A Salon with Jason Halprin – 6/15/18

Please note that this Canyon Cinema Salon will take place at Artists’ Television Access on Valencia Street. Just before he leaves the Bay Area, please join current Oakland and soon to be Montréal resident Jason Halprin for a Salon with Canyon Cinema on the evening of Friday, June 15th 2018 at ATA, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco. Jason will present a variety of work he has made over the last 20 years alongside selections from Canyon filmmakers Gary Adelstein, Gina Carducci, Julie Murray, and Robert Schaller.

“My work explores the way humans are affected by their immediate surroundings, and how the shape of a location can impact social interaction and culture… Cities and wilderness both open cerebral pathways that might otherwise not be taken… as for me, I am haunted by landscape.” – Jason Halprin

Program will include:

Stone Welcome Mat by Joey Carducci (2003, 6.5 minutes, color, silent)
Mylar Balloon Rip-Off by Jason Halprin (2007, 3.5 minutes, B&W, silent)
Monongahela Ghost Train by Jason Halprin (2007, 3.5 minutes, B&W, silent)
More Italian Places by Gary Adelstein (1989, 12.25 minutes, color, sound)
Agnes & Me by Jason Halprin (2011, 9 minutes, B&W, sound)
Triptych by Robert Schaller (1996, 3 minutes, B&W, silent)
Summer Home by Jason Halprin (2001, 5 minutes, color, sound)
Expulsion by Julie Murray (1999, 9 minutes, color, sound)
In Which There Appears Trains, a Carousel, and Rain by Jason Halprin (2016, 10 minutes, color, sound)
Imperfect Video by Jason Halprin (2013, 20 minutes, color, sound)

Focusing on details of movement, texture, line, and shape inherent in our surroundings, while borrowing visual tropes from travelogue, home movies, and structuralist film, his work explores how geography and place, both observed and constructed, manifests in the moving image. Working in small-gauge film and archival video while employing techniques from optical printing to time-lapse cinematography and hand-processing, Halprin’s preoccupations range from amusement parks and nostalgia to tourism and historical revisionism to musings on 9/11. In Halprin’s own words: “My work explores the way humans are affected by their immediate surroundings, and how the shape of a location can impact social interaction and culture… Cities and wilderness both open cerebral pathways that might otherwise not be taken… as for me, I am haunted by landscape.”

Originally from Southern Colorado, he graduated from the University of Colorado with a BFA in Film Studies (’01) and a BA in History (’01), earned an MFA in Film Production from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (’04), and will be pursuing a PhD in Film & Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Currently, he teaches production in the Cinema Department at City College of San Francisco, and was previously on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colgate University, and Columbia College Chicago. Previous screenings have included Media City 14 (Windsor), the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), MCA Chicago, the Images Festival (Toronto), L’Etna (Paris), Anthology Film Archives, Crossroads (San Francisco), and in alleyways in Buenos Aires and Paonia, Colorado, USA.

The Canyon Cinema Salon series is made possible with generous support from the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation.