Continuum is named for Dominic Angerame’s silent and exquisitely filmed black and white 1987 city portrait. The program also features Bay Area filmmaker Karen Holmes’ underappreciated late 1970s landscape and performance film, Saving the Proof; Los Angeles effects artist and filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s 1973 masterpiece Down Wind; Gunvor Nelson’s My Name is Oona, one of the canonical works of the American avant-garde; and two works from the mid-2000s: Tomonari Nishikawa’s frenetic single-frame city portrait, Market Street, and animator Janie Geiser’s Terrace 49. The program is bookended with Valentin De Las Sierras and Mujer De Milfuegos, films by Canyon Cinema founders Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand that continue to resonate as vital, adventurous film art.
Song of revolutionary hero, Valentin, sung by Jose Santollo Nasido en Santa Cruz de la Soledad; Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico.
“My Name is Oona captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl…”
A thoughtful treatment of some of the problems we (mankind) have been having in dealing with our fellow species…
Images of impending disaster— slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill, and a frayed, almost snapping, elevator rope…
As I am interested in the projection apparatus and human visual perception, I carefully juxtaposed images on Market Street by single-framing, in order to create certain happenings on the screen.
“In a superb manner, Continuum builds from the bottom up a complex and finely woven picture of a day-in-the-life of labor…”
“Saving the Proof is a complex transformation of an ordinary action: a woman walking…”
A kind of heretic fantasy film. An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman…
