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We show films every Saturday at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st).
SHOWTIME 8:00pm. ALWAYS FREE BOOKS, VINYL, VHS, AND WINE.
SEPT. 16: PEOPLE LIKE US + MUTANTS + KRAFTWERK +We're blasting out of radio silence with as star-studded a show as any this year: Vicki Bennett (aka P.L.U.) IN PERSON, a UK A/V queen coming back to the West Coast with more of the wildly wily collage narratives that we've all grown to love! ALSO our very own outrageous innovators, the Mutants, in the Cali premiere of Mike Plante's 17-min. look back at their punk rock heyday. AND juicy clips of both Kraftwerk and Negativland in rarely seen performance-docs. Negativland VJ and SFAI whiz Sue-C is in fact spotlit in a Ryan Worsley short, and even fellow Art Institute alums the Avengers get into the act via an obscure 1979 Tri-X doc of a SOMA gig. PLUS Pussy Riot, a Soda_Jerk nougat, a Scopitone nugget, some pedal steel shenanigans, and Russ Forster's theremin--live on Valencia Street! $12
SEPT. 23: LOST HIGHWAYS TRAVELOGS/BOOK LAUNCH
It is rare enough that we have the opportunity to watch experimental road movies, but that such a program would be framed by an introduction and book launch by thee international expert, in our first Psycho-Geo go-round of the Fall season, is cause for celebration indeed! Oft-times researching in the Bay Area during the writing of Lost Highways, Embodied Travels, Kornelia Boczkowska is of course especially interested in having her personal selection of artists' films–all discussed at length in her extraordinary edition--shared with our kino-community. Her exquisite curation includes works by Bill Morrison, Ken Kobland, Sky Hopinka, Peter Rose, Jessica Bardsley, Bill Brown, Cathy Lee Crane, Paige Taul, and Jon Behrens (RIP). And even more rarities are packed into this diverse review of hand-made, animated, found footage, structuralist, diaristic, and narrative pieces--all on TRAVEL--in a 2-part program that will proudly serve as Kornelia's principal West Coast tour stop. Free postcards! $10
SEPT. 30: ROURKE's SUTRO FLOWER TOWER + IVY/JOSH's UNDERCOMMONS + Our second Focus on Locus boasts a first half exclusively about our own Bay Area! Jeremy Rourke debuts an animation/music/performance hybrid on the history of Adolph Sutro and his eponymous Tower, and he also drops a dollop of knowledge 'bout the history of our very own ATA Gallery! ALSO Ivy McClelland (via video) and Josh Harper are both on board for a guided tour of the compilation tape anchoring their recent Adobe Books UnderCommons exhibition, of essential NorCal counter-culture. PLUS People's Park (Anthony Buchanan), Folsom St. Fair (James Hong), Berkeley Mudflats (Chris Marker), Oakland Cemetery (Kevin Deal?), Bay Area Billboard Art (David Heintz), and, yes, the Bullitt trailer (Steve McQueen). AND THEN: The second, “Exterior” part of the program promises the premiere of of Karl (Godspeed You Black Emperor) Lemieux' uncanny Quiet Zone, ex-SF Andy Moore's expansive Valley Fever, Jeff Doyle's sublime Window, and Jake Parker Scott's fluid Monterey Aquarium. $10
OCT. 7: SHAPING SAN FRANCISCO's 25th B-DAY BASH! OC is overjoyed to host the 25th Birthday celebration of our stalwart Mission District cohort Shaping SF! We’ve been privileged to witness the birth and continued growth of this enlightened Psycho-Geographic org, and tonight we're collaborating on a program that is in fact ON our shared neighborhood! Amidst the cake, snacks and drinks, the much-beloved Vero Majano steps forward with a slate of of films and videos that serve as compelling testimonies to the wrenching changes in the 'hood over the past half-century, starting with Ray Balberan’s little-seen Blame It on the Reds. PLUS Vero’s own I Reminisce, Al Hernandez' That Mission Rising, a chapter from the film based on Michelle Tea's Valencia, Viva 16, and A Young Girl’s Poem. We round out the evening with Sabrina Alonso’s Mischief at 16th and Florida. Chris Carlsson and LisaRuth Elliott are also in the house to reflect on a quarter-century of their indispensable research, writings, and guided tours. $10
Outrageous, energized, and oh so campy, Marie Losier's loving portraits of world- famous artists and performers have long delivered deliciously on the international festival circuit, but now we're specially blessed with her spunky esprit IN PERSON, as she's just arrived in town for her 6-week Residents shoot. In the first iteration of OC's ELECTRONICA TRIFECTA, tonight she'll share her newest bouillabaisse about OC fave Felix Kubin, a genius German musical prankster profiled in all his glorious goofiness! AND Marie is joined onstage by none Other than Mike Kuchar, not only the subject of her Bird Bath, and Beyond, but also the inspired cine artiste behind the ever more relevant sexual-identity puzzler The Secret of Wendel Samson, starring Red Grooms! AND dearly departed Kuchar twin George remains present in our hearts and minds via Marie's momento mori Electrocute your Stars. Free Bud Lites to support their trans stance! $12
