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Upcoming ATA Screenings and Events
- Thursday, May 23, 2013, 8:00 pm, $6
CCSF Directing Students Showcase
- Friday, May 24, 2013, 7:00 pm, Free
Shorts from SFSU Cinema Department
- Sunday, May 26, 2013, 7:00 pm, $6
THERE IS NOTHING OUT HERE
- Thursday, May 30, 2013, 7:00 pm
Physical Traces
- Saturday, June 1, 2013, 11:00 am
Physical Traces
- Sunday, June 2, 2013, 11:00 am
Physical Traces
- Thursday, June 6, 2013, 8:00 pm, $5
OpenScreening
- Saturday, June 8, 2013, 7:00 pm, $10
Bollywood Trannies: Queering Desi Cinema
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Shorts by KAMRAN SHIRDEL
Posted May 6, 2013 at 7:00 pm by Fara
Meet Our Volunteers: Grace Rosario Perkins and Shae Green
Posted April 23, 2013 at 1:17 pm by Isabel Fondevila
Each month, we are featuring interviews with the volunteer staff that make ATA possible, recognizing their work at ATA and their contribution to our vibrant artistic community.
Here are the interviews with our Gallery Director Grace Rosario Perkins and ATA Board Member Shae Green.
GRACE ROSARIO PERKINS
Can you tell us about your first volunteering experience/s at ATA?
I started volunteering at ATA in 2007. I was attending Mills College and I think I had just switched from being an Art History major to an Intermedia Arts (video/sound/installation) person so I became more interested in working with alternative video/film spaces as opposed to galleries and museums. I was also most interested in microcinemas and film programing because a few years prior I had met Astria Suparak who was a film programmer who toured the country multiple times screening really amazing shows. All of these interests just culminated in me seeking out a similar community. I hadn’t even been to a show at ATA, I just started volunteering. I can’t remember what the first show I worked was but when I first started I remember there being a film series at ATA that showed a lot of really crazy stuff like Fred Halsted. I also remember working one of the last Madcat Film Festivals and there was some real excitement in the air that night.
You are an artist and part of the Black Salt Collective. Has being involved with ATA inspired you in any way, and if so, how?
I think being at ATA has informed my practice in a lot of ways. It is a space that allows me to engage with a very specific community of creative people and virtually every time I go to ATA I see something completely unlike the previous show… ATA pretty much runs of the gamut of film and music shows. It’s always fun to just stop by and see what is happening. I find ATA to be a nice space that is extremely accessible to many types of programming and because of that exposure I at times find myself feeling pretty motivated to try new things, even if it’s as simple as seeing someone doing something with projection… A “Why haven’t I done that?” kind of thing. Not that I always do it but at least it gets me thinking.
You run the ATA Gallery. What does your job as the gallery curator and manager entail?
I find artists every month to show their work on the ATA gallery walls. There is often the occasional opening or closing party and I am kind of the point person for times and dates, helping artists with anything else that may arise. Ideally I would like to host more group shows so if there are any curators out there that have a concept for a show, please email me: gracerosario @ gmail.com or just any artists looking for a space to show their work.
What do you do as for your day job?
I work at Creativity Explored as a Visual Arts Instructor. I’ve been working with adults with disabilities for a long time now, working at pretty much every art center in the Bay, and its work that I really enjoy. At Creativity Explored, I work with people on a lot of different projects- drawing/painting, sculpture, video, sound, and lately have been lucky enough to put some shows together. I usually have artists work on larger projects that are usually conceptually based and am currently finishing up some short abstract videos for projection for an upcoming show titled SPACE that opens May 2nd at the Creativity Explored gallery. I co-curated the show with another instructor Miranda Putman, and the exhibition is being promoted as “an immersive gallery experience consisting of sculpture-based work made from repurposed materials paired with sound, video, and light components.” It’s pretty exciting because Creativity Explored hasn’t really had a show with this sort of focus and in addition to that, the artists themselves have been invited to be a crucial part of the actual installation process creating an environment entirely of their own.
Why is ATA important to you? And to the community?
ATA has been around for almost 30 years. It’s crazy. Spaces like this need to exist, otherwise we’d just have really boring, dry art spaces run by people with money and little heart. It’s very crucial to keep these spaces afloat, specifically spaces run independently by a crew of volunteers who more or less have a pretty substantial commitment to the space. Look around the Mission, specifically Valencia Street, ATA is pretty much a one of a kind place these days and people need to support it to keep it alive.
What would you say is needed to volunteer at ATA?
