Hold Me While I’m Naked (George Kuchar, 1966)

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Living in Studio Kuchar

Curated by Hou Hanru, Julio Cesar Morales, and Mary Ellyn Johnson

March 9 – April 21, 2012
Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11:00 am–6:00 pm
Opening reception: Thursday, March 8, 5:30–7:30 pm

Walter and McBean Galleries
San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

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SFAI honors influential artist and faculty member George Kuchar with new exhibition, Living in Studio Kuchar, opening March 8 at the Walter and McBean Gallerie

Living in Studio Kuchar situates Kuchar’s work in the specific locale and community of SFAI, which for four decades served as a site of experimentation and collaboration; a network of students, filmmakers, and friends; and his emotional home. The exhibition will transform the galleries into an active experience for audiences: Installations will reproduce Kuchar’s homestudio, and there will be a self-serve VHS tape viewing area, a listening station of soundtrack records from Kuchar’s collection, and an interactive filmmaking space where visitors are invited to use costumes and props to make their own Kuchar-esque films.

Other works on view will include seminal films such as Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), ranked as one of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century by the Village Voice; class films made with SFAI students; selections from the long-running project “Weather Diaries” (including Hot Spell, the last video Kuchar completed before his death in September 2011); and drawings and comics. The exhibition will also feature videos by both local and international artists—John Waters, Todd Solondz, Lisa Blatt, Miguel Calderon, Tim Sullivan, and Nao Bustamante, among others—that focus on Kuchar’s influence and mentorship.

Born in New York in 1942, Kuchar began making 8mm movies in the 1950s with his twin brother, Mike. They soon became central to the underground, avant-garde film scene, screening work alongside Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. Called “legends in the world of experimental film” by Roger Ebert, the Kuchars have influenced filmmakers including Waters, Solondz, Gus Van Sant, David Lynch, and Brian De Palma, and theorist Gene Youngblood named George one of the great artists in the history of the moving image. Kuchar’s film and video work has screened around the globe in cinemas, festivals, and major museums. Recent honors include the exhibition George Kuchar: Pagan Rhapsodies at MoMA PS1 in New York; the addition of his 1977 short film I, An Actress to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry; and his selection for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, to be held March 1 though May 27, 2012 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

More information about the event can be found at:
http://www.sfai.edu/event/living-studio-kuchar

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For more information about George Kuchar and to rent his films from Canyon…

The Return, Nathaniel Dorsky (16mm, 2011)

Like a memory already gone, this place of life.

For more information and to rent this film…

Felicia R. Lee’s article discusses the impending demise of Canyon Cinema, its limited resources, and the looming $30K that is needed to save our organization:

“It would be tragic if it went under, because it would make a good portion of this work inaccessible,” said Steve Anker, the dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts. “They represent one of the bastions of the real 16-millimeter film experience,” he added.

Read the full article here:

California Filmmakers’ Cooperative Sees Grim Future
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/movies/canyon-cinema-filmmakers-cooperative-sees-grim-future.html?_r=1&ref=arts

Canyon Cinema is sad to lose one of its oldest members, Robert Nelson, who will be missed. Below are some wonderful write-ups on the late filmmaker.

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New York Times article by Bruce Weber:

“Confoundingly plotless but cleverly and energetically edited to render images in often poignant, often uproarious juxtaposition, Mr. Nelson’s movies are varied in tone and subject matter, but they all exhibit the subversive relish of a renegade, quirky wit.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/arts/robert-nelson-experimental-filmmaker-dies-at-81.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper

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MUBI Notebook Blog:

“Known for prankster experimentalism and on-the-spot invention, the films of San Francisco native Robert Nelson are among the defining landmarks of the post-Beat American underground of the 1960s and 70s. His free-spirited approach, sharp wit, and artistic rigor marked inspired collaborations with William T Wiley, William Allan, Steve Reich, and the Grateful Dead, and helped shape a language and style for the burgeoning psychedelic culture.” (VIA REDCAT)

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/robert-nelson-1930-2012

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Preservationist Insanity Blog (Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive):

“So many filmmakers are filmmakers in some way or other because of Bob (among them Peter Hutton, Fred Worden, Chris Langdon, Curt McDowell, Mike Henderson, numerous others). Peter once told me that when he saw Bob’s films for the first time, his reaction was “wait, you can make movies like that?”, and started making films himself.”

