Welcome to the Fall Schedule for Other Cinema. We have a ton of neat stuff this season and we hope you will come often. A number of the films we are showing have video clips available for preview in Quicktime format. These clips are indicated by a projector icon in the applicable sections. If you don't have the Quicktime plug-in, you can download it for free at www.apple.com/quicktime.

Bring The War Home

SAT. 9/11: WHISPERED MEDIA'S ON THE FRONTLINES OF FALLUJAH & NO RNC/NYC


OC inaugurates its Fall ‘04 schedule with a session that focuses on resistance to American imperialism abroad and at home. We'll see first-hand accounts from intrepid videographer David Martinez, who fearlessly angled for independent perspectives inside the battle of Fallujah. Then we'll witness street battles against the same Republican war machine on U.S. soil, as Miles Montalbano, Adams Wood, and Mark Liiv deliver riveting reportage from the RNC invasion of New York City. Supporting both segments of video testimony are Diane Nerwin's Thief of Baghdad, Dara Greenwald's Strategic Cyber Defense, Jacob Bricca's Homeland, Paper Tiger's Hollywood Victory, and other smart-bombs of art. Doors open at 8pm for season-opening reception and scritti politti on the screen.

Click here for Quicktime Preview

   

 

 

 

 

Free-Reelin' Revue

SAT. 9/18, SUN. 9/19, MON. 9/20: ROBERT NELSON RETROSPECTIVE

Believe it or not, the legendary dean of West Coast experimental cinema is re-emerging from his NorCal hideout for a once-in-a-lifetime three-evening retro of 15 of his funky underground satires. Our opening Saturday show features Confessions of a Black Mother Succuba, King David, Oh Dem Watermelons, and the intensely anticipated The Great Blondino. Sunday's session serves up Limitations; Suite California, Part 1; The Off-Handed Jape; Hot Leatherette; Rest in Pieces; Special Warning; and Deepwesturn. Monday's closing program promises Grateful Dead, The Awful Backlash, Plastic Haircut, and Bleu Shut. …an utterly extraordinary opportunity to experience these rare reels, introduced in a salon setting by the magister ludi himself.

 

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

Fear Run Amok

SAT. 9/25: CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE DEFENSE-FUND BENEFIT.

Both the art community and civil libertarians everywhere were dealt a severe blow last May with the witch-hunt and arrest of several members of the acclaimed CAE in Buffalo, NY. Police there invoked the invasive powers of the Patriot Act to indict Steven Kurtz and his associates with bioterrorism, because of petri dishes that were part of Kurtz's installation art. This draconian dragnet has sent a chill through all citizens who value critical discourse through engaged art-making. A speaker from CAE's publisher, Autonomedia, hosts a laboratory of experimental works on biology and law, including the White Ring's Homeland Security, Dale Hoyt's Transgenic Hair Shirt, Rachel Mayeri's Genome, Robert Wyrod's In Vivo, and Eli Elliott's ASScroft. PLUS clips from A Plague on Your Children, Know About Biowarfare, Natalie Jeremijenko, Dara Greenwald, Yes Men, and the Ensemble's own pieces.

$5 - $50 sliding scale - what's freedom of expression worth to you? Put your money where your mouth is, you armchair radicals!

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

 

 

 

Black Power

 

SAT. 10/2: MOVE + THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR

 

Riding into our Mission gallery on a national groundswell of outrage over the militarization of urban police units, Ryan McKenna and Benjamin Garry galvanize the region with a new doc detailing the controversial history of the radical African-American commune, MOVE. Narrated by Howard Zinn and woven of interviews and archival material, this 50-min. essay foregrounds issues of Black identity, separatist living, political racism, and police brutality that have become part of a contentious national debate since the 1985 Philadelphia fire-bombing. Following their debut, we'll revive (on video) Ivan Dixon's outrageous satire The Spook Who Sat by the Door in which a dissatisfied "token Black" CIA agent takes his espionage tools to the ghetto to launch a guerrilla war against the white power structure on the occasion of this Black Power cult classic's 30th anniversary.

 

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

The Hallucination Generation

SAT. 10/9: ERIK DAVIS' ALTERED STATE: CALIFORNIA VISIONARY FILM .

Performance lecturer Erik Davis returns to OC with a dose of visionary cinema from psychedelic-era California, exploring how media and mysticism fused within the crucible of its spiritual counter-culture. The Haight-based author of Techgnosis initiates his lecture-demo with the abstract animations of Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, and James Whitney. Then Davis proceeds to illuminate a more figurative body of film work, including Curtis Harrington's very rarely seen Wormwood Star, Larry Jordan's Triptych in Four Parts, Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother, and Bruce Conner's expanded Looking for Mushrooms. Trip fare: $6.66.

