Program 2
curated by Samuel Breslin
Thursday, December 7th, 2017 @ 9pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 58 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale (advance tickets here)
Om
John Smith
1986 | 4 minutes | UK | 16mm | color | sound
A short film about haircuts, clothes and image/sound relationships.
"This is hard-core cinema."
-Peter Kubelka
Broken Tongue
Mónica Savirón
2013 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Mainly made with images from the January 1st issues of “The New York Times” since its beginning in 1851 to 2013, Broken Tongue is a heartfelt tribute to avant-garde sound performer Tracie Morris and to her poem Afrika.
-MS
The Girl Chewing Gum
John Smith
1976 | 12 minutes | UK | 16mm | b&w | sound
"In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes - not prescribes - the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the 'spectra of narrative' (suppressed by structural film), to play word against picture and chance against order. Sharp and direct, the film anticipates the more elaborate scenarios to come; witty, many-layered, punning, but also seriously and poetically haunted by drama's ineradicable ghost."
-A.L. Rees
Nightmare Arson Fire
Joshua Gen Solondz
2016 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm/performance | live sound
IT'S UNDERWAY. IT HAS A FEW FORMS. IT SPEAKS HOW IT WISHES TO SPEAK. IT RUPTURES SYSTEMS.
SOMETIMES I'M AFRAID OF IT. IT WANTS THE VOICE OF RESCUE, A LIV/FE.
I FOUND ITS MOTHER IN A BASEMENT, A REEL LABELED NIGHTMARE ARSON FIRE. I TRIED TO REPRINT IT, TRIED TO DUPLICATE ITS BEAUTY, BUT IT DIDN'T TAKE, IT'S DIFFERENT IN CERTAIN WAYS, EVEN THOUGH I TRIED TO HELP IT. SOMETIMES WHILE IT PLAYS, THE RADIO SAYS THINGS ABOUT WOMEN AND CRIME AND FIRE, HAPPENED A FEW TIMES.
SOMETIMES...
I BECAME SUPERSTITIOUS. I KNOW IT WILL SPEAK.
MY FATHER GAVE ME A HAT RECENTLY. IT SAYS 'TOO BAD'. I CALLED HIM UP, BUT HE COULDN'T REMEMBER WHAT IT SAID.
SOMETIMES...
IF I REPEAT AN ACTION,WILL I FORGET THE UNNECESSARY? DOES THAT SEEM FAIR?
-JGS
Orpheus (outtakes)
Mary Helena Clark
2012 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
"Using footage from Cocteau's Orphée, Mary Helena Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames."
-Andrea Picard, TIFF
Cloverleaf Interchange
Brendan Glasson
2017 | 20 minutes | USA | slide film | live music & spoken text
A driver and a passenger misread a highway sign, sparking a sequence of dreams in the passenger and a sequence of daydreams in the driver.
-BG
Brian Lye is a filmmaker and visual artist from Vancouver, Canada. Lye’s lens-based works are preoccupied with magic, humour, and the everyday. His films and animations have won awards and screened at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, the Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona and LIVE Vancouver’s Performance Art Biennale.
John Smith was born in Walthamstow, London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art, during which time he became involved in the activities of the London Filmmakers Co-op. Inspired in his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he has developed an extensive body of work that subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction. Often rooted in everyday life, his meticulously crafted films playfully explore and expose the language of cinema. Since 1972 Smith has made over fifty film, video and installation works that have been shown in independent cinemas, art galleries and on television around the world and awarded major prizes at many international film festivals.
Mónica Savirón (Spain) is a filmmaker, independent curator, and writer. Currently based in New York, her work explores the cinematic possibilities of sound and avant-garde poetics.
Joshua Gen Solondz is a film/media artist and musician.
He’s shown work at a variety of festivals including MOMA’s Documentary Fortnight, Images Festival, video_dumbo,Toronto International Film Festival, Lima Independent Film Festival, Onion City, Chicago Underground, FICValdivia, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, CAAMFest, and the New York Film Festival. Josh also has screened at venues such as Light Industry, UnionDocs, Harvard Film Archive, Parsons Hall Project Space, DINCA, Plug Projects, and New York University.
Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work uses the language of collage, often bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code, to explore dissociative states through cinema. Working with quotation, the materiality of film, and incongruous sound/image relationships, Clark’s recent work explores shifting subjectivities and the limits of the embodied camera. Her films, such as After Writing (2008), And the sun flowers (2009), Sound Over Water (2009), By foot-candle light (2011), The Plant (2012), Orpheus (outtakes) (2012) and The Dragon is the Frame (2014), have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others.
Brendan Glasson (b. 1985, Providence, RI) is a composer and multimedia artist based in Oakland, CA, where he is an MFA candidate in the Electronic Music and Recording Media program at Mills College. Brendan has performed works at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the MUDAM museum in Luxembourg, and the RISD museum in Providence, RI, and has held residencies at the Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Lovell, ME. As a musician, he has performed with many diverse acts, including the Providence Research Ensemble, the William Winant Percussion Group, and Sigur Rós.