Screening
Friday, 08 Jun 2007 to Friday, 20 Jul 2007

Langton and San Francisco Cinematheque present Terra Incognita—three nights of screenings of works by artists and filmmakers that resonate with the exhibition, Critical Foreground.

Terra Incognita I
Friday June 8
4-9:30pm
Sliding scale $5-$10

The artists and filmmakers in Terra Incognita I approach the subject of landscape with a critical eye, taking a fresh look at how landscapes are constructed and understood. Lindsay Benedict and João Penalva focus on the resonance of the site in narrative and psychological landscapes; Hernan Khourian and Miguel Alvear & Patricio Andrade take a surreal, yet critical approach to the correlation between identity and land; Mungo Thomson explores the political ramifications of landscape and territory; and an anonymous group of Waorani from Ecuador challenge the limits and dangers of documentaries.

Program:
4:00pm
Lindsay L. Benedict, Turn Back (Home), (2006, 4:05 minutes)
Lindsay L. Benedict, You Coated Me With A Layer of Fat, (2006, 3:05 minutes)
João Penalva, The White Nightingale, (2005, 42 minutes)

5:00pm
Hernan Khourian, Puna, (2007, 43:30 minutes)
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Blak Mama, film in progress “Blak Chases Bambola” sequence, (10:30 minutes)
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Wir Könen Es, (2007, 3 minutes)
Anonymous, Home Movie, filmed in Bameno River Ecuador, (2005, 13 minutes)
Mungo Thomson, The American Desert (for Chuck Jones), (2002, 33:45 minutes)

6:45pm
Lindsay L. Benedict, Turn Back (Home), (2006, 4:05 minutes)
Lindsay L. Benedict,You Coated Me With A Layer of Fat, (2006, 3:05 minutes)
João Penalva, The White Nightingale, (2005, 42 minutes)

7:45pm
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Blak Mama, film in progress “Blak Chases Bambola” sequence, (10:30 minutes)
Miguel Alvear and Patricio Andrade, Wir Könen Es, (2007, 3 minutes)
Anonymous, Home Movie, filmed in Bameno River Ecuador, (2005, 13 minutes)
Hernan Khourian, Puna, (2007, 43:30 minutes)
Mungo Thomson, The American Desert (for Chuck Jones), (2002, 33:45 minutes)

Terra Incognita II
Friday June 15
7 pm
Sliding Scale $5-$10

Terra Incognita II features the work of Abbas Kiarostami. Kiarostami (b. 1940, Tehran) is a master of modern cinema and one of the few Iranian filmmakers to enjoy fame in the Western world. He has made such classic films as The Wind Will Carry Us , Through the Olive Trees, and Close Up. His films are distinguished by their simplicity; a poetic meditation slowly deepens into a sophisticated dialogue that mixes nature and culture, fact and fiction. In 1998, he became the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with A Taste of Cherry.

Program:
Roads of Kiarostami (2005, 32 minutes)
*Taste of Cherry (1997, 95 minutes)
*Please note that we will be screening a digital version

Terra Incognita III
Friday July 20
4-10pm
Sliding scale $5-$10

New Langton Arts and San Francisco Cinematheque present Terra Incognita III, six hours of shorts by local and international artists exploring the multiple facets of landscape including work by Alfonso Alvarez, Bill Baldewicz, Freda Banks, David Borengasser, Brook Hinton, Peter Hutton, Jun Jalbuena, Joshua Kanies, Chris Kennedy, Peter Max Lawrence, Beca Lafore, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Katherin McInnis, Tomonari Nishikawa, Vanessa O'Neill, Ken Paul Rosenthal, Laura Rodriquez, Margaret Schedel, Vanessa Woods, Won-Tae Seo, Charles Woodman, and David Yun.

Program:
4:00 - 6:30pm Terra Incognita III, curated by San Francisco Cinematheque
6:30 - 7:00pm Peter Hutton (New York Portrait, and Part III, In Titan's Goblet)
7:30 - 10:00pm Terra Incognita III, curated by San Francisco Cinematheque

Terra Incognita III

Alfonso Alvarez
Down On The Farm (2003, 6:30 minutes)
Shot at the Film Farm, a hand processing film workshop amid the rolling flatlands west of Toronto, Canada, Down on the Farm depicts a local farmer harvesting hay from dawn to dusk.

Katherin McInnis
landscapes in alphabetical order (2003, 1 minute)
McInnis' film is made with stills from the Prelinger Archives films after searching the keyword "landscape" (in alphabetical order by film title). The soundtrack is composed from the digital image files processed as sound files.

Joshua Kanies
Chasm (2007, 8 minutes)
In Chasm, Kanies takes a discerning look at the residual effects of human consumption. As an avid nature enthusiast and mountain climber, Kanies' current motion picture work focuses on using personal and poetic documentary as a tool for exploration, environmental education, and conservation.

David Borengasser and Freda Banks
Faces on Mars (2007, 7 minutes)
Using extreme close ups and enlarged film grain, Faces on Mars is a psychological narrative from the points of view of a woman driver and her male passenger. The physical distance between them reflects an emotional distance, with landscapes and a radio broadcast filling the gap as bold saturated colors shift mood and time.