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sex Positive

SAT. 10/16: THE NAKED FEMINIST +

Here's the NorCal theatrical debut of Louisa Achilles' empowering doc on women who actively chose a career in the sex industry, as opposed to being victims of it. Her 50-min. investigation gives voice to proud porn superstars Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, Candida Royale, and Marilyn Chambers, interspersed with behind-the-scenes peeks into the world of hardcore entertainment. PLUS a pair of additional premieres: Sylvia Schedelbauer's manga-enhanced, on-the-set glimpse inside the realm of Japanese adult-film actresses, and Julia Ostertag's bold declaration of libidinal independence, SexJunkie. ALSO: A quartet of Oddball's early erotica, and Robbyn Leonard's "Snake Charmer" installation. Special sextravaganza price: $7.

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

Re-Defeat Bush

SAT. 10/23: KAL SPELLETICH & MATT HECKERT'S BUSHWHACK

 

Kal "Seemen" Spelletich emcees this industrial-strength assault on the abomination who inhabits and if we have anything to do with it, will soon vacate the White House. Please help us drive this demon out by supporting our last-ditch punk-rock pow-wow to rally the local anti-authoritarian forces. Kal invites attendees to try out his Presidential Head-Puncher, and kinetic sculptor Matt "Pink Section" Heckert also debuts a kick-ass pyrotechnic apparatus and a new collage video. ALSO: shorts by Animal Charm, Aaron Valdez, Bryan Boyce, James Ficklin, Jeff Taylor, Steven Wong, Eli Elliott, and Mark Rinehart's provocative portrait of Kal, Propane Rain. As partying partisans pummel the Bush puppet, all are encouraged to support punkvoter.com by kickin' in for the keg. Hell yeah!

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   


 

 

 

 

 

Shock Cinema

SAT. 10/30: GREGORY'S GODFATHERS OF MONDO +

With 1962's Mondo Cane, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi gave birth to the mondo genre, which is today a sprawling sector of cinema between exploitation and documentary, recently receiving renewed attention as so-called "Reality TV." In David Gregory's feature-length survey of their careers, these two Italian auteurs make a final effort to defend their "shockumentary" approach from the critical storm that labeled their work as hopelessly colonial and racist. This new review is packed to the gills with excerpts and insider information. Come in costume for free mulled wine (served by maniacs on the loose!) and ambient visual treats, including The Addams Family, Boris Karloff, Eartha Kitt as Cat Woman, and the Yves Klein clip from the original Mondo Cane.

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

 

True or Farce?

SAT. 11/6: CHAPMAN + PACKARD'S STAR WARS MOCK + DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

As the second installment of our two-week Pseudo-Doc duo, here's the SF debut of three outrageous challenges to our critical faculties. Damon Packard's Star Wars Mockumentary hurls a half-hour of knee-slapping scorn at the man everyone loves to hate, George Lucas. William Karel's 50-min. Dark Side of the Moon is possibly the most clever confabulation of urban myth, journalistic chicanery, and editing sleight-of-hand ever to argue for the lunar-landing hoax a fake documentary about a fake movie about a fake moon-landing. Adding his razor-sharp wit and his razor-thin presence to our Salon of Skepticism is Gibbs Chapman with his finger-pointing Push Button, a 16mm critique of leisure ideology. PLUS Leonard Nimoy's Bigfoot, UFOs, & imitation krab.

 

 

East vs. West

SAT. 11/13: STRATMAN'S KINGS OF THE SKY + HONG'S TAIPEI 101 + CHEN'S INTO AIR

Apropos the dramatic effects of globalization, these three new pieces test the shifting tensions within and among racial and ethnic identities in the sleeping giant of the 21st Century, China. Guggenheim Fellow Deborah Stratman (of ‘03's In Order Not to Be Here) took her camera to Chinese Turkestan, touring by bus with an Uyghur acrobat troupe. Her perilous verité of heroic tightrope-walking in Muslim communities chafing under post-9/11 "nationalization" presents us with a poignant metaphor for a precarious balance of power and autonomy among Asian minorities. Local essayist James Hong returns from Taipei with a caustic commentary on the Americanization of this increasingly Westernized world capital. Part poetic meditation, part political manifesto, Ms. Dovar Chen's lyrically lensed Into Air weaves an exquisite audiovisual tapestry of the sights and sounds of Taiwanese workers facing a globalized economy upon admission into the WTO.

