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Sf Cinematheque presents: Andrew Lampert In Person

Far from the fussiness of his downtown day job—preserving classics of the avant-garde at Anthology Film Archives—the cinema of Andrew Lampert sprawls with contingency, chance and unscripted accident. He writes: “…sublime confusion fashions new narratives and non-linear relationships. Space and time. The time it takes to fix a mistake[…]. This is cinematic. Which is to say the projector and the screen and the projectionist and the audience are together far more integral to cinema than any film running through a projector in a booth behind the audience[…]. What we watch in the cinema, you can call it content, is interchangeable. Movies eventually resemble movies[…]. Celluloid is not cinema, not even close. So what does expanding cinema mean? […] for us expanded indicates multiple projectors, numerous means. Simultaneity and synchronicity, or the complete lack thereof. Space and time.” Squarely presented in the present tense, Lampert’s film/performance hybrids—equal parts stand-up shtick and fluxus-inspired conceptual conundra—hold the social space between projector and screen to be truly where the action is. Tonight’s encounter features the “contracted cinema” work, CONSTIPATION: A Film for Filmmakers, a super-8 farewell of sorts to the fetish that was Kodachrome; short films, including Taste Test and undoubtedly many surprises. (Steve Polta)