Other Cinema is a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District, inspired and sustained by fine-art filmmaking, engaged essay and documentary forms. They embrace marginalised genres like ‘orphan’ industrial films, home movies, ethnography and exploitation, as media-archeological core-samples, and blow against consensus reality and the sterility of museum culture.
Sun 17 Oct 2.30pm & 4.30pm
Craig Baldwin Double Bill
Spectres Of The Spectrum & Sonic Outlaws
Drawing on early television shows, industrial and educational films, Hollywood movies, advertisements and cartoons, Baldwin generates a wholly original paranoid science-fiction epic. In the year 2007 a young telepath and her father are revolutionaries pitted against the ‘New Electromagnetic Order’. Their story is interwoven with a history of the development of electromagnetic technologies, from X-rays to atom bombs, from television to the Internet.
Dir. Craig Baldwin, USA, 1999, 1h 31m
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Days after the release of Negativland’s parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, Island Records’ lawyers descended upon the band. Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts, in this cut-and-paste collage-essay surveying the prospects for an ‘electronic folk culture’ in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.
Dir. Craig Baldwin, USA, 1995, 1h 27m
Sun 24 Oct 2.30pm
What The 70s Really Looked Like + 70s Remix
A media-archaeological mix of 16mm commercials, PSAs, and TV ephemera from the decade of
polyester and smiley faces. From the classic iconography of the Marlboro Man to the absurd pitches
for Jack LaLanne’s ‘Glamour Stretchers’, this time warp of candy-coloured clips offers an insight into a
lost, impossibly innocent world of fondly remembered looks, styles and attitudes, from way back in the
20th Century. Curated by Matt McCormick and Morgan Currie, USA, 1h 40m
Thu 4 Nov 6.30pm
Hawaiian Noises
The music video is arguably the archetype of the late-modern mass form of media communication. From an overlapping of every episode of Trapped in the Closet to Tony Cokess manifesto for pop to Oneohtrix Point Nevers haunted looping of Chris de Burgh, these videos subvert the attention-deficit forms of MTV, questioning the power that todays entertainment industry holds over our desires and the production of our subjectivities.
Fri 5 Nov 7.30pm
Spacedisco-One
SpaceDisco-One borrows elements from Logan’s Run, Battlestar Gallactica, 1984, 9/11 Fox News footage, and scenes of Winston Smith and O’Brien and Logan’s daughter at Universal Citywalk to create a gonzo vision of future and past. A blend of 1970s and 1980s pop cultural references, libertarian perspective, and the simply bizarre from Damon Packard.
Dir. Damon Packard, USA, 2007, 58m
Sun 7 Nov 2.30pm
Decasia
Morrison’s artful collage of found archival footage, all of it shot pre-1950 on a cellulose nitrate base and most of it in advanced stages of decay. The footage is slowed to allow a greater appreciation of the effect and character of the visual damage to the original materials, which include everything from fragments of silent melodramas to ethnographic studies, travelogues, newsreel footage and wildlife documentaries.
Dir. Bill Morrison, USA, 2002, 1h 7m
Sun 14 Nov 2.30pm
The Net
A marvellously subversive approach to the history of the internet, this documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution, through the prism of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, and also taking in Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, Stewart Brand, utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, the CIA, LSD, Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
Dir. Lutz Dammbeck, USA, 2003 1h 55m