Program 4
curated by tooth
Saturday, December 9th, 2017 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 80 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale (advance tickets here)
In its form asleep
Antoinette Zwirchmayr
2016 | 3 minutes | Austria | 16mm | color | silent
Antoinette Zwirchmayr's serenely composed images create a calm, surrealistic atmosphere of transformation. As if time were suspended, her still lives linger with lucid clarity in a state between dream and consciousness. A male body, seen through the filmmaker's lens, reveals abstract, sculpted forms reminiscent of classical statues. Breathing softly, the dreamer is alive. The quail eggs resting atop his upper legs conjure up thoughts of birth and rebirth (through sleep). While the images seem to be corresponding silently with one another in a dreamlike logic, the film projector hums, shedding light on interior and exterior and back again.
-Light Cone
Loose Ends
Esperanza Collado
2017 | 4 minutes | Spain | 16mm | b&w | silent | international premiere
Night Train
Guy Sherwin
1979 | 2 minutes | UK | 16mm | b&w | sound
The sound of lights passing through a darkened landscape seen from a moving train.
"Night Train may be seen as continuing the Vertovian tradition of employing film to reveal phenomena not normally visible to the naked eye."
-Nicky Hamlyn
(100ft)
Minjung Kim
2017 | 3 minutes | Korea | 16mm | color | silent | US premiere
We have different sizes of feet. You are 1ft. I am 0.75ft.
-MK
"Minjung Kim's 100ft consists of a single uninterrupted shot, lasting an entire 100ft roll of 16mm film, as two figures with different sized feet traverse a vast, striated landscape."
-TIFF
Once. maybe twice; or The clockwork of summer
Dicky Bahto
2013/2017 | 3 minutes | USA | super 8 | b&w | silent | theatrical premiere
Venus Delta
Antoinette Zwirchmayr
2016 | 4 minutes | Austria | 16mm | color | silent
"In Zwirchmayr's short film Venus Delta a sequence of dreamlike scenes unfolds quietly. Set in an otherworldly layered landscape of rock formations by a pristine mountain spring, an atmosphere of eerie feminity pervades the images. Round, golden objects of unknown origin lie scattered about mysteriously. Somehow they seem connected to or springing from a nearly motionless young woman whose face is hidden behind a voluptuous, almost menacingly grand, mass of hair. Seen only in fragments and shot from odd angles, the body remains anonymous at all times. A surreal quality infests these visually sumptuous quasi- still lifes, accentuating barely noticeable tensions between human form and nature, body and object, between male and female forces in minute details. When a slightly moving bulk of shiny dark hair fills the screen it almost appears to conceal the entrance to a dark vaginal chamber of secrets. Watching the curious golden balls float out of sight down the slow-moving stream channels feelings of loss and longing as well as more positive notions of departure, promise and adventure."
-Julia Dossi
Decoy
Alee Peoples
2017 | 11 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound | world premiere
Comparing walls and bridges. The weight of human accuracy. Language matters.
-AP
Cube and Room Drawings
David Haxton
1977 | 15 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
Restored print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive
Cube and Room Drawings begins with a view looking down at an angle toward grey paper covering the floor. A performer enters from the back of the scene and begins drawing lines on the floor. The lines are the beginning of a drawing of a distorted cube. The performer leaves the scene. The paper begins to rotate on the floor. As the paper rotates the cube gradually becomes correctly oriented, as if it were drawn on a vertical piece of paper. The performer enters again and draws another cube that corresponds to the perspective of the other cube. After leaving and re-entering the performer draws red receding lines on the floor. He leaves and the paper rotates and the red lines become a grid that corresponds to the vertical screen. The film continues with several additional actions that continue this theme.
Rhus Typhina
Alexandra Moralesová & Gregory Bagdasarov
2014 | 3 minutes | Armenia/Czech Republic | 16mm | b&w | sound
One of the series of labodoble experiment of the natural (organic) film developers.The structure of the film is based on the chemical formula of the Rhus Typhina's developer. The main protagonist of the film is a species of flowering plant in the family Anacardiaceae whose leaves and berries are mixed with tobacco and other herbs and smoked by Native American tribes. We tried to apply the properties of the Rhus Typhina in the photochemistry. The film captures the research, experiments, harvesting and preparationof the film developer in which latter original negative was developed. The nonlinear structure of the chemical formula as well as nonlinear research of the process are reflected in the order of the frames. There is no post-production except the sound. All editing work was made while film was loaded in the camera before chemical development.
