Experience

Finding Warren Sonbert

Unlike most experimental filmmakers, Warren Sonbert’s collected works have had the benefit of full retrospectives at major museums (San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, New York’s, Guggenheim) and a strong preservation effort. These garlands were posthumous, coming after the artist died of AIDS in 1995, but accord on this scale is rare for an underground moviemaker, no matter the biographical fillings. An avid traveler, opera buff and cinephile, Sonbert dipped into many cultural niches without subscribing to any particular dogmatism. Beginning as a teenage prodigy amidst Andy Warhol’s Factory, Sonbert brought his Bolex camera to bear on his life, tastes and milieus. He’s sometimes simplistically referred to as a "diarist" filmmaker, though Sonbert developed more over time than the term implies. As his films moved from outsider pop to symphonic polyvalence, their overlaid and often contradictory tones and themes inscribed a uniquely capacious cinema.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film

Insider

SFIFF51: Katherin McInnis cues the carnival music

Photographer and filmmaker Katherin McInnis, a longtime Bay Area resident who recently relocated to Brooklyn, screens her most recent film, Woodward’s Gardens, in the experimental shorts program "In A Lonely Place: New Experimental Cinema" at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. A couple of years ago, McInnis, in conjunction with local exhibition space Southern Exposure and the Mission-based Neighborhood Public Radio, created an audio tour of the city blocks bordered by Duboce, Mission, 15th Street and Valencia that once comprised the grounds of Woodward’s Gardens—an elaborate 19th-century amusement park. One part zoo, one part leisure space and one part spectacle, the grounds were owned and operated by the hotelier-cum-showman Robert Woodward, who came to be known as the "Barnum of the West." McInnis was so intrigued by the transformation this urban space had undergone in just over a century that she decided to create a film version of the tour. She also offered a photo-essay on the project last year in SF360.org.

topics: bay area, experimental film, q&a, san francisco international film festival

Insider

SFIFF51: Craig Baldwin shoots the moon, and the desert

Craig Baldwin has slaved in the underground for some three decades, evading mainstream recognition and achieving rarefied status as a guide and shaman for other artists working on the fringes. As the longtime programmer and force of nature behind the Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access, Baldwin provides a space for radical artists trafficking in the avant-garde, and adventurous, appreciative audiences allergic to corporate media. As a filmmaker based in the Mission—about as subterranean as you can get—Baldwin has made several feature-length, obsessively crafted collage films (including the barbed political satires O No Coronado! and Tribulation 99 and the gleefully subversive takedowns Sonic Outlaws and Spectres of the Spectrum) in which he appropriates snippets from old educational films and "B" movies to construct alternative histories of American history and media. His new film, Mock Up On Mu, is an imaginary science-fiction yarn starring the actual historical figures of Jack Parson, L. Ron Hubbard, Margaret Cameron and Aleister Crowley. More of a lark than Baldwin’s previous films, and featuring a substantial amount of footage he shot, it has its world premiere April 28 at the Sundance Kabuki and April 30 at the Pacific Film Archive as part of the SF International Film Festival. We spoke to Baldwin on the phone from Minneapolis, where he was in the middle of a college lecture-and-screening tour. Our feeble typing skills couldn’t match the torrent of Craigspeak, so any non sequiturs or fleeting incoherence in the transcript can be attributed to us, not the filmmaker.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film, political film, san francisco international film festival

Found

"Palestine: Interior/Exterior"

Watching Kamal Aljafari’s astonishing film The Roof (2006)—a work at once explicitly personal, coolly contemplative, and full of coruscating protest—is to recognize a marvelously intuitive artist and the momentum of a larger cinematic movement at the same time. In its hour-long exploration of two Palestinian family homes inside Israel, that of Aljafari’s parents’ house in Ramleh and his grandmother’s house in Jaffa, The Roof recalls the social-psychological landscapes and formal strategies of such filmmakers as Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad and Rashid Masharawi without ever feeling merely derivative of them. Rather, The Roof registers a potent new cinematic voice while offering more proof that today’s Palestinian cinema is one of the most vital anywhere.

topics: bay area, directors, experimental film, kino21, political film

Platform

Thomas Beard exposes "Live Cinema"

For decades, experimental filmmakers have actively rejected the conventions of story-driven cinema for a poetic, experiential aesthetic. It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that a few avant-garde visionaries would eventually challenge the codified, calcified nature of the moviegoing experience itself, where audiences passively sit through an identical fixed presentation from Tampa to Tucson, Tehachapi to Tonapah. Their goal is to turn each screening into an act of creation, with its attendant unpredictability and excitement. Some artists, like Zoe Beloff, bring rickety, old-fashioned projectors into the room to resurrect film’s mechanical and tactile characteristics. Animal Charm does a live mix of found footage. This exciting genre of experimental filmmaking is the focus of San Francisco Cinematheque’s brand-new collection of essays and artifacts, “Cinematograph 7—Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader.” Edited by New York programmer and critic Thomas Beard, the book launches with a party and screening this Thursday, April 10, at Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia (at 21st St.) featuring the aforementioned Animal Charm, SUE.C and Refraction. We caught up with Beard, whose latest venture is the weekly Brooklyn-based experimental film series Light Industry, via email.

topics: critics, experimental film

Experience

Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival

Who says it’s not easy being green? If you ask the folks behind the Bay Area-based Earthdance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival, engaging films with positive and eye-opening ecological themes can not only be easy but high fun. And they’ve been proving it since 2004, with an annual spate of short films covering a gamut of environmental subjects and stylistic approaches while studiously avoiding the doomy.

“We’re living at a time when we need stories that connect people, bring them together and inspire hope,” explains festival director and founder Zakary Zide. “We wanted to reach out and be more inclusive.” Doing so meant highlighting the humor, adventure and sheer wonder of the natural environment and the place of human beings in it. Rather than targeting single issues like global warming or the coming water crisis, EarthDance aims to be a bridge between art, nature and science. In that sense, says Zide, “It’s not even political.”

topics: environmental films, exhibitions, experimental film, film festivals, oakland museum of california

Take Two

"Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick"

My high school physics teacher was a slight, nondescript fellow who hyperactively sparked to life in the classroom. His mantra was “Physics is fun!” and he gave one of the more clever lads an unexpected bonus point for devilishly scribbling it on an exam in place of an elusive correct answer. The reward wasn’t for sucking up, mind you, but for understanding that enthusiasm was more important than the dogged mastery of information. That this long-forgotten anecdote (and life lesson) came rushing back to me after spending some time with “Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick” is neither accidental nor inappropriate. The 10 short comic narratives made between 1986 and 2001 assembled on this wonderful DVD are exemplars of an unpolished, unpretentious school of moviemaking that aims at every moment to be audience-friendly. It’s an attitude embraced today by thousands of adolescents screwing around with camcorders, and by one Seth Rogen. None of them has ever heard of the popular Bay Area filmmaker, I’d wager, but they all inherited his credo: Filmmaking is fun!

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, dvd, experimental film, independent film