Program 4
curated by Syd Staiti
Saturday, March 16, 2019 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 58 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets available at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
Facing the Waves
Eva Kolcze
2016 | 4 minutes | Canada | 16mm | color | silent
A study of light and shadows on a late summer afternoon.
-EK
FOR A YOUNG FILMMAKER
Sandra Davis
2014 | 7 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
FOR A YOUNG FILMMAKER is a shorter form, an ode - a kind of little story without a narrative. Ode in the french sense of a reverie for a moment in time, and for me, a passion of place. All vocal material exists in english and in french, so as to be understood by both native speakers. French is used also for its sonorous qualities, and because it is so exact, and at moments, so capricious, in its whimseys of potential metaphor. All vocal material exists in english and in french, so as to be understood by both native speakers. French is used also for its sonorous qualities, and because it is so exact, and at moments, so capricious, in its whimseys of potential metaphor.
-SD
Rear Window
Ernie Gehr
1991 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
"A view from a Brooklyn apartment sublimates Hitchcock's voyeurism into a frenzied engagement with the visible. The film varies exposure or racks focus so that the flickering, spatially ambiguous patterns that press the limits of the frame momentarily dissolve themselves as tree branches or a fire escape or a shadow caught on the screen of someone's laundry rippling in the breeze. 'I cupped one of my hands in front of the camera lens and attempted to make tactile to myself light, color and image,' Gehr explains in his notes, linking the film to his father's death and calling it a 'hopeless attempt' to render the ephemeral tangible."
-J. Hoberman
Sea side
Emmanuelle Negre
2018 | 4 minutes | France | 16mm | color | sound
Seaside is an experimental found footage film. People are playing and having fun at the beach. Removing the emulsion on people's silhouettes erase identity and what the film was made for, fixing people's image throughout time and memory.
-EN
The Magician's House
Deborah Stratman
2007 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Sometimes the supernatural lingers plainly in the most ordinary places, secret only in so much as its trace goes unnoticed. Both a letter to a cancer stricken alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, The Magician’s House is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or “Sorcerer’s Lamp”. The music, “La lutte des Mages” (The Struggle of the Magicians) was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought man was a "transmitting station of forces." To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.
-DS
A Return
James Edmonds
2018 | 6 minutes | UK | 16mm | color | sound
To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits, perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. Peering into layers, sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance.
A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience.
Structures shift and intermingle, two worlds become one.
-JE
Sous de Soleil
Rose Lowder
2011 | 4 minutes | France | 16mm | color | sound
In the heat of summer solar panel reflections blend with butterflies on flowers and a little bird eating the mulberries.
-RL
Waking With a Dead Arm
Rob Daglish
2018 | 3 minutes | UK | 16mm | color | sound
A neurological short story told through edited archival film.
-RD
Chimera
Philip Hoffman
1995 | 15 minutes | Canada | 16mm | color | sound
In 1989 I finished the film Kitchener-Berlin and put a close to a cycle of work which dealt directly with myself, and how self is expressed/constructed cinematically. At the same time I took my old super-8 camera out of the closet, and began collecting images, using the single-frame-zoom. Cubist in its visual delivery, the single-frame-zoom builds a splayed reality that brings together disparate vantage points simultaneously, and serves as the glue that blends and bonds peoples, places and spaces in Chimera.
-PH
Eva Kolcze is a Toronto-based artist who creates films and installations that investigate themes of landscape, architecture and the body. Her work has screened at venues and festivals including the National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), Anthology Film Archives, the Gardiner Museum, Nuit Blanche, Cinémathèque québécoise, Birch Contemporary and the Images Festival.
Sandra Davis is a San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker and curator whose work has been exhibited at film showcases and festivals worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Pompidou Center, Paris. She has held teaching positions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of South Florida, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She has lectured widely in the US and Europe on experimental cinema and its place within modern and contemporary art.
