Experience

San Francisco Cinematheque Springing into Action

The spring edition of the San Francisco Cinematheque calendar is making the rounds, and my copy is already dog-eared with wishful thinking. Beyond the usual bounty of local premiers and filmmaker spotlights, it’s exciting to see Cinematheque continue to cultivate unusual collaborations, programming formats and venues—even the most seasoned Bay Area filmgoer may need to consult the key to decipher some of this calendar’s site abbreviations (Quick, what’s PTUSF? NNC?). So grab your datebook and get ready for a rundown.

topics: audiences, avant-garde, curators, diy, documentary, exhibition, experimental film, yerba buena center for the arts

Q&A

Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema at SF MoMA

As part of its 75th Anniversary celebrations, SF MoMA has commissioned three trios of programs surveying different eras of the museum’s history of film exhibition. The first of these considers the years of 1937-1960, though really we’re interested in 1945-1954, when Frank Stauffacher’s seminal Art in Cinema series hatched a Bay Area avant-garde. Filmmakers and critics are easily overlooked, but the programmer’s work is particularly subject to forgetting. In Stauffacher’s case this is most unfortunate, as his catalyzing work not only demonstrated the radical possibility of film as (local) art, but planted the seeds for a new, promiscuous way of seeing called cinephilia. When today’s enthusiasts dart between a Michael Mann blockbuster and a Ken Jacobs shoestring revolution, they are in Stauffacher’s republic. Art in Cinema took too much of Stauffacher—the series effectively ended when he died from a brain tumor in 1955—but his garden flourished well beyond those nine years.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, san francisco museum of modern art

Nao Bustamante: Mining "Silver and Gold" in Park City

Glen Helfand: The late, great underground filmmaker Jack Smith was all about the strange sway classic Hollywood movies, particularly obscure stars and low-budget but still opulent art direction, have had on our psyches. By extension, his works, like the horrifying, amazing 1963 Flaming Creatures, have had their own way of bewitching all manner of artists by crossing lines of gender, fantasy, and decorum and décor—a recipe that recently has fueled numerous academic conferences and performance festivals. You can see aspects of Smith in Warhol, and Cindy Sherman, David Lynch, Nan Goldin, George Kuchar, and Matthew Barney have all admitted their aesthetic debt to Smith.

[Editor’s note: Get more of each ongoing Sundance Film Festival blog entry by clicking through on the headline.]

topics: activism, actors, avant-garde, performance

Critic's Notebook

3D reloaded: Where does 3D go from here?

The release of Avatar this month put a fitting capstone on a frenzied campaign by studios to reintroduce stereoscopic 3D to audiences in 2009. No less than 10 feature-length films were released in 3D versions this year, almost all of those animated films. In terms of animation, what began as a minor novelty has become the norm. There’s no doubt that some of the work is satisfying. (As Dennis Harvey noted recently here in SF360.org, animated features were some of the best releases of the past year.) And Monsters vs. Aliens, Up and even Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, were better in 3D than 2D. (Of course, I mean stereoscopic 3D, since these were all animated in the 3D CGI style, as opposed to 2D hand-drawn….) The technology itself is impressive. This is not, as Jeffrey Katzenberg was so fond of saying during the run-up to the Monsters vs. Aliens release, the red-and-blue-glasses 3D of the 1950s. The technicians have found a way to smoothly present depth and action, and are not intent on simply having hands reach out or explosions engulf viewers purely as spectacle.

topics: activism, animation, avant-garde, bay area, technology, world cinema

Platform

With movement and image, Catherine Galasso pays dual homage

Roy Sullivan was inordinately familiar with occupational hazards. The late Shenandoah National Park ranger (and Guinness record-holder) was zapped by lightning seven (!) times. This weirdly tormented figure is the inspiration for Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice, a performance piece by rising choreographer, dancer and video artist Catherine Galasso that integrates live movement with projected images. Attracted by our vibrant dance community (touted by fellow Cornell grad Chris Black) and experimental film scene (ditto, per close friend and filmmaker Sam Green), Galasso began her professional career in San Francisco. Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice plays Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 12 and 13 at SOMArts Cultural Center under the San Francisco Film Society’s cross-platform and new-technology umbrella, Kino-Tek. In honor of her father, award-winning composer Michael Galasso (Séraphine, In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express), who passed away in September. Glasso will perform a new solo dance, Simmer, as the curtain raiser. We caught up with the artist via email in the midst of her intensive rehearsals.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, dance, documentary, experimental film, music, world cinema

Platform

Russell Merritt animates the archives for SF International Animation Festival

Celebrating the Bay Area’s status as a hotbed for animation creators as well as enthusiasts, the now annual San Francisco International Animation Festival kicks off Wednesday, November 11, with an historic live event that features Lawrence Jordan among others. It then officially opens Thursday, November 12 with the premiere of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s fantasy featuring George Clooney. And it continues through the weekend with experimental shorts, commercial features and family cartoon classics that push the boundaries of the medium. Among them are rarities gleaned from the archives: Walt Disney’s Alice Comedies, a series of Disney shorts produced between 1923 and 1927, in which a live-action girl is inserted into an imaginary cartoon world. J.B. Kaufman and Russell Merritt, authors of Walt in Wonderland and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies will introduce a selection of films and lead the program, presented with the help of the Walt Disney Family Museum. Merritt, a lively raconteur and Professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley, where, for over 20 years, he has taught animation, art-house cinema and film history, will share a portion of his vast knowledge of film lore, Disney and otherwise, with the audience. First, he offered a preview for SF360.org readers. (SFIAF runs November 11-15; the Alice Comedies program takes place November 14, 1 p.m. at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema.)

topics: animation, archives, avant-garde, music, san francisco film society

Take Two

Remembering Chick Strand

This past July 11, filmmaker, teacher and lifelong Californian Chick Strand died at the age of 78. She was, without question, a crucial pioneer of West Coast experimental cinema. Strand is best known as one of the improbable few who helped instigate Canyon Cinema in the early 1960s, the Bay Area organization that has since nurtured several generations of avant-garde filmmakers. She began at Canyon as an enthusiast and community organizer, but by decade’s end was making her own work—films which, in the best experimental tradition, stretched the cinematic medium to realize a dynamic, idiosyncratic understanding of the phenomenal world. It’s only fitting that Cinematheque and Canyon would stage a tribute to Strand’s work (“After Day Comes Night & After That, Day Comes Again: A Tribute to Chick Strand,” in San Francisco Cinematheque’s program in SFFS Cinema by the Bay playing at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 23 and and “Cinematic Tribute: Films of Chick Strand” at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center on October 24); both are direct descendants of the grassroots screenings she helped run nearly 50 years ago.

topics: activism, authors, avant-garde, bay area, canyon cinema, critics, experimental film, yerba buena center for the arts