Canyon Cinema presents Lynn Marie Kirby: the insufficient frame, March 30, 2025
Posted March 5th, 2025 in Announcements, Events and Screenings, News / Events
Lynn Marie Kirby: the insufficient frame
Sunday, March 30, 3:40pm
The Roxie Theater, San Francisco
Presented by Canyon Cinema in association with San Francisco Cinematheque
Lynn Marie Kirby in person
Admission: $15 General / $12 Friends of Canyon & SF Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
By calling attention to the screen as more than a blank reflective surface, Kirby insists that “screen” is a complex set of meanings and uses—the environment itself is a screen.
– Jeffrey Skoller, from “Reflector to Transmitter: rethinking the idea of screen in the recent work of Lynn Marie Kirby”
Canyon Cinema presents the insufficient frame, the latest installment of its Canyon at The Roxie series celebrating Bay Area artists of past and present. The program includes films, videos, and live performance from the multifaceted work of long time Bay Area artist, filmmaker, and educator, Lynn Marie Kirby.
Kirby‘s work builds poetic vocabularies through moments drawn from daily life. Narratives are open-ended, built in collaboration and improvisation. Each work comes with its own set of materials investigations.
Today’s program highlights a selection of work from the 1980s to the present, including materialist explorations in celluloid film, improvisational analogue and digital video, and ephemeral multiple screen/ site embedded performative forms.
Following the presentation will be a conversation with Kirby and filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller, who has contributed to a new book on Kirby’s work published by X Artists’ Books: Time and Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby. Jumping off from Skoller’s essay and the Roxie presentation, they will speak about the history and evolution of Kirby‘s work, and questions and ideas that are raised through her uniquely expanded approach to cinema.
The musician and composer Anne Hege, as well as singers will perform. The book will be available in the Roxie lobby before and after the presentation.
NOTE: For Friends members at the Luminous Associate level and above, signed copies of Time and Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby will be available for pick-up at The Roxie.
Screening Line-up:
Three Voices (1984, 4 minutes, sound, 16mm exhibited as digital file)
Part of a series of films shot from my apartment windows. The character narrates possible scenarios of neighbors’ lives, talks about the mid-Atlantic accent, and the threat of war as the windows are washed and people move in and out of their apartments.
Across the Street (1982, 3 minutes, sound, 16mm exhibited as digital file)
I witness shocking events which remain unresolved. This is an urban story, it is the story of an event which takes place across from my third floor bedroom window. As the story is retold again and again the emphasis shifts from the details of the event to the unanswered questions raised by the event.
Bathing (1994, 5 minutes, sound, Hi8 video exhibited as digital file with live singer on stage and video on iPads in audience)
Improvisation for video and singer. The singer performs live in her bathrobe. Simultaneously, but purposely not in direct sync, the video plays. The video—of a man bathing, the sound of water and his humming, mixes with the live performance. Like a duet of cats, each in their own realm.
Sharon and the Birds on the Way to the Wedding (1987, 22 minutes, sound, 16mm exhibited as digital file)
A film about the language and perception of love and romance. The film blurs the line between fact and fiction, personal and cultural experience. “She found that the truth didn’t sound real. She did research. She went through the magazines. She found that there existed a magazine kind of love that had a vocabulary of about twelve words. She found that if she rearranged these twelve words around different names and places that she could make a story.”
Love, Lynn (1982, 1 minute, sound, 16mm exhibited as digital file)
A poem to my Mother and Grandmother.
Standardized Screen Tests (2008, 11 minutes, sound, digital video)
I was curious about the pressure young boys experience about masculinity as they move into puberty. I found an interview conducted by François Truffaud of the young actor Jean Pierre Léaud during screen tests for his film 400 Blows. I used these questions as my point of departure, thinking of these as screen tests after Andy Warhols’s series as well.
I worked with boys on my son’s baseball team and at his middle school. They were all around the age of eleven. We shot a roll of 16mm film for each boy, standard video, and with their cell phones. The project has several different iterations, a two-boy sequence, an installation, and a sequence with fifteen boys.
