This evening’s programs features a selection of films screened silent for the first time, presenting the opportunity to experience these works in a new light.
San Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound & film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Française. Clipson will screen film to two performances by Grouper at the Swedish American Hall on April 28th. http://www.withinmirrors.org/
Film program (all screened on original Super 8mm reversal or 16mm film prints.):
SPHINX ON THE SEINE (2009) Super 8mm/16mm, 9 minutes, color/B&W
A poetic journey, musing on a series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world: images that follow one
and other, but geographically span thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut.
LIGHT FROM THE MESA (2010) Super 8mm, 7 min., color/b&w
A collage of foliage, tree bark, branches and the sun woven together from trips to Alamo Square, Orlando, Florida and Rotterdam.
UNION (2010) Super 8mm/16mm, sound, 14 min., color/b&w,
An exploration of movement, woven into layers of time, and photographed in natural and nocturnal urban spaces, ambiguous within a confluence of lights, colors and darkness. Filmed in the parks of San Francisco with Anya Kamenskaya.
ABSTEIGEND (2012) Super 8mm, B&W, 6 minutes,
A walk and drive through New York and the industrial shipyards of Brooklyn and Oakland,
SPEAKING CORPSE (2012) Super 8mm, color/B&W, 7.5 minutes
The first part of a trilogy (with ANOTHER VOID and OTHER STATES), this multi-
layered collage of night imagery envelopes the figure of a man lost within the city lights.
BRIGHT MIRROR (2013)
A series of movements between a figure, a landscape (the Marin Headlands), and a camera (Super 8mm), blur into something between dance and the gesture of drawing. Made as part of a Headlands Center for the Arts Residency.
LIGHT YEAR (2013-2014)16mm, sound, 10 min.
A commission for the San Francisco Exploratorium, this film-collage studies the water systems and architecture of the San Francisco waterfront, in abstract and formal contexts.
DISPORTING WITH A SHADOW (2015) 16mm, 4 minutes, color/B&W
Water, fire and oil mix into an anxious premonition read across the surface of an eye, a pond and an expressway.
Filmed in Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
MADE OF AIR (2014) 16mm, sound, 11 min.
A dream lament for a drowned world. Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa.
LIGHTHOUSE (2015) 16mm film, 5 minutes, color/B&W
A study of surfaces figurative and metaphysical, with various levels and planes of a city combined and superimposed to become visual echoes, suggesting an animated city surface of grids, graphs, geometries and lines: layers of subterranean streets and shadows evoking multiple levels of consciousness. Filmed in New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong. An homage to Saul Bass.
TRT: 83 minutes