5/18/17 // Technical Sincerity with Gordon Ball
Posted May 16th, 2017 in News / Events
Technical Sincerity with Gordon Ball
Thursday, May 18th, 2017 // 7:30pm
16 Sherman Street, San Francisco
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Please join Canyon Cinema for another installation of our Salon series with longtime Canyon filmmaker Gordon Ball.
Technical Sincerity
Georgia (4min, color, silent, 8mm)
Sitting (2min, color, silent, 16mm)
Father Movie (10min, color, silent, 8mm)
Enthusiasm (13min, color + B&W, sound 16mm)
Mexican Jail Footage (18min, color, sound, 16mm)
Millbrook (9min, color, sound, 16mm)
7:00pm- Doors
7:30pm* – Screening and discussion.
*Note: Street entrance locked at 7:30 – please arrive on time.
Filmmaker Gordon Ball in person. Ball will also be reading from his new short story collection On Tokyo’s Edge at City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, May 17th at 7:00 PM. Click here for more details.
In 1980 Gordon Ball adopted a phrase from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “technical sincerity,” as touchstone for his first-person filmmaking. In his May 18 Salon the filmmaker will arrive in San Francisco to show and discuss six films from his body of work that exemplify this mode.
“Technical Sincerity”
“Yesterday, a friend who had asked to use a film of mine in a program, said to me “Of course, as I’ve said before, the technique of the film (Father Movie) is nothing to write home about.” I answered, “Well yes but I think that’s what gives it its power—in other words, it doesn’t conform to any textbook standards, but instead to the heart, the experience of the event and my feelings toward it as I filmed.” And he agreed. For “Father Movie” is a film made (except for prelude) at my father’s death; long sequences of it were shot literally weeping & driving (one hand on camera, one on wheel) through town by old places he’d lived in. For such a mode or “technique,” so much the opposite of anything planned, I recall a prose line from Yeats: “When heroism returns to the age, its first sign shall be technical sincerity.” I’ve never entirely understood what Yeats meant, but as time’s passed the line’s last words have come to represent a kind of personal touchstone for art. Not for heroism—which I don’t understand—but to distinguish internal soul from external formula. Surely this is applicable in film, where almost any Hollywood or other “theatrical” movie works from the latter & those of our most masterful contemporaries—say Brakhage and Kubelka—invariably bear the stamp of the former. Fine or rough, heavy or ethereal, there is always at base an unregretful uncompromising heart & consciousness. It is negligent of all but its own earnest rhythmic awareness: and that, after all, may be what we were looking for—what one person and no other can give us.” – Gordon Ball (September 28, 1980, Chapel Hill)
