Ruling Star (2019) by Jerome Hiler
upheld in rolling air by finer gravitations
Saturday, September 9 | 6pm at Gray Area
To the lighthouse. Devotional films on dailiness and intimate exploration—searching, finding, breathing in and breathing out. Films on the tactility of light, on embodied reverence, on the silence of rooms and luminous solitude.
SCREENING: Like a Lighthouse (2023) by Richard Tuohy (Australia) & Dianna Barrie (Australia); 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes. Oxygen (2023) by Karel Doing (UK); 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes. ipsa (I watched the Moon around the House) (2022) by Blanca García (Spain); Super-8mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 15 minutes. sin título (año pasado) (2020) by Blanca García (Spain); Super-8mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 3 minutes. October Light (2022) by Brandon Wilson (US); digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes. Ruling Star (2019) by Jerome Hiler (US); 16mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 23 minutes. TRT: 64 minutes
program community partner: The Roxie Theater
PROGRAM TICKETS
$12 General/$10 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
FESTIVAL PASSES
$110 General/$88 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
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CROSSROADS 2023
Like a Lighthouse (2023) by Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie
A blinding beam of light. The piercing sound of ships. Everything—the land, plants, the sky—shouts for attention. Perceptions assail us with their demands to be noticed. (Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie) world premiere
Oxygen (2023) by Karel Doing
Blades of grass are racing across the screen. (Karel Doing) world premiere
ipsa (I watched the Moon around the House) (2022) by Blanca García
Self-portrait, anchored in an imaginary tale—Emily Dickinson’s 629 poem—where filming and editing enact a play between the immanence of recording and fictional embodiment. The narration of a visiting Moon, discovering her body, adventuring into a world of tactile light, as well as the soothing capture of oneself, appeased through the tangible reality of the indexical image and freed through imagination. A film about the mutable self, recognised only as reflection, as a glimpse—like the moon, like film itself—a fantasy perceived only if traversed by light and shadow, and yet never fully apprehended but as an instant, fleeting. (Blanca García) north american premiere
sin título (año pasado) by (2020) by Blanca García
I was very sad when I filmed this, so I kept chasing consolation in the light dances. Last of the sin título film series. (Blanca García) north american premiere
October Light (2022) by Brandon Wilson
A rhythm of light as the earth leans back toward darkness. (Brandon Wilson) world premiere
Ruling Star (2019) by Jerome Hiler
Ruling Star opens with an overture of flying strands within a faux-Egyptian temple found in a California suburb. Soon, our votive, Pharaoh Akhenaten, senses a unifying principle beneath the varying and conflicting forms and appearances. Did he intuit a shared consciousness among all things? Not to worry, we move on and contemplate a number of sights found in my baffling new home. This was my first film using negative stock after a lifetime of shooting color reversal. The new color spectrum was extremely limited and seemed to gravitate to either brown-orange or blue. Many of my initial intentions for the film evaporated and new motifs were arising. I found myself conceptually lost. I had to go forward into the unknown without a plan. The glory of making films that are completely self-motivated is precisely that one has to find one’s own rules. It makes an overly pre-determined entity like film much more like musical improvisation. I’m not sure if the result is a film or an as-yet-unnamed form that uses the material of film but has its own ideas. (Jerome Hiler)
Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie (Australia) are the proprietors of small gauge film lab nanolab and are the founders of the artist-run film lab Artist Film Workshop in Melbourne. They are both long term and abiding exponents of the possibilities of DIY film. Part of their passion is sharing their passion about handmade cinema. They have taught experimental film workshops all over the world, spreading the word about working with cine-film creatively and joyously with limited means and resources. They embody the film lab spirit and evangelize about it wherever they go. Both have been wallowing in the world of cine film since the nineteen eighties. Their films are steadfastly (yet playfully!) materialistic, focussed on the essence of the apparatus of cinema.
Karel Doing (UK) is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analogue and organic process, experiment and co-creation.
Blanca García (Spain) Writer, researcher, librarian and filmmaker currently based in London UK. My Super-8 practice is an extension of some of my research interests, mainly the implications of reversal film’s indexicality and the interactions between visual and verbal poetics through in-camera editing.
Brandon Wilson (US) lives in the woods of northwest Oregon. He makes films to explore new ways of seeing and to celebrate the unknowable.
Jerome Hiler (US) has been shooting 16mm film since 1964. A New Yorker by birth, he entered the avant-garde community there during its most intense period of provocation and splendor. For all of his younger years, he contented himself with improvisational screenings at his home for other filmmakers. In 1971, he arrived in San Francisco and joined the filmmaking world there with the same at-home manner of ad-hoc screenings for whoever wanted to come by. In the 1990s, Hiler was invited by the collective silt to be part of a show titles homescreening, presented by San Francisco Cinematheque at the San Francisco Art Institute. After a few documentaries made with Owsley Brown, Hiler commenced on a series of films both new and using material from the past and sometimes both. His films have been seen throughout the US and Europe.