Author: suki

Co-presented by SF Cinematheque.

Craig Baldwin, ATA co-founder and organizer of the Other Cinema series of experimental and underground film/video and performances , is celebrated through two programs of his amazing and influential work exploiting found and archival footage embedded in countercultural sensibilities.

1st program:

¡O No Coronado!, 40 minutes\16mm

: Coronado, one of the least successful conquistadors, is perfectly suited to Baldwin’s purposes in part because his motivation is so blatantly delusional. Arriving in Mexico in 1538, he set out on a fruitless quest to find the imaginary Seven Cities of Cibola. Crossing the desert and the Rio Grande, Coronado explored what is now Arizona and New Mexico, stumbling across the Grand Canyon and engaging in numerous needless fights wit the Indians. The non-existent cities of gold led his expedition as far afield as present-day Kansas, before returning to Mexico City in sodden disarray.

Baldwin illustrates this empty quest with a melange of images culled from swashbucklers and westerns, classroom movies and museum paintings. Christian cartoons and industrial documentaries. He uses whatever comes to hand. This pragmatism produces a richness of metaphor. A clip from an old Vincent Price film stands in for the Inquisition. Coronado is occasionally visualized as Gulliver; when his Indian guide leads hism astray, he’s the Lone Ranger, accompanied by Tonto (and, quite poetically, a few passages from Ravel’s Bolero. When necessary, the narrative is goosed along with a few costume dramatizations. (Coronado is played by a goofy-looking actor in a Spanish helmet). Everything is tied together with generic sci-fi music, strategic sound effects, and two narrators (one specializing in boastful rants), Baldwin is more honest (than regular historical documentaries) in representing the present, interviewing not scholars but tourists and locals: “Coronado: isn’t that a shopping mall around here?” If you want to schlockument the box populi, this is how. –J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Wild Gunman, 20 mins\video

 Mobilizing wildly diverse found-footage fragments, obsessive optical printing, and a dense “musique concrete” soundtrack, a maniac montage of pop-cultural amusements, cowboy iconography, and advertising imagery is re-contextualized within the contemporary geopolitical crisis in a scathing critique of U.S. cultural and political imperialism.

RocketKitKongoKit, 30 Min\video

This kaleidoscopic, amphetamine-paced tour de force uses a barrage of found-footage images and rapid-fire narration to trace a history of Zaire since its independence in 1960. The CIA, German munitions manufacturers, and American popular culture are all indicted in this comic critique of neo-colonialism. Centering on President Mobutu’s lease of 1/0 of the country’s total land area to a West German rocket firm, the film explores both the explicit and implicit historical contradictions that this astonishing arrangement poses and is posed by. With sources of imagery ranging from corporate advertising through 50’s instructional films to Tarzan flicks, and musical components oscillating between aboriginal sounds and contemporary electronic compositions, a critical irony is established between the several voice-over discourses and an energetic montage of “found” visuals. Self-reflexively ordered like a plastic model kit, the film perhaps proposes another, more imaginative model of historiography.

2nd program: 9 PM (Sonic Outlaws)

Craig Baldwin, ATA co-founder and organizer of the Other Cinema series of experimental and underground film and performances, hosts a special anniversary iteration of the famous weekly series, showcasing the work of three members of the 992 collective -Bryan Boyce (San Francisco), James T. Hong (Taipei), and Sylvia Schedelbauer (Berlin).

The funky/punky media projects at 992 Valencia St. celebrate their 30th anniversary in the Mission trenches with a series of screenings to honor a home-grown DIY culture of radical vision and critical verve. This OC/ATA co-production sets it off with a dazzling showcase of the work of 3 of our “family” members who got their starts in our incubator storefront, then moved on up to international art-stardom. In person, Bryan Boyce introduces a recombinant raft of his righteously satiric shorts, including hits from the 90s as well as new instant-masterpieces like the Reality Factory and Google Mission. James Hong,Biennial regular now based in Taiwan, represents with a trove of trenchant geopolitical works: Condor, Behold the Asian, Suprematist Kapital, and A Portrait of Sino-American Friendship. Like her fellow Hall-of-Famers in archival/collage approach, now-Berlin denizen Sylvia Schedelbauer, most recentATA grad to grab world headlines, rewards us with Way Fare, False Friends, and her exquisite Sounding Glass.

New music/sound + film/video collaborations by:
Crystal Pascucci + Isabelle Harada
Zachary James Watkins + Rosario Sotelo
Lisa Mezzacappa + Janis Crystal Lipzin

with film scores performed live by the Eyes’nEars House Band:
Marta Raviglia (IT), voice
Steve Adams, winds
Piero Bittolo Bon (IT), reeds
Crystal Pascucci, cello
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass
Suki O’Kane, percussion

Mission Eye & Ear is a live cinema series that brings together Bay Area composers and improvisers with filmmakers and video artists drawn from ATA’s diverse and geographically sprawling family, to create new works performed live at ATA by a stellar ensemble of local musicians.  Composer-performers Crystal Pascucci, Zachary James Watkins and Lisa Mezzacappa represent a rich cross-section of the local creative music scene, influenced by electronic music, acoustic improv, noise, avant-garde jazz, alt-rock and contemporary classical music.  Filmmaker/media artists Rosario Sotelo, Isabelle Harada and Janis Crystal Lipzin explore political commentary, documentary storytelling, dreamlike cinescapes and formal abstraction in a wide range of narrative and experimental works.

