For seventeen years, the Venice CA-based PXL THIS Festival has celebrated the astounding persistence of the Fisher Price PXL-2000 camera, a plastic video camcorder that records sound and image directly onto audiocassettes. An invention without a future, the toy camera seemed dead on arrival, yet has proved itself a format that refuses to give up the ghost. Join us tonight to toast its astounding resilience as the inimitable fest-director Gerry Fialka leads us through highlights of his one of a kind video showcase, exploring the significance of this raw DIY moving image art-form with fourteen amusing PXL shorts from across the world, ranging in themes from the US involvement in Iraq as assayed by hand gestures in L.M. Sabo's Gestures; an 8-year old's lesson from a bee's eye-view in About Flowers; and an aesthetic exploration of horrific dreamscapes in Struan Ashby and Roy Parkhurst's Somnigraphic Traces of the Otherwise Undocumented Friedkin Institute for Sleep Disorder Research, and much much more. The program begins early with an interactive workshop on the wonders of the amazing device; prepare to be astounded. (Steve Polta and Jennifer Blaylock)

Program Notes

Tonight! Anne McGuire and George Kuchar, two twinkling pixels of video art goodness, team up for a Valentine's Day love fest, presenting a bountiful bouquet of voyeuristic melodrama, bemused tragicomedy, soap opera sentimentality and touching personal portraiture. Gorgeous George, the prowling, camcording everyman, presents new episodes of his continuous series of everyday video encounters, including The Legend of Creepy Hollow, VistaVisions, Centennial—a new weather diary (or sorts)—and a sure-to-be-special "new work of the new year." The magnificent Ms. McGuire will present televisual meltdowns All Smiles and Sadness (featuring Kuchar) and I’m Crazy and You're Not Wrong; her self-portrait-as-cyborg, When I Was a Monster; the stalkeriffic, SF Marina-lensed Joe DiMaggio 1, 2, 3; as well as Turntable and Wegman. Bring a date and overdose on the sweetness! (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

First prize winner at the 2007 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Jessie Stead's "structuralist road movie" Foggy Mountains Breakdown More Than Non-Foggy Mountains explores the magical mundanity of byway wandering (as well as the pleasures and absurdities of cinematic structuralism) with an endlessly mutating parade of Super-8 travelogue, abstract direct animation, transient poetics, and version after version of the Flatt & Scruggs bluegrass classic. Described by Ed Halter as "a strange brew of visual semi-sequiturs and relentless editorial logic," Foggy Mountains... receives its West Coast premiere tonight alongside Robert Nelson's long-rumored and virtually unscreened 1997 masterpiece Hauling Toto Big (also an Ann Arbor honoree). Decades in the making, Hauling... is Foggy...'s perfect complement, colliding a sprawling and unruly reality—complete with crazed carnies and rundown ranch hands—with Nelson's own idiosyncratic brand of home-brew formalism. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

Distributed Memory, originally presented at the Getty Center, features commissioned pieces supported in part by Montalvo Arts Center, pairs filmmakers and composers in the creation of collaborative real-time cinematic works from the recomposition of found and new materials. This evening is the second in a two-part series curated by Julie Lazar (the first will be presented at Montalvo Arts Center on February 8). In Rotary Wobble and Horizontal Boundaries, Pat O'Neill's formalized contemplations of urban and natural environments are merged with electronic musician Carl Stone's live digital scores. Janie Geiser and Tom Recchion’s fusion of live performance, re-photography and collage animation, Magnetic Sleep, reinterprets the formal melodramatic traditions of Man Ray and Maya Deren. (Steve Polta)

These films harness the forces of nature by attending to rich details of landscape and encounter. John Price's View of the Falls from the Canadian Side and Rose Lowder's Roulement, rouerie, aubage discover a lyrical rhythm and form to the flow of rushing water. Chris Welsby's Drift and David Rimmer's Narrows Inlet trace markings along sea and shore through the veil of lifting fog. Charlotte Pryce's miniaturist cinema reveals mythic illuminations of insect life in Concerning Flight while John Price's gun/play captures oblique moments that transition between earth and sky. Robert Todd's intimate camera in Qualities of Stone and Rebecca Meyer's more distanced view in things we want to see both trace the passing of time through the etchings of place. (Chris Kennedy and Vanessa O'Neill)

