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  • A Salon with Jason Halprin (From Little Things Big Things Grow)

    Just before he leaves the Bay Area, please join current Oakland and soon to be Montréal resident Jason Halprin for a Salon with Canyon Cinema on the evening of Friday, June 15th 2018 at ATA, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco. Jason will present a variety of work he has made over the last 20 years alongside selections from Canyon filmmakers Gary Adelstein, Gina Carducci, Julie Murray, and Robert Schaller.

    PROGRAM:

    1. Gina Carducci’s “Stone Welcome Mat” (6.5 min, 16mm, 2002)

    2. Mylar Balloon Rip-off (3.5 min, Super 8, 2007) (JH)

    3. Monongahela Ghost Train (3.5 min, Super 8, 2007) (JH)

    4. Gary Adelstein’s “More Italian Places” (12 min, Super 8, 1989)

    5. Agnes & Me (9 min, 16mm on Video, 2011) (JH)

    6. Robert Schaller “Triptych” (3 min, 16mm, 1996)

    7. Summer Home – (5 min, 16mm & Super8 on viddeo, 2001) (JH)

    8. Julie Murray’s “Expulsion” (9min, Super 8, 1999)

    9. In Which There Appears Trains, a Carousel, and Rain (10 min, video, 2016) (JH)

    10. Imperfect Video (20 min, video, 2013) (JH)

    BIO:

    Focusing on details of movement, texture, line, and shape inherent in our surroundings, while borrowing visual tropes from travelogue, home movies, and structuralist film, his work explores how geography and place, both observed and constructed, manifests in the moving image. Working in small-gauge film and archival video while employing techniques from optical printing to time-lapse cinematography and hand-processing, Halprin’s preoccupations range from amusement parks and nostalgia to tourism and historical revisionism to musings on 9/11. In Halprin’s own words: “My work explores the way humans are affected by their immediate surroundings, and how the shape of a location can impact social interaction and culture… Cities and wilderness both open cerebral pathways that might otherwise not be taken… as for me, I am haunted by landscape.”

    Originally from Southern Colorado, he graduated from the University of Colorado with a BFA in Film Studies (’01) and a BA in History (’01), earned an MFA in Film Production from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (’04), and will be pursuing a PhD in Film & Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Currently, he teaches production in the Cinema Department at City College of San Francisco, and was previously on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colgate University, and Columbia College Chicago. Previous screenings have included Media City 14 (Windsor), the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), MCA Chicago, the Images Festival (Toronto), L’Etna (Paris), Anthology Film Archives, Crossroads (San Francisco), and in alleyways in Buenos Aires and Paonia, Colorado, USA.

    The Canyon Cinema Salon series is made possible with generous support from the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation.

     

  • OpenScreening

    Usually the first Thursday of every month, but due to scheduling conflict we are holding  OpenScreening in the 2nd Thursday in June.

    ATA’openscreening.jpeg.pagespeed.ce.NgD79VABiRs Open Screening is the only monthly open submissions screening in the Bay Area. Get your work out there!

    Open Screening is where we invite local filmmakers to show their short subject films (under 15 mins.). It is a free event and you can either screen a film or just be a member of the audience. Either way it is FREE. It is a great place to network, if you are a filmmaker, crew member, actor or a fan of local films. Please let us know if you would like to screen something. We love films and would love to see yours.

    Submissions: Label all tapes w/ name, contact, title and length. Mail to: Open Screening, 992 Valencia, SF, 94110.  1-2 weeks advance submissions strongly recommended. If not, just walk in before the show. Maximum length: 15 min. Formats: Digital File (PC or Mac),  DVD, miniDV/DV-cam, VHS, beta, 8mm and 16mm. For 8mm and 16mm films give us advance notice.

    Door opens at 7

    contact: programming@atasite.org

  • ATA@SFPL: The Pleasure Garden & Chickens Come Home (screening at Noe Valley Library)

    Tonight’s 16mm screening pairs a film by San Francisco poet and filmmaker James Broughton with one from the Golden Age of Comedy, the era which so profoundly inspired Broughton’s films.
    *
    Chickens Come Home (James W. Horne, 1931) 31 min. Black & White
    In this pre-code-era comedy, Oliver Hardy plays a fertilizer salesman-turned-politician, and Stan Laurel his assistant. When an old flame (Mae Busch) turns up with a compromising photograph, Hardy’s mayoral campaign is thrust into chaos. He sends Laurel to delay his blackmailer while he and his wife (Thelma Todd) schmooze with prominent campaign donors. Of course it all builds to a riotous conclusion as one expects from Laurel & Hardy.
    *
    The Pleasure Garden (James Broughton, 1953) 38 min. Black & White
    After introducing a program of his earliest films at the Edinburgh Film Festival, James Broughton was invited to make a movie outside San Francisco for the first time. Filming in the ruins of London’s Crystal Palace with future Oscar-winner Walter Lassally behind the camera, Broughton recruited his then-lover Kermit Sheets, director Lindsay Anderson, and a dozen others to perform as various kinds of “seekers” trying to follow their passions despite the desires of a dark-clad bureaucrat named Colonel Gargoyle, played by John Le Mesurier. Hattie Jacques plays his nemesis Mrs. Albion, who releases the cast from Gargoyle’s puritanical restraints through the use of a magical shawl. Combining the filmmaker’s silent-comedy- and dance-inspired early style with English pantomime, The Pleasure Garden won Broughton a unique prize (“Prix du film de fantaisie poétique”) from the 1954 Cannes Film Festival jury headed by his hero Jean Cocteau.
    Noe Valley Libray, 451 Jersey St, San Francisco.