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We show films every Saturday at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st).
SHOWTIME 8:00pm. ALWAYS FREE BOOKS, VINYL, VHS, AND WINE.
Our Fall Season opener promises an explosion of creative energy akin to the moment when two atomic pits come together to achieve critical mass!---Curatorially, we drive together a pair of 45-min. sets---one animated and one musical--- to properly inaugurate OC’s autumn programming. Featured is the world premiere of Salise Hughes’ marvelous rendition of Mickey Mouse’s inside story---Citizen Mickey--following two tunes from Bernal Heights’ Scott Stark, the second being a duet with Jeremy Rourke! Jeremy’s presence invokes Peter Lichter, Sharon Liu, Gretchen Hogue, Laura Harrison, and the latest (The Lost Season) from Boulder genius Kelly Sears. The musical “half pit” leans in a festive, even comical direction, with some half-dozen anomalies from the margins of mid-century popular culture---Josie and the Pussycats, Sesame Street, two kinds of ventriloquism, and the premiere revival of Sam Green and Sarah Jacobson's Fabulous Stains. Come early for our reception with Korla Pandit, Barney Google, Kraftwerk, free toast-and-jam, and Russ Forster scratching vinyl on the sidewalk! $11
Exquisitely curated by that canny Polish critic—now almost a regular figure in the Bay Area film family that she’s chosen to adopt—here’s a living, breathing, oh-so-fresh program of small-gauge moving-image artworks that specifically focus on the Natural World. Selecting titles of tangible sensory power that provide a boldly physical, almost immersive viewing experience, Ms. Boczkowska--in a triumphant return from last season’s Road Movie tour–now promises a panoply of new pieces from world-renown masters such as Laura Kraning, Julie Murray, Tomonari Nishikawa, Emily Richardson, and Melissa Faivre, mixed in with our own in-the-flesh local heroes Dominic Angerame, Scott Stark, and Toney Merritt (world premiere)! Thematically organized within elemental sub-sets, the unprecedented accessing of contemporary international artists brings very many previously unseen perspectives to a community voraciously hungry for a revelatory visual poetics of the environment. $12
Rightfully praised as the granddaddy of hand-processing workshops, Hoffman has always stood as a lightning-rod of hope and creative agency through the 30 years of his summer retreats in Ontario, Canada. He finally blesses the Bay Area with three visits this week, with this OC program offering the best opportunity to revel in the most extraordinary 16mm exemplars from his three decades of enlightened instruction on photochemical experimentation. AND along with Phil himself, we have five of his graduates here in the flesh, each with their respective work: Alfonso Alvarez (Down on the Farm), Brett Kashmere (Ghosts of Empire), Deirdre Logue (Scratches), Rob Butterworth (Chicken Farm), and Annapurna Kumar (Something to Treasure)--a veritable 30-year reunion right here in San Fran! ALSO screening are Helen Hills’ Your New Pig Is Down the Road, David Gatten’s Hardwood Process, Jennifer Reeves’ We Are Going Home, Nazli Dincel’s How to Make a Film, Clint Enns’ A Day in the Shint, Maia Cybelle Carpenter’s The Shape of the Gaze, Karel Doing’s Dandelion, Chris Chong’s Minus, Janet Cole’s Gathering, Francisca Duran’s It Matters What, and Adrian Kahgee’s Everything Is Right Here. PLUS Gilbert with Shapeshifters Beer! $14
The first of three Focus-on-Locus shows in fact addresses our own situation here in the Bay Area, with a special section devoted to dear departed Scott Williams, long-time denizen of 20th St. in the Inner Mission. One of the greatest stencil artists of our times, Scott passed away in June, leaving behind a true Mission School legacy of obsessively worked paintings--in books, on buildings, in frames, and on the streets. Russell (Stencil Nation) Howze situates Scott's oeuvre within the energized NorCal art-scene of the last half-century, sharing clips from Nick Gorski's Spray Paint and Carla Leshne's Carmanic Convergence. ALSO Arlin Golden is in the house with his hilarious Backyard, to anchor a set of short docs on our Fair City: the Fillingers' Interchange, Attell's Fun House, and Oakland's Down to Earth, on sustainable collective living. AND speaking of utopian projects in the East Bay, tonight's real revelation is a 10-min. prime cut from a larger W-i-P by consummate film artist Ken Paul Rosenthal. PLUS Emeryville MudFlats, William Wiley's billboard art, and free postcards! $12
