Author: Fara

San Francisco Cinematheque presents: 

From Baltimore to Providence to Chicago to San Francisco, we lurch, drift and dream. In moldering back alleys and along gentrified promenades those with eyes to see create poignant cine-poems of decay, rebirth and love among the ruins. A cinema of desperation and possibility, these films jump between documentary, narrative and even surveillance genres in their exposition of the new weird America. Screening: Alee Peoples’ freewheeling Lonelyville, a wandering byway drift through depressed Providence, documenting the so-called housing market crash along the way; Crowning Glory (also by Peoples), a psychic punk/patriotic attempt at resuscitating loaded political icons (with a spastic dose of perverse pageantry); Gibbs Chapman and Catherine Lam’s “lecture on leaderless organization,” I know there’s something going on back there; Doug Katelus’ Lost in the Flood, a tribute to Valencia Street nighttime and a reflection on a life left behind; and 724 14^th Street, Ching Yi Tseng’s time-lapse song of life in our city. Finally, based ostensibly on a dimly recalled mis-telling of M. Somerset Maugham’s story of postwar dissolution, Stephanie Barber and Xav LePlae’s razor’s edge, as weird and joyful as it is lugubrious, follows wandering lovers through shopping malls, back yards and the barbershops of Baltimore on a long slow spiral into oblivion. Program commences with Scotch Tape by none other than the patron saint of moribund joy himself, Jack Smith. (Steve Polta)