March 24th and 26th // Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Posted March 22nd, 2017 in Canyon Cinema 50, Co-Presentations, News / Events
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, Program 1
Friday, March 24th, 2017 – 7:30pm
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – 701 Mission Street (at Third St), San Francisco
$10.00 / $6.00 to Cinematheque Members
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Presented in association with San Francisco Cinematheque
“Time, time, time. Life should be abundant enough for each person to feel what it is to have their greatest pleasure in wasting time.” — Tony Conrad
Straight and Narrow by Tony Conrad (10min, 16mm)
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present by Tyler Hubby (96min, digital)
Filmmaker Tyler Hubby in person.
Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was the subject of an NEA-funded Immersive Cinema residency hosted by Cinematheque in 2009. In his memory we are proud to present Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, Tyler Hubby’s rich and loving portrait of Conrad as well as an evening of his films. A 2009 interview with Conrad by Cinematheque’s Artistic Director Steve Polta is available here for the very first time.
Composer, filmmaker, conceptual artist, media activist, radical mathematician and more, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was one the most influential and inspiring American artists of his time. Completely in the Present—created over Conrad’s twenty-year friendship with director Tyler Hubby—portrays Conrad as arch, impish intellectual, perpetually curious, always learning and questioning. Documenting Conrad’s experiences with filmmaker Jack Smith, composer LaMonte Young and the Theater of Eternal Music and the formation of the Velvet Underground, as well as his own avant-garde filmmaking the film traces the artist’s life and career up to his re-emergence in the 1990s as a central figure in underground music and his profound impact on generations of artists. Combining intimate footage of Tony and his collaborators shot over the last twenty years, his own archive of recordings and films, and interviews with colleagues, the film reveals not only a playful approach to life and art making but one that is motivated by a deep sense of powerful, political radicalism.
The screening opens with Straight and Narrow, a rare 16mm film created by Beverly and Tony Conrad in 1970.
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, Program 2
Sunday, March 26th, 2017 – 7:30pm
Center for New Music – 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco
$10.00 / $5.00 to Cinematheque Members
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Presented in association with San Francisco Cinematheque
“By the mid-1960s I had been drawn to film because of its hopelessly shabby integrity, and also because of its restive and anarchic aspects, which implicitly challenged the progressivism of the art market. At the same time, and perhaps even because of its unruliness and freedom from the market, I felt that film could be used to construct esthetic challenges that the existing market disciplines in art did not, would not, or could not touch. It seemed to me quite rational to look to the border regions of art for its greatest mobility and interest. After all, it had been within music, not painting or sculpture, that the most radical artistic challenges of the early 1960s had appeared.” — Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present by Tyler Hubby (96min, digital)
The Flicker by Tony Conrad (30min, 16mm)
The Eye of Count Flickerstein by Tony Conrad (7min, 16mm)
Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals by Tony Conrad (10min, 16mm)
Composer, filmmaker, conceptual artist, media activist, radical mathematician and more, Tony Conrad was one the most influential and inspiring American artists of his time. Known for musical works that push issues of drone, repetition and duration into forms evoking of infinity, Conrad’s work with visual minimalism and flicker is equally ecstatic and overwhelming. Tonight’s screening includes Conrad’s “notorious” 1966 film The Flicker—a maximalist masterpiece in black-and-white frames—as well as The Eye of Count Flickerstein, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals and more.
Canyon Cinema is thankful for the long term support of the George Lucas Family Foundation. Dedicated project funding for Canyon Cinema 50 has been generously provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Owsley Brown III Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and The Fleishhacker Foundation.
