San Lorenzo Creek (2023) by Michael Damm
October 26 – November 12, 2023
CROSSROADS 2023 Online Echo – program 2
that what moves
Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS 2023 online echo is a cross-sectional distillation of this year’s festival, refracting its themes and presenting select works in two reconfigured programs. In this program, lyrical films of landscape, light and divination, reflecting on the aesthetics of seasons, shimmer between darker ballasting films meditating on violence, societal struggle and speculations on transcendence and eternity.
SCREENING:
Tarot Portrait: Faith (2023) by Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan (US); 16mm presented as digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes
bigbang (2023) by Karissa Hahn (US); digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes
that what moves: fingerinesses (2023) by Blanca García (Spain); Super-8mm presented as digital video, color, silent, 4 minutes
L’incanto (2021) by Chiara Caterina (Italy); digital video, color, sound, 20 minutes
San Lorenzo Creek (2023) by Michael Damm (US); digital video, color, silent, 4 minutes
Agua del Arroyo que Tiembla (2021) by Javiera Cisterna (Chile); digital video, color, silent, 10 minutes
Education lost (2022) by Francisco Álvarez Ríos (Ecuador); digital video, sound, 13 minutes
TRT: 63 minutes
Tarot Portrait: Faith (2023) by Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan
Faith is part of a set of cinematic tarot cards in which we collaborate with the subjects to create layered vignettes infused with personal symbolism. By choosing costumes, objects, actions and locations that represent their own visions, the stars of these films bring forth what they want to manifest mythically and physically within their lives. Inspired by their particular choices and personalities, we collaborate throughout the shoot, double-exposing each roll of film as a toss of the alchemical I ching while adding a spectral layer. Sealed into the receptive emulsion, these layered iconographies are then awakened with the projection of light and witnessed by those who may recognize parts of their own dreams. (Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan)
bigbang (2023) by Karissa Hahn
a distraction of simple thoughts while waiting on hold and aging. (Karissa Hahn) bay area premiere
that what moves: fingerinesses (2023) by Blanca García
Seeing leaves one thinks of hands, their fingerinesses are budlike. (Robert Walser).
Filmed during the Spring of 2022, letting the season unfold while at home, convalescing, the passage of time only enduring in the blossom of the magnolia tree. Part of the film diary series that what moves. (Blanca García)
L'incanto (2021) by Chiara Caterina
The voices of five women gradually fill the sound space of the film, weaving a pattern: a tarot card reader; a woman who survived one of the most horrific cases of sexual violence and homicide in Italy in the 1970s; a woman who is accused of killing four people; a woman tells of her relationship with death and a woman who has found her way in life through religious practice. These voices deal, in different ways, with the relationship to life through the discourse of death. (Chiara Caterina)
San Lorenzo Creek (2023) by Michael Damm
San Lorenzo Creek traverses a ribbon of wild land that cuts through suburban hills on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. It’s a nature film that is also, inextricably, a city film. Its images document a space populated by synanthropes (wild animals that find habitat within urbanized environments) and trace the contours of an ecosystem where introduced or invasive plant species entangle with those that are native to the region. This complex mix of layers reflects the social processes of colonization and urbanization that shape the contemporary natural world. The film is silent and without text, and manifests solely through the interplay of shots, cuts and the space of the illuminated screen. (Michael Damm)
Agua del Arroyo que Tiembla (2021) by Javiera Cisterna
A glimpse over the Diguillín river through the mechanical eye of an old digital camera. Light’s trail presents itself fortuitously over the reflection of the sun on the water, tracing infinite threads of concrete luminous information. (Javiera Cisterna)
Education lost (2022) by Francisco Álvarez Ríos
Education Lost forges an adverse portrait of Ecuador and its social distances. The film introduces a subjective wandering through out the turbulent paths of an unfortunate nation. The encounter with abandoned images gives me a chance to face the experience of perception through the eyes of others and celebrate the simple beauty of the visible. The images that built up Education Lost came from lost and found amateur Ecuadorian film footage, outlining the precariousness of some and the opulence of others. I use these images as outputs, unfortunate beats upon a country and the society of it. This visual exercise opens up the way for a sound execution that seeks to disintegrate the sound of reality through dissociated synthesizers and cassettes. (Francisco Álvarez Ríos)
Artistically Brittany Gravely (US) has focused on 16mm film for the past several years, but also creates works in many other media. Currently, she creates expanded and non-expanded cinema projects of a more mystical nature in Magical Approach, with Ken Linehan. Recently, their films screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Artifact, Fracto, CROSSROADS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and Antimatter, among others. She also works as the publicist and designer for the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge MA and is a founding member of the artist-run film lab AgX.
With a focus on sound and audio media, Ken Linehan’s (US) creative work explores intermedia space through works including field recordings, 16mm motion picture films, silkscreened images, works of cut paper as well as a variety of music projects. Most recently, Ken has been engaged in a series of psychic/cinematic collaborations in Magical Approach with Brittany Gravely. Having graduated in 2001 with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Kenneth has taught courses on sound art and film sound at MassArt and RISD. Over the past decade his work has been exhibited at arts spaces and other venues such as the RISD Museum, the Boston Center for the Arts, Apex Art, AS220 and the Brattle Theatre, including events programed by Mono No Aware, Magic Lantern Cinema, Millennium Film Workshop and Balagan Films.
Karissa Hahn (US) is an filmmaker/librarian based in Los Angeles. Hahn has shown work in various cinemas, galleries and institutions such as the New York Film Festival/Projections, TIFF/Wavelengths, MoMA, CROSSROADS, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Anthology Film Archives, among other venues.
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.
Chiara Caterina (Italy) After completing a degree in film studies in Rome university and a diploma in cinematography, Chiara Caterina attended a post-degree in Le Fresnoy—Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Lille (FR). Her short film Avant la nuit was awarded and selected in many international festivals inclouding the 27 European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; the 30th Hamburg International Short Film Festival; the 10th Berwick Film and Media Art Festival; the Videoformes 2015 International Festival in Clermont-Ferrand and the Kasseler Dok und Video Fest. Her documentary Il mondo o niente was selected among others at the 58 Festival dei Popoli and the Festival du cinéma de Brive. Her short film Enchantment was selected and awarded at 36 International Critics Week at 78 Venice Film Festival in 2021 and was screened in many other film festivals.
Michael Damm (US) is a filmmaker and installation artist based in Oakland CA. His work has been shown in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco), SF Camerawork, Belkin Satellite Gallery (Vancouver), Plus Kunst (Dusseldorf), Galeria Sztuki Wspolczesnej (Opole, Poland) and Cooley Memorial Art Gallery (Portland).
Javiera Cisterna (Chile) has been working on various shorts films on different formats. As of right now, she is working on her first long form project, a series of shorts named Reír al Sol, made with a scanner. She also has finished a number of short films that deal with images and their digital composition, including Erial, ruido; rauca and Water from the tremulous stream.
Francisco Álvarez Ríos (Ecuador) is the director and curator of the Cámara Lúcida International Contemporary Film Festival. In his work as an film artist, he investigates reality and its fugues, approaching it from different explorations around the demystification of the image.