

Besides his work as an independent filmmaker, Wiseman is a graduate of Yale Law
School, and has directed numerous theater pieces including Welfare: the Opera which he
also wrote the story for, at the 1992 American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia.

WISEMAN FBLMOGRAPHY

Titicut Follies {\967),Seraphita' s Diary (1982); High School (1968y,The Store (1983);
Law and Order (1969); Racetrack {\9S5); Hospital (1970); Blind (1986); Basic Training
(1971); Deaf (\9S6); Essence (1972); Adjustment and Work (1986); Juvenile Court
(1973); Multi-handicapped (1986)', Primate (1974); Missile (1987); Welfare {1975); Near
Death (1989); Meat {1916); Central Park {1989); Canal Zone {1911); Aspen (1991); Sinai
Field Mission (1978); Zoo (1993); Maneuver (1980); High School // (1994); Model
{1980); Ballet {1995).

Wiseman will speak about and show various clips from his works
October 2, 1995 at 8:00 PM, at the Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness Avenue.
This discussion, the first of FAF's Meet the Mavericks series, will be moderated by <

Academy Award winner Irving Saraf.
For information call 552-8760; for tickets call 392-4400. ^

•program notes by Jeffery Lambert*

CINEMATHEQUE: ^^^

BEHIND THE SCENE ON SCREEN

Thursday, October 5, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Who are these people who hold the San Francisco Cinematheque together? As a struggling
non-profit with a meager staff of two and a half, the Cinematheque could not subsist
without the love and labor of innumerable friends who regularly emerge from the large and
diverse San Francisco film community to help us out. There are those on whom we call
when in need, and there are those who appear on our doorstep (often having heard about us
at one of the local film schools or at the courthouse where parking tickets get transmuted
into hours of work) from all over the city, country and world to offer a bit of their sweat
and blood for a few weeks or months. They help us by answering phones, writing

San Francisco Cinematheque

program notes, licking stamps, selling tickets, making flyers, editing publications,
distributing calendars, logging films, organizing our library, compiling publicity booklets,
helping with projection, and just being there, so we know we can count on them in our
moments of crisis. But who are these people, willing to do both menial tasks with no glory
and challenging tasks that require feats of wild imagination, hours of organizational
precision, and leaps of unbounded faith? Many are filmmakers in their own right, whose
interest in seeing films and in making sure they continue to be seen at places like the
Cinematheque is an integral part of their own creative development. This evening's
screening is a look at the Cinematheque from the inside out, a way to get to know the some
of the creative individuals who are its lifeblood, and an eclectic visual feast of some of the
newest and hottest Bay Area short films.

— Irina Leimbacher

6.95: stnptease{\995) by Brian Frye; 16mm, color, silent, 3.5 minutes

"The spectacle is a false revelation, the mechanism of substitution; it replaces knowledge
with the promise of knowledge, language with the promise of communication, authenticity
with the promise of truth. It is an exercise in recursive teleology, its object the reproduction
of needs it cannot satisfy, the desire for alienation. It exists only as the materiel of
consumption, the wasted husk of consciousness in presence. Its enlightenment is that of
the pedagogue, a vicious obscurantism, translating the beauty of discontinuity into a simple
science of empty maxims and valorized tautology. For its disciples speak its name in
tongues that cannot be their own, and with the terror of the repentant suicide, they dance a
fearful tarantella and scream with rabid glee the terrible praises of its own forsaken corpse."

—Jackson P. Broadway

The Creative Process? (1995), by Shawn Parrish; 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 minutes

I had been having writer's block for over a month and the idea came to me for a joke about
making a film about a film student who is making a film but has no ideas. This idea turned into
a short comedy about badly made, pretentious, over-symbolic student films. What does it
mean, you ask? Well, I believe what I was trying to say was that no one should take
filmmaking half-assed. The two characters at the table (Ralph and Egg man) are like two parts
of me— one side wanting to make films that challenge their audience and the other always
saying that the film will be too artsy. (SP)

Bodylyrics i(1995), by Judith Pfeifer; 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes

The shadows and appearances of two individuals emerge and evaporate in an inner and
outer dialogue of approach and isolation. Alternating between a spherical, spatial
orientation and a search foi another body, they share their path by extending their balance
beyond their axis into tentative partner related movements. (JP)

ALLMIXEDUP (1995), by Geoffe Domenghini; 16mm, color, sound, 20 minutes

A film in three parts about the 'irrational' relationships between three couples. I: Despair.
II: Ambient Sound. Ill: A Film about Soap. (GD)

The Rope Factory (1995), by Kerri O'Kane and Megan Hayenga;
16mm, b/w, sound, 13 minutes

Two filmmakers explore the innards of an old rope factory built in the late 1800s. While
inside they tap into the magic of those quiet moments shared by friends exploring dark old
forbidden places. Most of the film has been hand-processed creating a unique and palpable
space.

Program Notes 1995

"Untitled" (1995), by Christian Bruno; 16mm, color, sound, 13 minutes
An artist asks himself, "Whose aesthetic is it anyway?" (CB)

ResuUsfrom Test Case 79014F (1995), by Rick Danielson;
16mm, b/w, sound, 10 minutes

A man is experimented on with uncertain results. (RD)

Gay Pride ^ ( 1995), by Timoleon Wilkins; regular-8mm, color, silent, 4 minutes

A film comprised of four color variations on one roll of unslit regular-8. The four screens
within a screen suggest a disturbing window through which particles and persons disperse
in reversing and repeating rhythm. (TW)

Untitled work in progress (1995) by Elise Hurwitz; 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes

She says chopping wood is more intellectual than physical (mentally searching for the line
along which wood will split). I watch her, wondering. (EH) ^

My Good Eye (1995), by Alfonso Alvarez; 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes

"Kinochestvo is the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a
rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal
rhythm of each object."

—From WE, Variant of a Manifesto, Dziga Vertov, 1922

"Kinodelic is the art of organizing the necessary movements of color film stock through an
optical printer in harmony with the internal rhythm in the music of Jimi Hendrix."

—From US, Variant of a Variant, Alva, 1995

3.95: untitled (1995) by Brian Frye; 16mm, color, silent, 3.5 minutes

"Records of a symbolic city in which the mark of historicity manifests itself despite the
static continuity of alienated architecture, and the spectre of specificity blooms in the
shadow of the careless machine. The true name of spaces is broken and their secret lives
can be realized only in moments."

—Jackson P. Broadway

. . . And now, as a coda, two from the Cinematheque staff . . .

Subway (1972) by Steve Anker, Steve; 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 minutes

To think that he gave up a career in filmmaking to become the Director of the
Cinematheque!

Let's Go to the Bad World (unfinished fake preview) (1990) by Joel Shepard;
16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes

And you thought Associate Directors don't have a dark side...?

San Francisco Cinematheque

...and then god became disoriented
in the for e s t of higher animals,,,

J. G. CHAPMAN IN PERSON

Sunday, October 8, 1995 — Victoria Theatre
a co-presentation of the San Francisco Cinematheque and nan productions

Tonight the Cinematheque and non productions are happy to co-present the premier of J.G.
Chapman's first feature film, ..xind then god became disoriented in the forest of higher
animals... J.G. Chapman has worked in and around audio/visuals in San Francisco since
1985. As recording engineer, he has been involved with hundreds of recordings ranging
from Thinking Fellers to Joe Satri£ini, red house painters to Faith No More. With devotion
and respect reserved for the non -commercial, otherwise obscure, or projects somehow
placed under the vague guise of truer art, he has worked on composing, recording, and
producing many music and sound pieces, as well as sound for film for American
Playhouse. More recently, he has become active as a cameraman and/or visual collaborator
for film and video. Since 1987 he has written, directed and resourcefully produced six
short films. Mr. Chapman also works as a technician and consultant in recording studios,
post-houses and performs myriad duties from negative cutting to lens repair in an effort to
finance his personal projects. ..xind then god became disoriented in the forest of higher
animals... will be preceded by two short works, Thad Povey's Thine Inward-looking Eyes
and Danny Plotnick and Laura Rosow's Pillow Talk.

Thine Inward-looking Eyes (1993), by Thad Povey; 16mm, color, sound, 2 minutes

To paraphrase something Lao Tzu didn't say: This film's an empty cup— You fill it up.
(TP)

Pillow Talk (1991), by Danny Plotnick and Laura Rosow;
Super-8mm, color, sound, 18 minutes

Extreme manipulation of filmic time and space combined with an impressionistic lighting
scheme help create an urban spaces nightmare. They're fighting downstairs, they're
fucking next door, they're stealing your clothes in the laundry room, and you're no better
than the rest. Loquacious and lugubrious. Sorta like Jeanne Dielman meets Laverne &
Shirley. (DP)

. . .and then god became disoriented in the forest of higher animals. . . ( 1 994) , by J.G.
Chapman; 16mm, color, sound, 70 minutes

Doomed to be mysteriously connected to the essence of life, square peg Audrey Muse
wrestles undauntedly with the future machine of western civilization. Squatting with a
bumbling undesirable and an obsessive criminal handyman in the anarchistic zone outside
the new world order, she naively launches illegal social commentary and, in a world
without plants, animals or reliable oxygen, begins the inevitable journey into cynicism and
disillusionment. (JGC)

J.G. CHAPMAN FttMOGRAPHY

Controlled Logic and Binary inc. (1988); Exteriors (1989); Red Carpets (1990); Under
(1990) (Co-Director and Director of Photography); Man of Unfoundedness (1991); Meet
the Thinking Fellers (1993); ..uind then god became disoriented in the forest of higher
animals... (1994)

Program Notes 1995

ELLEN BRUNO: PORTRAITS FROM THE EDGE

ELLEN BRUNO IN PERSON

Thursday, October 12, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Ellen Bruno's passionate involvement in the lives of the people she chooses to film
provides a context for a humanistic understanding of her subjects' perspectives and
prepares the viewer to analyze the political forces that shape their own, as well as other
people's lives. In her documentaries, Bruno intends to show the audience "other
possibilities of existence, other ways of being in the world" (—Ellen Bruno). She paints
deeply personal portraits of people from different cultures, evoking awesome respect for
people who persevere. Through her deliberate, reflective pacing and poetic feel for detail,
Bruno explores themes of survival— how life miraculously persists and how philosophical
idealism is retained in the presence of tragedy and oppression.

Bruno acknowledges the huge impact that her community work has upon her filmmaking.
Before receiving her Master's Degree in documentary filmmaking from Stanford in 1990,
she worked in refugee camps on the Thai -Cambodian border, as field coordinator for the
International Rescue Committee's Family Reunification Program, and as Director of the
Cambodian Women's Project for the American Friends Service Committee. Recently, her
volunteer work with the Zen Center Hospice provided the inspiration for her latest project.
Blessed.

Samsara (1990); 16mm, color, sound, 29 minutes

The Cambodian survivors in Samsara are tested to the limits of human endurance in a
country disrupted with deep political turmoil. They are attempting to restructure their lives
in the wake of destruction left by the Khmer Rouge. Using ancient prophecy, Buddhist
teachings, folklore and dreams, Bruno documents a shattered society in a climate of war as
they struggle to understand their past. Bruno reveals a new vision of reality, an elusive and
difficult path of nonresistance.

Satya: A Prayer For The Enemy (1994) ; 16mm, color, sound, 28 minutes

Bruno structures yet another vision of reality in Satya as she seeks to understand the basis
and inspiration for the nonviolent resistance of Tibetan nuns against the religious
oppression and cultural genocide practiced by the Chinese government against the Tibetans.
Bruno makes a profound visual, emotional and political statement through the intimacy and
gentleness with which she handles the material.

"If more films were made with a conscience even remotely close to this one, the world
would be a different place."

—National Educational Film Festival.

