Artists' Television Access

ATA @ SFPL (screening at Noe Valley library)

Tuesday, March 29, 2016, 6:30 pm, Free

Artists’ Television Access (ATA) teams up with SFPL to mine the treasures in the Library’s 16mm film archive. Join us for a quarterly screening series of fantastic movies.These short films remind us that the word “movie” comes from “movement”. They emphasize motion and music instead of the verbal.

Program: all films are presented in 16mm.

Phantomatic Bikes (Andrew “Mush” Emmons, 1971) 8.5 min Color.
Cyclists race along the winding roads of the Marin Headlands as a rock and roll organ pulsates on the soundtrack. The San Francisco Public Library used to hold an annual Festival of Young Filmmakers, and this pure kinetic expression won a prize in the 1972 edition. Its teenaged director went on to become an acclaimed photographer and cinematographer, now based in Brazil.
Baggage (Alexander Neel, 1969) 22 min B/W.
Mamako Yoneyama is a world-class mime equally influenced by Marcel Marceau and Zen. In this wordless psychodrama, she carries a metaphorical weight across Bay Area locations from the airport to the Emeryville Mudflat. Printmaker Jack Stauffacher plays a clergyman in one scene filmed at the St. Francis of Assisi Chruch.
Man and His World (Homer Groening, 1966) 2 min Color.
One of many varied short films made by the father of ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, who named that family’s patriarch after his own dad (who didn’t even like doughnuts).  If Planet Earth ever commissioned a public service announcement it might look like this.
Pas de Deux (Norman McLaren, 1968) 14 min B/W.
The most hauntingly beautiful film ever nominated for the Best Live-Action Short Oscar. This groundbreaking experiment from the founder of the National Film Board of Canada’s animation department, applies painstaking optical printing techniques to a bewitching dance choreographed by Ludmilla Chiriaeff. The soundtrack is Romanian pan flute music.
Luminauts (Christian Schiess, 1982) 9.5 min Color.
This is one of the few films made by a local artist whose light sculptures can be seen at the Exploratorium and elsewhere. His brother Michael’s electronic music score pulsates with the images: against a dark background, mysterious figures (Judith Harding and Ed Holmes) clad in special “light-suits” twirl neon wands in a high-tech tribute to Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century motion studies.
Noe Valley Branch Library      
451 Jersey at Castro st, Sf

Leave a Reply