-AM & GB
Mirror
Robert Morris
1971 | 9 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
Morris, in a winter landscape, holds a mirror to nature, and to the camera.
Las acciones duran
Esperanza Collado
2017 | 6 minutes | Spain | 16mm | color | silent | international premiere
Some Unseen Lights
Andrew Kim
2012 | 5 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
Three times the same strip of film.
-AK
Ice
J.J. Murphy
1972 | 7 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Ice is a film of a film (Franklin Miller's Whose Circumference Is Nowhere) rephotographed through 50 pounds of ice. The soundtrack is a loop - sound equipment recording underwater.
"Ice (1972): made in collaboration with another film-maker in Iowa. Murphy uses his friend's film projecting behind a 50 lb. block of ice. The ice, a frozen but ever-changing lens between the projector and Murphy's camera: a chilled aurora dialogue."
-Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb
Antoinette Zwirchmayr born 1989 in Salzburg, Austria. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her works have been featured in festivals including International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (D) Indielisboa (P), Toronto International Film Festival (CND), Media City Film Festival (CND), New Horizons Film Festival (PL), CPH: DOX (DK), Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA), FID Marseille (F). She has been awarded with the Start-Up Grant for Young Film Artists (Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria 2017), Annual grant for photography (Land Salzburg 2017), Simon S. Filmaward (2016), Kodak Cinematic Vision Award (Ann Arbor Film Festival 2016), Best Innovative Film Award, Diagonale - Festival of Austrian Film (2016), Annual grant for film (Land Salzburg 2014), Best short documentary Award - Diagonale, Festival of Austrian Film (2014), Sponsorship Award (Salzburger Kunstverein 2014), Birgit-Jürgenssen-Award (2013).
Esperanza Collado (Valencia, 1976) works with installation, environment-performances, film and written work that engage with the philosophical vocation of cinema and the spacial and choreographic possibilities of projection. Her book Paracinema: la desmaterialización del cine en las prácticas artísticas received the Spanish prize "Escritos sobre arte" in 2011. Her acclaimed environment-performance We Only Guarantee the Dinosaurs (2014-15) was described by Jodie Mack as "a carefully constructed choreography […] through an earnest investigation of the essence of cinema (pre-, present, post-) and its possibilities. […] The future of a thriving cinema(rt) relies upon efforts like [this]". Collado’s works have been shown in Close-Up Cinema (London), BEEF (Bristol), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), MACVal (Paris), Images Festival (Toronto), Tate Modern (London), Biennial of Havana (Cuba), Filmbase (Dublin), Art Cinema OFF-off (Ghent), Museum of Contemporary Art of Tehran (Iran), Art Centre Ongoing (Tokyo), Anthology Film Archives (New York), etc. In 2008 she co-founded the Experimental Film Club in Dublin. She has curated film programmes and exhibitions for Museum of Contemporary Art of León, Close-Up Cinema, Irish Film Institute, thisisnotashop Gallery and Biennial of Havana. Together with Rafa Martínez del Pozo, she runs LEVE, a record label that releases annual editions of field recordings on 45rpm vinyl made by invited artists. She lectures at the Fine Arts College in Cuenca (Spain).
Guy Sherwin
Studied painting at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960s. His subsequent film works often use serial forms and live elements, and engage with light, time and sound as fundamental to cinema. Recent works include installations made for exhibition spaces and performance collaborations with Lynn Loo working with multiple projectors and optical sound. He taught printing and processing at the London Film-Makers' Co-op (now LUX) during the mid-70s.His films were included in Film as Film Hayward Gallery 1979, Live in Your Head Whitechapel Gallery 2000, Shoot Shoot Shoot Tate Modern 2002, A Century of Artists Film & Video' Tate Britain 2003/4. He lives in London and teaches at Middlesex University and University of Wolverhampton.