Blessed ( 1995); 3/4 inch video, color, sound, 12 minutes

In her newest work, Bruno brings her astute observations and deeply personal, lyrical
style closer to home in a story about an inter-racial couple living in the Tenderloin. Bruno
documents the wisdom and spirit of survival of this couple as they confront their demons
and attempt to live out the American dream in an unconventional way. Ellen Bruno portrays
yet another perspective on the human condition in this film as she attempts to confront vital
social issues and challenge her audience's points of view.

•program notes by Chryss Terry*

San Francisco Cinematheque

BLACK SHEEP BOY
AND OTHER FILMS BY MICHAEL WALLIN

MICHAEL WALLIN IN PERSON

Sunday , October 15, 1995 — SF Art Institute

Michael Wallin's first one-person screening in seven years at the San Francisco
Cinematheque highlights the completion of his long awaited new film Black Sheep Boy, a
poetic rumination on desire, the construction of sexual fantasy, and the pursuit of the
idealized other. Tonight's show is also an opportunity to revisit several of Wallin's earlier
works, including the award-winning Decodings.

Michael Wallin has been making films in the Bay Area for 25 years. His involvement in the
film community has included an eight-year stint as Manager of Canyon Cinema, the
country's largest distributor of independently-produced experimental work, and eight years
on its Board of Directors. He has taught film production and theory at California College of
Arts and Crafts, and is currently President of the Board of the San Francisco
Cinematheque. In 1988 Wallin received the James D. Phelan Art Award in Filmmaking for
the body of his work, and his film Decodings was chosen for the Biennial Exhibition of the
Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989. In order to make Black Sheep Boy, he received
major production grants to artists from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
American Film Institute as well as a grant from the Independent Television Service (ITVS).
In addition to making films, Wallin also works as a psychotherapist at Fort Help
Counseling Agency and has a private practice.

Sleepwalk (19^3); 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes

Sleepwalk, one of the first films Wallin finished while attending film school, grew out of an
interest in the Russian mystic philosophers Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and their theories
concerning the expression of personality through personal mannerisms, gesture and
nuances of behavior. In his film Wallin deconstructs the physical expressions that
characterize three of his friends, examining the process by which these idiosyncrasies
delineate the specificity of personality.

Along the Way (1983); 16mm, color, sound, 20 minutes

The third film in a trilogy of related works that includes Monitoring the Unstable Earth and
Fearful Symmetry, Along the Way addresses the function of topography as perceived
through landscape and cityscape. However, while the previous films move toward
abstraction. Along the Way centers itself on people, events and the experiential aspects of
space. Taking the form of a travelogue or diary film, it chronicles the activities of leisure
time, while focusing them through the analytic lens of formalist structure. Finished during
the dissolution of a ten-year relationship, the film contains the emotional residue of that
event, playing with a deliberate sentimentality or nostalgia for things past.

Decodings {\9SS)', 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 minutes

The mystery of life is being here with you. The mystery is being with your absence.
This is a story. There is isolation and brotherhood. Desperation and hope. A heart
is laid bare. There is blood. A man leaps from an airplane. Danger. It is not a
story for the timid.

— from the script of Decodings

Program Notes 1995

While I was editing the film I began to realize that my choice of material reflected concerns
that seemed almost 'autobiographical.' The film evolved into a sort of
emotional/psychological/sexual self-portrait. I wrote a piece for the film as a narration, but
it was too naked. I gave it to a writer friend with instructions to create vignettes and
characters to carry the thematic material. He did, creating a series of anecdotes, parables
and pseudo-scientific musings to accompany the images and the music of Shostakovich.
The film deals with the issues of the kinds of relationships that can exist between males and
the possibilities for and the barriers to intimacy. It is concerned with the struggle to break
through family/cultural expectations and role-playing to express true individuality and
experience true freedom. (MW)

''Decodings is a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of
collective memory, in this case found footage from the 40s and 50s . The search for self
ends in aching poignancy with stills of a boy and his mother at the kitchen table, catching
the moment that marks the dawning of anguish and loss; desire becomes imprinted on that
which was long ago."

— Manohla Dargis, Village Voice

Black Sheep Boy (1995) \ 16mm, color, sound, 37 minutes

Michael Wallin's most recent film. Black Sheep Boy, explicitly addresses his experience of
his own sexuality and the way that it has structured and responded to desire, especially as
expressed through voyeurism. Although the visual element of the film consists
predominately of intimately photographed nude or partially clothed young men, as a text it
maintains a studied distance from these men, allowing for their presence only as the objects
of its gaze, which the spoken text implicitly identifies as that of the filmmaker. This
position of identification with the gaze of the camera emphasizes its function as a probing
tool, one which allows for examination and dissection but stymies the maturation of desire
into identification with its object. However, while the visual object of desire remains
external, the subject of examination and point of intimate revelation attaches itself to the
voice of the text, that of the filmmaker, and the features that characterize the specificity of
his desire. In this way, the true intimate subject of the film becomes explicitly located in the
disembodied corpus of the text itself, and so not only functions as an exegesis of desire and
its problematics as expressed in this one individual, but also implicates the spectator in that
critical evaluation, its revelation demanding reciprocation.

"On the surface. Black Sheep Boy might appear to stereotype gay men as sex obsessed—
and with youth at that. But Wallin accomplishes something deeper: he presents a thinking,
feeling human being on a quest for self-knowledge. Boy has links to experimental classics
such as Jean Genet's Un Chant d' Amour and Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, but addresses
the philosophical and psychological implications of sexual yearning more directly."

—Daniel Mangin, S.F. Weekly

MICHAEL WALLIN FiLMOGRAPHY

Black Sheep Boy (1995); Greed, or Buffalo Baba (1972/1980); Decodings (1988); The
Place Between Our Bodies (1976); Along the Way (1983); Sleepwalk (1973); Fearful
Symmetry (1981); A5 the Wheel Turns (1973); Monitoring the Unstable Earth (1980);
Kali's Revue (1972); Cool Runnings (1980); Mendocino (1968); Tall Grass (1980);
Phoebe and Jan ( 1968).

•program notes by Brian Frye*

San Francisco Cinematheque

TRINH T. MINH-HA'S A TALE OF LOVE
TRINH T. MINH-HA IN PERSON

Thursday, October 19, 1995 - Kabuki Theatre
The San Francisco Cinematheque, NAATA and FAF present a special sneak preview

The San Francisco Cinematheque, the National Asian American Telecommunications
Association and Film Arts Foundation are honored to present a sneak preview of Trinh T.
Minh-ha's eagerly awaited first narrative feature, A Tale of Love. A filmmaker, writer,
composer and teacher, Trinh Minh-ha has been a vital and provocative presence in the Bay
Area film community for several years. Her category-defying films, her poetic and
uncompromising critical writing on cinema, feminism, and gender and cultural politics, as
well as her soft-spoken yet rigorous classes at San Francisco State and U C Berkeley have
inspired and challenged many of us working and thinking in the representational arena.

Bom in Hanoi and educated at the University of Saigon and the National Conservatory of
Music, Trinh Minh-ha left Vietnam at the age of seventeen and continued her studies in the
Philippines and in Paris. She moved to the United States in 1970 where she received
graduate degrees in Ethnomusicology and Music Composition, and a Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature. Between 1977 and 1980 she taught at the National Conservatory of Music in
Dakar, Senegal. Here in the United States she has taught at Cornell, Smith, Harvard and
San Francisco State, and she is presently Professor of Women's Studies and Film at the
University of California, Berkeley. While teaching, writing and making films, Trinh also
travels and lectures extensively on art, film theory and practice, feminism, and cultural
politics in the States as well as in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The recipient
of several awards and grants (including the AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya
Deren Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of
the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Film Institute, and the California Arts
Council), Trinh's films have shown widely in the United States, in Canada, Senegal,
Australia and New Zealand as well as in Europe and Asia, with retrospectives in the UK,
the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Hong Kong.

All of Trinh Minh-ha's works challenge and undermine the experience of film both as
spectacle and as bearer of authoritative meaning. Her first film, Reassemblage, which was
shot in Senegal with a hand-cranked Bolex, challenges traditional ethnographic style and
embodies a reflection on the cinematographic language commonly used in ethno-
documentary films. Her subsequent films. Naked Spaces - Living is Round, Surname Viet
Given Name Nam, and Shoot for the Contents all continue to actively engage the audience
in the process of meaning construction as they question and dismantle fixed notions of
identity, culture, and the power to name, to speak about. As Trinh writes in her book When
the Moon Waxes Red, there is a great need to make films politically, and "a politically made
film must begin by first shaking the system of cinematic values on which its politics is
entirely dependent." Her new film which we have the privilege of screening tonight will
certainly continue to shake both the system and our expectations while at the same time
marking a new departure for Trinh into the realm of 35mm "fiction" filmmaking.

A Tale of Love (1995); 35mm, color, sound, 108 minutes

Director, Producer, Writer, Editor: Trinh T. Minh-ha; Co-Director, Co-Producer,
Lighting & Production Designer: Jean-Paul Bourdier; Line Producer/ Production
Manager: Erica Marcus; Director of Photography: Kathleen Beeler; Art Director:
Angela D. Chou; Assistant Editor/Location Manager: Corey Ohama; Post-
Production Consultant/Re -recording Mixer: Jim KaWett; Music: The Construction

Program Notes 1995

of Ruins; Constructors: Greg Goodman, J.A. Deane; Sound Recordist: Lauretta
Molitor; Cast: Mai Huynh, Juliette Chen, Dominic Overstreet, Mai Le Ho, Kieu
Loan.

Set in the framework of contemporary American life, A Tale of Love follows the quest of a
woman in love with Love. The film is loosely inspired by The Tale of Kieu, the Vietnamese
national poem of love, written in the early 19th century. The poem tells of the misfortunes
of Kieu, a martyred woman who sacrificed her "purity" and prostituted herself for the good
of her family. Vietnamese people (both in Vietnam and in the diaspora) see the poem as a
mythical biography of the "motherland," marked by internal turbulence and foreign
domination; they recognize their country in the karma-cursed and passion-driven Kieu.

The film portrays the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, a free-lance writer
who sends money to her family in Vietnam by working for a women's magazine and
posing for a photographer. Yet, while caught between different cultural and emotional
worlds, our modem day Kieu broadens the role of the nineteenth century woman of The
Tale of Kieu by exposing the link between sex and the virtual decapitation of women in
love stories.

Kieu struggles with her Aunt, a single mother and a social worker, over traditional values
and the demands of modem life. In his studio, Alikan the artist photographs Kieu sheathed
by transparent veils, shrouded in mystery. Idealizing the headless female body, he exposes
the voyeurism of both the camera eye and the spectator's eye in the consumption of images
of love. Kieu's relationship with Alikan is, however, based on mutual agreement and their
dialogues hint at a larger conversation between cultures and genders. The two are playing a
match of chess where desire drives the game.

Away from the photographer's studio, Kieu is working on an article about the legacy of
The Tale of Kieu for a women's magazine. Kieu's mentor Juliet, the editor of the
magazine, is a woman who loves through the sense of smell and believes only in a "great
love," a la Romeo and Juliet. With Juliet, Kieu comes to understand how the poem
resonates in her own personal life. In the end, overcoming the sorrows of love and exile is,
for Kieu, to reinvent both herself and the 2(X)-year old poem. n ^ ^ j \j

Voyeurism runs through the history of love narrative, and voyeurism is here one of the
threads that structure the "narrative" of the film. Is the film about love? Is it a love story?
As the title suggests, it is above all a "tale"; a tale about the fiction of love in love stories
and the process of consumption; a tale that marginalizes traditional narrative conventions
such as action, plot, unity of time and realistic characters. Opening up a space where
reality, memory and dream constantly pass into one another, A Tale of Love unfolds in
linear and non-linear time. It offers both a sensual and an intellectual experience of film and
can be viewed as a symphony of colors, sounds and reflections. As a character in the film
says, "Narrative is a track of scents passed on from lovers to lovers."