http://preservationinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/01/cant-really-express-at-all-how-very-sad.html

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For more information on Nelson’s films and to rent them from Canyon Cinema…

Salute to George Kuchar

Friday, December 16, 7PM
Ninth Street Independent Film Center
145 Ninth Street, San Francisco, CA
$7 general; $5 students and seniors

Leisure (1966); Back to Nature (1976); Aqueerius (1980); Yolanda (1981); Cattle Mutilations (1983); Motel Capri (1986)

Born in the Bronx in 1942, George Kuchar (with twin brother Mike) began his unbelievably prolific life of filmmaking as a pre-teen and had created such classics of 8mm melodrama as The Wet Destruction Of The Atlantic Empire and The Naked And The Nude before even completing high school. Unstoppable, he has, over the following 50+ years, created a jaw-droppingly voluminous filmography of camp genre send-up, diary film and video portraiture which is unparalleled in its far-reaching cultural influence. One of the most influential figures in film history, George—in his work, in his life and in over thirty years of teaching filmmaking at SFAI—has continuously been a force of perverse subversion and indefatigable joy, a treasure and shining light in so many of our lives. Please join Cinematheque, Canyon Cinema and SFMOMA in celebration of this man. (Steve Polta)

Presented in Association with San Francisco Cinematheque

For more information about George Kuchar and to rent his films from Canyon…

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Canyon Cinema, one of the world’s premier experimental film distribution centers is in the process of celebrating its 50th year anniversary.

Undoubtedly, Canyon Cinema has become synonymous with Bay Area independent and experimental film. At present, Canyon Cinema has 320 members worldwide and distributes more than 3,200 films and hundreds of DVDs. As we have actively grown over the past fifty years, Canyon has chronicled the history of this unique genre. This fall we celebrate our anniversary and remember our shared lineage with the Bay Area experimental film scene through a series of screenings at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center.

These events were possible through a generous grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

For Iona by Bruce Cooper (16mm, 2012)

From Bruce Cooper – “The Iona of the title is both the green island off the west coast of Scotland,  where the film was photographed; and also my infant daughter Iona Patrice Cooper – born August 8, 2004 and died November 22, 2004.”

For more information and to rent this film…

Still from Gehr’s Table (1976)

Ernie Gehr’s “Mind Expanders” in the New York Times

Manohla Dargis’s excellent feature on the life and works of Ernie Gehr in last week’s New York Times:

“THERE are a multiplicity of adjectives that fit Ernie Gehr’s experimental film and digital work: abstract, beautiful, mysterious, invigorating, utopian. The work can also be oblique; this is not a bad thing! His 14-minute film “History” (1970), to take one extreme example, largely consists of what looks like a sparkly black-and-gray blob that brings to mind a hallucination of a desert night sky, like van Gogh on acid. What you’re looking at, and perhaps losing yourself in, isn’t a representation of something outside the camera, but film itself: those clouds of dye in color film and churning grains in black and white that make up the actual image you see.”

Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/movies/ernie-gehrs-films-traffic-in-images-and-light.html?_r=3&ref=movies

For more information on Gehr and to rent his films…

Hand Painted Films of Stan Brakhage Screening

7:00 – 9:00 pm
Friday, November 18, 2011
Ninth Street Independent Film Center
145 Ninth Street
San Francisco, California

Canyon Cinema, one of the world’s premier experimental film distribution centers is in the process of celebrating its 50th year anniversary.

Undoubtedly, Canyon Cinema has become synonymous with Bay Area independent and experimental film. At present, Canyon Cinema has 320 members worldwide and distributes more than 3,200 films and hundreds of DVDs. As we have actively grown over the past fifty years, Canyon has chronicled the history of this unique genre. This fall we celebrate our anniversary and remember our shared lineage with the Bay Area experimental film scene through a series of screenings at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center. These events were possible through a generous grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Please join us for a night of 16mm Hand Painted films by Stan Brakhage.

We will be screening:

Garden of Earthly Delights, Stately Mansions Did Decree,Thigh Line Lyre Triangular, The Dante Quartet, Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse, Occam’s Thread, and Yggdrasill Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind.