David Yun
A Taste of Home (2007, 7:29 minutes)
A Taste of Home is an excavation of a suburban landscape. Thematically, Yun's work often explores the feelings of isolation that plague modern society and the misunderstandings that arise from our lack of personal, familial, and cross-cultural communication.

Janis Crystal Lipzin
Cracks Between the Stones (2004, 11 minutes)
Cracks Between the Stones asks viewers to reconsider the expert speculation and interpretation of the architectural remains of earlier cultures. The visuals were composed from many hours of footage shot over a 10-year period at remote Amer-Indian sites, in the European Arctic area, Stonehenge (Britain), and contemporary North American urban sites.

Laura Rodriquez
Flower Fall (2007, 4:30 minutes)
A hand-processed Ektachrome single-frame animation, Flower Fall is a meditation on vibration and color, inspired by the chakra system. From self-love sing-a-longs to empowering 'queer girl magic movies' to luminous meditations on nature, Rodriguez's films and videos are about transformation and healing.

Brook Hinton
A Trip Down Third Street Before the Unknown: Scenic Highlights from the SFMuni T-Line (2007, 8 minutes)
Hinton's film is a silent meditation on public space in contemporary life based on San Francisco Muni's new and controversial "T-Line". Hinton's work addresses the emotional reality of existence in our speed of light cacophony, seeking to counter and subvert the status quo on behalf of forgotten corners of private and cultural life.

Bill Baldewicz
West Wind Quartet (2007, 8 minutes)
Utilizing primarily regular 8mm unslit film to create a four screen affect, the imagery of West Wind Quartet traces atmospheric progress along the California coast, through San Francisco, the East Bay and across states to Nevada and the Four Corners.

Charles Woodman and Margaret Schedel
Horse Farm Mixer (2006, 8 minutes)
Slow, sensual and languorous, Horse Farm Mixer is a serial scan of a horse farm.

Vanessa O'Neill
August (2007, 4:30 minutes)
Hand-processed and hand-worked, August explores how the end of a season evokes transient imprints and reverberations of memory.

Vanessa Woods
Passing (2007, 01:20 minutes)
Passing is a short film that explores the idea of passing (passing time, passing histories, and passing away). To create the film, self-portraits of the filmmaker taken in an abandoned home were used as a stage to re-inhabit and reinvent through single frame animation. Mark making, collage and sound engender a new history in the spaces of a vanishing home.

What the Water Saw (2006, 2:34 minutes)
What the Water Saw explores a mystery at the depths of the sea. The film is structured to mimic the ocean's moods, creating a varied psychological space for the viewer. Equally important, the visual construction of the film moves between form and formlessness. What the Water Saw combines negative and positive black and white footage with densely painted 35mm film.

Won-Tae Seo
Tower Crane (2006, 8 minutes)
Basing the film's structure on the direction and rhythm of movement of a tower crane, Seo depicts the nature of cinematic space, representing three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional screen.

Ken Paul Rosenthal
Arcs of Texture (2006, 6 minutes)
Rosenthal's films are poetic meditations on urban space, the natural world, and human gesture, and often employ hand-processing, bacterial manipulations, re-photography and multiple projection set-ups. In Arcs of Texture, the face of the city is rendered as a light-infused intersection of people, glass, and concrete.

Peter Max Lawrence
de Young (2007, 8 minutes)
De Young is an architectural and textural tour of the de Young Museum and grounds in San Francisco.

Chris Kennedy
The Acrobat (2007, 16 minutes)
A consideration of the relationship between gravity and politics--the necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall.

Tomonari Nishikawa
Sketch Film #3 (2006, 3 minutes)
Inspired by the idea of using a super 8 camera as one would a sketchbook, Nishikawa takes single-frame shots, edits in camera, and processes the film by hand. In Sketch Film #3, Nishikawa captured abstracted shapes and movements, and manipulated the imagery to create a sense of depth.

Jun Jalbuena, in collaboration with Beca Lafore
Walking Through The Landscape of Other People's Eyes (2007, 30 - 60 minutes)
audio/live performance
Jalbuena and Lafore question and explore the functional dynamic of a landscape in art, defining a landscape as material to walk through and inhabit. Utilizing twenty hours of interviews comprised of activists in San Francisco discussing the complexities and problems of group dynamics, the filmmakers present an arrangement of recordings as a conversation between two people.

Peter Hutton
New York Portrait, Part III (1990, 15 minutes)
"New York Portrait, Part III takes on a unique tone in relation to Hutton's ongoing exploration of rural landscape. The high angle of observation, frequent in Hutton's previous New York films here seems to carry a sense of withdrawal, a distance matched by compassion..." - Tom Gunning, Art History Professor University of Chicago

In Titan's Goblet (1991, 10 minutes)
This film refers to a landscape painting by Thomas Cole circa 1833. It is intended as an homage to Cole, who is regarded as the father of the Hudson River School of painting.

Image credit: Lindsey Benedict, You Coated Me With A Layer of Fat, 2006, video still. Image courtesy of the artist.





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