Kieu acts as a foil to a multiplicity of desires embodied in the other characters. With Alikan,
Minh, Java and Juliet, she experiences love through sight, sound, smell and touch.
Similarly, the film offers the spectator more than one way into it own "love stories." Rather
than being homogenized, the relationship between the visuals and the verses remains
layered and elliptical. Light, setting, camera movement, sound and text all have a presence,
a logic and a language of their own. Although they reflect upon one another, they are not
intended to just illustrate the meanings of the narrative. The film also works with a subtly
"denaturalized" space of acting. In the way the shots and the dialogues are carried out, both
spectators and actors share the discomfort of voyeurism: the unnatural ness of those who

San Francisco Cinematheque

"look without being looked at" (the makers, the spectators) versus the self -consciousness
of those who "know they are being looked at while they are being watched" (the actors).

TRINH T. MINH-HA FiLMOGRAPHY

Reassemblage (1982); Naked Spaces— Living is Round (1985); Surname Viet Given Name
Nam (1989); Shoot for the Contents (1991); A Tale of Love (co-directed with Jean-Paul ;
Bourdier, 1995).

BOOKS BY TRINH T. MiNH-HA

Un Art sans oeuvre (1981); African Spaces— Designs for Living in Upper Volta (in
collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, 1985); En minuscules (1987); Woman, Native,
Other (1989); When the Moon Waxes Red (I99l)\ Framer Framed (1992).

"I am interested in making films thai further engage filmmaking, £ind contribute to the body
of existing works that inspire and generate other works. In this process of mutual learning,
of constant modification in consciousness, the relation between filmmaker, film subject and
film viewer becomes so tightly interdependent that the reading of the film can never be
reduced to the filmmaker's intentional. . .Reading a film is a creative act and I will continue
to make films whose reading I may provoke and initiate but do not control. A film is like a
page of paper which I offer the viewer. I am responsible for what is within the boundary of
the paper but I do not control and do not wish to control its folding. The viewer can fold it
horizontally, obliquely, vertically, they can weave the elements to their liking and
background. This interfolding and intervening situation is what I consider to be most
exciting in making films."

-Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1988

•notes on A Tale of Love provided by Trinh T. Minh-ha •
•notes on the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha by Irina Leimbacher*

QUEER SHORTS BY FEATURE DIRECTORS
JENNIE LIVINGSTON IN PERSON

Sunday, October 22, 1995 — SF Art Institute

Hot Heads (1993), by Jennie Livingston; video, color, sound, 6 minutes

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), by Todd Haynes;
16mm, color, sound, 40 minutes

Name Day (1993), by Maria Maggenti ; 16mm, b/w, sound,

Intrepidissima (1992,) by Marta Balletbo-Coll; video, color, sound, 7 minutes

Fingers and Kisses (1995), by Shu Lea Cheang; video, color, sound, 5 minutes

Coming Home (1995), by Shu Lea Cheang; video, color, sound, 4 minutes

The Discipline ofDe (1978), by Gus Van Sant; 16mm, b/w, sound, 9 minutes

My Friend {\9S5), by Gus Van Sant; 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 minutes

Program Notes 1995

FILMS FROM PARIS' LIGHT CONE
LIGHT CONE FOUNDER YANN BEAUVAIS IN PERSON

Thursday, October 26, 1995 — Center for the Arts

This evening the San Francisco Cinematheque is honored to welcome Yann Beauvais with
a program of films brought to us all the way from Paris. Beauvais is the co-founder, with
Miles McKane, of Light Cone, France's most active distributor of alternative film which,
like the Bay Area's own Canyon Cinema, accepts experimental films on deposit with the
filmmakers retaining ownership and setting their own rental rates. He also founded and
does the programming for Scratch Projection, a major venue for experimental films in
France, as well as being the Film and Video Curator at the American Center in Paris.

Uta Makura (Pillow Poems): Of Gardens. Outings. Tokyotokids. On the Go (1994-95),
by Vivian Ostrovsky; 16mm, color, sound, 19 minutes

The filmmaker's reflections on traveling to Japan.

New York Long Distance (1994), by Yann Beauvais; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes

An evocation of Beauvais' relationship to New York since 1962 through a combination of
postcard images and autobiographical fragments.

The film is concerned with the distance between a memory and the image of this memory, a
distance one always tries to abolish. (YB)

La Peche miraculeuse (The Miraculous Catch of Fish) (1995), by C6cile Fontaine;
16mm, color, silent, 18 fps, 10 minutes

Using found footage, travel footage, mattes and superim positions, Fontaine takes us on a
lush and lyrical journey into the sea and the film medium.

Bouquets 1-10 (1994-95), by Rose Lowder; 16mm, color, silent, 12 minutes
An investigation into landscape, time and the act of seeing.

Vagues a ColUoure (Waves at Collioure) (1991), by Jean Michel Bouhours;
16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes

In the summer of 1914, Collioure was a small and tranquil fishing village far from the
convulsions of a Europe in flames. Matisse painted a curious canvas there, French Window
in Collioure. Homage to Collioure, a wink to the cubists, a reference to Matisse; an
offering to the wind and to the sea.

The furious north wind sends you its spasmodic grumblings in the crystalline air. The sea
is unleashed by the wind, which suddenly deserts the various small boats; SOS for the
imprudent. The huge breaking waves make the children on the beach happy. (JMB)

Trama (1987-80), by Christian Lebrat; 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes

Trama succeeds in producing and multiplying perspectives, flights, depths and parallel
worlds. Spatial rotations not inscribed in the ribbon appear, chasms open, points of escape
multiply, the screen twists in all directions, thickens and collapses to this frantic rhythm.
(YB)

San Francisco Cinematheque

Un Navet (A Flop) (1976), by Maurice Lemattre; 16mm, color, sound, 31 minutes
One can say that film lovers are going to be spoiled! The creator and his assistant Ren^
Charles have done everything to offer the screen-intoxicated a real hard punch of cinema.
Of course, not everyone will be of this opinion, and there will always be the cinematic
epicures who prefer to go to the boulevards or the Champs-El ys^es to belch at their
leisure...

It's true that one needn't be disgusted to view this film. Even the connoisseurs of the
"underground", the "different", the "experimental", and tuttiquanti (as well as, a fortiori ,
the art cinema clods...) will grumble in front of this screen!

But that's exactly what Lemattre wants, you clever ones! To make you completely sick of
cinema! (ML)

TEXT FROM THE SOUNDTRACK OF MAURICE LEMAITRE'S UN NAVET (A FLOP)

(translated by Irina Leimbacher)

Yesterday at the movies, I saw a great film...

A film by Maurice Lemaitre...

A flop, it was called...

Really a good film... A success!

But this one, well...

That film, on the other hand, is really bad...
Frankly disgusting
Really, not successful I
How can one make a film like that?
It has neither tail nor head!
Don't you agree?
Don't tell me you like the film!
' - I don't know what you could see in it!

You have to be sick to make things like that!
The filmmaker certainly isn't in his right mind.
I wonder what made him make this horror!
One shouldn't allow this type of thing!
What could have made him do that?
Don't you agree?
Why aren't you saying anything?
You are all really clods.

One can show you anything and you swallow it and say thank you!
There's no way to get a murmur out of you, some opinion!
You think this is good?
You like it, huh?

There's no reason not to be frank, if they
., gave you shit to eat, you'd only ask for more?

No, really, look at this bimch of idiots, flopped down like cows,

chewing their cud !

Seriously, don't you think this guy is making fun of you?

You're not going to just sit there without moving, until the end of the

fihn?

You have to do something, stop the projection, something, I don't know!

If at least there was a little music. . .

You're discouraging, one can't expect anything from people as spineless as

you.

People who will pay to swallow any kind of trash!

Just put you in front of a screen and you're happy!

Program Notes 1995

I mean, this isn't cinema!

You'd never make me say this fihn is worth a good Renoir, a good

Eisenstein...

There's not an idea in it!

Empty, it's totally empty.

He's got nothing to say, this guy!

He's making fim of you.

And he's right, because you're letting him...

There ' s no reason not to be frank. .

I don't know what else to say, even to insult you. You couldn't care less...

It's true that you're clods...

Isn't there even one among you, to react a little, to say something?

Ok, ok, it's me who's wrong!

Even so, you have to be masochistic...

Oh well, I don't care, if you like such things...

There are limits though!

That guy, if I had him, I'd stick my fist in his face!

It's not permitted to make fun of people like this!

What shit...

There it is, your little cinema, huh,

are you content, did you have a good belch?

Me, in any case, I won't be taken in, I won't fall for that stuff!

You can't take me for a half-wit! ' -^ ' *

I'm staying just to see how far that guy can take you, you bunch of suckers!

And I bet you'll even thank him, you imbeciles!

Thank you, Mr. Filmmaker, for mocking us!

No, you haven't seen yoiu-selves, eyes round as marbles, watching this

junk!

Ah, if you could only see yourselves !

You're not very bright. . .

There are some people who deserve a good kick in the ass. . .

Hitler was right, there really are inferior races. .. degenerates. . .

One can't do anything for those people. . .

Say something, for god's sake!...

program notes by Irina Leimbacher and Emily Golembiewski*

TERMINAL USA - UNCENSORED!
WITH DER ELVIS & SLEAZY RIDER

JON MORITSUGU IN PERSON

Sunday, October 29, 1995 - SF Art Institute

"These films are maximum fuck but with strange appeal."

—Strange Noise Magazine (Japan)

"Moritsugu's films are profoundly original yet utterly repulsive. He is most definitely the
boil on the buttocks of the American independent film scene."

—Terry Van Horn, London Film Collective
(from Moritsugu's press kit; there is no London Film Collective)

Kazumi's been shot but needs more dope. The straight laced brother is hot for a local
skinhead, sis is blowing the lawyer and mom just wants to order a pizza. A world of pill
poppers, girl rockers, hippies, sausage trafficers, sluts, suckers and a garden of beef. You

San Francisco Cinematheque

have entered the world of filmmaker Jon Moritsugu, creator of a vast range of eye-
popping, furiously paced punk-pop art comedies. Lawless but never careless, he is one our
countries most talented young independents. He states, "I want an immediate response,
which is either disgust or people liking it. I'm not trying to do anything lofty like change
the world, I don't think that's possible through filmmaking."

With a group of films spanning ten years that have shown at film festivals around the
world, Moritsugu has shown that you can make a sophisticated, genuinely subversive film
with very little money, proving that creativity and desire are not always ruled by the dollar.
Tonight Moritsugu will present the uncensored version of Terminal USA. The film was
produced for television broadcast by the Independent Television Service. Until now.
Terminal USA has only been available in a "self-censored" version, which obscured some
of the raunchier visuals and language, and also contained a great deal of fake censorship of
innocent material. Moritsugu will also present two hilarious, classic shorts, Der Elvis and
Sleazy Rider.

Der Elvis (19S7); 16mm, color, sound, 23 minutes

This devastating put-down is absolutely the last work on Elvis mania. Scuzzed to the max,
Der Elvis takes on the man and the myth in the cruelest way imaginable, detailing his weird
sex life, his obsession with laxatives and enemas, the dozen or so drugs found in his body,
and his gun fetish. Of course, it's difficult to understand anyone's interest in Elvis, he was
truly terrifying; a sweaty, brooding sow wrapped in polyester, yodeling comball Vegas
muzak. Der Elvis elegantly destroys the illusion with warped, elliptical editing,
disorienting manipulation of sound, and general skull-bashing, sledgehammer approach. "I
found him strangely fascinating... for everything bad I've said about him, I still have a
certain amount for respect for Elvis."