Apropos of the tragic loss of Mills College, here's the SF premiere of Daniel Weintrub's righteous doc, tracing the life and work of the visionary composer and performer who taught there for many years. Oliveros was one of the world's original electronic musicians, and one of the few females amongst the early generation of post-War American experimentalists. She was a master accordion player, a mentor to hundreds of contemporary musical artists, and a technological innovator who developed software to to enable the disabled to create their own music. At the vanguard of US sound art for six decades, her philosophy inspired Terry Riley, Laurie Anderson, Linda Montano, Alvin Lucier, Morton Subotnik, Ramon Sender, Miya Masaoka, and Thurston Moore, all of whom we see and hear in this fascinating feature serving of archival footage, interviews, and performances. Introducing and contextualizing the movie is none other than Matt Robidoux, local hero-artist and an ex-Oliveros student. $11
Here’s an overdue appreciation of freakin' genius Fluxus understandings that were introduced not only into Art, but into everyday life by none Other than Nam June Paik! In Amanda Kim’s electrifying hour doc, we see the radicalization of the unassuming Korean classical pianist by the ideas of John Cage, and then his ensuing career of delightfully playful sculpture and performance, mostly with the banal TV receiver. AND in fact, we’ve got a like-minded Live A/V crew in the house who enact some of that same media-delirium in their half-hour performance piece: Michael Masaru Flora, Too Hands and Isorhythmics singly and collectively twist, switch, and stutter behind their deconstructed cathode ray tubes! AND with a nod towards the approaching All Hallow’s Eve, we’ve assembling a roster of supporting shorts to further the crucial notion of creative play:Alice in Wonderland, Cat Woman, King Kong, and Monte Cazazza (RIP) all surprise our eyes in ways so true to trickin'-n-treatin’. Come in costume ready and willing to savor Gilbert Guerrero’s Shapeshifter suds! $12
Zoe Beloff IN PERSON!: A trilogy of works reimagining the unrealized Hollywood projects of three radical 20th Century artists. In 1930, Sergei Eisenstein pitched a science-fiction film Glass House to Paramount Pictures, its theme is the architecture of surveillance. Eleven years later, Bertolt Brecht arrived in Los Angeles, where he wrote notes for a film A Model Family in a Model Home, inspired by a Life Magazine article about a farm family who win a week’s stay in a model home at the Ohio State Fair. In 1947 writer and film critic James Agee wrote a scenario for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. Deeply disturbed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Agee imagined New York destroyed. In the ruins, Chaplin’s Little Tramp builds a shack in Central Park. Agee's was a thought experiment about how one might start again in the aftermath of disaster, to go beyond capitalism in the face of our modern technological world. Together, these films portray an alternative history of what might have happened had these figures manned the dream factory for a shift. $12
NOV. 11: JORDAN BELSON RETRO + PAD/BOB's VISIONARY 3-D An eye-popper, both hyper-abstract and hyper-real! Tonight's Optronica2 promises a mini-retro of newly restored 16mm masterworks by none other Jordan Belson, thee North Beach visionary who opened up new dimensions of cinematic experience in both his legendary Vortex light shows in GGP's Planetarium and in his psychedelic single-channel film works. Introduced by local Belson scholar Lumia, we see four pristine prints from his late 60s/early 70s peak: Phenomena, Momentum, Meditation, and Chakra. Lumia segues between the pieces with biographical background, 35mm slides, recorded audio, and a video visit by Anthology Film Archives' John Klacsmann aiding curator Raymond Foye in his inspired preservation project. Sharing top billing are the utterly astounding stereoscopic projections of Pad McLaughlin and Bob Bloomberg, much-loved OC superstars, arguablythe leading purveyors of 3-D magick in all of NorCal. They mobilize a matrix of brilliant projectors, radiant screens, and audio playback to conjure up their own set of impossible worlds: A pair of new collaborations, Hall/Jameson's One Night in Hell, OK Go/Pilobolus Dance Company's All is Not Lost, Santiago Caicedo's Moving Still, et alia. $13