Program Notes

Kicking off the Light Works retrospective, Jennifer Reeves' tonight presents some of her most recent projects—elaborate film experiences presented in richly colored and extensively hand-manipulated 16mm celluloid. Even as filmmakers' attentions turn towards the digital, the multi-screened and performative works on tonight's program—Light Work Mood Disorder and He Walked Away—eschew single strand/single screen presentation and expand on the artists' already accomplished work with abstract visuals and direct-film techniques, providing, in the words of Timothy Zwettler, "a big reminder of the fragile, forgotten materiality of film for a new generation of artists." Also screening: 1999's Darling International (co-directed by M.M. Serra), excerpts from in-progress multi-screen works and other surprises exclusive to the San Francisco engagement. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

Cinematheque concludes its whirlwind Reeves retrospective tonight with her 2004 feature, The Time We Killed. Shot in striking high-con black and white, The Time We Killed is an immersively captivating, free-associative tale of an agoraphobic writer fearfully trapped in her Brooklyn apartment on 9/11. A collaboration with poet Lisa Jarnot, who appears on screen in nearly every frame (and whose poetry is featured), the film is a claustrophobic exploration of contemporary subjectivity and the relationship between internal and external reality, “a cinematic fugue of lost lovers, found memories and televised invasions.” The Time We Killed will be preceded by one of Reeves’ earliest films, Elations In Negative. (Steve Polta)

Program Notes

Six recent works which vacillate between radical introspection and cosmological wonder, each inverting interior and exterior worlds, finding intimacy in the cosmos, divinity in the details. Sylvia Schedelbauer's associative collage Remote Intimacy presents a detached personal history with the dreadful certainty of a dream. Mark Street's Alone, Apart meanders between filmic figure and ground, wresting strangeness from the everyday while Jeanne Liotta's Eclipse allows the lunar eclipse to shine through emulsified noise. Abraham Ravett's Tziporah and Karen Johannesen's Light Speed each meditate on domestic details, hinting at the eternal within the everyday and Peggy Ahwesh's Warm Objects uses a heat-sensing camera to look (just) beyond the skin deep. Finally, traveling sound artists Paul Bradley and Maile Colbert present a cinematic translation of their multi-channel installation, Transit, an environmental work exploring spaces between memory and emotion, between inhale and exhale. (Steve Polta)

Tonight we celebrate the release of Cinematograph Seven—Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Thomas Beard, with a blowout event on the verge of raucous cinematic madness. Join us for the rhythmic analog anomalies of Refraction (“performative cinema with motion film and sound delivered by mechanical means”), presented by collective members of Wet Gate and Cine Pimps; the patchwork performance of Sue Costabile, aka SUE.C, which combines a crafty amalgam of photography, watercolor, hand-made paper, fabrics and drawing into a dark and moody textural milieu; and the convulsive vintage video-scape mash-ups of SoCal duo Animal Charm, as we commemorate this elated occasion. Come for the “live cinema” delirium and flip through the pages of our publication of honor. This fine volume, available tonight includes documentation of Brian Frye in conversation with Guy Sherwin, Lia Gangitano on Luther Price’s performance films, Ed Halter in conversation with Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, program notes by Bruce McClure with annotations by Tess Takahashi, and Mike Plante on Animal Charm, as well as other essays and ephemera from Cory Arcangel, Zoe Beloff, silt, and Ian White. (Jennifer Blaylock)