This September event, part of ATA’s 30th Anniversary celebration, is the third and final in a series of Mission Eye & Ear events this year, organized by Bay Area musician and curator Lisa Mezzacappa with ATA. The first edition of Mission Eye & Ear, in 2011, commissioned nine composer-filmmaker teams to create new works. The series was remounted in a day-long marathon at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2012, and has since traveled to cities in Italy and Germany, where local musicians provide live scores for films commissioned for the series.

Visit: www.missioneyeear.com

Mission Eye & Ear is supported by a grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation.

Artist bios

Isabelle Harada is a displaced, trans-disciplinary alchemist who draws parallels between physics and epistemology. By mapping and overlaying these two systems in animated works, she attempts to find entropy between proof and skepticism on multiple levels of experience and perception. Currently working towards her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, her work has been most recently shown at the Clinton Street Theater, the Rivertech Building, and in Rose Bond’s “Boundary Crossings” group show.

Janis Crystal Lipzin has been making art in virtually every form of reproducible media for nearly forty years. Utilizing such diverse media as 8mm and 16mm film, various kinds and formats of photographic prints and transparencies, video, audio, digital photography, multi-media installations and media performance, she has confronted an array of uncomfortable subjects such as pyromania, prehistoric murder, pesticide abuse, reproductive rights, and mortality.  She taught Film and Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 2009 where she served as Chair of the Film Department, and before that, directed the Film/Photo Program at Antioch College. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Ohio University in Painting and Photography. She also studied painting at New York University and received her MFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute.  Lipzin’s films and photo work have been featured in numerous museum shows including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the  Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the Neuberger Museum at SUNY  Purchase, and the Kunstmuseum in Berne, Switzerland. Her many awards include three Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based bassist, composer, and curator. An active collaborator and arts organizer in the Bay Area music community for twelve years, she leads several of her own ensembles and performs in nearly a dozen others. Her music spans raucous garage jazz to ethereal chamber music, scores for experimental film and immersive installation environments. She collaborates frequently on cross- disciplinary projects with filmmakers, visual artists and writers. Lisa has been artist-in-residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Banff International
Jazz Workshop, and the Painted Bride Arts Center. She holds an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley, and a BA in music from the University of Virginia. Lisa has recorded on the Tzadik, Clean Feed, NoBusiness, NotTwo, Kadima, Leo, Edgetone, Porto Franco, Odd Shaped Case and Evander record labels, and has performed at countless music venues in the Bay Area, New York, and abroad, including the Earshot, Montreal, Novara and Monterey Jazz festivals.

Crystal Pascucci is a cellist, composer and improviser. An active performer in the Bay Area, Pascucci has recently performed the work of Roscoe Mitchell at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland, as a featured solo performer at both the NextNow Music Series and the Light A Fire Music Series, at the SIMM Series (duo with Eric Glick Rieman), the graphic-score work of Christina Stanley at the 11th Annual Outsound Summit New Music Festival, and at the 11th Annual Transbay Skronathon with Matt Davignon – performances with Aaron Bennett’s Electro-Magnetic Trans-Personal Orchestra, Oakland Active Orchestra, the work of Polly Moller at the Soundwave Festival, with Opera Wolf as guest artists for the New Music Works: CAGE 950, John Cage 100th Birthday Celebration and more. Crystal is a Co-founding member of the Oakland Composer’s Union and performing with renowned clarinetist, Rachel Condry, in the improv duo, Chocolate for Breakfast. Crystal holds a Bachelor’s of Music Performance from SUNY Fredonia, a graduate professional degree from The Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford and has attended Mills College.

Rosario Sotelo is a Chicana artist who spent most of her childhood living near the Calexico, Mexicali Mexico border. Her work was recently presented at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City and the New York Film Festival. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008.

Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Zachary has received commissions from Cornish College of The Arts, The Microscores Project, Beam Foundation, Somnubutone Radio Series, sfsound and the Seattle Chamber Players. His 2006 composition Suite For String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition and has subsequently been performed as part of the Labs 25th Anniversary Celebration and the Labor Sonor Series at Kule in Berlin, Germany. Zachary has presented works in numerous festivals across the United States and in Berlin Germany including the Internationales Klankunstfest 09, Sounds Outside Festival, the 2007 Bent Festival in Los Angeles, the 2006 International Computer Music Conference, the 10th Annual Music For People and Thingamajigs Festival and the second Biennial SJ01 Global Festival of Arts on the Edge.

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