$7 general; $5 students and seniors

Film Still from Jordan’s Solar Sight (2011)

Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation Features New Work by Larry Jordan

From Cine-File’s website:

The Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, now in its second year, has already established itself as a world-class, exceptionally curated showcase of unique (and overlooked) hand-drawn, stop-motion, and/or computer-assisted short films. While the first year’s programming separated the (wholly revelatory) retrospective films from more recent (and equally startling) works, this weekend’s screenings freely intermingle past and present; the earliest highlight being Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin’s irresistible modernist fantasia JOIE DE VIVRE (1936), a hyper-optimistic (and now-otherworldly) B&W ode to technological progress. More recent highlights range from the humanistic, comic, and progressively-absurdist beachfront watercolors of Bill Porter’s ON TIME OFF (2008) to the unbelievable CGI cross-sections of imaginary objects in Zeitguised’s PERIPETICS (2009), which finally realizes the bizarre possibilities of a computer graphics completely untethered from Hollywood’s industrial demands for sensible parametric modeling, physically plausible dynamic simulation, and photorealistic texture mapping. Holding all of these visually heterogeneous films together is an exquisite and borderline-synesthetic sensitivity to the importance of sound (avoiding the avant-garde’s frequently hermetic silence)—from the wintry Poisson static of FIRST SNOW (Joshua Bonnetta, 2004) to the zoomorphic and/or imaginary instruments of PIANO (Paul, Rayment, 2010) and MYSTERY MUSIC (Nicola Mahler, 2009). In addition to three group shows, the Saturday, 6pm show is a solo-program of work by Portland animator Lori Damiano, who will be appearing in person. – Michael Castelle

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Expanding on the mention of retrospective films above, a number of titles in the festival stand out. Most obvious is Robert Breer’s great 1978 film LMNO, which shares the techniques of most of his other films (simple line animation, spray painting, collage) and his exquisite editing and sense of rhythm, but is much less frequently screened and thus “crucial viewing” all by itself. James Otis’ 1981 film JACOB’S LADDER is a black and white spiraling, swirling computer-generated abstract animation. It combines its technological origin and its imagery (reminiscent of natural processes and objects—fractals, polyps, branching plants, crystal growth) seamlessly and beautifully. The corker of the work I’ve seen showing is not a retrospective film, but a brand-new work by one of the masters of avant-garde animation who is usually only represented by his older classics. Lawrence (Larry) Jordan’s SOLAR SIGHT (2011) is a marvel. He forgoes his customary use of drawings and etchings (often Max Ernst or Gustove Doré), instead turning to the unsettling (in a Jordan film at least!) appropriation of paintings and photographs (nature scenes, portraiture, King Tut’s golden mask). The slickness of the photos in particular are truly disjunctive in Jordan’s hands. Combined with his familiar collage style, they both feel out of place (but intriguingly and meaningfully so) and open up the film in a way that much of his other work does not—or at least in a different way. The film almost verges on the post-modern (shocking for Jordan), but rather than critique and ironic comment it achieves a cosmic sense of wonder out of the combination of this decidedly 20th century imagery and Jordan’s more familiar source material. – Patrick Friel

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More info on the festival at www.eyeworksfestival.com, and more write-ups at www.cine-file.info.

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For more information on Lawrence Jordan and to rent his films…

As part of the San Francisco Film Society’s Essential SF event, Michael Fox describes the impact, history, and future of Canyon Cinema:

Legend has it that Canyon Cinema’s first shows in 1961 were projected on a sheet in Bruce Baillie’s backyard. Let’s print the fact, since it takes little away from the DIY attitude Baillie espoused: It was an army surplus screen. Canyon quickly grew from those ad hoc gallon-jug beginnings into the exhibitor and distributor of Bay Area experimental films, providing crucial support for a fertile avant-garde film scene that came to rival New York in inspiration, ingenuity and influence.

The article also includes comments from Executive Director Dominic Angerame on the unstable future:

“Our financial future is a murky crystal ball because there’s no way of predicting our market,” [Canyon Cinema Director Dominic] Angerame explains. “There’s no way of doing a business plan. Some of our biggest renters of 16mm celluloid are university instructors, and as they retire their replacements are not renting films. When Chick Strand ran the film department at Occidental College, she was giving us thousands and thousands of dollars. Now we receive nothing.”

Read the whole article here:
http://www.sf360.org/events/?pageid=13922

More on Essential SF events and screenings:
http://www.sffs.org/content.aspx?catid=928,943,1022&pageid=2481