In Person: Michael Betancourt, Yin-Ju Chen and Zack Parrinella
presented in association with Canyon Cinema Foundation, Center for New Music, Oddball Film + Video and Shapeshifters Cinema
sponsored by LUNA, MUBI, Ninkasi Brewing and Vimeo
technical sponsor San Francisco Film Society
Full Festival Pass: [$70 general/$40 Cinematheque members] available here.
Admission: [$10 general/$5 Cinematheque members]. Advance tickets available here.
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Films on the flows of power, through virtual space, physical space, non-space and outer space. Displaced speculative fictions for the Anthropocene end times. (Steve Polta)
SCREENING:
The Dogs of Space (2015) by Michael Betancourt; digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes, from the maker bay area premiere
A short dramatizing the launch of two Soviet space dogs, Belka and Strelka, into orbit. This narrative fuses documentary, scientific, fictional and abstract glitch footage into a composite story. (Michael Betancourt)
Non-Places: Beyond the Infinite (2016) by Péter Lichter; digital video, b&w, sound, 6 minutes, from the maker bay area premiere
Marc Augé's essay (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) meets with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in some Hungarian highway rest areas. (Péter Lichter)
Shooting Star (2015) by Pierre Yves Clouin; digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes, from the maker U.S. premiere
It is because I’m shooting this star that this star is a shooting star. (Pierre Yves Clouin)
Le Pays Dévasté (The Devastated Land) (2015) by Emmanuel Lefrant; 35mm, color, sound, 12 minutes, from Light Cone bay area premiere
—What do you see?
—A place not suited for human beings
Le Pays Dévasté relates to the Anthropocene, the current geological age, viewed as the period during in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. (Emmanuel Lefrant)
A Distant Episode (2015) by Ben Rivers; digital video, b&w, sound, 18 minutes, from LUX bay area premiere
A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind-the-scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black and white, hallucinogenic world. (Ben Rivers)
Industroclaustria (2015) by Zack Parrinella; 16mm, b&w, sound, 5 minutes, from the maker bay area premiere
Modern human society requires copious amounts of machines and industry to succeed. Industry surrounds all of our cities and cuts through every landscape. This film explores the feeling of claustrophobia that is evoked by this endless machinery. (Zack Parrinella)
Iron Condor (2015) by Meredith Lackey; 16mm, b&w, sound, 10 minutes, from the maker bay area premiere
Iron Condor presents the sensible evidence of the Chicago Futures and Options Exchange from grain to data. The film takes its name from an option trading strategy whose profit/loss graph resembles a large bird. Through an exploration of spaces in the American Midwest including a day trader’s cabin in rural Indiana, a palace of murals made from corn in Iowa, a sinkhole in the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky, an ubiquitous data center monitored by analog telephone handsets and an indoor skydiving facility in Illinois, Iron Condor proposes a nexus of data, virtualization and commodity while searching for human presence in the contemporary landscape. Leo Melamed, the American pioneer of financial futures, describes the stock market prior to electronic trading: “...windows were what you peered through, a mouse was a rodent and the apple was but a fruit.” (Meredith Lackey)
One Universe, One God, One Nation (2012) by Yin-Ju Chen; digital video, color, sound, 17 minutes, from the maker bay area premiere
Yin-Ju Chen’s new video installation One Universe, One God, One Nation seeks to evoke a sense of closure and despair in the face of the inescapable cycles of history. The particular moment evoked here is the age of space exploration in the 1960s, juxtaposed with the forms of imperial, ideological and totalitarian power existing at that time. The inspiration for the work came from Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration as a form of “world alienation” and also from the astrological horoscope of Chiang Kai-Shek, which predicts his charismatic and authoritarian character. How is it that most modern movements for a better future, and all attempts to break free from the chains of power, ultimately fall prey to their own mythologies? Here we enter the slippery ground between “science” and “collective dream image,” between the knowledge and the fantasy of an epoch. One Universe, One God, One Nation is a visual meditation on power, modern forms of totality and totalitarianism, mass mobilization, devotion, the auratic and the supernatural. It works through the juxtaposition of images taken in outer space with images of war and submission to power. (Anselm Franke, Taipei Biennial 2012)
Above still taken from Iron Condor by Meredith Lackey
CROSSROADS 2016 receives generous support from: Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation and The Willow Foundation.