An interest in watching experimental films or documentaries. A little patience. ATA is kind of just a big vessel and you can pour your ideas into it and most likely create your own interesting series or shows or art exhibits and that is what is the most enticing to me, so I feel like if that’s your thing, ATA is a good place to hang out.
What is the craziest or coolest thing you have seen at ATA so far?
About a year ago I brought a few artists from Creativity Explored to come work in the ATA Window Gallery to create a collaborative installation and they were pretty psyched. One artist talked about it every day… “We’re gonna go back and paint on the window?” I think just the excitement of taking their art to a public space with very different perimeters was really exciting for them and to be there to see them experiment was pretty great. That was kind of a cool synthesis of my worlds. I also find our fundraisers extremely fun– a lot of socializing, dancing, whatever. Good vibes all around at those things and kind of illuminates the validity of this community for me and many others.
SHAE GREEN
How did you first become involved with ATA?
I wanted to learn about video production and ATA offered free workshops to volunteers. I signed up. Thirteen years later, I’m still here.
You started volunteering at ATA in the late 90′s . Can you tell us how ATA has changed since?
A lot has changed technology-wise. We used to have computer labs with big clunky Mac IIs and linear editing suites with an effects generator called a Video Toaster – yes, raining sheep was one of the transition options.
What do you do nowadays at ATA?
I’m on the Board of Directors and I just finished creating a Volunteer and Technical Handbook. ATA is an informal place, but we want to ensure new volunteers have the information they need.
Why is ATA important to you? And to the community?
ATA is my oasis. I meet great people – other volunteers, artists, community members – and get to participate in the presentation of art. ATA is important to the community because it offers an opportunity to gather, view and present art and ideas that are outside of the mainstream.
What is something you have done at/for ATA that you feel very proud of?
For six years, Isabel Fondevila and I curated ATA’s Film & Video Festival. What started as an idea casually discussed in the office became a reputable event. With inspiration and hard work anything is possible.
Volunteer with ATA!
ATA is looking for volunteers to help with our Gallery and our Screenings. Volunteers run screenings, organize events, curate shows, and get stuff done. Volunteers can come to any ATA show for free. We need people who are creative and reliable.
Email volunteer@atasite.org and become a part of something good.
We Are Winning, Don’t Forget: Short works by Jean-Gabriel Périot
Posted April 20, 2013 at 10:19 pm by Lizzy
Jean-Gabriel Periot played his collage films at ATA last night. Poetic and unnerving, the images rain onto the screen; they layer on top of one another. He has pulled them from the archives, but they look different now, arresting. I stared as Hiroshima evaporated and rebuilt. I watched the faces of the Civil Rights Movement, not the famous ones, but regular people, in quick succession and with powerful music, like an advertising campaign. For what? The subjects are political, but these are not protest films. They are about the act of seeing. The films pull these images out of their context and they force us to look.
I was at an opening recently and a friend said, “I don’t like political art.” What an absurd thing to say, I thought. What you mean is not that you don’t like political art, but that you don’t like didactic art. People are so touchy about being told what to think, about being made to feel guilty. These films are not guilty of that, and yet they call our attention to the politics. They put us into a political arena, and this is significant. We are living in a time of widespread apathy, when the political landscape looks so bleak that artists have either holed up in the personal or joined the camp of some topical issue. We are in the era of the social justice film.
Periot’s work is neither topical nor personal. It makes space for a political comment but it remains open. The title track, We Are Winning Don’t Forget, shows simply that we live in a state of conflict. It shows the violence, and it seems to ask, to what end?
In the Q&A after the screening, Jean-Gabriel made fun of two of the films, because they were simplistic, because they had a message wrapped up in their visual trickery. Those films were jokes, he explained. The serious work has no message; it ends in the question.
The images are not new. We have seen them before, but always with a voiceover, a lulling commentary that prevents us from looking straight at the pictures; we see them through the prism of our culture. I had seen the post-war footage of French women being shaved in the public square, but there was always a narrative, a historical context that formed a buffer for my emotion. When you remove the context, the power of the image is raw.
The last film in the series is a narrative short, with weighted and deliberate acting that threatens to drag the bottom out of it. The style makes a sharp departure from the earlier work, yet in its tension and its language, this last film is the key. With circular and deliberate concentration, it offers instructions for this peculiar way of seeing: one must watch the stream of pictures with eyes open, with wonder, and with forgiveness.
