Mexperimental Cinema begins in the aftermath of the civil war that was the Revolution, as the movie camera becomes one more tool for the painters, photographers, and intellectuals engaged in a nationalistic and utopian project. Dating from the early thirties to the nineties, the work included in this series exhibits affinities to the film experiments of European Surrealists, the New American Cinema, the abstract animations of Fischinger and Man Ray, Third Cinema (especially Cuban cinema and Julio García Espinosa's manifesto "For an Imperfect Cinema"), and other oppositional film practices. The survey encompasses work emerging from the three state-sponsored experimental film competitions, leftist political polemics and countercultural fantasies created by the student movement, punk rants and partisan satires. Mexperimental Cinema also includes the film experimentation of artists Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias and Adolfo Best Maugard; and any consideration of the avant-garde in Mexican cinema would be incomplete without examining the Mexican period of Luis Buñuel's career. Experimental films exist in a complex dialectic relationship with the commercial film industry in Mexico. On the one hand, these films are part of a larger oppositional practice. On the other, many of the directors make their livelihood working in the commercial film studios, and part of the aesthetic sensibility is borrowed from mainstream Mexican movies, from the classics to 1970s narco-churros. These aesthetic appropriations involve studied (and sometimes affectionate) tributes, but attempt to engage the spectators through the mechanisms of dismantling narrative, structural experimentation, and the subversion of causality. Jesse Lerner and Rita GonzálezMexperimental Cinema is curated by Jesse Lerner and Rita González, who have written the program notes. Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker (Natives, Frontierland/Fronterilandia), writer, and curator. He is currently finishing a film on the history of the excavation and collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. Rita González is a video artist (see April 1), occasional filmmaker, writer, and media curator who is currently the Lila Wallace Curatorial Intern at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. With Ramon García she is working on an experimental biography on the last day in the life of the actress Lupe Velez. The project is sponsored by the US-Mexico Fund for Culture (Fideicomiso/Rockefeller Foundation) and UC MexUS.A catalog to the exhibition is available at the PFA Box Office and is sold in the Museum Store. At the Headlands Center for the Arts on Sunday, April 19 at 4 p.m., Mexperimental curators Jesse Lerner and Rita González will present and discuss highlights from the series. For further information please call (415)331-2787.Tuesday April 7, 1998