Sleazy Rider {19SS); 16mm, b/w, sound, 23 minutes

A shiny, dusted fairy tale of "girl hoods on an epic sum ride," Sleazy Rider is a sort of
remake o( Easy Rider, but instead of cocaine, these evil hippie chicks smuggle sausage and
sniff spray paint, only stopping to terrorize retarded suburbanites. With clips from hard-
core porn, mean gossip about Dennis Hopper's illegitimate daughter, and a stomping,
ultra-distorted soundtrack. Sleazy Rider handily crams the whole biker "scene" into the
garbage. "For all the nice things people said about Easy Rider, I thought it was a pretty
lame movie... I just wanted to take this hippie manifesto and fuck with it." Music by
Steppenpuke, Feedtime and, Sockabilly.

Terminal USA (1993); 16mm, color, sound, 57 minutes

Terminal USA is a relentlessly anarchic soap opera fever dream of the "model" minority
family, starring Moritsugu himself in double role as Kazumi and Marvin, the good and bad
Asian brothers. Moritsugu sees his characterization of the family as unique in television
history, "You don't see Asian Americans on TV. I see this as a first, a very Americanized
Asian American family... you never see that on television, which is really disconcerting."
With a meticulously perverse attention to sets and costumes. Terminal USA examines the
problems facing our troubled teens today: pregnancy tests, blowjobs, IV drug use,
skinheads and, of course, gunshot wounds. Riddled with reckless, yet comedic violence,
hilariously strange anti-acting, cross burning, and somersaulting blood spattered
cheerleaders. Terminal USA may be more then you bargained for.

His biggest budget film so far, Moritsugu says that "it's the closest I'll ever come to
making a Hollywood film. ..it was also the most disgusting, worst way to make a movie.

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Program Notes 1995

wilh that much money and that many people around." Regardless, Terminal USA is
Moritsugu's most sophisticated work, crystallizing his obsessions (teenagers, racism,
rebellion", punk rock) in a brilliant satire of the ultimate dysfunctional family. Also
featuring a stellar performance by Hippy Porn co-director Jacques Boyreau as Tabilha the
Skinhead, and sound by Monte Cazazza and Michelle Handelman.

It is a positive, constructive act to create your own world out of one that is not yours. It is
often the only sane thing to do. Even though Moritsugu's films are bursting with bile, he is
motivated by more than just a hatred of society. "I make films not only out of bitterness and
anger... my films are the way I wish the world was... and it's an optimistic thing to do
that."

MORITSUGU SELECTED FiLMOGRAPHY

Der Elvis {1987); Sleazy Rider (1988); My Degeneration (1989); Hippy Porn (1991, Co-
Directed with Jacques Boyreau); Terminal USA ( 1993); Mod Fuck Explosion ( 1994).

•program notes by Joel Shepard, Associate Director, SF Cinematheque*
(notes originally appeared in a different form in Your Flesh magazine)

LOOK AND LISTEN: A FILM/SOUND LABORATORY

CO-PRESENTED AS PART OF THE llTH ANNUAL FILM ARTS FESTIVAL

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF KEVIN DEAL
ORGANIZED BY STEVE DYE

Thursday, November 2, 1995 — Roxie Cinema, 3117-16th Street

lOOl^ ^ ilSTlN

A FiLK/SodWT> Laboratory

THEREIS M /)L-WHEA\IC/^L sound f\m I/AAGE laboratory that EJCI5T5
HEREON ALL SIDES OF THE BAY. TONIGHT WE HAVEmANV EKPERimENTERS
WITHUSTOCONJUR AND CREATE.

/^LL OF THESE SOUNDS ARE EPHEmERAL. /^LL THESE l/ftAGES FLEETING.
TOGETHER THEY CAN BECOME GREATER THAN THE SUmOF THEIR PARTS.
THEY CAN RESONATE. AND ALLOW US TO CARRY THAT FEELING FRO/A
BEYOND THIS mOmENT.

Wet 6/>rE presented by

THE >^LL Projector Orchestr/^

In the first decades of this century, before the advent
of Magnetic Audio Tape, there existed Optical Film Sound. Early
experimenters inscribed directly on the negative allowing light to
make the final registration... sound... created without being uttered!

An Optical Track, interruptions In a focused beam of light to
create sound, is essentially the same technology used in CDs.
Unlike Digital Optical Sound, however. Optical FilmSound is a non-
precision instrument which allows for analog anomalies..
Wet G/^TE proudly celebrates

the 100th Anniversary of Machine Noise.

The /^ll Projector Orchestr/^ is:
Peter CoHHEim. Reep. Owen O'toole. Steve Pye loi

San Francisco Cinematheque

ST/>RT TilLKlNG (COLOR 8 miN. 1995)

ft\US\CAl AcCOft\t>Ati\rt\i:HT ^\^ Phelfs

The first person I met when I arrived in S.F. in 1978 was Lowell
Williams. He ran a super 8 showcase called OFF THE WALL
CINEMA and offered to show my first feature length film at the now

defunct ABOVE BOARD THEATRE. Lowell became a wine sleuth,
drove a Greyhound bus and operated a mail-order record business
called RADIOACTIVE RECORDS. We remained friends through the
years and Lowell was unquestionably a true one.

The soundtrack is taken from Lowell's answering machine.
The support in the voices of his friends and neighbors inspired me to
finish this film. The title is Lowell's as well as the occasional spinning
captions. Though absent, he still gets the last word.

Lowell's OFF THE WALL CINEMA had presented several
shows at the ROXIE so It seemed only fitting that this film memento
be shown here tonight.

"The grey fox! We're waiting for you."

El Fue go (color / miN. ) by Cory Mc/^bee

AccomP/iNiEPBY Cory Mc/^bee /^nd Bobbie Lurie

Experimental animation featuring hand manipulation by means of sun
and magnifying glass, super glue. Ink, acetate, and fire.

Bep Bug (vipeo ¥ miN.)

ViP&O AHV PERFORm/lMCE BY BOMHiE kAPL/lH.

Bonnie Kaplan is a performance artist who utilizes Video as an
auxiliary self, as a tool for self exploration.

kiNG miP/^S (COLOR 10 miN.) BY STEVE PYE

Tr/^pition/»l Phrygi/^n music by the Dactyls.

who guide you on a journey to the gardens and laboratory of an
ancient scientist With an eye-witnesses account of what transpired
there.

Pi^cTYLS /^re;

Eliz/ibeth Gr/iy. Miik PlNl^O.

Fr/im HoLLi^riP. Steve Pye

ORBiTi^L Loop II

SOUNP COliSTRUCTlOti WITH ViPEO iZO rt\\H. )

Donkey Boy is currently a four-legged but fluid entity straddling the
trough of media piracy. Donkey Boy exploits the collision of moving
images with the electro-accoustic sound scape.

P.B. isPB/l

Luther Brapfute /^nd Pe/^m S/^htor/imeri

102

Program Notes 1995

PAUL MCCARTHY WITH HEIDI AND PAINTER

Paul McCarthy In Person

Thursday, November 9, 1995 — Center for the Arts

When I was doing performances and paintings in the mid-1960s I was really interested in
experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, and Andy Warhol. Their
films corresponded to my interest in performance and happenings. I wasn't satisfied with
art as just painting.

—Paul McCarthy, 1995

The San Francisco Cinematheque is pleased to present two videos by renowned
performance artist Paul McCarthy including Heidi, a collaboration with Mike Kelley, and
the West Coast premiere of Painter which was created as part of an installation for the
Museum of Modem Art in New York. Throughout his career, McCarthy has continuously
pushed the boundaries of aesthetic definitions, traditional artistic genres, and good taste.
Disgusting some, delighting others, McCarthy uses humor and transgression to satirize and
deconstruct traditional notions of what constitutes acceptability. McCarthy has been making
films and videos since the late 1960s, and more recently, has been using actual sit-com
sound stages and sets which give his videos a sense of familiarity and acceptability that is
eerily undercut when characters sexual desires are violently demonstrated through the use
of foodstuffs. Ketchup, especially, takes on a multitude of connotations in McCarthy's
work: it is food, movie blood, real blood, and finally a bitterly comic representation of
American excess. What once was an innocent condiment is transformed, smeared
everywhere, rubbed on the body, and defiled. Our perception of ketchup is forever
changed. This disconcerting effect, changing the way we perceive what once was familiar,
is also produced by his brilliant installations that present distorted alternate worlds inhabited
by Animatronic-like figures of twisted cartoon animals, men humping trees and generally
behaving in manners that would shock and disgust their Pirate of the Caribbean
counterparts over at Disneyland. McCarthy currently teaches at UCLA where he has been
since 1984.

Heidi (1992), collaboration with Mike Kelley; video, color, sound, 63 minutes

It's not about the Austrian or German version of the story based on the novel by Joanna
Spyri. It's a combination of American horror film, the story of Heidi, and Disney-esque
props mixed with attitudes of modernism. That kind of overlapping structure is what
interests me. The references I make to the media and to Disneyland/Hollywood is another
subject. It has to do with virtual reality settings. It's a world that is quickly approaching,
and I gravitate towards it. It's startling, how it's affecting humanity. I am not critiquing it,
its destructiveness, in the sense that it is destroying nature. I am not making a judgment.
You can't stop it. But it does put people in crisis. (PC)

Pointer (1995); video, color, sound, 50 minutes

"In Painter, Mr. McCarthy plays the most romanticized of all artists, grossly exaggerated
but with a ring of truth. His costume includes a hospital gown, enormous rubber hands and
ears, and a bulbous nose that bobs up and down during tantrums. His props are out-sized
paint brushes and rollers, and tubes of paint as big as occupied body bags.. .He plays up
the onanistic, infantile side of masculine creativity while lampooning sundry artistic
myths."

— Roberta Smith, The New York Times

103

San Francisco Cinematheque

The environment is like a television stage set and part of it is a mock TV set. It has to do
with painting being an icon of western art and about the representation of the artist by
Hollywood... Romantic, yes, but also a conception of the artist as stupid, as a pervert or
clown— Batman and— Joker, Nick Nolte and Paul Newman as New York painters. (PC)

• program notes by Jeffery Lambert*

CULT RAPTURE!: AN EVENING WITH ADAM PARFREY

ADAM PARFREY IN PERSON

Sunday, November 12, 1995 - SF Art Institute

Nearly a decade after the debut of his incendiary anthology Apocalypse Culture, Adam
Parfrey returns to the scene of the crime for another shattering exploration of millennial
agony. Cult Rapture fixes its sigh on the grotesque, extreme, and little explored flashpoints
of American culture, including the true story of David Koresh and the Branch Dividians,
the burgeoning Patriot and Militia movements, the militarization of domestic police, sex
cults for the handicapped, Elvis cults, serpent worship, the increasing popularity of
electroshock therapy as "normal" treatment, the cult of Sai Baba, and the strange but epic
story surrounding the inexplicably popular 1950s "Keane" paintings of big-eyed waifs.
Parfrey will screen videotaped evidence of the strangest cults in America.

MEDIA FANTASIES AND REALITIES

FILMS BY LAURA POITRAS & DAVID AND JUDITH M ACDOUGALL

LAURA POITRAS IN PERSON

Thursday, November 16, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Laura Poitras is an emerging independent filmmaker whose work explores a variety of
social issues such as gender identity and media analysis. During her years in San
Francisco, Poitras studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Mills College and
worked as the San Francisco Cinematheque's Program Assistant and Technical
Coordinator. She currently lives in New York City where she is doing graduate work at the
New School for Social Research.

Exact Fantasy: a film about media correspondence and bringing the stars down to
earth (1995), by Laura Poitras; 16mm, color, sound, 27 minutes

Exact Fantasy: a film about media correspondence and bringing the stars down to earth
is a personal essay exploring how people forge identifications with media representations.
The film is structured around five "found" fan letters (four written, one on audiotape)
originally written to various public personalities. In response to these letters I have
constructed a series of visual tableaus that build upon a tension between these letters as
social 'objects' or 'facts,' and their mediated re-presentation within the film.

