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ATA is proud  to present a selection of works from one of our favorite local artist Kerry Laitala accompanied by friends.

The San Francisco-based filmmaker Kerry Laitala is unquestionably one of the most inventive and original experimental filmmakers today. An expert in optical printing, D.I.Y practices, such as photogram and hand processing techniques, she utilizes these processes (among others) to re-shape ‘found’ materials into 16mm & 35mm handcrafted short films that embody and celebrate the phenomenon of motion pictures that made the early cinema going experience awe-inspiring. Inspired by avant-garde filmmakers like Phil Solomon and Paul Sharits, her work conveys a similar connection to the materials, but with a more unhinged sense of decay, and her works utilize hybrid strategies. Over the past decade her award winning films have played at venues in the U.S. such as the Whitney in New York and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and at festivals like Sundance, SF International and the New York International film festival (“Views from the Avant-Garde”) – . European venues such as The Tate Moderne and the Cinematheque Francaise have screened her work, as have festivals in Edinburgh, Rotterdam, Osnabrück (, Stuttgart and Helsinki’s Avanto festival. 

Program:

Eye of the Maelstrom, sound by experimental composer/musicians The Atchleys, 16mm dual projection – 16 minutes

Proxima, sound by experimental composer/musicians The Atchleys, 16mm dual projection- 8 minutes

Fly EYE Fire, expanded cinema with 16mm dual projection-5 minutes

Figments in Film, 8 minutes

Conjuror’s Box- 5 minutes

Knee Jerk- 5.5 minutes

Hallowed- 7 minutes

Untitled W.I.P. expanded cinema with 16 & 8mm dual projection-7 minutes

DISPATCHES FROM ATZLAN: CHARLES FAIRBANKS + CAITLIN MANNING +
For our annual No-Thanks Giving gathering, we host Charles Fairbanks and Caitlin Manning, both filmmaker expats coming up from separate towns in Southern Mexico. Charles shares the West Coast premiere of The Modern Jungle, his hour-long collaboration with Saul Kak–a visual artist from a Zoque village–on a lush but critical allegory of globalization, as filtered though the fever-dream of a Mexican shaman. Ex-Mission sister Caitlin circles back to San Fran with Resistance, Autonomy, and Women’s Rights in Chiapas, on the community craftwork of A.G. Lopez. Oaxacan visionary Bruno Varela is also represented with another of his exquisite experimental essays. AND North-of-the-border Native (now NY-based) Adam Khalil sends in the debut of Cultural Capture: Terminal Addition, on cultural appropriation and the white-washing of indigenous history. Food and drink from the region will be on hand in a festive reception for our much-missed comrades! 

Craig Baldwin in person, 16 mm projection.

Spectres of the Spectrum is a feature-length 16mm film utilizing old ‘kinescopes’ (filmed records of early TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly from the late Fifties’ educational show called ‘Science in Action’) to create an eerie, haunted “media-archaeology” zone for a sci-fi time-travel tale, wherein live-action actors search for a hidden electromagnetic secret to save the planet from a futuristic war-machine, inspired by HAARP the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. (Though fictionalized for Baldwin’s film, HAARP is, in fact, a very real phenomenon. On the surface, it is a data-gathering tool to explore the Aurora Borealis in detail. But in fact, HAARP doubles as one of the most sophisticated components of the Star Wars weapons arsenal, a particle beam device that can be accurately targeted on specific sites in the ionosphere.

Set in the year 2007 in the blighted desert outpost of Las Vegas, a young telepathic woman (“BooBoo”) scavenges for survival on an old bombing range with her father (“Yogi”) who is holed up in a cinder-block pirate-TV station, broadcasting rambling diatribes on the impending global electromagnetic ‘Pulse’. A solar eclipse gives BooBoo a cosmic opportunity to save the world, through a superluminal voyage back into time to retrieve a secret message left on the airwaves by her scientist grandmother.

With their Airstream trailer converted into a spaceship, the amazed BooBoo is able to catch up with outwardly propagating Fifties’ educational-TV broadcasts, affording an accelerated review of mid-century science and science-fiction cinema; and narrating a loose and collage-happy history of heroes and martyrs of the electromagnetic revolution. Commentary on Mesmer, Morse, Bell, Tesla, Farnsworth, and others comes from Yogi and his ‘TV Tesla’ correspondents, in a playfully speculative effort to trace the growth of corporate hegemony over the electromagnetic spectrum. Through an increasingly abstract montage of live-action, archival film, broadcast video, and ‘exploded’ interviews, the fantasy narrative warps into disjointed, abstracted, audio-visual phrases, suggesting the breakdown of personal ego/memory, historical representation, and, yes, of spacetime itself.