San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival, April 27-28, 2013, sfgvff.wordpress.com
Posted March 29, 2013 at 6:39 pm by Ali Kashani
The San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival is a biennial film and video showcase centering Vietnamese filmmakers in Việt Nam and the diaspora—an international vision reflecting a transnational reality. This year’s festival inaugurates, with a party, its 2013 showcase of filmmakers of Vietnamese descent. The Opening Night Gala, held on April 26 at Artists’ Television Access, offers you the chance to mix and mingle with filmmakers, film-lovers, spoken word performers, poets, and visual artists who’ve dropped by to celebrate northern California’s only Vietnamese-focused festival of films. Music, open mic, and refreshments provided by the festival’s host organization, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. $10. Please help DVAN celebrate the film festival’s launch—everyone loves a good beginning. After that, the San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival runs from 2:30pm to midnight each day, April 27-28, 2013, at the historic Roxie Theater. See sfgvff.wordpress.com for the full festival program.
SF Cinematheque’s 2013 CROSSROADS Festival
Posted March 24, 2013 at 11:40 pm by Kathleen Quillian
CROSSROADS is San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual film festival, a celebration of recent and rediscovered avant-garde film/video work.
CROSSROADS 2013, curated by Cinematheque Artistic Director Steve Polta, will take place April 5–7, at the Victoria Theatre (2961 16th Street, SF). This year’s festal will feature a total of 51 films, videos and performance works by 48 filmmakers from around the world screened over 8 feature-length programs.
HIGHLIGHTS of this year’s festival include:
— WORLD PREMIERES of work by Stephanie Barber, Luther Price, Talena Sanders, Jonathan Schwartz and Robert Todd.
— LOCAL PREMIERES of work by Olivia Ciummo, Mary Helena Clark, Paul Clipson, Jim Drain and Ben Russell, Taylor Dunne, Erin Espelie, Josh Gibson, Chris Kennedy, Robbie Land, Laida Lertxundi, Jesse McLean, Natasha Mendonca, Sharon A. Mooney, Jeremy Moss, Sarah Grace Nesin, Alee Peoples, Suzan Pitt, Ben Rivers, Michael Robinson, Kelly Sears, Danielle Short, Fern Silva, April Simmons, Jessie Stead, Makino Takashi and Karen Yasinsky.
— APPARENT MOTION: A live cinema performance event featuring local artists Beige and dyemark and, from Barcelona, Spain, Crater.
— A SOLO ARTIST TRIBUTE to sometime San Francisco-based filmmaker Scott Stark, including the world premiere of a major new work, The Realist.
— THE WORLD PREMIERE of Jodie Mack’s Dusty Stacks of Mom, a long-form psychedelic tribute to a struggling family business, set to a completely re-written and re-performed cover-to-cover remix/remake of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with vocals performed live by Jodie Mack herself!
General admission tickets are $10 per event ($5 for Cinematheque members). Festival Passes provide admission to all 8 programs and are available for $50 ($25 for Cinematheque members). For tickets and more information visit http://www.sfcinematheque.org/#/calendar/201304050/
3rd i Films Call for Submissions
Posted March 12, 2013 at 3:40 pm by Gilbert Guerrero
SUBMIT A FILM
Calling all Bay Area Filmmakers!
3rd i Films is actively seeking Film Submissions for its annual festival and year-round programs in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Film Submissions
We are looking for innovative films and videos of all lengths and genres from and about South Asia and the Diaspora. We aim to provide a platform for artists taking new directions. Films and videos may be experimental, narrative, documentary, animation, comedy, music videos, digital media, produced in any year and of any length.
Please download and complete the submission form before sending us your film:
Do not send your entry in a fiber-filled envelope.
Submission deadline: July 15, 2013
Submission fees: $10 for shorts (under 40 minutes) / $20 for features
Send to: 3rd i Films, c/o Kathleen Dargis, 5464 Shafter Avenue, Oakland CA 94618
Note to Filmmakers Outside the Bay Area:
We are not currently accepting unsolicited submissions from filmmakers outside the Bay Area. If you would like us to consider your film, please send us an email to programming@thirdi.org, before sending a preview.
If you have any questions, please write to us at info@thirdi.org
PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD TO YOUR COLLEAGUES!
Original post: http://www.thirdi.org/festival/submit-a-film/
The Mission Alliance To Cultivate Home
Posted February 27, 2013 at 10:55 pm by Fara
Gentrification has met its MATCH!
The Mission Alliance To Cultivate Home is forming and we want you. The brutality of SF’s latest wave of gentrification is on the tip of everyone’s tongues and it’s time to speak out, act up, and save our homes and communities!
We are forming a broad coalition of people and organizations fighting gentrification. This is an organization we will all to build together, kicking everything off with a planning gathering on the afternoon of March 10th at the historic Redstone Building on 16th and Capp.
