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sf cinematheque presents: 

David Cox and Kelly Sears In Person

Very apocalyptic, but also very charming. With a visual style recalling a digital-era Lewis Klahr, the video work of Kelly Sears draws significantly on the American vernacular of mid-century advertising, industrial cinema and other ephemeral forms to describe a paranoiac culture of surveillance and secret messages hidden in plain sight. Voice on the Line describes presciently our contemporary concern with telephonic surveillance in a tale of Cold War paranoia. Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise, described in Art Lies as “a mix between the horror film Carrie and Charles Burns’ Black Hole” concerns a series of disasters in an early ‘70s American high school. Other Sears films screening include He Hates to Be Second, an abstract portrait-of-sorts of Robert Kennedy and the tragic plight of the mid-century male; The Body Besieged, on the darker side of the yoga craze; and more. This opening program of Sears’ shorts is followed by David Cox’ Time Ghost, “a rumination on current urban geopolitics and technology,” assembled also from appropriated ephemera and the cut-up monologues of William S. Burroughs. Finally, Clandestine, Gideon C. Kennedy and Marcus Rosentrater’s similarly collaged speculative history of spy radio broadcasts emanating from so-called “numbers stations,” concludes this evening’s exposé. (Steve Polta)