The films of Ernie Gehr investigate deceptively simple materials and landscapes of everyday encounter as radically potent portals into the continually unfolding mysteries hidden beneath the surface of our perception. Gehr’s intuitive capacity for elegantly executed, yet perpetually probing works bring new light to a shifting definition of the “experimental” in film. A self taught filmmaker who became a central figure in the fields of Structural Film and the avant-garde communities of New York and San Francisco as well as a long time teacher in of the SFAI Film Department, Gehr continues to make works that expand and investigate our ways of seeing.
Emmanuelle Nègre is born in France in 1986 and studied at the Villa Arson School of fine Art where she got Master in 2010. She was co-director at Catalyst Arts's Belfast from 2011 to 2013. Also resident at La Station in Nice from 2013 to 2017. In 2017 she started to program screenings under the name Fovéa. Emmanuelle is showing her work locally and internationally as part of exhibitions and screening.
Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, exodus and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Mercer Union (Toronto), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Film Museum (Vienna), Whitney Biennial (NY) and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH/DOX, Toronto, Oberhausen, True/False, and Rotterdam. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois / UIC.
James Edmonds is a filmmaker and painter from England living in Berlin. His work is driven by a personal poetics which explores the intersection of the recorded image as a material, formal reality and subjective experience as a synthesis of everyday existence and memory.
His films, paintings and sound works are sometimes combined in space along with found materials, suggesting complex overlapping subjectivities and landscapes.
He has presented work at film festivals such as TIFF Toronto, NYFF New York, L’ ge d’Or Brussels, Flex Fest Florida, Process Festival Riga and Fronteira Festival Brasil. Solo presentations have occurred at 3 137 Athens, Cinema Parenthèse Brussels, Nocturnal Reflections Milan, Auslands-Filme Berlin and Another Vacant Space Berlin.
He occasionally also writes and since 2015 organizes a film series in Berlin called Light Movement.
Rose Lowder
I trained as a painter and sculptor in Lima, Peru, then in London. I worked for a decade as an artist while earning a living as a film editor. I became interested in research in film from 1977 onwards, establishing with Alain-Alcide Sudre a non-profit organization, the Experimental Film Archives of Avignon. The Archives have become a collection of 16mm films as well as a paper document collection. The first is made available to the public with films rented from other sources by means of annual screenings and the second can be consulted freely as a reference library. At one point I wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled "The Experimental Film as an Instrument for Visual Research." I also teach a filmmaking course at the Sorbonne, Paris, with the grand title of Associate Professor.
Although I began filmmaking by pursuing concerns common to other contemporary art practices, my attention was rapidly attracted by a twofold feature of the photographic procedure which allows one to handle the content and the form of the material while the process inscribes automatically some of the traces and characteristics of the reality being recorded. This paradox led me to study perception, the possibilities and problematics of research in art as well as how theoretical approaches to experimental film and traditional cinema have evolved. Underlying these studies is a search for meaningful ways to work with film regarding our contemporary society controlled by multinational economics. As the totalitarian environments of urban landscapes become more and more uninhabitable, I seek, against the grain in our "virtual" space age it seems, a more human physical home.
Rob Daglish is a London based artist filmmaker.
Born in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Philip Hoffman’s filmmaking began with his boyhood interest in photography. As semi-official historian of family life, Hoffman became intrigued by questions of reality in photography and later in cinema. After completing his formal education which includes a Diploma in Media Arts at Sheridan College and a Bachelor of Arts in Literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, Hoffman began working on his films, as well as teaching film, electronic and computer-based media in the Media Arts Program at Sheridan College. Currently Hoffman teaches in the Cinema and Media Arts Department at York University.
A film artist of memory and association, Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker. He apprenticed in Europe with Peter Greenaway in 1985, where he made ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1985), which was nominated for a Canadian Genie Award. Hoffman has been honored with more than a dozen retrospectives of his work. Since 1994, he has been the artistic director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), a one week workshop in artisanal filmmaking in Mount Forest, Ontario. In 2016 Hoffman received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.