Latent Light: Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: Poised for Parabolas (2004, 5 minutes, silent, digital video)
One in a series of Latent Light Exposures, exposing 16mm film without a camera to the landscape, then improvising with the processed film in transferring to the digital realm. A tribute to the people who have lost their lives over the years in the construction of the bridge and from suicide. I see a small slice of the bridge daily from my apartment and have long been haunted by the power of its presence, a gateway to both death and the world beyond mainland US borders.
Requiescat (2006, 4 minutes, silent, digital video)
This 100-foot roll of film contains 1000 X’s. Each “X” scratched into the film is a prayer or a wish for the repose of a person killed in Iraq. In transferring the film to digital video, I did not etch an “X” for each death into the film emulsion. Instead, I punched the transfer machine each time I saw an “X” pass in real time. This new gesture marks each death anew, with a skip or glitch or polarity change.
Eulogy (2025, 16 minutes, sound, digital video with live voice over)
A meditation on how the world was in 1948, with post war optimism, and the future we are now living, through the lens of mothers and daughters, death and hope.
Listen to the World Waking (2021, 17 minutes, sound, digital video with live singing)
During Covid I worked again with the San Francisco Girls Chorus, this time for six months on Zoom. We talked about finding a place where choristers could reflect, sit, and listen over the course of six months.
Some choristers went to gardens and parks; some found spaces inside their homes. They sat, then took notes, then collected objects, then sound and video. They sent me all of this collected material. From their texts, my long-time collaborator Denise Newman and I wrote a libretto. The choristers composed the music and sang the lyrics. I scanned their objects and made a video using all of these materials.
Approximate Running Time: 87 minutes, with conversation to follow
Performance by musician and composer Anne Hege, and singers: Teyu Han, Miyu Han, Katie Huang, Emily Jiang, Nayoung Jung, Anne Rainwater, Allison Rosengard, Dorothea Tompkins, Celeste Winant.
Bathing assistance: Zachary Epcar, Tegan Ford, Pauline Grant, Yumeng Guo, Zoe Greenham, Joyce Grimm, Ben Hassler, Toney Merritt, Judit Navratil, Molly Rapp, Ashley Spencer, Maxine Schoefer-Wulf.
About Lynn Marie Kirby
Lynn Marie Kirby is an artist, filmmaker, and longtime Bay Area educator focused on questions of place, the residue of history, and social choreography. Her conceptual practice engages time as a material, different sensory systems, improvisation and collaboration, accidents that make her jump, and forms of contemplation. Her work has been shown around the world and supported by generous foundations, galleries and museums. Kirby is Professor Emerita in the Graduate Film and Fine Arts Programs at the California College of the Arts.
About Jeffrey Skoller
Jeffrey Skoller is a writer and filmmaker. In both scholarship and image-making, Skoller explores the radical aesthetics and praxis of the political avant-garde, representations of history and time, and contemporary cinematic hybrids such as the essay film, experimental documentary, animated documentary and expanded cinemas. Skoller’s films have been exhibited internationally. He is the author of Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (University of Minnesota Press) and POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (Blackdog Press). Skoller is Professor Emeritus in the Film & Media Dept. at UC Berkeley.
About Anne Hege
Born in Oakland, Anne Hege began her musical studies singing with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir and the Oakland Youth Chorus. Hege received a BA in music with honors from Wesleyan University and an MA in music composition from Mills College. In 2014, she completed her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University where she studied embodied cognition theory and musical meaning. She has composed for film, installation art, dance, and concert settings. Since 2008, Hege has composed musical scores for choreographer Carrie Ahern. The New York Times praised her score for Ahern’s SenSate as “convincing” and “strangely environmental.” Influenced by her deep listening practice, her latest compositions lie somewhere between ritual, music, and theater with some homemade instruments thrown in for good measure.
