presented by San Francisco Cinematheque in association with Gray Area
Admissions: Early Bird $10; Presales $15; Door $20 / Cinematheque members $8 (DOOR ONLY)
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SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE and GRAY AREA present PERPETUAL MOTION, the largest convergence of international, multi-generational performance cinema practitioners ever assembled in the San Francisco Bay Area. The series is presented September 16–December 7, 2016. All performances at Gray Area.
Performance Cinema: an exciting and emergent genre of avant-garde moving-image art which represents a crucial attack on the sterility of the contemporary, digitally-located media environment, arguing for the embodied, collective consideration of real-time, site-specific media experiences. Through mis-used or modified analog film projectors, live video synthesis and physical interaction with the media interface, performance cinema practitioners variously burn, etch, mutilate and destroy projected film, machinery and the image itself. Performance Cinema practitioners create immersive spectacles of sight and sound, opening a space for questioning and contemplating visual culture through direct activation of the senses. As a dynamic, regenerating and resurrecting media experience, Performance Cinema exists only in the moment of perception and is truly an art of its time. Full series information available here.
Sally Golding (Australia/UK) / Malic Amalya + Nathan Hill (Oakland) / Hangjun Lee (Seoul) + Jérôme Noetinger (Grenoble)
Cinema is the art of destroying moving images.— Paolo Cherchi Usai
Tonight’s assertive works explore states of being, nothingness and points in between: destruction, loss, rebirth and resurrection of time, films and ephemeral media lost for ever yet always haunting our dreams. Oakland-based duo Malic Amalya & Nathan Hill enact Towards the Death of Cinema, a 16mm projector/synthesizer duet documenting cycles of destruction, resilience and transformation in the Bay Area through prepared film that warps, smokes and bursts before your eyes. From Australia (via the UK) world-renowned curator and Performance Cinema historian Sally Golding performs Light Begets Sound, a durational performance focusing on the phasing of both 16mm projector and LED lights articulated through custom software and custom built light sensors. Program concludes with the first-ever West Coast appearance of Hangjun Lee (Seoul), performing with acclaimed electroacoustic musician/composer Jérôme Noetinger (Grenoble) his visceral and ambulatory multi-projector Film Walk: "I draw the film strip while I’m walking. People can see me walk, people can hear me walk, people can experience the film strip’s movement."
 | Malic Amalya & Nathan Hill Malic Amalya and Nathan Hill make experimental 16mm films and lo-fi videos with electronic musical scores. Visceral and cacophonous, their films traverse gritty landscapes of abandoned buildings, melting celluloid and queer fetishes. Their work lingers on minute gestures and decaying objects, making the discarded, the abject, and the perverse precious. Malic & Nate have been collaborating since 2014. Their work has exhibited in art galleries, experimental film festivals and radical queer spaces throughout the US and Europe, including Collectif Jeune Cinema's What's the Fuck? Fest***! in Paris, MIX NYC and the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival in Chicago. Their film Magnetic Resonance won an Audience Choice Award at CROSSROAD 2016. Malic holds an MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He teaches film production at the California College of the Arts. Malic and Nathan live and work together in Oakland. |
 | Sally Golding (Australia/UK) is a multimedia artist combining film projection, lighting and sonic composition to create expanded cinema performances and participatory installations. Golding’s audiovisual performance work focuses on the experience of the audience, pushing the boundaries of visual and auditory perception through the breakdown of the cinematic system into flicker, waveforms and colour fields; while her installations have harnessed the presence of the audience themselves by incorporating their reflected image into projections within immersive spaces. Known internationally for her expanded cinema performances, Golding’s live sets are edgy and intense, driven by a minimalist approach to horror aesthetics leading her to explore science and superstition, philosophy and pulp. Her sonic work revolves around a custom system of printing complex optical sound compositions onto 16mm film, and performing with light sensitive audio devices and amplified lighting. Cacophonic in form and content, Golding’s performances transcend chaos and enter a hypnotic zone, while her installation work evokes acts of self-perceiving leading to meditative and transgressive states.Through the curatorial outlets of Unconscious Archives (London) and OtherFilm (Australia), Golding presents live audiovisual and sound art performance as a means of examining: ‘liveness’; the synaesthetic concerns of audiovisual art; and the contemporary role of the audience. |
 | Born in 1977, Hangjun Lee is a filmmaker and independent curator who also works as a programmer at EXiS in Seoul. He also curated screening & live media program such as Cinematic Divergence (2013) and Mujanhyang Festival (2014) for National Museum of Contemporary Arts (MMCA) in Seoul. His works are based on multi-projection and optical sound, often involving improvisations with a variety of artists. Since 2006 he has been working on an audiovisual research project, “Expanded Celluloid, Extended Phonograph” in collaboration with Hong Chulki, a noise improviser. Their collaboration stimulated critical investigations into the performativity of practices in the darkroom, the screening room, the private recording/ practicing studio, and the public performance spaces utilised for the improvising musician. |
 | Jérôme Noetinger, a musician, filmmaker, publisher and organiser, is one of the outstanding figures in French experimental electronics. Born in Marseille, he studied electronic music with composer Xavier Garcia in Grenoble and earned a reputation above all as part of the three-member group Metamkine, which he founded in 1987 with the cineastes Christophe Auger and Xavier Quérel. |
Perpetual Motion is a presentation of San Francisco Cinematheque in partnership with Gray Area and is supported by generous funding from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and by generous donations from Cinematheque’s individual donors and members.
pictured above: Hangjun Lee—Film Walk