anticipated artists in person: Ben Balcom and Scott Stark
pictured above: Love and the Epiphanists (Part 1) (2018) by Scott Stark
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ADMISSION DETAILS
Single Screening Admission: $12 general/$10 Cinematheque and SFMOMA members with member code. Single Screening advance tickets available here.
CROSSROADS festival day pass (Saturday & Sunday only): $25
CROSSROADS festival day pass provides admission to all daily CROSSROADS screenings and general admission access to SFMOMA galleries (including Pat O’Neill: Three Answers).
Sunday, June 9 CROSSROADS festival day pass available here.
NOTE: Admission to the special exhibition Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again is not included with the festival day pass but can be purchased here.
Love floats through Hollywood cinema like a flaming dirigible.
— Scott Stark
CROSSROADS 10 culminates with Scott Stark’s Love and the Epiphanists—a sprawling quasi narrative sci-fi performance hybrid based on re-printed and re-purposed Hollywood film trailers. Throughout the program, explosions, eros and (of course) apocalypse abound as history unreels and and we fade to a marvellous view. Dig and search for the meaning of such unexpected life.
Atomic Garden (2018) by Ana Vaz (Brazil); digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
We could say that a firework is not different from a tree, or from a big artificial flower that grows, develops, flowers and dies in a few seconds. Withered, finally, it soon disappears in unrecognizable fragments. Well, let’s take this firework and make it last for a month, and we will have a flower with all the characteristics of other flowers. Or so, inverting the order of factors, may us imagine that the seed of a plant can explode like a bomb. (Bruno Munari)
Atomic Garden is a stroboscopic reflection on transmutation, survival and the resilience of myriad life forms in the face of toxicity. Exploding and expanding past, future and present, the films trusts the anarchy of explosion as a movement of protest and renewal of life in its multiple forms. A stroboscopic tale of survival and transmutation. (Ana Vaz)
Love Seat (2017) by Lyndsay Bloom (US); digital video, color, silent, 3 minutes, exhibition file from the maker world premiere
An experimental film self-portrait considering love, loss, and the aborted. Utilizing a mechanized dolly, layered images suggest the multiplicity of one body. Camera by Giancarlo Ruiz. (Lyndsay Bloom)
The Sequence of Years (2018) by Ben Balcom (US); digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
I am old where I was born. It must have been magnificent once. The way it appears now is not how it once was. It couldn’t be, otherwise this would be something else. Perhaps for a moment I am there again. But when I open my eyes, I can’t remember anything. There is only this longing for someplace I've never been. (Ben Balcom)
Fountains of Paris (2018) by Stephen Broomer (Canada); digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes, exhibition file from the maker bay area premiere
Paris, past and past and present. The fountains of Paris witness day passing into night, gatherings of children and workers and lovers. The fountains of Paris, decorated with statues of an ancient order of philosophers and gods, confer with medieval illustrations in stained glass, merging Christian and Greco-Roman visions “and we fade to a marvellous view..." (Stephen Broomer)
Saturno (2019) by Colectivo Los ingrávidos (Mexico); digital video, color, sound, 4 minutes, exhibition file from the makers world premiere
We came into the world under the sign of Saturn, the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. Saturn pulls the word down into its vortex and turns the flow of events into rings, lines and particles. There we are all invisible. There we have no face. There we have no name. There our present seems suspended. There we are all limbo. (Colectivo Los ingrávidos)
Love and the Epiphanists (Part 1) (2018) by Scott Stark (US); multimedia performance, color, sound, 30 minutes, from the maker bay area premiere
Love and the Epiphanists (Part One) is the first part of an ongoing 35mm film project with live performance components, including wide-screen anamorphic 35mm film, 35mm slides, digital video, audio recordings and live spoken text. The films used are largely sourced from my collection of 35mm Hollywood movie trailers from the past 20+ years, using a hand-made contact printing process that allows me to repeat, reorder, reverse, double-expose, stain, misalign, twist and otherwise strangle the images. I also apply stencils, filters and other visual elements to further alter and repurpose the original material. The soundtracks are similarly reproduced and altered. The process results in a visual and aural cacophony of shifting frame lines, percussive sequencing, multi-layered imagery and general disruption. The narrative of the film is set against future moment in time known as the Epiphany, when the catastrophic effects of climate change are no longer reversible, and a succession of environmental crises each surpasses its critical tipping point. Rising sea levels, droughts, wildfires and flooding have led to mass migrations of coastal populations, disappearing agricultural lands, and widespread starvation, poverty and disease, which in turn have triggered political instability and violent insurgencies worldwide. In this toxic environment, two individuals find love and sanctuary.
[…] In addition to the main 35mm wide-screen projection, other media is used to pull the disparate elements together, including subtitles, spoken word, audio excerpts and music. Narrative explication is supported by excerpts from romance novels, reinforcing the notion of love as a marketable commodity in the form of popular prose; and by historical texts about climate change denial, waste management (and mismanagement), and environmental calamities.
Love and the Epiphanists is an ongoing, long-term project that will have several “parts” released over the coming years, with each part being a self-contained unit. […] Playful and chaotic, with the original trailers reprinted by hand onto raw film stock, and augmented by a battery of other media, Love and the Epiphanists creates a pulsing, kinetic and intensely dramatic visual joyride. (Scott Stark)
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CROSSROADS 10 is generously supported by the George Lucas Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, the Willow Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Cinematheque’s Members and Donors.