Re: [Frameworks] Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000

From: Jacob (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Nov 15 2010 - 20:25:58 PST


Very sincere thanks to everybody who put this together, it's a treasure...

---
Jacob
SLC, UT, 84117
http://making-light-of-it.blogspot.com/
---
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 8:46 PM, Scott Stark <email suppressed>wrote:
> Hi all, below is information about the publication of Radical Light:
> Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000,
> edited by Steve Seid, Kathy Geritz and Steve Anker, and its accompanying
> exhibition series.
>
> More information is available on the Pacific Film Archive's website:
> http://press.bampfa.berkeley.edu/radical/.
>
> cheers,
> Scott
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *University** of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
> Presents*
>
> *Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area,
> 1945–2000*
>
> BAM/PFA’s Radical Light—book, film/video series, and gallery exhibition—
> places the San Francisco Bay Area as the unrivaled epicenter of an explosion
> of avant-garde film and video in the second half of the twentieth century
>
> * *
>
> **With its undulating topography, diverse population, legacy of technical
> innovation, and reputation for providing safe harbor for liberal attitudes
> toward political, religious, and sexual orientations, the San Francisco Bay
> Area is both a haven and an inspiration for a variety of artists, perhaps
> none more so than those experimenting with alternative film and video. In
> fact, since the mid-1940s, when Surrealist-influenced films were created in
> some of the country’s earliest filmmaking classes at the San Francisco Art
> Institute, the Bay Area has been a global center for an extraordinary
> constellation of artists who use film and video not for entertainment or
> documentation, but as an apparatus for the untethered pursuit of personal
> expression.
>
>
>
> This vital but often overlooked artistic and regional history finally
> receives its critical due with the decade-in-the making *Radical Light:
> Alternative Film and* *Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, *a
> 352-page richly illustrated book published by the University of California
> Press and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. BAM/PFA is
> celebrating the publication of *Radical Light *with an accompanying film
> series, gallery exhibition, and related *(address suppressed): Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA *events.
> Edited, curated, and programmed by BAM/PFA Film and Video Curators Kathy
> Geritz and Steve Seid, and CalArts Dean of the School of Film/Video Steve
> Anker, *Radical Light *offers audiences the first comprehensive overview
> of this sweeping endeavor to reinvent the moving image.
>
>
>
> Though the book traces the history of alternative film and video in the Bay
> Area back to 1878 in Palo Alto, when Eadweard Muybridge began his pioneering
> experiments with the photographic image, *Radical Light *highlights the
> mid- 1940s as the tipping point for the local development of a community of
> avant-garde filmmakers such as Sidney Peterson, Harry Smith, Frank
> Stauffacher, and James Broughton, who made the first Bay Area experimental
> films. During the 1950s, Jordan Belson, Patricia Marx, and Christopher
> Maclaine made their first films, and by the 1960s artists such as Bruce
> Conner, Bruce Baillie, and Chick Strand changed the shape of filmmaking by
> intertwining film and activism. *Radical Light *traces the arrival in the
> 1970s of the first openly gay film artists Barbara Hammer and Michael Wallin
> and the first generation of video artists, including Paul Kos, Terry Fox,
> and Howard Fried. The next wave of mediamakers, including Peter d'Agostino,
> Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Doug Hall, investigated gesture, language, and
> text as it is reproduced through the image, while artists such as Lynn
> Hershman, Max Almy, and Chris Robbins constantly tested the relationship of
> technology to culture. Meanwhile, longtime Bay Area filmmakers such as
> Nathaniel Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, and Scott Stark explored the formal properties
> of the film medium; George Kuchar reinvented melodrama; and Craig Baldwin
> and Trinh T. Minh-ha subverted documentary. *Radical Light *culminates
> with the generation that rose in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Marlon Riggs,
> Greta Snider, Lynne Sachs, Steve Fagin, Anne McGuire, and Tony Discenza,
> which made its mark working across all media in a style as eclectic as the
> evolving image-scape.
>
>
>
> With attention to contributions from nearly every corner of this disparate
> community of local alternative film and video artists, *Radical Light *and
> its accompanying film series, gallery exhibition, and *(address suppressed) *events brings
> this neglected history into the light for audiences to rediscover.
>
>
>
> *ABOUT THE BOOK:*
>
> *Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area,
> 1945–2000*
>
> *Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid, editors*
>
> Available worldwide
>  ------------------------------
>
> Paperback, 352 pages
>
> ISBN: 9780520249110
>
> $29.95, £20.95
>
>
>
> Hardcover, 352 pages
>
> ISBN: 9780520249103
>
> $60.00, £41.95
>
>
>
> This kaleidoscopic collection of essays, interviews, photographs, and
> artist-designed pages chronicles the vibrant and influential history of
> experimental cinema in the San Francisco Bay Area. Encompassing historical,
> cultural, and aesthetic realms, *Radical Light* features critical analyses
> of films and videos, reminiscences from artists, and interviews with
> pioneering filmmakers, curators, and archivists. It explores artistic
> movements, film and video exhibition and distribution, artists' groups, and
> Bay Area film schools. Special sections of ephemera—posters, correspondence,
> photographs, newsletters, program notes, and more—punctuate the pages of *Radical
> Light,* giving a first-hand visual sense of the period. This
> groundbreaking, hybrid assemblage reveals a complex picture of how and why
> the San Francisco Bay Region, a laboratory for artistic and technical
> innovation for more than half a century, has become a global center of
> vanguard film, video, and new media.
>
> Among the contributors are Rebecca Solnit and Ernie Gehr on Bay Area
> cinema's roots in the work of Eadweard Muybridge and others; Scott MacDonald
> on Art in Cinema; P. Adams Sitney on films by James Broughton and Sidney
> Peterson; Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Lawrence Jordan, and Yvonne Rainer on
> the Bay Area film scene in the 1950s; J. Hobeman on films by Christopher
> Maclaine, Bruce Conner, and Robert Nelson; Craig Baldwin on found footage
> film; George Kuchar on student-produced melodramas; Michael Wallin on queer
> film in the 1970s; V. Vale on punk cinema; Dale Hoyt and Cecilia Dougherty
> on video in the 1980s and 1990s; Scott Stark on film and video installation;
> Kathy Geritz on feminist filmmaking and theory; Steve Anker on pioneering
> college film programs; Steve Seid on conceptual video and performance; and
> Maggie Morse on new media as sculpture.
>
> Co-pub: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>

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