Radical Light: The 1980s and 1990s

Short of Breath (Rosenblatt, 1990)

Filmmakers Timoleon Wilkins and Cauleen Smith, and curators Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz in person!

Radical Light: Alternative Film And Video In The San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, (UC Press), edited by Steve Anker, Co-Curator of Film at REDCAT, and Pacific Film Archive curators Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid, is a rich compendium of essays, reminiscences and striking visuals that attests to the vital and varied experimental film and video scene that has existed in the Bay Area for more than half a century. In conjunction with the book’s release, Filmforum and other organizations are hosting a series of screenings highlighting an amazing range of work produced in the Bay Area over the past seven decades. Filmforum’s show on January 16th will highlight films made in the 1980s and 1990s, with two filmmakers, Timoleon Wilkins and Cauleen Smith, in person along with curators Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz!

We are especially proud to be able to organize this screening as the second evening of a cluster of events taking place in January throughout the greater Los Angeles area celebrating the book and the legacy of alternative film & video in the Bay Area, with six different screenings: The UCLA Film & Television Archive (Jan 14 and 21), Filmforum (Jan 16 & 23), REDCAT (Jan 17) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Jan 20).

Special thanks to Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, Steve Seid, and Berenice Reynaud.

The 1980s was a period of rebirth for personal experimental cinema in the Bay Area, with many filmmakers carrying seminal artistic traditions into new territory. Subjective vision, celluloid materiality, irreverent spontaneity, found footage, formal exploration, and social critique were reclaimed and often combined, distinctively and expressively, into single films. This program includes from this period Gunvor Nelson’s witty conundrum, Field Study #2. It ranges from Charles Wright’s ecstatic collage of image and sound spaces, Sorted Details, to Nina Fonoroff’s devastating evocation of a mind divided against itself, Department of the Interior; and Lynn Marie Kirby’s brief but deeply resonant personal narrative, Across the Street.

By the 1990s, many Bay Area filmmakers were products of Bay Area film programs, with some, such as Jay Rosenblatt, Greta Snider, and Cauleen Smith going on to teach. Dominic Angerame continued to run Canyon Cinema, a distributor of experimental cinema; Scott Stark founded Flicker, which documents alternative cinema online; and Jenni Olson programmed for the local lesbian and gay film festival. These were artists who spent a lot of time viewing and thinking about cinema, which nurtured an interest in the particularities of the medium. For Greta Snider, this included hand exposing and processing her film. Jay Rosenblatt found new meaning in footage he found or collected, while Cauleen Smith fabricated a personal history in her collage film. In their films, Angerame and Timoleon Wilkins each beautifully evoked a specific place.