The primary theoretical questions I want to pose in the film are: what sorts of identifications
do we, as audience members, forge around media representations and personalities?; how
might such identifications collapse or redefine a split between public and private?; in what
ways do we internalize and externalize our relationships to these representations?; and

104

Program Notes 1995

finally, how do the fan letters presented within the film intersect with, or resist dominant
ideologies? The concrete and ideological sites from which these questions are posed
include: 'home,' family, storytelling, talk-radio, dreams, food, visual pleasure, social
alienation, TV, and others. (LP)

Photo WaUahs (1992), by David & Judith MacDougall; 16mm, color, sound, 60 minutes

"Renowned ethnographic filmmakers David and Judith MacDougall explore the many
meanings of photography in this profound and penetrating documentary. The film focuses
on the local photographers of Mussoorie, in northern India. Through a rich mixture of
scenes that include the photographers' work, their clients, and both old and new
photographs, this extraordinary film examines photography as art and as social artifact— a
medium of reality, fantasy, memory, and desire."

— University of California Extension Center for Media and Independent Leiiming

Film/Video Rental Catalog 1995-1998

A BRUCE CONNER CELEBRATION !
TELEVISION ASSASSINATION AND MORE

BRUCE CONNER IN PERSON

Sunday, November 19, 1995 — AMC Kabuki 8 Theatres

The San Francisco Cinematheque is proud to present a special evening celebrating the work
of Bruce Conner, one of America's master filmmakers and artists, including the premiere
of Television Assassination (1995). A pivotal artist of the last four decades, Conner's work
ranges from assemblage, photography, and drawing to a body of films for which he was
recognized with a Maya Deren Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFI in 1988. This
November Conner not only has two one-person shows in New York but is also included in
a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Beat Culture and the New America. Conner's
pioneering use of found footage has inspired countless filmmakers since A Movie was
released in 1958, and tonight's program includes that seminal work as well as Cosmic Ray,
Mongoloid, Report, The White Rose, America is Waiting, Television Assassination, Take
the 5:10 to Dreamland, and Valse Triste. The films were selected and ordered by Bruce
Conner.

The films of Bruce Conner, found footage and otherwise, have had an immense impact in
the film world. Combining and building upon a tradition of satire and irony that includes
the Marx Brothers, Spike Jones and his City Slickers, and Marcel Duchamp, Conner has
created a body of work that acutely satirizes the conditions of the "real" as well as the "reel"
world. His films deal simultaneously with socio-political themes and the formality and
playfulness of their own construction. Anthony Reveaux notes that Conner's films "are
unique constructs composed of familiar imagery recombined into richly provocative puzzles
that rhythmically prod the viewer to attempt reconciliations of ambiguity with the obvious
and comic with the horrific, as irony unites anger and concern." The viewer is plunged into
a world that is both familiar, due to the recognizable nature of the images, and unfamiliar,
due to radical juxtapositions and recontextualization. It is the ability to combine elements as
diverse as a car race and a famine in the "reel world" in a way that asks the viewer to try to
come to some better understanding of the sometimes maddening fast-paced tone shifts that
occur in the "real world" that gives Bruce Conner's films their power and excitement.

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San Francisco Cinematheque

Cosmic Ray (1961); 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

""Cosmic Ray seems like a reckless collage of fast moving parts: Comic strips, dancing
girls, flashing lights. It is the dancing girl— hardly dressed, stripping or nude— which
provides the leitmotif for the film. Again and again she appears— sandwiched between
soldiers, guns, and even death in the form of a skull positioned between her legs. And if
the statement equates sex with destruction, the cataclysm is a brilliant one, like an
exploding firecracker, and one which ends with a cosmic bang. Of course the title also
refers to musician Ray Charles whose art Conner visually transcribes onto film as a potent
reality, tough and penetrating in its ability to affect some pretty basic animal instincts."

—Carl I. Belz, Film Culture

Mongoloid {\9^S); 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

"The manipulation of found footage has recently become one of the cliches of rock-video
production, albeit one usually marked by a withering literalness or ill-judged arbitrariness.
Conner's early promo for Devo set a standard few have bothered to maintain, and exhibits
a wholly characteristic rigor in both its formal and ironically 'illustrative' concerns. The
mad montage of found footage astutely locates the 'brain disorder' of Devo's tasteful ditty
in the American Psyche at large."

—Michael O'Pray & Paul Taylor, Junk Aesthetics

A Movie (1958); 16mm, b/w, sound, 12 minutes

Recalling the mad parody of Hollywood montage in Duck Soup, A Movie has a lot to tell us
about the movies. With its car chases. Cowboys and Indians, plane crashes, and a woman
removing her stockings, it reminds us of the direct, visceral thrill we get from these classic
images. Slowly, however, the film transforms itself into a slower, contemplative mode that
knowingly reveals the fragility and absurdity of human existence.

Report (\963-67)\ 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 minutes

"Report began as a full documentary about the Kennedy assassination but fell foul of
reproduction rights— the collagiste's occupational hazard... It opens with repeated shots of
the motorcade, the President and Jackie waving, the rifle carried aloft in a police station, an
ambulance. These are reprinted to create a stretched or staggered effect... The shooting itself
is not shown, but it is reported over a violent flicker pattern, a strobe-pulse which triggers
subjective color sensations and depth-illusions on the screen. Later, as the last rites are
given, cycles of academy count-down leader are shown..."

— A. L. Rees

The White Rose (1967); 16mm, b/w, sound, 7 minutes

"...a fine, brief, tongue-in-cheek 'documentary' of a huge painting being removed from an
artist's studio, carried onto a Bekin's moving van with a combination of cold efficiency and
all the lugubrious solemnity of a state funeral. It has remarkable timing and pace, and an
'artless' style which can only come from a deep sense of what the art is all about."

—Tom Albright

America is Waiting {19S2)', 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 minutes

Designed as a film to accompany a song by David Byrne and Brian Eno, America is
Waiting uses the montage/collage technique to explore patriotism, modes of
communication, war, and personal problems with an acute irony. America is shown to be
waiting for something, some sort of message, and the "Hero" who shows up at the
beginning of the film disappears leaving us in a maze of terror that includes the Bride of
Frankenstein, Mount Rushmore, and "Larry's personal problems."

106

Program Notes 1995

Television Assassination (1963-1995); 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 minutes
San Francisco Premiere

""Television Assassination is not only one of the best of Bruce Conner's film (thus one of
the greatest pieces of poetic cinema ever made) but is the strongest expose of TV yet made:
adroit use of TV-to-film black bars testifies to the 1st person singularity of Bruce Conner's
re photography of the televised assassination, but in such a way that the terrible content of
this event seems acted, phony, soap opera; whereas the true subject of the film— TV itself,
its dead light, its eradicating glitches, wipes, electrical phosphorescence— appears to be
assassinating EVERY thing in its visual grasp. The extraordinary music by Patrick Gleeson
not only supports this dreadful envisagement but seems to be flawlessly atone with it."

— StanBrakhage

Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (19^7) \ 16mm, sepia tone, sound, 5: 10 minutes

"...the state produced by a film like 5:10 to Dreamland is very similar to the feeling
produced by a poem. The images, their mysterious relationships, the rhythm, and the
connections impress themselves upon the unconscious. The film ends like a poem ends,
almost like a puff, like nothing. And you sit there, in silence, letting it all sink deeper, and
then you stand up and you know that it was very, very good."

—Jonas Mekas, Soho Weekly News

Valse Triste (1979); 16mm, sepia tone, sound, 4 minutes

"Valse Triste is an homage to surrealist cinema and the belated trance film... It also
reworks the debased popular 'dream sequence', principally by imitating one of its cliche-
prone situations— a boy's dream about steam engines, daily chores, home, travel, and
girls. Shorn of context, ordinary images keep their typicality but gain uniqueness, mystery
and the aura of memory... This material is renewed, or redeemed, by stripping it of its
sentimentality and information."

— A. L. Rees, Monthly Film Bulletin

BRUCE CONNER FiLMOGRAPHY

A Movie (1958); Liberty Crown (1967); Cosmic Ray (1961); Permian Strata (1969);
Leader (1961); Marilyn Times Five (1968-73); Vivian (1964); Crossroads (1976); Ten
Second Film (1965); Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977); Breakaway (1966); Mongoloid
(1978); Looking for Mushrooms (1961-67); Valse Triste (1979); Report (1963-67);
America is Waiting (1982); The White Rose (1967); Television Assassination (1963-1995).

Bruce Conner's Films On Tape Are Available For Sale Here This Evening Or From

Canyon Cinema, 626-2255

•program notes by Jeffery Lambert*

ANDY WARHOLS
VINYL AND MY HUSTLER

Sunday, November 26, 1995 — SF Art Institute

My Hustler (1965); 16mm, b/w, sound, 67 minutes

Conceived in collaboration with Chuck Wein, who is actually credited as the director. My
Hustler employs formal strategies which differ quite significantly from those characteristic

107

San Francisco Cinematheque

of Warhol's work. Its more conventional scenario and the tighter quality that marks its
narrative structure are likely the result of Wein's influence, as well as that of Paul
Momssey, who was responsible for the sound recording. This film was not scripted by
Tavel, a fact which undoubtedly accounts for the more prosaic, less self-consciously
perverse character of its narrative. The film features Paul America, Ed Hood, Ed
MacDermott and Genevieve Charbon, with America playing the hustler to Hood's
possessive queen, the passively virile object of desire who, while himself serenely
unconcerned to the point of disinterest, serves as the locus of the sexual tension that drives
the film. More closely related to the later "Warhol" films more properly attributed to Paul
Morrissey than Warhol's other films of this period. My Hustler approximates, to some
degree, the form of soft-core pornography, although the self-consciousness and distance
which characterize Warhol's presence are by no means entirely absent. In addition, this
film served as an early documentation and affirmation of gay lifestyles.

Vi/iy/ (1965); 16mm, b/w, sound, 66 minutes

"It's an expose of sort of pseudo teddy boy delinquent New York speed heads. There's no
moral pulled out of it, that's what I like, there's no morality involved, no pseudo
moralizing. It's just there."

— Ondine(1977)

The first film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange, Vinyl features
Gerard Malanga in the role of Alex (although in Vinyl this character goes by the name of
Victor) as well as J. MacDermott and Edie Sedgwick, and is accompanied by a soundtrack
described by Steven Koch in his Stargazer as "alternating between cacophony and the
hideous 'acid' maundering of the Velvet Underground's insufferable navel-gazing guitars."
The rights to the book were acquired for a purported $3,000, and the film was scripted by
Ronald Tavel, who wrote the scenarios for many of Warhol's films, during a three-day
period in March of 1965. The film covers only the first half of Burgess' novel, a
circumstance apparently due to Tavel 's having managed to read only that far before writing
his script. The film owes its exaggeratedly "stagey" (read fiat) acting to the fact that all of
the actors are simply reading their lines from cue cards held off-screen, as none had been
given a chance to memorize their lines. The violent eroticism of Burgess' novel is
refocused through a self-conscious, stilted sado-masochism, epitomized by Malanga's
"whip dance", manifesting itself as a theatrical re-creation of a mode of exchange rooted in
the theatre of personality. This eroticism, expressed in the form of homoerotic domination
and display, finds its counterpoint in the person of Edie Sedgwick, the silent, passive
observer to the drama of the film proper. The sole female figure in an implosive teleology
of masculine self-annihilation, she marks the screen most conspicuously in the moments of
her absence, displaying the fundamental distance of the non-participant, the disengaged
presence that enables the hyperbole of drama.

