Artists' Television Access

RADICAL LIGHT (Women of the West: ’70s Bay Area Experimentalists)

Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 7:30 pm

San Francisco Cinematheque presents:

The decade of the ‘70s was characterized by strident manifestos and polemics, a condition from which artist-made films were hardly immune.  But that history doesn’t appear so simple to those artists who made it. These films both resist and embody the archetypes that were assigned to art created by women of the time. Each film asks us to look closely and savor its qualities, such as the metered scoring in Anne Severson [Alice Anne Parker]’s The Struggle of the Meat; rigorous & seductive self-examination in Barbara Linkevitch’s  Traces; submission to constructed accident in Jane Dobson’s Stained Picture; unconscious and the corporeal in Gunvor Nelson’s Moon’s Pool; non-interventionist process in Dorothy Wiley’s Cabbage; collision of illusionism & 2-D in Caroline Savage’s Voyeur; absurdity of the infinite  in Freude [Bartlett]’s Folly;   uneasy meditation on the nature of perception in Stephanie Beroes’ Valley Fever; and painterly animation in Barbara Hammer’s Our Trip. Revisit or discover a new these radical films by some of the women who made the Bay Area scintillate in the ‘70s.   (Janis Crystal Lipzin)

Anne Severson:  The Struggle of the Meat (1974) 4 min. / Barbara Linkevitch:   Traces (1973) 12 min. / Jane Dobson:  Stained Picture (1982) 4 min. / Gunvor Nelson:  Moon’s Pool (1973) 15 min. / Dorothy Wiley:  Cabbage (1972) 9 min. / Caroline Savage:  Voyeur (1977) 7 min. / Freude:  Folly (1972) / Stephanie Beroes:  Valley Fever (1979) 20 min. / Barbara Hammer:  Our Trip (1980) 4 min.