Experimental filmmaking that countered Hollywood
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-san-francisco-film-20110113,0,1947779.story
Screenings around L.A. of San Francisco-area alternative movies from
1945-2000 will honor the influential film scene.
By Reed Johnson
January 13, 2011
From the late 1940s through the present day, a certain well-known
California city has been the epicenter of intrepid, innovative
filmmaking that has dazzled viewers and shredded the conventions of
traditional narrative cinema.
Hint: It isn't Los Angeles.
To be sure, L.A. has nurtured its own highly impactful experimental
film scene and spawned avant-garde giants and enfants terribles like
Kenneth Anger and Pat O'Neill. But the metropolis in question is
greater San Francisco.
For decades, the Bay Area has supported one of the world's most
prolific, stylistically free-form and influential alternative-film
environments. Long overshadowed by the Hollywood industry, the Bay
region's experimental-underground film and video culture has
continued to thrive into the early 21st century, surviving natural
disasters, demographic upheaval and even the Silicon Valley-generated
cash influx that sent rents skyrocketing and drove many San Francisco
artists into exile, or at least to the more affordable East Bay.
This month, that dynamic milieu is getting its due with "Radical
Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area,
1945-2000," a series of screenings being sponsored by REDCAT (at its
multipurpose space inside Walt Disney Concert Hall), the UCLA Film &
Television Archive (at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater), Los
Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) on Hollywood Boulevard, and
L.A. Filmforum (at the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian and the Echo
Park Film Center).
Cut into rough thematic blocks such as "Landscape as Expression" and
"Beat Era San Francisco," "Radical Light" pays tribute directly to
the legions of filmmakers and indirectly to the exhibitors,
distributors, film societies, local colleges and, perhaps most
importantly, the risk-taking audiences who supported them in creating
and sustaining a community.
"There really was a feeling that if you wanted to do something, just
get some friends together and do it," said Steve Anker, REDCAT film
co-curator, dean of the School of Film/Video at California Institute
of the Arts, who lived in San Francisco for several years beginning in 1980.
The screenings tie in with the recently published book "Radical
Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area,
1945-2000," co-edited by Anker and two curators from the Berkeley Art
Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid.
Styling itself as "a kaleidoscopic compendium of writings and
hundreds of period visuals chronicling the ongoing vitality of the
Bay Area," the profusely illustrated 350-page volume sketches the
work and careers of such key Bay Area film and video artists as Stan
Brakhage, the godfather of American avant-garde filmmaking, as well
as Gunvor Nelson, Dorothy Wiley, James Broughton, Christopher
Maclaine, Bruce Conner, Lawrence Jordan, Jay Rosenblatt and Alice
Anne Parker Severson.
Relying on scattered grants, the Hotel Tax Fund and a
do-it-yourselfer ethos that made a virtue of necessity, these artists
drew energy from a famously tolerant and free-thinking city where
anything that could be imagined might be permitted. By obsessively
pursuing their own aesthetic and political objectives, Bay Area
filmmakers collectively created an edgy cinematic parallel universe
to counter commercial Hollywood.
"A lot of the alternative filmmaking was the alternative to
Hollywood," said Dominic Angerame, who has helped shape Bay Area
visual culture both as a filmmaker ("Premonition") and as executive
director of Canyon Cinema, a home-grown exhibition-distribution
company that has played a crucial role in exposing San Francisco artists' work.
By contrast, Angerame said, many filmmakers who joined an exodus from
Los Angeles to the Bay Area over the past century "either got tired"
of laboring in Hollywood's backyard or else found ways to cannibalize
mainstream cinema and incorporate it into their own work.
The films being screened in Los Angeles suggest the vast range of Bay
Area expression. They include "A Trip Down Market Street, 1905," a
12-minute real-time vision of the city's most iconic thoroughfare;
Lawrence Jordan's sepia-toned "Visions of a City" (1957), in which
the roving poet-protagonist Michael McClure's cubistically reflected
image in car windows, mirrors and storefront displays creates a
Baudelairean tone poem of the Beat era flâneur; Christopher
Maclaine's "The End," a 35-minute stream-of-consciousness lament at
the Cold War prospect of planetary suicide; and Nelson and Wiley's
"Schmeerguntz" (1966), a savagely humorous, proto-feminist
deconstruction of postwar American consumerism's squeaky-clean
surfaces, and the crud that lurked beneath them.
Cauleen Smith, a filmmaker and professor of visual arts at UC San
Diego, said that when she was studying cinema at San Francisco
University in the early 1990s, the Bay Area's relative affordability,
artistic vitality and centrality in the gay rights, feminist and
other social movements made it a kind of urban laboratory for young
aspiring alternative cineastes.
"In one semester I had Angela Davis, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Lynn
Hershman," Smith said, referring to the African American political
activist and two prominent Bay Area filmmakers cited in "Radical Light."
"I was and still am amazed by the actual integrity of the [Bay Area]
artists," continued Smith, whose film "Chronicles of a Lying Spirit
(by Kelly Gabron)," a 13-minute autobiographical meditation on the
mediation of black history by white-male-dominated media, is being
screened Sunday. "The way that they made art was exactly the way they
saw the world, or the way they wanted it to be."
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