Presented in Conjunction with the Exhibit California Suite: New Art from LA in the Walter/McBean Gallery of the San Francisco Art Institute in the Walter/McBean Gallery of the San Francisco Art Institute

Film artists in Los Angeles are buried but not yet dead. There’s not much of a film community between Hollywood and the galleries, but there aren’t real communities of any kind in LA. So anything worth making will have a polemical edge; this is no time for lyricism or abstraction. Jon Gary’s Watts Super Sista Girl deftly conflates the most persistent clichés about life in the black ghettos of LA; William E. Jones’ Other Families is an intelligent guide to the politics of “family values” and its contradictions; Sharon Lockhart’s Khalil, Shaun, A Women Under the Influence is a series of unsettling silent portraits alluding to filmic illusion; Britta Sjogren’s A Small Domain is a miraculous film about a 95-year-old kleptomaniac; and When it Rains, an apparently casual parable about a community falling apart and coming together, is one of Charles Burnett’s (Killer of Sheep, Nightjohn) finest films. (TA)