•program notes by Brian Frye*

SEASONAL F O R C E S - A SONOMA COUNTY ALMANAC
JANIS CRYSTAL LiPZIN IN PERSON

Thursday, November 30, 1995 — Center for the Arts

"Her films are like a whole new religion! They are such a complete sensibility that they
open up another world— what we used to call 'transcendental'"

108

Program Notes 1995

—Joyce Wieland

Janis Crystal Lipzin, a distinguished member of the filmmaking faculty at the San
Francisco Art Institute since 1978, is currently Director of the Undergraduate Studio
Program. A filmmaker, photographer and intermedia artist, Lipzin has presented her work
internationally, including installations and screenings of her films at Museum of Modern
Art (New York), Musee Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Stadtkino (Vienna) and the
Institute for Contemporary Art, London. Her many awards include three grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently completing for publication an anthology
of critical writing by and about women filmmakers: An Editing Room of her Own: A New
Lens for an Old Camera.

"[Janis Crystal Lipzin] 's films are just what the doctor ordered!"

— Mollis Frampton

The Bladderwort Document {197S), S-8mm, color, silent, 12 minutes
A modest diary film made in 1978 when I spent six months living at a place called
Bladderwort Farm in southwestern Ohio. This land was named after the only insectivorous
plant native to North America. In this film and my color photographic work, I am
concerned with gathering what Andre Bazin called "molds of light" (although I use the term
somewhat differently). Here I play with light: pick it up and embrace it, throw it around,
pierce it, and wiggle it. I used Super-8mm equipment to suggest the intimacy of an amateur
home movie. (JCL)

"The Bladderwort Document is a visionary document of Bladderwort Farm, is a fleeting,
silent documentary that tumbles out of your projector, builds suspense, twists, folds in on
itself, glides, smiles, then flies back into the projector. A subjective study of implosions,
explosions and reflections of light, it grabs you by the lapel and sings."

—Tony Dallas (Cinemanews #78-5)

"[Gertrude] Stein says in Composition as Explanation (1926), The business of Art is to
live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete
actual present.' The imagery used in The Bladderwort Document has this same quality of
fluid language: winter trees advancing and receding / the color spectra of natural light /
shadows on a soft wood noor...The visuals move past in an additive fashion as in music:
textures of animal fur/the quivering of light through leaves/an ambiguous space shown
from a variety of angles."

— Margaret (Peggy) Ahwesh, Field of Vision

Seasonal Forces— A Sonoma County Almanac, Parts 1 and 2 (1995);
S-8 mm, color and b/w, sound, 46 minutes

Lipzin's most recent film. Seasonal Forces, reflects the terms and evolution of her
engagement with the phenomena which shape the environment in which she lives and
works.

Seasonal Forces explores the interplay between two facets of the stream of historical
events, emphasizing their covalence and mutuality as they are inscribed upon the fabric of
memory. One facet encompasses the atomic events of collective, social history which
become critical points of the personal -historical narrative. The other highlights the cyclical,
unfixed epiphanies which resonate within the moments of everyday life.

109

San Francisco Cinematheque

At times the filmmaker assumes the (not necessarily impartial) distance of the observer,
documenting the fact of natural disaster or tracking the sun on its daily voyage from
horizon to horizon. At other times, she immerses the viewer in the brilliant immediacy of
experience, marveling at the new harvest or the clamor of machinery. In this way, the film
identifies the tensions which bind author and text, speaker and spx^ken.

The histories of the spaces Lipzin identifies are, as always, written in the interval between
event and recollection that constitutes the sum of experience. They blossom in the
rarefaction of the social sphere, drawing in on themselves the remnants of the presence it
mediates and making meaningful the events that constitute the markers of histories.

— Brian Frye

The first two sections of Seasonal Forces explore the conjunction of human and natural
events unfolding in rural areas everywhere, especially Northern California. In constructing
the film, I have drawn on footage shot over the past 22 years— some appropriated from
commercial sources, some hand-processed, others processed in Toronto at the only lab in
North America processing such obsolete film stock as I employed. The variety of types and
ages of the film stock is reflected in the colors and textures which, in turn, illuminate the
various events in the film. An arbor covered with wisteria blooms extravagantly, only to
collapse under the weight of a late Spring rain. It is rebuilt and the cycle begins again. In
between occur an arson, flood, earthquake, wildfire, planting and the harvest.

Part 2 reflects on the animals in our lives and their relation to us and to each other as
providers of food, companionship, clothing and sport. Part 3 alludes to current land use
controversies such as the dissonance between agricultural homesteads and tract
developments; decades-old gardens destined to be abandoned to bulldozers, and the
transformation of orchards into vineyards.

These events have been recorded on the skeletal remains of a material (the Super-8 film
format) which had a life time of only 30 years. Utilizing a medium considered obsolete in
the age of digital imaging, brought to mind Aldo Leopold's 1949 classic conservationist's
memoir, A Sand County Almanac, in which he posed: 'We face the question of whether a
still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural and free.' His assertion
precedes and informs my work in which I observe the changes occurring around me as I
attempt to understand what it means to cultivate a sense of place in time. (JCL)

Home Entertainment Center for a Farmworker ( 1989); a film-sculpture

constructed from materials found on Lipzin's farm in western Sonoma county which
incorporates a re-edited version of a commercial film, originally an advertisement for
pesticide-distribution machinery. Dovetailing with the concerns addressed in Seasonal
Forces, this sculpture recognizes the poisonous hazards endured by the people who work
in the orchards and vineyards of Sonoma County, offsetting this continuing exploitation
with a literal alternative: examples of produce grown by the artist using only the non-toxic
diatomaceous earth with which they are dusted.

•program notes by Brian Frye»

FIRST FESTIVAL CELLULOIDALL
TIMOLEON WlLKINS IN PERSON

Sunday, December 3, 1995 — SF Art Institute

110

Program Notes 1995

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by Eric Waidemar. iSoua, Btw/ni«at. s mia., 24 ffs.

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iat« a Idad «( tnac* wbta paiatia; filn fnmt by ftamt aad «•
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111

San Francisco Cinematheque

JAMES BENNINGS DESERET
James benning In person

Thursday, December 7, 1995 — Center for the Arts

Currently teaching at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, and a
filmmaker for over twenty-five years, James Benning has made a significant contribution to
American experimental cinema. His concern for American culture, in both its contemporary
and historical guises, has consistently and eloquently informed his entire body of work,
which includes 11x14, One -Way Boogie Woogie, Landscape Suicide, North On Evers and
many others. His remarkably successful integration of structural and narrative concerns is a
testament to his versatility, and indicates possible directions of cinematic endeavor which as
yet remain largely unplumbed.

Deseret {1995, San Francisco Premiere); 16mm, color/b/w, sound, 80 minutes
As a filmmaker, James Benning has consistently concerned himself with the space in which
texts articulate the distinction between the structural elements which determine their form
and the body of information contained by that formal structure. While examinations of both
form and function are ubiquitous to experimental cinema, Benning has chosen to forego the
polemicism that has often accompanied these efforts, working toward an equilibrium that
engages the covalence and interdependence of narrative and structural elements. Occupying
a familiarly idiosyncratic position on the point of intersection of these variant tropes, his
new film, Deseret, juxtaposes radically discontinuous visual and textual information
through the lens of an apparently arbitrary formal schema, engaging these disparate
elements in an investigation of the relationship between history and the space in which it is
written. Visually, the film consists of a series of tableau shots of the Utah landscape,
unitary in their sense of brooding solitude and desolation, comprising a virtual summation
of the significance of that space on its own terms. Two overarching structures determine
the formal relationship between these images and the text that they parallel, both of which
serve to situate the visual, metaphorical space contained by the images within the historical,
literal space of the text. Each image occupies the space of time of one sentence of the text,
emphasizing the passage of filmic time, while the shift from black and white to color
follows the turn of the century, marking the passage of historical time. The text itself
consists of a series of 93 condensations of newspaper articles which appeared in the New
York Times over the course of the 96 years it has existed, all of which concern some aspect
of the political entity now known as the State of Utah. Taking its title from the name that
the Territory of Utah originally proposed for itself upon the occasion of its entry into the
Union, Deseret in fact tracks the evolution of these two corporate entities, the New York
Times and the Church of Mormon, from their historically contemporary births through the
present, addressing the shifts in their relationship through historical space and the
incommensurability of this history to the physical space in which it occurred. It is here that
the explosive, uncontainable, irrational significance of the text is generated; in the
irreconcilable collision of the image and the word, which negate each other in the assertion
of their atomic singularity. The film situates itself in the context of that corpus of films
which address this mutual atomism, one which includes such work as Hollis Frampton's
Nostalgia and Straub/Huillet's Too Early/Too Late , although it does so through a
particular concern for a space and sensibility specific to Benning's work, one which does
not partake of the formal purity or polemical politics of these other works. Benning's
stance is an equivocal one— he neither claims a necessary interpolation of ideological
presence in spaces nor despairs of engaging with these terms outside of the realm of the
individual, but rather allows the presence of ideology to make its presence known and felt
in the spaces left unfilled by its authors.

•program notes by Brian Frye*

112

Program Notes 1995

STEVE FAGIN'S MEMORIAL DAY (OBSERVED)
WITH SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

STEVE Fagin In Person

Sunday, December 10, 1995 — SF Art Institute

Steve Fagin targets the "major fantasies governing the history of the Western world" to
present a re-reading of history that exposes the illusion and misrecognition that passes as
historical fact. His work incorporates a mixture of appropriated and original footage, stage-
play and real events to reveal a past in which the mythical, the surreal, and the fictional find
free reign. Fagin's tapes focus on a variety of issues, from the evangelization of South
America to orientalism in the writings of Raubert and Roussel. His work consistently
revolves around issues of history and representation, investigating new and old ways in
which "the other" is seen in Western culture, how opinion is gathered and value secreted.
The San Francisco Cinematheque is pleased to present tonight's screening of Mr. Fagin's
latest video piece Memorial Day (Observed) which was commissioned by KCET public
television as part of a creative project on notions of democracy. It will be followed by the
film with which it was designed to be shown, Alexander MacKendrick's Sweet Smell of
Success (1957).

Memorial Day (Observed) (1995), by Steve Fagin; video, color, sound, 12 minutes

"They can never attain as much as they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet
without hiding itself from sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment, they
think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near
enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its
delights, they die." —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ( 1840)

This short piece observes the observance of Memorial Day 1995, in Columbus, Ohio. It is
meant to be an updated 'acting out' of the above wisdom of de Tocqueville. Through a
series of quotidian exchanges, a couple's frustrations are staged, shifting abruptly among
soap opera, Brechtian distanciation, and psychoanalytic possession. These are the great
grandchildren of the America that de Tocqueville observed over 150 years ago-an America
that does not only suffer from the absence of democracy, but suffers at its heart and in its
heartland from the expectations of democracy itself. (SF)

Sweet Smell of Success ( 1957), by Alexander MacKendick;
35mm, b/w, sound, 96 minutes

In British director Alexander MacKendrick's first Hollywood picture, Burt Lancaster and
Tony Curtis compete for the honor of most despicable man in a contest scripted by Clifford
Odets from Ernest Lehman's novella "Tell Me About it Tomorrow." It's a jazzy, smoky
film filled with bravura performances and dialogue that brilliantly teeters on the brink of
incomprehensibility. Lancaster is J.J. Hunsecker, a megalomaniac newspaper columnist in
what is possibly his best performance. Tony Curtis plays against type as well as a sleazy
press agent: "the man with the ice cream face... who has the scruples of a guinea hen and
the morals of a gangster." The story itself is an insider's view of the seamy underside of
the New York entertainment industry, complete with cigarette girls, jazz clubs, the Chico
Hamilton Quartet and tons of bitterness manifesting itself in Odets's blistering dialogue.
Lines like "watch me run a fifty yard dash with my legs cut off" are perfectly matched by
MacKendrick's kinetic film style. Sweet Smell of Success is the film that the Coen brothers
have been trying to make for years.

