Mar
20
|
The
City Symphony (1987-1997)
Dominic Angerame in person!
“To see the city through the eyes of Dominic Angerame is to see
an organic beast of concrete that sifts and breathes in rich shades of
black and
white.” -Silke Tudor, SF Weekly
Dominic Angerame takes a break from teaching at the San Francisco Art
Institute and running Canyon Cinema to visit Los Angeles. Join us as we
welcome him with The City Symphony. Screening will be the following:
Continuum (1987, 16mm 15 min., b&w, silent)
"Through elegantly overlaid,
constructionist windows of geometric form, we see into the turgid furnace
of man's multifarious tasks, and, as in a vision, behold the ballet of
his tools and accoutrements: steaming tar, turning pulleys, swishing mops,
changing lights and sewer-plates, acetyline torches and sandblasting serpents,
snorting sting of jackhammers and gleaming jewels amid grime where undinal
heat makes the atmosphere buckle." - Ronald Sauer
Deconstruction Sight (1990, 16mm 13 min., b&w, sound)
"A somber, gong-like
tone opens Deconstruction Sight: the first image is a small light
in darkness, a delicate flicker that grows to become a welder's torch.
We are led into the film by a suggestive imagistic shorthand: 'the rise
of man' is attended by the building of structures, and cities, a montage
of the emblems of civilization. The end of the film brings a series of
unnerving images - one reminiscent of an eerie jack-o-lantern from childhood
memory: a skyscraper looming in the night, a bank of windows lit up like
its gaping mouth. As fog and clouds rush in fast frame across the sky
for a dizzying, synesthetic effect, Kevin Barnard's soundtrack pounds
an urgent wail to the rhythm of climax spending itself in question, in
philosophical ambiguity, not release. An almost palpable centrifugal force
seems to move the final moments of the film into a spinout." - Barbara
Jaspersen Voorhees, 1990
Premonition (1995, 16mm, b&w/so, 11min.)
"Premonition, despite its
sadness, does not judge modernity and its Gargantuan feats of engineering,
but, on the contrary, admires them, in the fullest aesthetic sense of
the word, like a traveler turning a bend in the road whereby an enormity
of landscape is revealed, overwhelming his ego, freeing him up toward
a larger question while simultaneously diminishing his particularity in
the very grandeur of it all." - Ronald F. Sauer
In The Course of Human Events (1997, 16mm 25 min., b&w, sound)
After the 1989 quakethe
city of San Francisco decided to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway once
and for all. The climate of dread evoked by Premonition is followed
by a primitive yet seductive 'tableau' of twisted metal. The bulldozers
are prehistoric monsters that tear bits of metal and stone from the vulnerable
concrete. Angerame films the spectacle in extremely precise shots that
surgically unveil our obsession with destruction and technological decline.
Line of Fire (1997) (16mm 6.5 minutes, b&w, sound)
"In November of 1993
I was diagnosed as having coronary arterial disease. A subsequent angiogram
revealed that open heart surgery was necessary and duly performed. This
angiogram was filmed originally on 35mm motion picture film. In March
of 1995 my apartment burnt down in the early morning hours and my girlfriend
and I escaped with our neighbor down the rear fire escape as lethal smoke
was enveloping us. I was able to return to the scene the next day in order
to film the aftermath. This film is a blend of footage from these two
episodes and explores the temporal nature of the lives we live."
–Dominic Angerame
Since 1969, Dominic Angerame
has made more than 35 films that have won awards in film festivals around
the world. Angerame teaches filmmaking/cinema studies/criticism the San
Francisco Art Institute as a visiting artist. He has been the Executive
Director of Canyon Cinema for the past twenty years. Under his leadership
Canyon Cinema has become one of the world’s most renowned distributors
of avant garde and experimental films. Canyon Cinema’s contribution
to the field of experimental/avant garde filmmaking is historic and heroic.
|
Dominic Angerame's
Continuum |