Tonight's films divulge the buried undercurrents of institutional manipulation, emotional experience and the social politics imbedded within documentary images and image making. Kwame Braun's experimental video essay, passing girl: riverside—An Essay on Camera Work, unfolds the complexities of emotion and politics entwined within a simple moment between a young girl and a man with a video camera. Memo to Pic Desk, by Chris Kennedy and Anna van der Meulen, takes an idiosyncratic look at the theatricality of vintage news photography using typewritten materials from the archives of the Toronto Daily to disclose how moral codes, delinquency, and freewill are pulled into an altered coherence. Harun Farocki's Respite resurrects archival footage from 1941 that documents the life of inmates at the Dutch transit camp for Jews in Westerbork, Holland. Shot by an inmate of the camp at the command of an SS officer, the hidden politics of the images create a visual tension of conflicted interests. Farocki, in an ode to silent film, has inserted inter-titles with detailed descriptions of the images as well as his own ruminations on the psychologically complex footage. (Jennifer Blaylock)

When asked once about his orchestral work Skies of America, avant-garde jazz musician and composer Ornette Coleman explained, "I was trying to describe something that has no territory." Along the way, through Skies... and other ambitious works, Coleman changed the potentialities of music itself. It's in that spirit-of figuring the unimaginable and reworking both the subject and practice of art-that the films in this program invent new ways to map real and imagined landscapes.

On the Assassination of the President they say that the conspiracy theory is the worldview of the disenfranchised. We aren't sure who says that. But, whoever they are, they might tone it down and take a page from Adam Keker. This astonishing "expose" reveals the top-secret dossier to be viewed only in the event of the president's death. (Adam Keker, USA 2007, 6 min) In GGA competition.

Number One If the operation of the human mind were visualized, one version might look like this sublime video. Pierce presents thinking as a multivalent mechanism, continuously attracted to multiple thresholds of the concrete and abstract. (Leighton Pierce, USA 2007, 10 min) In GGA competition.

Energy! This video is amazing! But what is it? The producers say it depicts "an uncontrolled electrical discharge of 30,000 volts that exposes photographic paper, which is then arranged in time to create new visual systems of electron organization." We're inclined to agree. (Thorsten Fleisch, Germany 2007, 5 min) In GGA competition.

Cabinet A hand on the shoulder. A deep breath. An empty room. Todd Herman's fragile video presents a conceptual space between aging and expiration. (Todd Herman, USA/NA 2007, 16 min) In GGA competition.

The Drift The song came from outer space and sparked a devolution. Everything falls apart... and floats away. (Kelly Sears, USA 2007, 9 min)

Easter Morning Shot in 1966 and rediscovered by Conner, this (originally) 8mm beauty includes effects and editing performed in camera and a score by Terry Riley. This is a completely different, re-imagined and reconfigured work than Conner's classic Easter Morning Raga (1966). (Bruce Conner, USA 2008, 10 min)

Observando el Cielo The absolutely breathtaking Observando... won a prestigious Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival for being, as the RIFF jurors described it, "unafraid of beauty." The film comprises seven years of astrological field studies figuring Earth itself as a giant recording device. (Jeanne Liotta, USA 2007, 19 min) In GGA competition.

Total running time 75 min.

Since 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of work exploring the poetics of loss and the dangers of mediated experience, a cinema of ambivalent melancholy and existential danger. The General Returns from One Place to Another pits a cynical Frank O’Hara monologue against an ominous vibrating landscape. And We All Shine On is a machine-eyed vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise. Light Is Waiting, in which a Full House episode "devours itself from the inside out," excavates a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Frequently working with abjected imagery—forgotten television, mid-century magazines—and overly familiar pop songs, Robinson’s work flirts with a resigned pessimism, yet dares to find hope in the very heart of despair. Also screening: Tidal, Victory Over the Sun, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Chiquitita and the Soft Escape and All Through the Night. (Steve Polta)

In his landmark "A People's History of the United States", historian Howard Zinn toppled the conventions of top-down historiography by focusing on those whose voices are rarely heard. Filmmaker John Gianvito, inspired by Zinn, creates his own unique testament, a minimalist memorial to America's radicals and freethinkers. A film of poetic simplicity, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind uses a mostly still camera and ambient sound to contemplate a series of gravestones and historical markers memorializing people who fought daringly and selflessly for social equality and justice. In its quiet way the film mimics with surprising effectiveness the inherently evocative power of these sites, as each viewer calls up his or her own memory and imagining of the voices and images of the past. The graves of John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez and others thus mark a picturesque yet somber travelogue through American history that culminates in a stirring montage of ordinary people marching and organizing in the spirit of those who came before them. Some graves may be unmarked or passed over, but Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind reminds us that the lives and ideas they stand for live on in us.

