Perpetual Motion, Program Seven: Cinema of Confrontation / The End
Bruce McClure / Greg Pope + Sult
presented by San Francisco Cinematheque in association with Gray Area
Admissions: Early Bird $10; Presales $15; Door $20 / Cinematheque members $8 (DOOR ONLY)
Advance tickets here.
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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.
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.
Bruce McClure (Brooklyn) / Greg Pope (UK/Norway) + Sult (Norway/Oakland)
Perpetual Motion goes out with a bang! As centerpiece to this conclusive program, Greg Pope (UK/Norway)—known for his exhilarating and masterful projection performance collaborations with various notables of the Scandinavian noise underground—returns to the Bay with Oslo/Oakland acoustic noise trio Sult to perform Skeleton, a dance macabre in four movements, conjured from a battery of slide projectors and hand-cranked flicker devices. “A darkened room—our cinema cave—our shelter and religion. Ghosts dance in the flame, images are cast and the wood splits. Sound waves and light waves radiate and refract. Skeleton comes to life…” Program is opened and closed by Performance Cinema powerhouse Bruce McClure (Brooklyn). Fresh from an extensive mid-career retrospective at the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam, McClure presents two performance sets of Rotorattlers—deconstructive prepared projector performances for flickering film loops, optical sound, effects pedals and 3000 watt Atomic strobes. While many have attempted (and even succeeded at) “stripping cinema to its absolute essentials”—light, darkness, sound—only in the work of McClure are these constituent parts so finely chopped, blended, pureed and synesthetically fused. “After all, wreckage is often more interesting than structure.”—Bruce McClure
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
Jacob Felix Heule, Clarke Robinson, Matt Ingalls