Our second Program on Place claims a field-of-view as far and wide as Planet Pluto, boasts eight premieres, and features four of the makers in person! Cal Poly's Lana Caplan pops in with a book- launch and a new movie on SoCal beach milieux, before Catherine Finsness debuts her enlightening doc on Eclipse Chasers (with Kelly Sears' classic Maximum Umbra as complement). Arlin Golden contextualizes his provocative Balloon Boy, and David Sherman sends in DiElectric Drift, his filmic record of a pilgrimage to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Peggy Nelson shares Manhatta II, on the covid-period “abstraction” of NYC streets, while Diane Nerwen's Boom shows us the same de-populated city, but from a penthouse perspective. PLUS Nik Nerburn's Minnesota doll-house psycho-drama, If A Man Wanted to Disappear, Travis Wilkerson's aforementioned Pluto Declaration, and a sublime 16mm circle around Richard Attenborough's beautiful Baobob. Free postcards! $12
It's Indigenous People's Day, and we are overjoyed to welcome back Gustavo Vazquez, SFAI grad and UCSC prof, with his new doc on the beloved seed culture of Qaxaca, The Keepers of the Corn. Gustavo presents the story of the native species as told by the indigenous famers, artisans, and cooks whose ancestors shepherded the ever-evolving seeds from the dawn of agriculture into the 21st Century--a story of collective labor and food sovereignty spanning more than 350 generations! ALSO in person is Alex Mejia, with the world premiere of Franciscan Inscriptions, his astonishing collage-essay on the role of Franciscan monks in the contradictory colonial struggle for the spread of written literacy in the New World. PLUS Pulque, Sarah Lewison's (Fat of the Land) own paean to the native Meso-American diet, here on the production of this cactus-based beverage. AND: Through respective clips we pay tribute to two Mexican maestros who passed away last year: Gregorio Rocha and Lourdes Portillo. Pulque tastings! $14
A special feature of every OC calendar, our Live A/V shows proudly showcase a particularly West Coast cine-practice: Motion Picture pieces PLUS Sound tracks, respectively, performed in situ and in real-time conversation! Headlining this first of a program-pair is the much-loved Frisco ensemble Third Hand, a multi-tasking multi-media crew organized around, in this case, J Lee’s truly marvelous Rear-Projection stagings—here in Operation Theater they explore the living mechanics of the human body, as probed by electronic sensors. Jetting up from San Diego is ex-SF hero-artist Mike Trigilio, who’s taking a break from his UCSD duties to debut his dazzling digi-animations, both as single-channel abstractions and as in-the-moment video-synthesizer performances. Our beatnik homegirl Linda Scobie also dives in to demonstrate what she’s been up to with her water-color painting on found 35mm slides, tonight in collaboration with audio-artists Country Dolls. AND Rebecca Barten graces us with her presence and the world premiere of her Amelia--yes, on that amazing aviatrix. ATA janitor Craig Baldwin sweeps into the mix his stereoscopic twin-projection Double Helix, after a playful potpourri of optical tricks punctuate the pre-show reception! $14
Our second live-cinema screening is shaped by its proximity to Election Day, so that Kal Spelletich can more effectively conjure his curse on candidate D.Trump and his Nazi posse! ProPublica hero-reporter AC Thompson and sound artist Mansur Nurullah aid Kal’s American Aria live remix of never-seen Jan. 6th footage, towards an energized condemnation of the QAnon election-deniers. Co-billed is that nationally-touring video-poet 99 Hooker, a welcome member of the OC family and an electronic artiste whose work approaches stream-of-thought image-generation. AND also here is none other than Bill Daniel, with one of his 16mm double-projection collabs with local musicians. Tommy Becker, too, makes the scene, with the world premiere of his Stars Bright on a Blue Field, while long-time ATA fave Mike Kavanagh brings in his desperately needed critique of AI. PLUS Russ Forster on Banjo, Pussy Riot, Indecline, Vic Berger, and a hilarious battery of anti-Trump punches. $14
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