Author: Fara

Curated and presented by Dale Hoyt
presented by SF Cinematheque in collaboration with Pacific Film Archive

During its 30+ years of existence, the San Francisco Art Institute’s New Genres (formerly Performance/Video) department has produced innumerable high-caliber artists and has influenced performance and conceptual art on a global scale. Simultaneously, the department’s commitment to maintaining state-of-the-art production facilities has contributed to an equally impressive output from myriad film- and video makers. Tonight’s program presents a survey of this important work. While as aggressive and sophisticated as their performance counterpart, the work of these artists displays an equally ingenious and ground-breaking visual language and deals with such varied issues as formalism, feminism, abstract narrative, transgressive sexuality, personal biography and body politics. And, drawn from three decades of activity, the program comprises an historical microcosm of video technology, beginning with industrial and broadcast cameras and behemoth Portapaks through the Hi-8 video revolution, “cuts-only” editing, the Amiga Toaster and Avid systems, up to DV’s utopian technological plateau. Join us for an evening of the early works and rarities of some of the field’s major artists, including Jordan Biren, Nao Bustamante, Monet Clark, Torsten Zenas Burns, Cecilia Dougherty, Didi Dunphy, Dale Hoyt, Andrew Huestis, Tony Labat, Jennifer Locke, Anne McGuire, Guy Overfelt and Emjay Wilson. (Dale Hoyt)

A new short by Elia Vargas,

Woven is textures of reality balanced in psychosis. It is a narrative driven as much by sound as by image that explores our relationship to the world through our perceptions. Those five wonderful sensory tools that extend our percepts. Woven observes Valentine as she undergoes an animalistic transformation in the pursuit of perfection- through song. Her musical journey is fragmented as her own sense of reality blends further into the world she has created for herself. Does she succeed?

Woven is the consequence of many miraculous moments and artists.

Featuring the Music of Honeycomb

Live sets by:

Ever Isles:  http://everisles.bandcamp.com/album/cocoon

Honeycomb:  http://www.myspace.com/honeycombmusic

…………
on elia:

There is a breadth and unique sense of engagement in the video documentation style of Elia Vargas that extends beyond the traditional framework of a documentary.  His subject matter broadly encompasses local and international events, interviews, and personal narrative, while his visual and audio techniques give the viewer a layered sense of presence and engagement.  Elia speaks of being driven by both a compelling desire to document, and an inherent belief in story telling.  While one could be said to compromise the integrity of the other, there is a clear fusion of the two in his work, revealing a consistent and focused interest in individuals and in capturing individual moments.

When Elia talks about documenting, he speaks about “experimental documentation,” about “documenting while going off a feeling” in order to convey “the uniqueness of a moment.” When considering the range of subjects Elia explores, you begin to see not just an interest in the culture and story of people, but the culture and story of sound, and how these elements connect.

-Nif Hodgson

Amreeka chronicles the adventures of Muna, a single mother who leaves the Palestinian West Bank with Fadi, her teenage son, with dreams of an exciting future in the promised land of small town Illinois. In America, as her son navigates high school hallways the way he used to move through military checkpoints, the indomitable Muna scrambles together a new life cooking up falafel burgers as well as hamburgers at the local White Castle.

Told with heartfelt humor by writer-director Cherien Dabis in her feature film debut, Amreeka is a universal journey into the lives of a family of immigrants and first-generation teenagers caught between their heritage and the new world in which they now live and the bittersweet search for a
place to call home. 90 min., 2009

Sponsored by ANSWER Coalition—Act Now to Stop War & End Racism