Artists' Television Access

Author: Fara

  • GAZE: Frame by Haunted Frame – a Screening of Animated Experiments

     

    From microscopic intimacy to historical urgency, GAZE is excited to present our third “all-animation” screening. Join us for an evening of screenings that include meditations on bio-mechanical abstraction, spatial memory, the mythopoeic, as well as personal and political explorations in movement.

    Featuring:

    1) REGAL by Karissa Hahn (2:15 minutes, 2015)

    Torrented/pirated (digital) images as found footage, printed from a household printer onto 16mm clear film. Such as the loading dial, REGAL aims to circulate and find its way back to the screen. Take this proxy and see that the ghost has become tangible. Informed largely by: Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image”

    2) THE OLD MAN AND THE PEARS by Jing Sun (5:01 minutes, 2016)

    A weak and hungry old man begs for a pear from a fruit peddler, but the peddler refuses and rejects him. A little boy bravely steps forward and spends his last coin to buy a pear for the old man. Finally, a magical form of justice emerges from the ground.

    3) KATAGAMI by Michael Lyons (3:15 minutes, 2016)

    Stop-motion animation made by photographing and rephotographing antique kimono resist-dyeing stencils in positive and negative. Spatial shifts and variations in the repeating pattern elements generate apparent motion. Photographed on Super 8 and developed in Matchanal (Uji powdered green tea, Vitamin C, Washing Soda).

    4) CHALK TRACE by Esther Johnson (2:39 minutes, 2013)

    As a child in the 1950s, Ron Cockroft drew a chalk line from his school in Oldham to his home in Chadderton. Chalk Trace commemorates and reanimates his graffiti journey through a now much-changed network of streets. The film was photographed in the original streets of Oldham as they stand today – over 60 years after Ron’s original graffiti.

    5) WE R THE MOLD by Dawn George (7:00 minutes, 2016)

    Up close, mold is an intricate mass of branching filaments and delicate fruiting bodies creating a colourful connected web. When viewed from a distance, mold loses its complexities and a more destructive nature is realized… much like the world we live in.

    6) IN HER OWN PATTERN by Irina Haugane (1:01 minutes, 2015)

    The video is a study of a fly, who flies in an open space, yet stays in a very small area. The pattern of the fly is animated with a semi-transparent line, which varies in thickness according to the speed of its movements. This video-work contemplates relative time by drawing a paralell between the life of a fly and man.

    7) LATEX by Pamela Guest (1:02 minutes, 2016)

    A short non narrative film that explores clear, material, plastic and it’s relation to a living human being.

    8) INTANGIBLE BODY by Emelie Mahdavian (2:45 minutes, 2016)

    This experimental film explores censorship of Iranian women’s dance performance and what constitutes a woman’s ”body” in the digital age. Given that women “dancing” in public is illegal in Iran today — and even animated movies are censored — we set out to play with the edge of what constitutes a body, a dance, or an Iranian woman.

    9) “MORE DANGEROUS THAN A THOUSAND RIOTERS” by Kelly Gallagher (6:19 minutes, 2016)

    An experimental animated documentary exploring the powerful and inspiring life of revolutionary Lucy Parsons.

    10) UNIVERSAL MECHANISM by Caroline Blais (1:00 minutes, 2016)

    As the Earth rotates slowly, various forces of nature, mechanical movements, and human trajectories occur simultaneously.

     11) SHE COLLAGE by Kate Lain (9:55 minutes, 2015)

    She Collage is part response to the work of Southern California–based collage artist Terry Braunstein, part reflection on the practice of art-making. Like Braunstein’s art, the film is itself a collage—in this case, frame-by-frame hand-manipulated images of Braunstein, paper cutout stopmotion animation, archival footage, and an assemblage of sounds.

    12) COPPER PERFORATION LOOP TRIPTYCH by Ruth Hayes (3:21 minutes, 2016)

    Iterations of Copper Perforation Loop, an original length of direct animation created by scraping emulsion off of 16mm black leader against a 5” diameter circular disc of perforated copper. The Triptych includes the original loop, and hand processed contact prints, one of which was printed onto Liquid Light coated clear leader.

