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Film Setting
Son In the
Bedroom, a couple's anguish turns to rage
turns to rational madness
Reel
World Keeper
of the Flame It was a bad year for local independent
movie theaters
Reps
Etc. Reps
Etc. Film Reps
List for 12-26-2001
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Umbrella Man Working in every conceivable
format, experimental filmmaker Scott Stark has produced
an average of three pieces a year since 1980. That's
remarkable consistency, especially given Stark's
obsession with innovation. "Each of my films has its own
language," the Bernal Heights resident explains. "You
don't necessarily know what that language is when you
start watching, so it might be confusing until you
figure out what's going on and get into the
rhythm."
In
one of his new pieces, the ironically titled
SLOW, Stark aggressively employs the
old-fashioned wipe to slice and dice the frame. "It's a
fine line between artistic control and randomness," says
Stark, who's had two solo shows (a decade apart) at New
York's Museum of Modern Art. "If you exert too much
control, you're telling the audience what you want them
to see. I like setting up situations where the world
reveals something about itself. That process makes the
viewer participate a little bit more." The friction
between that desire to engage the audience and Stark's
insistent eclecticism gives his films an unexpected
tension.
The
artist, who supports himself as a Web application
developer, has landed another new film, Angel
Beach, in next year's Whitney Biennial. The
27-minute piece is constructed of rapid cuts between
snapshots of women in bikinis from 1969 to '71 that
Stark found at a flea market. The speed of the editing
produces a fluttering effect that suggests movement that
isn't in the original stills. "I'm very much interested
in creating things in your mind that aren't really
there," he confides. It makes sense, then, that Stark
came up with the rubric "Don't Even Think" for the S.F.
Cinematheque's four-night retrospective of his work,
commencing Thursday, Nov. 29, with a program of new
films at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The blowout
concludes at 8 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 7, at the S.F. Art
Institute with a multimedia performance extravaganza.
For info, visit http://www.sfcinematheque.org/.
Pennies From Heaven In one of those
vagaries of exhibition, the current one-week run (ending
Thursday, Nov. 29) of the Iranian gem Djomeh at
San Jose's Cinematheque at the Towne marks the film's
U.S. theatrical premiere. A wider urban release is
planned for early 2002. ... UC Berkeley will host an
international conference next May with the irresistible
theme "Born to Be Bad: Trash Cinema From the 1960s and
70s." Academics talking exploitation -- now that's
entertainment! Details are online at socrates.berkeley.edu/~tamao/Trash.htm.
Spectres of the Spectrum I don't often
alert you to projects still at the screenwriting stage,
but Craig Baldwin's half-formed ideas are more enjoyable
than most people's finished films. The architect of
alternaclassics O No Coronado! and Tribulation
99 is deep in the throes of devising another
one-hour, quasi-experimental narrative. "This one is
seated right in the subjectivity of my protagonist, a
disoriented woman on the run from Scientology," Baldwin
speed-briefs me. "It's a stream-of-consciousness road
movie about access to knowledge and institutional
surveillance. A lot of the soundtrack is intercepted
cell-phone calls."
Baldwin, who doubles as the longtime maestro of
the Other Cinema at the ATA Gallery, will shoot the
as-yet-untitled film in Las Vegas and the Southwest,
"drawing out of the mystique of the landscape." As per
his usual modus operandi, he'll incorporate acres of
black-and-white found footage. "It's not an exposé," he
remarks drolly. "It's a pastiche." As if making a
paranoid erotic thriller that catalogs our loss of
privacy weren't sufficiently ambitious, the
hyperenthusiastic Baldwin also conceives of his upcoming
film as a parody of spy movies.
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