Perpetual Motion | Dust to Dust
SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE and GRAY AREA present PERPETUAL MOTION, the largest convergence of international, multi-generational performance cinema practitioners ever assembled in the San Francisco Bay Area. The series is presented September 16–December 7, 2016. All performances at Gray Area.
Tickets: $10 Presale / $15 Day of Show / $20 at the Door
Perpetual Motion opens with cosmic cinematic evocations of primordial energy, fusing creation and destruction into scintillating experiences of accumulation and decay. Program opens with an incantatory arc performance (straight outta Oakland), in which forgotten film detritus from abandoned archives is repurposed as sublime meditative subject, in which notions of microcosmic and macrocosmic merge. arc is followed by an extremely rare U.S. appearance by Jürgen Reble (Bonn, Germany) who, as part of the seminal filmmaking ensemble Schmelzdahin, pioneered collective performance cinema work throughout the 1980s, developing a practice of film, performance and installation rooted in real-time chemical and mechanical manipulation of celluloid film. Reble’s Alchemie, incorporating continuous chemical treatment of a 10-meter loop of film transmutes precious metal to dust, restructuring film emulsion live before your eyes in ever increasing abstraction. Program concludes with an equally rare appearance by Trinchera Ensamble (Mexico City/Seattle), whose Lux-ex-Machina forms an overwhelming and chaotic live film-collage combining appropriated celluloid with optic games and spontaneous cutting, scratching, burning, dissolving, painting of film—an experiential hypothesis of a perpetual simultaneity, an “atmospheric reflection of what cinema should be.”
Performance Cinema: an exciting and emergent genre of avant-garde moving-image art which represents a crucial attack on the sterility of the contemporary, digitally-located media environment, arguing for the embodied, collective consideration of real-time, site-specific media experiences. Through mis-used or modified analog film projectors, live video synthesis and physical interaction with the media interface, performance cinema practitioners variously burn, etch, mutilate and destroy projected film, machinery and the image itself. Performance Cinema practitioners create immersive spectacles of sight and sound, opening a space for questioning and contemplating visual culture through direct activation of the senses. As a dynamic, regenerating and resurrecting media experience, Performance Cinema exists only in the moment of perception and is truly an art of its time. Full series information available
here.
Perpetual Motion is a presentation of San Francisco Cinematheque in partnership with Gray Area and is supported by generous funding from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and by generous donations from Cinematheque’s individual donors and members.