Minjung Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. She completed her MFA in film and video at the California Institute of the Arts. Her directorial credits include FOOTAGE (15) and Australian Paper(15). (100ft) (17) is her latest short.
Dicky Bahto lives in Los Angeles. He has exhibited work utilizing still and motion picture photography, sound, and performance at a variety of museums, galleries, microcinemas, film festivals, conferences, alternative spaces, and scenic locations spanning the Northern Hemisphere, including commissions from Monday Evening Concerts and The Huntington. As a member of the EPFC Co-op, he is a co-recipient of an inaugural Artist Project Grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
His interest in music has led him to both collaborate with and perform works by various composers, including Casey Anderson, Ashley Bellouin, Luciano Chessa, Julia Holter, and Mark So. In addition to creating album art for some of the above musicians, he has made several music videos for Julia Holter, and his portraits of artists including Julia Holter, Laida Lertxundi, and Tashi Wada have been printed in The New York Times, Bomb, Vogue España, The Wire, MOJO, among other publications.
Alee Peoples (born 1981, Oklahoma City) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen-printing, sewing, sculpture and film. Along time ago she saw ministry play on her 15th birthday. A not-so-long time ago she and two friends did a14-date film tour through the South/Midwest. For some time now, she 'makes a living' by installing art in art museums.
David Haxton (b. 1943, Indianapolis Indiana) is an artist who works primarily in photography and film. His current work is concentrated in the use of the photographed image. As it has always been, Haxton's work is approached from a painter's perspective and more specifically current thinking that is sourced in objectivity, intermingled with process and materials. In the early seventies he moved away from painting and made the film installation "Four Screen Films". The piece is about the reconstruction of one space into another. Several other installation films were made during that time, each with the purpose of reconstructing one space within another. His first New York exhibition of these film installations was at Sonnabend Gallery. It was a group exhibition of films with Vito Acconci, John Baldessari and David Shulman. He showed the Installation film Three Changes. His most recent solo exhibition was at Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach Florida, November 2012. In 2012 his film Painting Room Lights was included in a semi permanent exhibition titled "Watch This! New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Smithsonian has also included Haxton's films in their permanent collection. The Whitney Museum has recently acquired sixteen of his films for their permanent collection. His films are included in the permanent collection of the MoMA. Selected other collections include: The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Albright Knox Gallery, National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia, Maslow Collection in Scranton, Pa., Denver Museum of Art, and the Chicago Art Institute.
Alexandra Moralesová was born in 1989 to Czech mother and Argentinian father. She studied at the Centre of Audiovisual Studies at The Film faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). Beyond the inspiration by the practices of experimental film, she's mainly interested in remediation of found footage and found objects. Through various ways of viewing it, those objects represent for her its own possibility of de/construction in order to cross the frontier between analog and digital media and so disrupt the spectacle and alternate existing narratives. It`s been several years that she explores the post-production tools as for example the editing table or film viewers. The output of her works is often a performance, film screening or installation.
Georgy Bagdasarov was born in Armenian family in 1978 to the sounds of rockets taking off into space from Kazakhstan. He never boarded any of those rockets and spent all his life living in various locations throughout Eurasia. Now he lives and works in Prague. His work explores the space between analog and digital, and merges them together. His works are created under strong influence of structural films, cooking recipes and syntax of computer codes. He combines different media: digital and film stock as well as music and food.
Robert Morris (born February 9, 1931 in Kansas City, Missouri) is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, minimalism, land art, the Process Art movement and installation art. Morris lives and works in New York.
Andrew Kim is an filmmaker who received his MFA from School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts in 2013. His work is inspired by the material properties of cinema and its unique ability to reify abstract ideas and ineffable feelings. Combining formal experimentation with at concern for the phenomenology of the cinematic experience, Andrew’s films are an attempt to understand the movement of the mind. Ultimately, he hopes to transcend the exact mechanics of motion pictures such that a film might articulate a new knowledge.
J.J. Murphy is an independent filmmaker. He teaches Film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work (Continuum Books, 2007, 290 pages) and The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (University of California Press, 2012, 303 pages).