Alternative Visions 2018

September 5–November 28, 2018

This expansive season of our avant-garde showcase extends from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, with many filmmakers and other luminaries in person.

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  • Kelly Sears: A Tone Halfway Between Lightness and Darkness

  • The Washing Society

  • As Above, So Below

  • Empty Metal

  • Tomonari Nishikawa: Tokyo - Ebisu

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The Smiling Madame Beudet and Abstract Shorts by Germaine Dulac

    Wednesday, September 5 7 PM

    A program of films by a pioneering French avant-garde filmmaker who aimed “to give more space to sensations and dreams,” including short experimental works and her masterpiece, The Smiling Madame Beudet.

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  • Afterimage: Collage Animations by Kelly Sears

    Wednesday, September 12 7 PM
    Kelly Sears and Rick Prelinger in Conversation

    Sears’s experimental animations, collaged from materials ranging from first aid handbooks and high school yearbooks to military newsreels and exercise tapes, are “witty, savvy, ironic, poetic, exhilarating, even cosmic” (Craig Baldwin).

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  • Poor Little Rich Girl

    Andy Warhol
    United States, 1963/65
    Wednesday, September 19 7 PM

    Revisit Warhol’s famous Factory with this portrait of young heiress Edie Sedgwick, who “was, quite simply, a dazzling film presence” (New York Times). Preceded by a selection of Warhol’s screen tests.

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  • The Book of Wonders: Films by Stan Brakhage and Georges Méliès

    Wednesday, September 26 7 PM

    Seemingly poles apart, Brakhage and Méliès were both independent spirits, explorers of the mythic and the everyday. This program features the rarely screened The Loom and other works by Brakhage as well as Méliès’s The Kingdom of the Fairies.

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  • Out of the Vault: Luminous Procuress

    Steven Arnold
    United States, 1971

    Restored 16mm Print

    Wednesday, October 3 7 PM
    Introduction by Steve Seid

    The legendary, gender-obliterating funfest unleashed by the cantankerous cross-dressing Cockettes shines on in this immaculate restored print.

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  • Ism, Ism, Ism: Recycled Film in Latin America

    Wednesday, October 10 7 PM
    Introduction by Jesse Lerner

    A trip through Latin American films, from polemics to poetics, that use appropriation as a form of critique and a strategy of decolonization. Featuring found-footage works by Luis Ospina, Alfredo Salomón, Enrique Colina, Marisol Trujillo, and others.

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  • The Washing Society

    Lizzie Olesker, Lynne Sachs
    United States, 2018
    Wednesday, October 24 7 PM
    Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs in Person

    Olesker and Sachs fold the history of labor and immigration into this intimate chronicle of the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat. With Sachs’s Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor and Gunvor Nelson’s Old Digs.

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  • Afterimage: EMPTY METAL

    Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer
    United States, 2018
    Wednesday, October 31 7 PM
    Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, and Diana Ruíz in Conversation

    Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy—as it follows the lives of several people attempting to bring about change. With short The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets.

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  • Underground International: Kurt Kren and Tomonari Nishikawa

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    Wednesday, November 7 7 PM
    Tomonari Nishikawa, Patrick Harrison, and Megan Hoetger in Conversation

    Interweaving works by a pioneering Austrian and a contemporary US-based Japanese filmmaker, this program highlights connections across continents and generations animating the structural filmmaking tradition.

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  • As Above, So Below

    Larry Clark
    United States, 1973
    Wednesday, November 14 7 PM
    Larry Clark, Ra Malika Imhotep, and Jamal Batts in Conversation

    Clark’s drama of post-Watts resistance and black power is a rediscovered masterpiece and a key work of the L.A. Rebellion. With Frances Bodomo’s short Everybody Dies!

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  • The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors: Three Films

    Wednesday, November 28 7 PM
    Jeffrey Skoller in Person

    Three works bear personal witness to collective histories, from Auschwitz to the Japanese internment to postwar Japan: Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory, Abraham Ravett’s The March, and Jeffrey Skoller’s recent The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors.

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