Bring a friend or family member
Spread the word
Be ready to share ideas you have for creating action
Come at 3 sharp so we can get the ball rolling!
Bring your best collaboration and dialogue skills
Take a moment on the way to the gathering to think about your place on the spectrum of privilege in relation to this issue
We will provide:
Some history of gentrification and anti-gentrification work in the Mission
A facilitated brainstorm of potential avenues of action
A potential framework for sparking a potent wave of effective activism
Working groups ready to move forward
Spanish language translators
Together we will make a plan to move forward with power and grace, style and effectiveness.
March 10, 2013, 3:00 pm at the Redstone Labor Temple, 2926 16th st, 2nd floor
If you are available to translate please contact
Anandi at: anandiwandi@gmail.com
Cast Shadows Left Me Dreaming In Super 8
Posted February 10, 2013 at 6:56 pm by Lizzy
The cinema house at ATA nearly burst its well-worn seams on Saturday in honor of the special benefit event, Cast Shadows. Paul Clipson and John Davis projected super-8 film in collaboration with live performances from musical explorers Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Marielle Jakobsons, and Barn Owl. 
The program opened with a speech and dedication from one of ATA’s founding members, who called the venue the best piece of art he ever created, except, perhaps, his daughter. Then the lights shut off and we looked deep into the cellulose eye of Paul Clipson’s projection.
This was my first exposure to Clipson’s layered world. Afterwards, a friend told me that the piece was a-typical; Clipson’s work is usually non-narrative, but the opening film featured a young woman in motion. The music and the rhythm of the cuts pulsed like a heartbeat, ominous and gorgeous, as the girl disappeared into her own reflection. Then urgency fluttered like a panicked eye across the screen, and the film stock flooded with color. Deep orange light saturated the picture and the girl ran down a wooded hill. Was she being chased, or was she chasing herself? It was irrelevant amid the beauty of the layers.
The second piece opened with Marielle Jakobson’s eerie violin. Gentle bowing floated over a vibrating mechanical hum: the ambient noise of a warehouse, or the grinding of parts about to move. John Davis projected a diptych with soft, rounded edges, a blurred and bleeding picture that cut from the mundane to the lyrical. Davis’s projector danced with the film stock, fast and slow, stopped, then backwards, until finally he clicked through frame-by-frame and the ticking sound blended with the music of the violin. This film had an exceptionally good use of Bart in art. It was beautiful and a bit sad, a gentle celebration of the camera’s dance with the world.
The program was an exploration of textures: on the film stock, in the difference between digital and natural sounds, on the surfaces of objects. The third piece began in quivering moments. The camera hovered, and I noticed the irregularity of organic forms. Light dripped over the screen like hot metal. Then Barn Owl drove the piece to crescendo with a rising, sometimes shrieking soundtrack that escalated into stanzas of dizzying panic. First the sun, and then a group of electric lights flitted and hurled themselves at the lens like moths to a lamp. How can I describe this imagery? It is hypnotic and begs for metaphor.
When the third film ended, the lights came up on a full house of patrons, artists and musicians who paid money and donated time and work toward preserving the ATA community. It was a pleasure to be in such good company.
For more a full slideshow of Nicholas Waton’s images from the Cast Shadows event, please travel here.
Cate Giordano: Sculpture, Satire, Original Score.
Posted January 22, 2013 at 5:12 pm by Lizzy
Cate Giordano makes filmmaking look easy. Just pick up a camera and mess around. Her films are so light to watch that you don’t notice their bizarre complexity, until the fake-mustached protagonist transforms himself (herself) into the female lead and climbs out of a cardboard lion. No, I’m serious: this makes perfect sense.
What carries the absurdity is the fact that Cate’s main character is—in all of his or her incarnations—a charmingly ineffectual everyman. The characters range in development. In the shorter films, the humor is sometimes just situational: eating pizza in a clothing boutique, asking the shop girl if she wants to star in a feminist film called Ass n Titties. As the program continues, we meet Hunter Dodge, who dances with his wooden wife, and tries to defend her from malicious attempts on her life (is she alive?) by Hunter’s trampy ex, a pouting, chain-smoking blonde.
Overacting plus a great wig collection fills the work with easy laughs, but the melodrama actually saves the metaphors from being heavy. If you write them down— a paper lion, a mythical white buffalo, a wooden wife—they might sound trite, but they appear in such an absurd narrative structure that they feel completely fresh. It is also helpful that Giordano is a sculptor. The beasts are pretty awesome, even on film. In the Q&A, she mentioned that Italian Vogue temporarily (and without permission) appropriated one of her buffalo for a photo shoot.
