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 CYRUS TABAR + BILL DANIEL + SAM GREEN + Apropos of our ongoing obsession with sense-of-place, this plucky program points particularly to the rapidly shrinking periphery for Bay Area subcultures. Prodigal son Cyrus Tabar appears in person for the world theatrical premiere of his Masochism of the Margins, the true story of a feisty alternative live/work space (ATA!) holding its ground against Mission gentrification—shot in the very gallery it screens in! Jason Blalock’s In the Wake of Ghost Shiprelates the fate of a sister collective in Richmond, Burnt Ramen, that was swept away in the post-inferno paranoia. The backstory of another victim—Lonestar Swan, the legendary Adobe Books Birdman—is detailed in Roger Wolfe’s Schizophrenia. And speaking of “legendary”—Bill (Bozo Texino) Daniel rhapsodizes on another lost edge of the City, Bayshore, also premiering in its new sound version! Vero Majano’s now-classic Calle Chula strikes another melancholy note, a lyrical cry for a neighborhood being bleached to death. PLUS: Sam (Weather Underground) Green pays his own respects with two graveyard dirges, Vallejo’s lot 63, grave c and the just-finished Julius Caesar Was Buried in a Pet Cemetery. BONUS: Premiere of pre-school superstar Tala Brecke‘s (in person) The Drive Day and pre-show busking by Russ Forster, to Anthony Buchanan‘s S8 love letter to ATA!!

Artists’ Television Access (ATA) teams up with SFPL to mine the treasures in the Library’s 16mm film archive. That’s real film, not video! This month they are showing, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980, 16mm) 65 minutes

In 1942, as the United States sent its first troops to Europe, a flyer was distributed back home, declaring that “Hitler and his hordes will not come if women help to build ships…or if women take other jobs directly aiding the war effort”. Later that year, Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb wrote the song “Rosie the Riveter” which became a hit for The Four Vagabonds. A photograph of Naomi Parker, a lathe operator at the Alameda Naval Air Station, was circulated nationally; many believe it inspired J. Howard Miller’s famous image of a woman with a rolled up sleeve, proclaiming “We Can Do It!”

Connie Field’s documentary goes well beyond the surface understandings of the Rosie icon, subverting appropriated footage from vintage propaganda films by juxtaposing it against in-depth interviews with five remarkable women looking back on their days in the wartime workforce. We meet welder Gladys Belcher and labor organizer Lyn Childs, both of whom worked in the Richmond, CA shipyards, Wanita Allen from a Detroit foundry, Lola Weixel, a New York bomb case welder, and Margaret Wright, a riveter at Lockheed in Los Angeles. Their collective testimony provides insight into many relevant topics: the suddenness of a national shift in attitudes about women’s labor in time of crisis, the double-standards applied to men and to women, and to white and to non-white workers, the promotion of a consumer-focused society as the war wound down, and much more. An incredible work or oral history made at just the right moment of remove from the time period discussed, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” in 1996.

MATT McCORMICK’s BUZZ ONE FOUR + OC inaugurates its 32nd year with the Cali premiere of McCormick’s highly anticipated magnum opus—a meticulously crafted hour account of an A-Bomb-laden B-52 that crashed outside of Washington DC!! This still-classified chronicle is finally coming to our screens because…the pilot was Matt’s grandfather! Matthimself flies in from Oregon to introduce this astonishing tale—a personal essay-cum-morality play about the criminal negligence of the Air Force and the utterly stoopid waste of lives and resources that was the Cold War. Veritable pillar of Portland’s Peripheral Produce community, the much-missed McCormick also shares some of his sublime shorts—Future So Bright and The Motion Makes Me Last—after an opening-reception montage of military follies.