presented by San Francisco Cinematheque in association with Gray Area
Admissions: Early Bird $10; Presales $15; Door $20 / Cinematheque members $8 (DOOR ONLY)
Advance tickets here.
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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.
arc (Oakland) / Jürgen Reble (Germany) / Trinchera Ensamble (Mexico City/Seattle)
Perpetual Motion opens with cosmic cinematic evocations of primordial energy, fusing creation and destruction into scintillating experiences of accumulation and decay. Program opens with an incantatory arc performance (straight outta Oakland), in which forgotten film detritus from abandoned archives is repurposed as sublime meditative subject, in which notions of microcosmic and macrocosmic merge. arc is followed by an extremely rare U.S. appearance by Jürgen Reble (Bonn, Germany) who, as part of the seminal filmmaking ensemble Schmelzdahin, pioneered collective performance cinema work throughout the 1980s, developing a practice of film, performance and installation rooted in real-time chemical and mechanical manipulation of celluloid film. Reble’s Alchemie, incorporating continuous chemical treatment of a 10-meter loop of film transmutes precious metal to dust, restructuring film emulsion live before your eyes in ever increasing abstraction. Program concludes with an equally rare appearance by Trinchera Ensamble (Mexico City/Seattle), whose Lux-ex-Machinaforms an overwhelming and chaotic live film-collage combining appropriated celluloid with optic games and spontaneous cutting, scratching, burning, dissolving, painting of film—an experiential hypothesis of a perpetual simultaneity, an “atmospheric reflection of what cinema should be.”
 | arc refers to a process rather than an author. a curvature within a void which makes something momentarily visible. a form through which something moves but within which it neither originates nor terminates, nor is contained. in this process, material elements are used to investigate immaterial states. framing the space of encounter as a site of unfixed ritual and sensory research—the cinema, gallery, studio, home, stairwell, street, etc. countless iterations of the the open field or the enclosure. a coded and symbolic language is used to trace lines between seemingly disparate paths of knowledge held in recurrent forms, manifesting in oscillating relationships between microcosm and macrocosm. arc is initiated by tooth. |
 | (b 1956, Düsseldorf) A member of the seminal 1970s/80s performance cinema collective Schmelzdahin, Jürgen Reble works in film, performance and installation which is rooted in manual processing of film footage using mechanical and chemical processes and reconstruction of the cinematographic apparatus. His works have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; Auditorium of the Louvre; Filmmuseum Amsterdam and the Walker Art Center among other venues. Reble lives and works in Bonn, Germany. |
 | La Trinchera (the Trench) is an ensemble of artists who execute live audio-visual improvisations using analog technology, mainly with 16mm projectors. Operating as an impulse generator and calling out for experimentation in a "free fire zone," this clash of individual creativity provokes a sense of immediacy with visual situations, to create unique kinetic experience generated through the fusion of image and sound converging in a particular space at a particular time. Since 2004, La Trinchera has taken its expanded cinema performances around the world including to the Museums Quartier and the Essl Museum, Vienna; the Engelman-Ost Collection, Uruguay; the CCEBA, Argentina; the 8th Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris; the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda and the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City; FLEXfest, Gainsville FL; and Antimatter Media Art Festival, Canada. For Lux-ex-Machina, La Trinchera will be Mexican expanded cinema performers Elena Pardo, Rafael Balboa and Manuel Trujillo with Seattle-based filmmaker and musician Eric Ostrowsky. |
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: arc