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

 

This Guitar Kills Fascists

SAT. 11/20 JESSE DREW'S RED COUNTRY & JOHNNY CASH'S RIDIN' THE RAILS

Part 1 of our Hillbillies and Hobos double-header brings back to the Bay Area the good doctor (and doc maker) Jesse Drew, who digs down into the roots of 20th-century "country" music, as it became differentiated from folk. A new set of politics was grafted onto the formerly democratic, working-class musical genre as a result of Cold War anti-communism, Vietnam-era militarism, and backlash against liberal lifestyles. Jesse demonstrates these ideological declensions through a loving review of the music of the Carter Family, Ernest Tubb, Merle Travis, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Paycheck, and many more. And in celebration of a singer that couldn't be co-opted, we'll close our hootenanny with Johnny Cash's jaw-dropping 45-min. novelty, Ridin' the Rails, sung/narrated by the Man in Black himself. PLUS moonshine swillin' and swoonin' to the sounds of the Mad Cow String Band.

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

Tagging Town & Country

SAT. 11/27: DANIEL'S BOZO + PARKER'S PIECE BY PIECE + STONE'S UNDERFOOT

Tentatively slated to introduce his magnum opus Who Is Bozo Texino?, Bill "Flight Risk" Daniel delivers the results of 20 years of dangerous documentation of hobo and railworker graffiti. Hand-crafted from hours of super-8 and 16mm film, freight-car interviews and campfire recordings, and copious photos of chalk and grease-pencil monikers, this subcultural survey narrates a very rare history of railroad's greatest graffiti legends. Also in person, Jon Parker's hour-plus Piece picks up the story in ‘70s SF, and painstakingly chronicles the generations of urban spray-painters since. Capping off this carnival of outsider art is Melinda Stone's marvelous new movie on sidewalk graffiti!

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

Media Archaeology

SAT. 12/4: PRELINGER'S PANORAMA EPHEMERA + CONNAH'S HOME-MOVIE MUSIQUE

Rick Prelinger, archivist, essayist, and free-culture advocate, graces our gallery with his rich compendium of mid-century industrial-film artifacts. A patchwork quilt stitched from the myriad skeins of our cinematic collective (sub)conscious, this feature-length compilation flows from his fabled treasure-trove of informational and orphaned motion-picture Americana. Opening the evening is the masterful artistry of Mr. Graham Connah and friends. These interpretive musicians have created original compositions to a rapturous suite of our loveliest 16mm rolls of personal travelogue and home-movie material, including views of ‘20s Spanish mercados, poetic reveries of ‘50s Hungarian cemeteries, and delirious color rhapsodies of Central Park in the Sixties. Come at 8pm for a compelling personal memoire of the '39 World's Fair, unspooled to the accompaniment of period 78s. AND free flea market slides, of course.

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

 

Video Trouvé

SAT. 12/11: FOUND MAGAZINE'S FOUND VIDEO FESTIVAL

In the OC spirit of serendipitous street magic, and as the second part of our Media Retrieval mini-series, here's a cabinet of curiosities curated by Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner (tho they'll have to leave the building a couple days before the actual screening). Their collection project struck a national nerve 3 years ago by recognizing the revelatory potential of discarded lists, notes, letters, and doodles. For this, their first foray into time-based ephemera (!), these scavengers have turned their sense of the sublimely absurd to those VHS cassettes that we everyday see underfoot, or in second-hand stores and sidewalk sales. Come and appreciate the pathos and unintentional poetry of even the most improbable video flotsam. PLUS Craig Baldwin's double-projector Roto-Rooter performance, a special sidebar of rank-amateur music "demos," 2-bit beer, and free found CDs!

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

Avant To Live

SAT. 12/18: NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS

As always, our calendar is consummated by a flaming cavalcade of recent pieces that celebrate personal expression and radical cinematic form. Among the titles, most in their debut, are Anne McGuire's Elizabeth Hepburn Sings, Marshall Weber's Requiem for a Dying Planet, Ken Paul Rosenthal's Flow, Aaron Valdez' Big Screen Version, Enid Blader's Hammerhead, Ben Folstein's Attack of the Fisher Cat, and a nice pair of premieres from Martha Colburn, A Little Dutch Thrill and XXX Amsterdam. ALSO on the program are new projects from Negativland, Adam Bork, Ben Wood, Yin-Ju Chen, and Robbyn Leonard's Falling, with live music by Laurie Amat & Lucio Menegon. Holiday Bonus: an atrocity exhibition of the worst-ever Xmas films in multi-projection mode.

Click here for Quicktime Preview
   

 

Previous Calendars