Alternative Visions 2019

September 4–November 13, 2019

Our annual series of avant-garde and artist-made films returns with a stellar roster of in-person guests, as well as programs of strange and wonderful surrealist works from around the world.

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Jodie Mack: Yard Work Is Hard Work
Scott Stark: Bloom
José Rodriguez Soltero: Lupe
Stacey Steers: Phantom Canyon
Sky Hopinka: Dislocation Blues

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Dreams of Suitcases and a Blue Lobster: Latin Surrealism
Wednesday, September 4 7 PM
Introduction by Tarek Elhaik
A program of works from Latin America exploring cinema’s oneiric, disturbing, and irrational potential, including Raúl Ruiz’s first short and a lost treasure from Colombia codirected by Gabriel García Márquez.
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Surrealistic Animations by Stacey Steers
Wednesday, September 11 7 PM
Stacey Steers in Person
Stacey Steers’s handmade, hypnotic collage animations make use of materials from silent cinema footage to nineteenth-century prints. She presents several collage works plus the hand-drawn Totem and a lecture on the creative process.
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Jodie Mack: Pattern Language
Wednesday, September 18 7 PM
Jodie Mack in Person
Jodie Mack’s exuberant animations explore the poetic possibilities of the materials and patterns of everyday life. This program features films by Mack alongside works by animators she admires.
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Ism, Ism, Ism: Latin Camp
Wednesday, September 25 7 PM
Hollywood glamour is destabilized, appropriated, and filtered through a camp lens in this program of shorts by Teo Hernandez, Eduardo Solá Franco, Horacio Vallereggio, and José Rodriguez Soltero.
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L’age d’or
Luis Buñuel
France, 1930
Wednesday, October 2 7 PM
Buñuel’s Surrealist classic, cowritten by Salvador Dali, represents a golden age of revolutionary filmmaking, a cinema of humor, eros, and outrage. With Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice.
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Found Images: Films by Scott Stark
Wednesday, October 16 7 PM
Scott Stark in Person
Found footage maestro Scott Stark twists the detritus of industrial imagery into (in his words) “a pulsing, kinetic, intensely dramatic visual joyride.” He presents films made over the last three decades, plus the performance piece Love and the Epiphanists.
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Afterimage: Sky Hopinka in Person
Wednesday, October 30 7 PM
Sky Hopinka and Almudena Escobar López in Conversation
Indigenous filmmaker Sky Hopinka presents his “ethnopoetic” films, “wellsprings of beauty and mystery, filled with surprising confluences of speech and song, color and motion” (Artforum).
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The Time of “Women’s Work”
Wednesday, November 13 7 PM
Introduction by Jeffrey Skoller
The temporalities of “women’s work,” as seen by experimental filmmakers Chick Strand, Harun Farocki, Nicolás Pereda, and Elisa Giardina Papa.
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Alternative Visions 2019

September 4–November 13, 2019

This installment in our annual series of avant-garde and artist-made films includes in-person presentations by two animators who work by hand, Stacey Steers and Jodie Mack, both artists in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Scott Stark presents a variety of his films constructed from found images, culminating with a new film performance featuring Hollywood trailers and all forms of media. Sky Hopinka is in person with a selection of his experimental ethnographies layering images, texts, and song, and Jeffrey Skoller introduces a program he selected that examines so-called “women’s work.” Examples of Latin American, European, and contemporary American Surrealism—presented in conjunction with Strange and the related film series—as well as Latin American camp also enliven the...

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Series organized by Film Curator Kathy Geritz and Jeffrey Skoller, and presented in conjunction with the course on avant-garde film taught at UC Berkeley by Skoller. The programs with Stacey Steers and Jodie Mack are Headlands Artist Events, presented by BAMPFA. Dreams of Suitcases and a Blue Lobster and Latin Camp are made possible as part of the Los Angeles Filmforum series Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, part of Pacific Standard Time, and supported by the Getty Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Sky Hopinka’s visit is part of Afterimage: Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation, which is made possible by generous funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association®; it is presented in conjunction with UC Berkeley’s On the Same Page. Jodie Mack’s program is presented with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Endowment and the National Endowment for the Arts. The programs with Jodie Mack and Scott Stark are cosponsored by Canyon Cinema.