Heritage is the most complex work in the program. Beau, a buffalo hunter made irrelevant by modernity, persecuted by his wife Ruby and a crew of maniacal evangelists, leaves home in search of the white buffalo. Strange adventures ensue, including baptism by blue paint, doppelgangers, and humanoids made of spray-foam and cardboard. I especially appreciated the automatic garage door as a cinematic tool, and an unexpected cut where a poetic and dreamlike sequence ends with a view of Costco. In her comments after the films, Giordano said that she works without a script; editing is like writing. Yeah, I get that.
Interview with Antero Alli, director of “dreambody/earthbody”
Posted January 14, 2013 at 9:49 pm by Isabel Fondevila
We asked Antero Alli a few questions about his latest experimental documentary video “dreambody/earthbody,” which premieres in SF at ATA on January 25. Antero will be available for Q&A after the screening.
What is ParaTheatrical ReSearch? When did you become interested in paratheatrical processes?
The term “paratheatre” was coined in the 1970′s by the late Polish theatre director, Jerzy Grotowski, to address a highly dynamic, visceral approach to performance that erased traditional divisions between spectators and performers. Paratheatre was also executed outdoors in the forests of Poland as non-performance events.
ParaTheatrical ReSearch is what I call the asocial group ritual dynamics I have been developing since 1977. Initially inspired by Grotowski’s paratheatrical experiments, I have worked with many groups over thirty-five years to develop my own paratheatre medium incorporating techniques of Zazen meditation, physical theatre, dance, and vocal creations towards accessing and expressing the internal landscape of autonomous forces in the body itself. To me, the physical body “embodies” the Subconscious mind. People can read more about ParaTheatrical ReSearch at www.paratheatrical.com
What is the goal of the dreaming ritual?
I discovered this dreaming ritual in 1986 by piecing together movements I recalled from my nocturnal dreams into a dream choreography that, when performed, triggered the forces, images, visions, and emotions innate to the dreams they originated from. The following year, I met Aborigine elder Guboo Ted Thomas who initiated me to a new way of seeing the Earth itself as this vast dreaming entity incarnating as a planet. His aboriginal vision of the Daytime/Dreamtime continuum brought new depth to my little dreaming ritual. You ask about the goal of this dreaming ritual. The goal may differ for each person but the overall effect of doing it tends to expose the links and overlays between our daytime and dreamtime realities. It amplifies a unifying influence in our consciousness which I feel is needed in today’s hypermedia fragmented world. You can read more about this dreaming ritual at www.paratheatrical.com/dreamingrites.html
What was the biggest challenge during the production?
The biggest production challenge for me personally was shooting all the action on the fly with no rehearsals or second takes. As the group underwent this paratheatre process, I had to think on my feet and shoot whatever I could using one camera (Canon XL-2 mini-dv). This was a group of seven previously trained in paratheatre methods who agreed to meet with me one night a week for seven weeks. The challenge for them was to do this work with someone watching and photographing them under bright lights. This paratheatre work is usually done in dim light or candlelight with nobody watching.
Do you hope your film encourages people to think about their own dreams differently? if so, how?
I hope my experimental documentary inspires people to rethink their dreams in a less interpretive way and more like a rich resource for images, stories, emotions, and raw material for their creative and artistic processes. I am aligned with the Surrealists of the 1920′s who avoided dream analysis in favor of tapping into the personal and collective Unconscious as a wellspring of creativity, shock, and awe..
What did you personally learn from making this film?
Every film project is like going to a new film school for me. I learned many things doing this project, like how it’s almost impossible to show the inner workings of this paratheatrical process in video or film. However, it was well worth doing since certain visceral and spiritual resonances experienced and expressed by the dreaming ritualists can be felt and sensed by the viewing audience. Even though we may not understand something intellectually, I see value in witnessing and resonating with experiences we do not yet understand. Technically, I learned how to shoot by my wits more and improvise with the given material with much better results than I’ve had before. I learned how to make a documentary that also feels like a dream.
You have been showing your work at ATA on a more or less regular basis. Why do you choose ATA as a film house for your films?
I have been showing my work here at A.T.A. since 1992 with the S.F. premiere of my first paratheatre video document, “Archaic Community”. I’m an underground filmmaker and A.T.A. is an underground venue and so, it’s been a good fit so far. There are other S.F. Bay area venues I show my work but I seem to always return to A.T.A. I like the unpretentious D.I.Y. spirit and laidback atmosphere here and the friendly down-to-earth people that run it.