Pool In the aftermath of the devastating tsunami of 2004, a small town in Indonesia begins repairing a shattered community. There, in a half-finished swimming pool used as a makeshift reservoir, local children conquer newfound fears by learning to swim again, in this poignant reflection on healing. (Chris Chong Chan, Malaysia 2007, 13 min)

When asked once about his orchestral work Skies of America, avant-garde jazz musician and composer Ornette Coleman explained, "I was trying to describe something that has no territory." Along the way, through Skies... and other ambitious works, Coleman changed the potentialities of music itself. It's in that spirit-of figuring the unimaginable and reworking both the subject and practice of art-that the films in this program invent new ways to map real and imagined landscapes.

On the Assassination of the President they say that the conspiracy theory is the worldview of the disenfranchised. We aren't sure who says that. But, whoever they are, they might tone it down and take a page from Adam Keker. This astonishing "expose" reveals the top-secret dossier to be viewed only in the event of the president's death. (Adam Keker, USA 2007, 6 min) In GGA competition.

Number One If the operation of the human mind were visualized, one version might look like this sublime video. Pierce presents thinking as a multivalent mechanism, continuously attracted to multiple thresholds of the concrete and abstract. (Leighton Pierce, USA 2007, 10 min) In GGA competition.

Energy! This video is amazing! But what is it? The producers say it depicts "an uncontrolled electrical discharge of 30,000 volts that exposes photographic paper, which is then arranged in time to create new visual systems of electron organization." We're inclined to agree. (Thorsten Fleisch, Germany 2007, 5 min) In GGA competition.

Cabinet A hand on the shoulder. A deep breath. An empty room. Todd Herman's fragile video presents a conceptual space between aging and expiration. (Todd Herman, USA/NA 2007, 16 min) In GGA competition.

The Drift The song came from outer space and sparked a devolution. Everything falls apart... and floats away. (Kelly Sears, USA 2007, 9 min)

Easter Morning Shot in 1966 and rediscovered by Conner, this (originally) 8mm beauty includes effects and editing performed in camera and a score by Terry Riley. This is a completely different, re-imagined and reconfigured work than Conner's classic Easter Morning Raga (1966). (Bruce Conner, USA 2008, 10 min)

Observando el Cielo The absolutely breathtaking Observando... won a prestigious Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival for being, as the RIFF jurors described it, "unafraid of beauty." The film comprises seven years of astrological field studies figuring Earth itself as a giant recording device. (Jeanne Liotta, USA 2007, 19 min) In GGA competition.

Total running time 75 min.

In his landmark "A People's History of the United States", historian Howard Zinn toppled the conventions of top-down historiography by focusing on those whose voices are rarely heard. Filmmaker John Gianvito, inspired by Zinn, creates his own unique testament, a minimalist memorial to America's radicals and freethinkers. A film of poetic simplicity, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind uses a mostly still camera and ambient sound to contemplate a series of gravestones and historical markers memorializing people who fought daringly and selflessly for social equality and justice. In its quiet way the film mimics with surprising effectiveness the inherently evocative power of these sites, as each viewer calls up his or her own memory and imagining of the voices and images of the past. The graves of John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez and others thus mark a picturesque yet somber travelogue through American history that culminates in a stirring montage of ordinary people marching and organizing in the spirit of those who came before them. Some graves may be unmarked or passed over, but Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind reminds us that the lives and ideas they stand for live on in us.

Pool In the aftermath of the devastating tsunami of 2004, a small town in Indonesia begins repairing a shattered community. There, in a half-finished swimming pool used as a makeshift reservoir, local children conquer newfound fears by learning to swim again, in this poignant reflection on healing. (Chris Chong Chan, Malaysia 2007, 13 min)