Back after last season's brilliant Samuel Beckett essay, LA-based archivist/artist Ross Lipman graces our gallery with a pair of premieres—new think-pieces that cut beneath the gloss and dross of commercial cinema to analyze the deeper human psychology that drives the work in the first place. In his 70-min. Vanishing Gods meta-commentary, played out through marvelous puppets and countless film clips, a hypnotized dummy manages to recover his memory—in fact the cultural history of ventriloquism itself, from the prophetic tradition to the modern horror film...a strange house-of-mirrors journey into our collective unconscious. Opening is not only Lipman's Cropping of the Spectacle--a deconstruction of the birth and continued ideological power of television via the 1954 anti-Communist McCarthy Hearings broadcasts--but also April Camlin's live ventriloquist act, Glucuous!! PLUS assorted film clips of magicians, marionettes, and puppet-performances. $10
NOV. 25: SHERMAN/BARTEN: TOTAL MOBILE HOME
David Sherman and Rebecca Barten return to OC to unspool underground histories of their DIY exhibition space, Total Mobile Home microCINEMA, and the extraordinary experimental cinema culture that exploded in the 90’s Bay Area. They enact a live cine-essay, mapping a moment in underground film, that began in an illegal basement space, using scavenged technologies, to cultivate intimate connections of makers and audiences. Tis an action-packed journey through the TMH archives of events, including a cine-performance by Luther Price (Clown 2), salons with Bruce Baillie and with Sidney Peterson, and George Kuchar's video portrait Cellar Sinema. ALSO premiering the TMH Oral History Project, a compilation of annotated interviews with Jeffrey Skoller, Steve Anker, Brian Frye, Steve Polta, Irina Leimbacher, Mark Street, and Timoleon Wilkins, plus pieces by TMH participants, including Harun Farocki’s Parallel II, Emily Richardson’s The Futurist, Lynne Sachs’ Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, Scott Stark’s Degrees of Limitation, David Sherman’s Roman Chariot, and Rebecca Barten’s Angelpuke. JUST ADDED: the debut of David’s collage-essay on early video art, including considerations of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. $12
Ecosex is an expanded form of sexuality that imagines sex as an ecology that extends beyond the physical body. The Ecosex Art Movement is alive and well and making movies. Come enjoy the pleasures and sensuality of nature from various international perspectives and styles and get your ecosexual gaze on! It’s also a happening with surprises and free swag. Program includes Playing with Fire—An Ecosexual Hot Mess (a 15-min. sneak peek of Beth & Annie’s next feature film, which is about fire), Imagine the Earth Is Your Lover (one-minute films from around the world curated into a dazzling collection), Ecosexercises (Beth & Annie will demo!), Ecosex Wedding Project (documentation of weddings to nature entities), An Ecosex Walking Tour of Holly Park (documentation of a performance producedwith the SF Public Library), In the Gardenwith the Vaginas of Anarchy, (co-created with Katie Bush), and Farewell Carol Leigh, (an homage to Scarlot Harlot). $11
Calling all atheists, agnostics, and skeptics! We got a laff riot in store for you this “holiday season”! Headlining is the West Coast premiere of thee outrageous hour-plus psychedelic portrait of Apostle Paul, by none other than the prolific comic provocateur outta Pratt, Jim Finn! His fracturedfairytale stars Linda Montano (!) as Christianity's first missionary, sojourning through 16mm religious films (from OC Archives!), cassette propaganda, board games, and animation, all to the tune of Roman Empire doom metal. Finn sends in his personal intro via video. AND: Our program's first half is as stuffed as a Xmas stocking with additional anomalies: Max Oginz is in-person with the debut of his Manifestation Document, Jodie Wille's teaser for her long-awaited Unarius ode, Eldridge Cleaver in Jeremiah Films' Cult Explosion, and a Mormon clip that finds Jesus atop the Mayan pyramids of Yucatan. Come early for eggnog and glimpses of Rochemont's Luther. $9.99
DEC. 16: BECKER + DAVIS/EVANS + N.E.W.
A mini-fest of innovation in film form, this season's NEW Night boasts 15 cine-initiatives, with 12 artists in person! As to “Embodied Exhibition”, in fact a live film-performance anchors each of the two halves of the show: Tommy Becker's Elective Artand John Davis and Keith Evans' 3rdAttractor: Profile, Chorus, Break. AND Others in the flesh are Ellie Vanderlip with Elephant's Foot, Kathleen Quillian's Ten-Dollar Bill, Linda Scobie's Tana, Max Oginz' House of Imaginary Objects, Anthony Buchanan's Cutting Up Winston, T.T. Takemoto'sAlways Wanting, Josh Harper's The Green Hand,Ivy Woods' Handled Handmade-Handfilm, and Luis Booth's T,O,N,G,U,E (with guitar accompaniment). PLUS Mark Street's Long Ago, Far Away, Salise Hughes' Education of Lulu, Jake Scott's Cloud Studies, and Alex Miller's Incubate.Free pencils! $13
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