SFCINEMATHEQUE

Luther Price. One of the weirdest, most wonderful, most fascinating, most unique filmmakers (and humans) ever to live. A total inspiration to me personally and an artist with a long and intimate history with San Francisco Cinematheque. Speaking for myself, as an artist and human, I wish I could approach Luther’s bravery. [...]

On April 10, the world lost Bruce Baillie (b. 1931), widely hailed as a master of 16mm personal filmmaking, whose works epitomize the “lyrical” mode of filmmaking strongly identified with ‘60s era northern California counterculture. As exemplified in such films as Valentin de Las Sierras (1968), Baillie’s Bolex—almost always hand-held—functioned as a graceful extension of […]

How can one translate the experiences offered by Paul Clipson’s films into linear writing? It can’t be impossible, for the films themselves proceed in such a direction: each one has a beginning, a middle and an end. Yet they do not work in that way exclusively—there is more at stake here than simple causality. [...]

This interview with filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad was conducted by Cinematheque Artistic Director Steve Polta on the final day of a three-program series of talks, performances and films—Tony Conrad: Flickering Jewel—presented by San Francisco Cinematheque in April 2009 at the San Francisco Art Institute, in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute and 23 Five’s Activating the Medium festival. [...]

There’s a chilling moment in Elisabeth Subrin’s The Fancy when the video’s narrator refers to a curator’s description of “Girl with Weed,” a triptych by photographer Francesca Woodman. The work features the head of an androgynous figure with closed eyes in the left frame and a nude woman holding a weed that’s as tall as she is, standing in shadow on the right. In the center panel, a barely perceptible dragonfly perches atop an ambiguous object that Woodman claimed was a bar of soap. [...]

Friday, Dec. 2 at 7:30pm; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; 701 Mission Street in San Francisco more info here / advance tickets here Lewis Klahr’s Prolix Satori by Kristin M. Jones The breathtaking elasticity of time and memory in Lewis Klahr’s elliptical collage films is echoed in the title of his ongoing, open-ended digital-video […]

Friday, Nov. 18 at 7:30pm; Artists’ Television Access; 992 Valencia Street in San Francisco more info here / advance tickets here Archive in the Sky by Craig Baldwin It is heartening to know that SF Cinematheque has so risen above (an operant metaphor in this post) what we now recognize as tempests in teapots over […]

Thurs, Nov. 3 at 7:30pm; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; 701 Mission Street in San Francisco Tonight’s screening celebrates the publication of POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg, published by Black Dog Publishing and edited by Jeffrey Skoller. This screening will feature Eisenberg’s 1997 film Persistence, which combines footage of a circa-1946 war-devastated Berlin […]

Thurs, Oct. 13 at 7:30pm; Artists Television Access; 992 Valencia Street in San Francisco Featured Film—Ken Jacobs’ Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 commentary by Federico Windhausen more info here / advance tickets here It has been said that, in the 1960s, the films of the Lumière brothers held a distinct appeal for “underground” filmmakers who […]

Thurs, Oct. 13 at 7:30pm; Artists Television Access; 992 Valencia Street in San Francisco While the City Sleeps: commentary by Max Goldberg In her posthumously published book, Cinema and Experience, Miriam Bratu Hansen named her opening chapter on the German critic Siegfried Kracauer, “Film, Medium of a Disintegrating World.” Hansen writes that Kraucauer, unlike Walter […]