    13) FROM THE DIZZINESS OF FREEDOM: THE PHILOSOPHY VESSEL by Melissa Ferrari (7:16 minutes, 2016)

    Across cultures, the labyrinth and the maze have played significant roles in the history, spirituality, mythology and entertainment of human society. By tracing their contexts and concepts across cultures, we can view mazes and labyrinths as philosophical architecture that embodies the history of human meaning and metaphysical thought. This film is a visualization of the strategies that people incorporate to find meaning in their lives inspired by the mythology and functions of mazes and labyrinths throughout history.

    14) RESUSCITATION by Hannah Raye White (5:24 minutes, 2016)

    The act of becoming is never as expected, but it is fundamental to the experience of being.

    15) BOTANICOLLAGE ON FRISCO BAY by Caryn Cline (3:46 minutes, 2017)

    GAZE is a film series based out of Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco that prioritizes work by Women, Trans, Genderqueer, and Non-binary artists. GAZE promotes a feminist artistic expression and creates dialogue related to the influence of this powerful medium. We are one of the many bay-area platforms that showcases independent cinema.We look for original work that might be considered surreal, experimental, political, abstract, narrative, personal, documentary, or an other genre

  • ATA @ SFPL (screening at Noe Valley Library)

    This evening’s films are all film festival prize-winners that parlayed awards acclaim into successful dispersal to schools and libraries in the era of 16mm documentary distribution. The films are loosely organized around the theme of “home”, and each subtly invites us to question the thin line between non-fiction and fiction.
     Sewing Woman (Arthur Dong, 1982)
    On the surface this is a straightforward account of the life story of one of the many women working in Chinatown garment factories 35 years ago. A narration delivered over images of her workspacce as well as an array of archival photographs tells us the alternately harrowing and heartwarming details of her life growing up in pre-Communist China, her arranged marriage into a “Gold Mountain family” and subsequent emigration to San Francisco. But the final moments of this Oscar-nominated short made by a San Francisco State University student (who’d later go on to create many documentaries & the book Forbidden City, USA) raise more questions than answers about this woman’s life.
     Before the Foliage Falls (Władysław Ślesicki, 1964)
    Since its 1949 founding, the Warsaw Documentary Film Studio has been key in making Poland one of Europe’s non-fiction filmmaking hotbeds & helping launch careers of directors like Krzysztof Kieślowski. This beautifully black-and-white slice of cinéma vérité follows one of Poland’s last traditional Roma caravans, compressing months of shooting into what feels like a short hitch onto their wagons. Though the film’s minimal dialogue is left unsubtitled, reminding viewers of our outsider status, we feel nonetheless welcomed by the inviting intergenerational campfire, the joyful music and dances, and the wide smiles of people living living a lifestyle that seems ripped out of a storybook.
    Spaceborne (Philip Dauber, 1977)
    This wordless film made by a UC Berkeley physicist compiles some of the most breathtaking NASA footage of its era (including Saturn V, Apollo & Skylab technologies) and marries it to a wonderful electronic music score by San Francisco’s Doug McKechnie and John Lewis. An opening title card promises that no special effects were used in its creation, but there are hints contradicting these claims, including a “thank you” credit to local legend Jordan Belson, who’d conjured countless illusions for his own cosmic films and would soon do the same for Hollywood’s The Right Stuff. The film was nominated for an Oscar in the live-action short rather than documentary category.
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    Artists’ Television Access
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  • ME and Mr. MAURI

    Presented by: Queer Cultural Center, Dr. Osa de la Riva, Eagle Bear Productions & ATA

    During the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Osa collected 75+ hours of raw video footage, some at the bedside of my friends dying from AIDS.  She did most of the original filming without a budget, using borrowed cameras and donated tape. ”My subjects’ lives, stories, insights, experiences and opinions might have been erased from the historical record had she not video-interviewed them before they died. These interviews include some of the earliest recorded first-hand statements about the early years of Two-Spirit and LGBT Latino Liberation in California.”

    From this archival footage our production crew assembled some of the most compelling moments and intertwined the stories of Native American/Latino activists who died of “the gay cancer” (AIDS/SIDA) during the 1980s. The recorded testimonies reflect the socio-political origins of several movements of the past 30 years: the Latino, Native American and LGBTQ civil rights movements and access to affordable health care.

    Following the screening, there will be a reception and a Q&A.