Photographic Memory: Bay Area Student Experimental Film Festival 2010

Ranging from the retro apocalyptics of The Eternal Recurrence, the fractured performance of Dance of Days, and the spare, elegiac video distortion of Portrait of Bonnie, each film in tonight's program of recent Bay Area student experimental works offers its own particular texturally haunting tone. A persistent sense of mortality and memory suffuses many of the films, and is perhaps most apparent in the “slice of death” documentary observation of The Final Chapter and the meditations on place composing Romance Standard Time and 131 Russ. Grainy, color-saturated rows of cotton candy, stuffed animals, and neon luminescence create a somnambulant impressionism in I Had A Dream I Went To Coney Island. Other formal explorations are interspersed throughout the program, including the striking Gradients, Reflect, and Frontier, while in the rotoscoped sci-fi synaesthesia of Reduction, rough-hewn geometric shapes become implanted mental pictures. However varied in manner and approach, these shorts share a mutual ability to channel and discuss the otherwise ineffable.

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