Author: Fara

Presented by SF Cinematheque in association with the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University.

Let the dreams you have forgotten equal the value of what you do not know…

—Andre Breton and Paul Eluard: The Original Judgement

Working for over three decades, filmmaker Lewis Klahr is known for an extensive body of films based in collage, associational montage and cut-out animation grounded in elements of 20^th Century popular culture, including advertising imagery, comic books, catalogs and ephemeral artifacts. While referring evocatively to collective American history, Klahr’s oblique, obsessive and idiosyncratic approach to this history and its material culture—suggestive of the hermetic personal yearnings of Joseph Cornell and the dreaming wander of the surrealist flâneur—belies a unique nostalgia and sense of personal mythology all his own. Appearing in person for two screenings, Klahr will present a selective mini-retrospective focusing on two important aspects of his work. Program one—Memory and Collage—will screen on Thursday, February 19 at 5pm at San Francisco State University.

program two: We Live in Cities and Pass through Varied Ambiances…

In his tales of lost souls and dreaming drifters, The City looms large in the films of Lewis Klahr as a site of mystery, chance occurrence, loves lost and found. For this second of two in-person presentations Klahr presents a unique selection of works selected especially for this screening as prequel and herald to an important new artistic direction. Featuring Klahr’s newest work, The Occidental Hotel (2014)—a mash-up of European street photography and Mexican comic books and an oblique evocation of urban transience, espionage and the surrealist drift—this program will present a career-spanning selection of earlier films (1992–2001) derived from the urban dérive. Notable in this program are a number of early, lesser known films which combine Klahr’s trademark cutout animation with first-person live action camera work. Program to include: City Film, a Lower East Side light-and-color study filmed 1988–92 (and screened as original Kodachome Super-8); The Aperture of Ghostings, a three-part suite (Elsa Kirk,Catherine Street and Creased Robe Smile) of “hieroglyphic montage,” drawn from lost-and-found photos, circa 1963; Whirligigs In The Late Afternoon, a personal love story of the artists’ life in New York City; and Green ’62, a portal to an older New York, conjured from a curved glass restaurant window on the Bowery. NOTE: This special once-in-a-lifetime screening—never before presented in this configuration—will also include additional films by Klahr not in distribution as well as camera rolls, rushes and other film fragments, anonymous home movies from the artist’s personal collection and more, all presented with generous introductions and context. (Steve Polta)

Tonight’s program is a live performance of seven scripts each read over a different scene from a variety of movies to make them into another story. The idea is as old as film is, and as fresh as the latest releases. Among the performers from Los Angeles and San Francisco are some live film narration veterans (Hofer, Luboviski-Acosta, Kearney, McJamerson and Steiner) and some new neo-script writers premiering their work (Kitchell, Kobek, Conheim and Regan). Our program spans 60 years of filmmaking with 7 directors from 5 countries. Curated by Hugo Ballroom.

from Johnny Guitar (1954, USA)
by Nicholas Ray
“Chapter 5”
TV Guide says: “Visit your nearest neighborhood cinema for this week’s episode of the most prescient Western serial of the 21st century.”
written and performed by Peter Conheim and Monica Regan
Peter Conheim is a film curator, musician and audio preservationist based in El Cerrito, California.  He is also the co-founder of Wet Gate, which uses only “found footage” and 16mm film projectors to create a live cinema collage performance, sampling the sound from the film tracks in real time, as well as Mono Pause, a long-running “Situationist rock” performing group (and its Southeast Asian music spin-off, Neung Phak). Additionally, he is a long-time member of the “culture jamming” performance and recording group, Negativland, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group’s adventures Fair Use in U.S. copyright law are legendary, most notably a fight with U2′s music publishers in 1992. Since 1999, he has been bass-playing sideman for singer Malcolm Mooney from the Germany-based music legends, CAN, in Malcolm Mooney and the Tenth Planet.
Monica Regan is a San Francisco-based writer whose work appears in Verse (forthcoming), New American Writing, VOLT, sidebrow, Poecology, Parthenon West Review, and 26: a journal of poetry and poetics, among other publications. Her photographs and text/image projects have exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Lincart Gallery, and Recology, Inc. Monica earned an MFA from San Francisco State University, where she was a recipient of an Academy of Americans Poets award. She has also worked for over 20 years in progressive social justice organizations in San Francisco, where she was born and raised.

from Pierrot le Fou (1965, France)
by Jean-Luc Godard
Quote: “In short, life filling the screen as a tap fills bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate.” – J-LG
written and performed by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist working in dance & both poetic and photographic documentation. Raised in the Highland Park neighborhood of Northeast LA, they now live in San Francisco. Along with Frankie Orendorff & Matt Weathers, Tatiana is a founding member of strictlyyouth, a de-colonized punk dance collective, & edit Primary Colors, a zine of primary source documents by people of color.

from The Sound of Music (1865, CSA)
by Robert Wise
Tagline: ”So long. Farewell. Break north.”
written and performed by Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson
Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney’s third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014) examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. His second, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was a National Poetry Series selection. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts.
Nicole McJamerson is a bureaucrat and a writer. She has, in the name of live film narration, acted as a film critic, a sociologist, and a marketing executive for a company that rents humans to other humans. Raised in Northern and Southern Louisiana, she lives with her family in California’s Santa Clarita Valle.

from Devicanska svirka (1973, Yugoslavia)
by Djordje Kadijevic
“A Primal Scene”
Tagline: “THE HYSTERICAL AFTERMATH THAT FOLLOWS A CHILD’S DEATH”
written and performed by M Kitchell
M Kitchell is an abstract mystic, artist, publisher and void-hunter living in San Francisco. He is the author of Apart From (Solar Luxuriance, 2014), the  forthcoming Spiritual Instrument (CCM, 2015) and others. He runs the small press Solar▲Luxuriance and can be found online at http://topologyoftheimpossible.com

from Chinatown (1974, USA)
by Roman Polanski
Quote: “Now remember, we live next door to the ocean. But we also live on the edge of a desert. Los Angeles is a desert community. Beneath this building, beneath our streets, is a desert. And without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we never existed.” — Chinatown
written by Jen Hofer and performed by JH, Douglas Kearney and Jewlia Eisenberg.
Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder (with John Pluecker) of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena (www.antenaantena.org). She publishes poems and translations with numerous small presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Her visual-textual work is currently on view at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover site.
Jewlia Eisenberg works at the intersection of text, voice, and diaspora consciousness, mostly with her ensemble Charming Hostess.  Recent work includes The Bowls Project (YBCA), on Babylonian women’s amulets, Teraphim (Meridian Gallery), on household ancestor worship, and Heavenshow (Contemporary Jewish Museum) on the letter Hei. CDs on Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture series include Sarajevo Blues, on Bosnian resistance poetry, and Trilectic, on Walter Benjamin. More here: www.charminghostess.com ”

from Little Boy Blue: Tiny Terrestrial (1990, Philippines)
by Eddie Reyes
Tagline: “The Gospel of Christ spreads to the stars”
written and performed by Jarett Kobek
Jarett Kobek is an essayist and novelist living in California. His books include ATTA (Semiotext(e)), a psychedelic biography of the lead 9/11 hijacker, and If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Penny-Ante Editions). His occasional forays into punditry have been published by White Cube, the Hammer Museum and Frieze. His love affair with America is over.

from Gravity (2013, USA)
by Alfonso Cuarón
“Grave”
Tagline: “What we have here is a failure to colonize.”
written and performed by Konrad Steiner
Konrad Steiner is a filmmaker, curator and producer with an interest in paracinematic performance, such as neo-benshi and video improvisation. He has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1984.