•program notes by Jeffery Lambert*

113

San Francisco Cinematheque

MEMORY: COVERED DISCOVERED RECOVERED

CURATED BY IRINA LEIMBACHER

Thursday, December 14, 1995 — Center for the Arts

...memory offers film its ultimate problem: how to represent the mind's landscape,
whose images and sequential logic are always hidden from view. "

—David MacDougall, 'Films of Memory'

This evening the San Francisco Cinematheque presents four films —one award-winning
documentary and three experimental shorts— that evoke the fleeting and elusive nature of
human memory. Finnish filmmaker Kiti Luostarinen's Tell Me What You Saw, which won
the 1995 Golden Gate Award for Best Sociology Documentary at the San Francisco
International Film Festival yet is still not distributed in the United States, explores six
siblings' and their mother's radically different reconstructions of the past in what seems to
have been an abusive family. This film, which belies the nature of traditional documentary
because ultimately absolutely nothing in it is certain, will be followed by Srinivas
Krishna's Tell Me What You Saw, Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve, and Phil Solomon's
Remains to be Seen which each use the texture and material of film to mimic the exquisite
transience of what may and may not be remembered, and which, dwelling as intently on
absence as on presence, place memory solidly in the context of forgetting.

Tell Me What You Saw (1992), by Kiti Luostarinen; 16mm, color, sound, 52 minutes

"A journey into the mysterious world of memory and oblivion through the eyes of a family
consisting of five sisters, one brother, and a mother suffering from dementia. The grown-
up children's' memories of their common past differ radically, even to the point of being
comically contrary in nature. And the mother fails to remember that she has any children at
all. What is a human being when past events vanish into total oblivion? What is the logic
and power of memory?"

—Finnish Film Foundation

Kiti Luostarinen has made fifteen short films and videos (many for Finnish television), and
also works in photography and design. She studied philosophy at the University of
Helinski.

Tell Me What You Saw (1994), by Srinivas Krishna; 16mm, b/w, silent, 7 minutes

"One weekend, I went to the farm of Philip Hoffman, a Toronto filmmaker, and there I met
Kiti. ...I soon discovered Kiti's obsession with all the dead little creatures we found in the
fields. Kiti began to film them. I began to film her. All the while, Kiti would tell me about
her film, a beautiful sad film about memory, its loss, and the consequences. Our
conversations about forgetfulness and the terrible silence it brings on still live with me. My
film is silent. 1 called it Tell Me What You Saw. It is a portrait of Kiti during our weekend
in the farm."

— Sirinivas Krishna

Srinivas Krishna lives in Canada and has made a feature film, Masala, as well as other
experimental works.

Optic Nerve (1985), by Barbara Hammer; 16mm, color & b/w, sound, 16 minutes

"Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve is a powerful personal reflection on family and aging.
Hammer employs filmed footage which, through optical printing and editing, is layered and

114

Program Notes 1995

manipulated to create a compelling meditation on her visit to her grandmother in a nursing
home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly evolving process of reseeing images
retrieved from the past and fused into the eternal present of the projected image..."

—John Hanhardt, 1987 Whitney Museum Biennial Exhibition Catalogue

Barbara Hammer is one of the most prolific experimental filmmakers working today, with
over 50 films to her credit. Optic Nerve was included in the 1987 Whitney Biennial; her
most recent work is the autobiographical.

Remains to be Seen (1989), by Phil Solomon, S-8mm, color, sound, 17.5 minutes

"In the melancholic Remains to be Seen, dedicated to the memory of Solomon's mother,
the scratchy rhythm of a respirator intones menace. The film, optically crisscrossed with
tiny eggshell cracks, often seems on the verge of shattering... Solomon measures emotions
with images that seem stolen from a family album of collective memory."

— Manohla Dargis, Village Voice

Phil Solomon has made over 20 films and recently has collaborated with Stan Brakhage on
a number of works. Remains to be Seen won the First Prize at the 1990 Oberhausen Short
Film Festival.

homescreening

CURATED BY NATHANIEL DORSKY & CHRISTIAN FARRELL

Sunday, December 17, 1995 — SF Art Institute

Sar\ Fraacisco C iaerfvaHveaue fre^tivU
koinescreeRiT\Q

lHj« , i mia tjcK. , Color ^^ ^*^ , ^^ ff< » B/w , s\\c^\ .

i. I fniO.

It «m , M fp . color , Jc.Ut ' -''^'' - ^'^"^^

^ 115

Rlmmaker Index

-A-

Ackennan, Dueane 40
Ackerman, Ralph 40
Adams, HoUy 68
Adrian, Maik 15-16
Ahwesh, Peggy 50
Alexander, Kluge
All Projector Orchestra 101
Allan, William 78
Alvarez, Alfonso 23-24, 89
Anger, Kenneth 61
Angerame, Dominic 49
Anker, Steve 89
Arnold, Martin 1, 17
Avery, Caroline 7

-B-

B., Beth 26

BaiUie, Bruce 45-49, 81,111
Baldwin, Craig 52
Balletbo-Coll, Marta 96
Beatty, Maria 68
Beauvais, Yaim 97-99
Beckett Plus One Productions
62

Benning, James 1 12
Billops, Camille 63
Black, Andrew 84
Black, Julie X. 72
Blackout, Moucle 4, 16
Blair, Linda 3 1-33
Bouhours, Jean Michel 97
Bradfute, Luther 101
Brakhage, Stan
29-31,34-36,51,56,61
Brehm, Dietmar 1, 4
Broughton, James 80
Bruno, Christian 89
Bruno, Hlen 91

-C-

Cameron, Donna 6
Chapman, J.G. 90
Charlton, Robert 79
Cheang, Shu Lea 96
Child, Abigail 84
Christanell, Linda 16
Cine Lourdes 40
Church, Tom 61
Coleman, Jeremy 6, 1 1 1
Conner, Bruce
81, 105-107, 111
Cooper, Bruce 111

-D-

The Dactyls 101
Daniel, Bill 111
Danielson, Rick 89

De Bniyn, Dirk 6
deGrasse, Herb 60
DiLillo, Lisa 68
Domenghini, Gecrffe 88
Drew, Jesse 70
Dye, Steven 101

-E-

Ertl,Geriiard5
Export, Valie 1,4.8

-F-

Faccinto, Victor 61
Fagin, Steve
Finley, Jeanne C. 73-74
Fischinger, Oskar 13
Fontaine, C6cile 97
Frye, Brian 40, 88. 89,111
Fulton. Jessica 71, 72

-G-

Gaine Ellen 13
Gehr, Ernie 40-42, 77
Geiser, Janie 50
GiOTgio, Grace 68

-H-

Hammer, Barbara 82, 1 14
Hans Scheirl, Angela 3, 7
Harrington, Sheila 72
Hatch, James V. 63
Hatfield, Terry 40
Hayenga, Megan 88
Haynes, Todd 96
Hershman, Lynn 69-70
Hiebler, Sabine 5
Hiler, Jerome 115
Hill, Chris 20-22
Hills, Henry 9-12
Hima, B 68
Hosier, Mark 52
Houlberg, Mia Lor 70
Hughes-Freeland, Tessa
26,68
Hurwitz, Elise 71. 72, 89

-J-

Janos, Dan 40
Johnsen, Michael 111
jOTdan, Larry 83

-K-

Kaplan, Bonnie 101
Kelley, Mike 103
Kern, Richard 26-27
Khachadoorian, Penyamin
115

Kirby, Lynn 78, 83
Klein, Laura 40
Kluge, Alexander 65-67
Kordon, Renate 4
Korschil, Thomas 5, 77
Kren, Kurt 1,3,4,5
Krishna, Srinivas 1 14
Kubelka, Peter 1,2
Kudiar, George 54, 60

-L-

Land, Owen (aka Landow
George) 60
Lebrat. Christian 97
Lee, Annabel 26. 67
Lemaitre. Maurice 98-99
Leugers. David M. "Casey'
111

Levine. Paula 70, 80, 85
Lipman. Ross 13
Lipzin, Janis Crystal 79,
108-110

Livingston, Jennie 96
Lowder, Rose 97
Luostarinen. Kiti 1 14
Lye, Len 6

MacDougall, David & Judith
105

MacKendick, Alexander 1 13
MacLaine, Christopher 81
Mader, R. 40
Maggenti, Maria 96
Mangolte, Babette 13
Manning, Caitlin 27-29
Martillano, Rose B. 72
Massingale, Danielle 68
Mattuschka. Mara 1, 4
Maysles, Albert 79
Maysles, David 79
McAbee, Cory 101
McCarthy, Paul 103-104
McCoy. Michael 1 1 1
McDowell, Curt 61
Merritt, Toney 84
Michalak, David 101
Mideke, Michael 115
Miller, Bruce 1 1 1
Minh-ha, Trinh T. 94-96
MdTatt, Tracey 14
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 13
Moritsugu, Jon 99
Motisher, Lewis 1 1 1
Miiller, Matthias 7
Muse, John 73-74

Rlmmaker Index

-N-

Nauman, Bruce 78

Negativeland52

Nelson, Gunvor 43

Nelson, Robert 60,82

Noren, Andrew 51

O'Kane. Kerri 88
Ono.Yoko 17-18, 57
Ostrovsky, Vivian 97

-P-

Packenham, Steve 40
Parfrey, Adam 104
Parker, Alice Ann 82
Parrish, Shawn 88
Pfeifer, Judith 40, 88
Plotnick, Danny 90
Poitras, Laura 104-105
Polanszky, Rudolf 4
Pollack, Ghana 71, 72
Ponger, Lisl 5
Povey, Thad 23-24, 90
Piirrer, Ursula 7

-R-

Radax, Ferry 3

RAP, Dr. Francisco

Gonzalez, Lisa Swenson 70

Robin, Daniel 63

Rose, Peter 77 "*

Rosenberger, Johannes 3

Rosow, Laura

Ross, Rock 6

Rouch, Jean 36-40

Rudnick, Michael 6, 76, 83

-S-

Sale,eizabeth71,72
Salloum, Jayce 25
Sandler, Arlene 26
Scalph, Tena 111
Schaller, Robert 111
Scheugl, Hans 1, 5
Schipeck, Dietmar 3
Schlemowitz, Joel 7
Schmidt Jr., Ernst 13
Schneemann, Carolee 68
Scott, Mary 72
silt 115

Shepard, Joel 89
Snow, Michael 60
Solomon, Phil 50, 115
Sonbert, Warren 74-76
Stanley, Anie 26
Stanormieri, E)ean 101

Steiner, Konrad 1 15
Strand, Chick 60
Szirtes, Andras 13

-T-

Taylor, Jocelyn 26
Toufic, Jalal 25
Trunk, Mary 71, 72
Tscherkassky, Peter 1, 16

-V-

Van Sant, Gus 96

-W~

Waldemar, Eric 111
Wallin, Michael 84, 92-93
Warhol, Andy 107-108
White, Jacalyn L. 83
Wiley, Dorothy 43
Wiley, William T. 82
Wilkins, Timoleon
6,89, 111

Wilhams, Marco 14-15
Wiseman, Frederick 86-87
Wishman, Doris 19
Wittenstein, Alyce 54
Wong, Al 77
Wood, Kim 71, 72
Work Practice and
Technology Group 74
Wright, Charles 84
Wright, Georgia B. 67

Zwerin, Charlotte 79

Film Title I^fDEX

— A—

The Abbotess and the Flying Bone 3

Adebar2

Ahem 23

All My Life 46, 81

All Women Have Periods 64

ALLMIXEDUP88

Along the ^y 92

. . .and then god became disoriented in the forest of

higher animals ... 90
The Angel of Woolworth's 72
America is Waiting 106
AraulfRainer2
An Arrangement of Nineteen Scenes Relating to a

Trip to Japan 115
automatic writing 71

— B—

Bad Girls Go lb Hell 19

Baglight 6

Bali M6canique 11

Beat 81

Beautiful People/Beautiful Friends 69, 70

Bed Bug 101

Before Need Redressed 43

The Bitches 27

The Bladderwort Document 109

Black Ice 56

Black Movie n 16

Black Sheep Boy 93

Blessed 91

Bloodsucker's Delight 111

Blue Sun Western 111

Body Bomb 27

Body-Building 7

Bodybuilding 1

Bodylyrics 1 88

Bouquets 1-1097

Bom Innocent 32

Breakfast 60

Brothers & Sisters 40

Buntes Blut (Colorful Blood) 4

By the Sea 84

— C—

Cable Car Melody 84
'camera rolls' 49
Canada Dry TUmor 111
Cannot Not Exist 57
Carriage Ti-ade 75
Cartoon le Mousse 60
Case P-200 70
Castro Street 46
Celluloidall 111
Cha-Hit Frames 6
Changes 64
Chaos, Chaos 40
Chronique d'un 6l6
(Chronicle of a Summer) 36,40

Cliff House 115

Color Adjustment 111

Color de Luxe 1

Color Flight 6

The Color of Love 50

Coming Home 96

Conversations Across The Bosphorous 73

Cosmic Ray 106

Crabbing 72

The Creative Process? 88

Credits Included

A Video in Red and Green 25

Crossing the Bar 84

CrossRoad 7

Cult Rapture 104

— D—

Das Schwartz Herz "Ropft

(The Black Heart Leaks) 7
Dawn 13

Decision: Alcohol 31
Decodings92

Deep Peep & Love Controls Time 40
The Deflowering 54
Delugion 83
Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die ubrige Zeit (The

Blind Director) 67
Der Elvis 100

Der musikalische Affe (The Musical Ape) 4
Der Ort der Zeit (The Place of Time) 5
Der Regen (The Rain) 16
Der Untergang der Titania

(The Sinking of Titania) 4
Deseretll2

A Different Kind of Green 24
Die Ewigkeit von Gestem

(The Eternity of Yesterday) 65
Die Geburt der Venus (The Birth of Venus) 4
The Discipline of De 96
Dirty 26

Dog of Nazareth (excerpt) 111
Double Agent 19
Duermete Ninita 24

— E—

EasWest 85

El Fuego 101

The End 6

Engorge Gobble and Gulp 68

Epilogue 7

Erection 58

Es hat mich sehr gefreut

(I Have Been Very Pleased) 4
Exact Fantasy 104

Fearful Symmetry 84
Feuerioscher E.A. Wittenstein

(Fireman E.A. Wittenstein) 66
Figure/Ground (The Snowman) 50

Film Title Index

Film For... 24

Film Watchers 60

Filmreste (Film Scraps) 3

Fingers and Kisses 96

Fircpage 111

Fog Line 34

Four in the Afternoon 80

Fragment 13

Fhiu Balckbum, geb. 5 Jan. 1872, wird gelfilmt

(Mrs. Balckbum, bom January 5, 1872, is

filmed) 66
Ftom Beijing to Brooklyn 26
FUji 33

— G— I

gajol-gusal 40

Gay Pride 4 89

George 10

Getting Closer 31

Gezacktes Rinnsal schleicht sich schamlos

schenkelnassend an 8
The Gifted Goon 56
Gills Beware 32
Gotham 10
The Great Blondino 82

— H—

Hall of Mirrors 75

Heidi 103

Here I Am 111

Hemalsl

High Heel Nights 26

High School 86-87

The History of Tbxas City 111

Home Entertainment Center for a Farm

Worker 110
Horoscope 27
Hot Heads 96

— I—

I am a Mechanic 40

I Change I Am the Same 82

I Smell the Blood of an Englishman 23

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

(acapella video mix, w.i.p.) 52
I Still Haven't Found What Tm Looking For (radio

mix) 52
I Zupt 49 111
Imaginary Light 51
In a Quiet Place 32
In Consideration of Pompeii 51
In Passing 71

In the Breast of Nature, part n 115
In Search of Our Fathers 14-15
Interior Scroll: the Cave 68
Intrepidissima 96

— J—

Janie32

— K—

The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks 63

Kaiserschnitt (Ceasarcan Section) 4

Kaleidoscope 6

Kilometer 123.5 40

Kindering 61

King Midas 101

Kino Da! 10

Kino-il3

Kugelkopt (Ballhead) 1

— L—

La P6che miraculeuse

(The Miraculous Catch of Fish) 97
La Reina 24

Land's End Field Notes 115
Landscape No. 1:

Outside the gold frame. Inside the car window 78
Landscape No. 2:

Selection from 36 hours on 24th Street 80
Landscape No. 3:

C to C — Several Centuries After the Double Slit

Experiment 83
Last Gasp 83

Lehrer im >\^del (Tfeachers Through Change) 66
Les mattres fous

(The Crazy Masters; Mad Masters; Master

Madmen) 36-39
Let's Go to the Bad World 89
Light Years Expanding 43
Lightplay, black-white-grey 13
Little Lieutenant 11
Looking for Mushrooms 81
Love Between a Boy and a Girl 70
Luke 111
Lunchbox 27

— M—

Mad Poets of Frisco 40

Mammals of Victoria 57

The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough,

Part V 77
Manhattan Love Suicides 27
Manifestoon 70
Mann & Frau & Animal

(Man & Woman & Animal) 1
Mantra 72

Manufraktur (Manufacture) 1
Mass For the Dakota Sioux 46
Matzo Balls and Black-eyed Peas 63
Media Darling 24
Memorial Day (Observed) 113
Memory Eye (1988), 23
Midweekend 7
Mirror, Mirror 70
Miss Somebody 71
Mongoloid 106
The Mongreloid 60

Film Title Index

Mosaik im Vertrauen

(Mosaic in Confidence) 1, 2
motel six 24
Motion Picture

(La Sortie des Ouvriers de I'Usine Lumiere a

Lyon) 5
A Movie 106
Mr. Hayashi 45
Munchen-Beriin Wanderung

(Munich-Berlin \\^king THp) 13
The Murder Mystery 4
The Museum of Modem Art Show 18
My Friend 96
My Good Eye 89
My HusUer 107-108
My Nightmare 27

— N—

NabelFabel (NavelFable) 4

Nachrichten von den Stauffem

(News from the Hohenstaufifens) 66
Name Day 96
Nazi 27

"Negativland mixing U2" 52
New Improved Institutional Quality
In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a

Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops 60
New York Long Distance 97
Noah's Ark... a Neozapatista Delirium 29
Night Cries 14
Nirvina of the Nebbishites 56
No. 4 (Bottoms) 18
Nude on the Moon 19
Nyphomania 68

— O—

Obital Loop n 101
The Off-Handed Jape 60
Open for Business 24
Optic Nerve 114
Orange 16

— P—

The P-38 Pilot 47

P.R.A.TE.R. 3

Pacific Far East Lines 84

Painter 103

Panorama 76

Parallel Space: Inter-View 16

Parasympathica 4

passage il'actel

Pause! 1

Perumos

(Bombs in Czech; Lightning in Romany) 22
Photo Wallahs 105
pidce touch6e 17
Pillow Thlk 90
Portraiture in Black 56
Portrat einer Behwarung

(Proven Competence Portrayed) 66

Prelude 28
Premonition 49
Primate 86-87

Quick Billy 48
Quixote 47
Quixote Dreams 23

— R—

Rabbit's Moon 61

Random 16

Rape 58

Rape Alert 64

Rear \\^mdow 41

Recollection 71

The Red Book 50

The Red Mile 34

Remains to be Seen 115

Remember Eden 32

....Remote.. ..Remote.... 4

Report 106

Results from Tbst Case 79014F 89

Revision 71

Rhythm 92

Rhythm 93 13

Rip 7

Rocketlipsbabblon 67

The Rope Factory 88

Ronnie 61

Roslyn Romance (Is It Really Thie?) 48

Running Fence 79

— S—

Same Difference 77

Samsara 91

Satya: A Prayer For The Enemy 91

Schwechater 2

SeView Movie 111

Seasonal Forces - A Sonoma County Almanac 79,

109-110
Second Persons 40
The Secret of Life 61
Semiotic Ghosts 5
Seven Day 33
The Sewing Circle 27
Side/Walk/Shuttle 77
Signal — Germany on the Air 41
Six Windows 33
Slate Cleaner 111
Sleazy Rider 100
Sleepwalk 92
Song Xn 29

Song XV : Fifteen Song "D-aits 30
Song XVI 30

Songs xvn & xvn 30

Songs XDC & XX 30

Songs XXI & XXn 30

SongXXm

23rd Psalm Branch (1966-67) 34

Film Title Index

Sonhos Brasileiros ('Brazilian Dreams') 29

Sonic Outlaws 52

Sonne halt! (Sun stop!) 3

Span 78

Spring 77

SSS 10

Start Tklking 101

Stellar 56

Stellium in Capricorn 67

Still Life 34, 47

The Story Lived by Artaud-M6mo 62

Straight for the money:

Interviews with Queer Sex Workers 68
Stripped Bare 29
Subcutan 3
Subway 89
Sunset Boulevard 5
Super-8 Girl Games 7
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story 96
Survival Run 79

— T—

T.E.M.P.S. 71

Tkke the 5:10 to Dreamland 107

A Tkle of Love 94-96

A "Kiste of Flesh 19

Tblevision Assassination 107

Tfell Me What You Saw (Krishna) 114

Tfell Me What You Saw (Luostarinen) 114

'Ibmet6s (Rmeral) 22

Tferminal USA 100

Tbxt I 16

Thine Inward-looking Eyes 90

This Is Not Beirut

There was and there was not 25

...Three, Fbur, Shut the Door 28

Three Homerics 56

Throne, Begonia Room, Walk, Ti-ainRide 115

Time and Places 34

Time Bomb 73

Tb Mom and Dad 111

lb Parsifal 45

'Ii-ama97

'Ih5e6

Thith Serum 75

Tlmg 47

TV Boris and Video Misha 22

TVI40

— U—

Un Film Tbrrible 23
Un Navet (A Hop) 98-99
Unnecessary Conversation 115
Unsere Afrikareise (Our THp to Africa) 2
Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries) 8
Untitled work in progress 89
Untitled: Part One 41

Uta Makura (Pillow Poems): Of Gardens. Outings.
Tbkyotokids. On the Go 97

— V—

Vagues ^ CoUioure (Waves at Collioure) 97

Valentin de las Sierras 46

Valse Thste 107

\fery Important: A Bird Walked On It 111

Vmyl 108

Visions of a City 83

— W—

walk in 16

^^Iking the Tbndra 6
^^^derlust 71
W^ter Motor 13
Wet Gate 101
What Gets You Off? 68
When The Bough Breaks 28
When Jenny When 64
The White Rose 106
Windowmobile 33
Wb-da-vor-bei 16

Women's Rites or Thith is the Daughter
of Time 82

— Y—

Your Mom 24

— Z—

Zum Geburtstag (For Your Birthday) 16

— #—

1. Mai 1958 16

2.95 Untitled ( 1)

2/60: 48 Kopfe aus dem Szondi-lbst

(2/60 48 Heads from the Szondi Tfcst) 1
3.95: untitled 89
5/62 Fenstergucker, Abfall, etc.

(5/62: People Looking Out the Window, Ti-ash,

etc.) 3
6.95: striptease 88
10/65: Selbstverstiimmelung

(10/65: Selfmutilation) 3
16/67: 20. September (16/67: September 20) 4
24 Hours a Day 26
31/75: Asyl (31/75 Asylum) 5
92 Avignon 16
442111
1989— The Real Power of TV 22

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