Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries
January 15, 2008 - February 26, 2008
An earthwork emerges from underwater; a man sails out to sea and disappears. The history of a glass of milk is chronicled, and the myths of the mainstream media smashed. Whether speculative, observant, or interrogative, the films in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral manifest the urge to deal with the world—its people, its injustices, its beauty—in diverse strategies and to surprising effect. Two programs provide overviews: Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television chronicles Paper Tiger’s twenty-five-year history of collective media, arcing from funky cultural critiques to incisive political activism. F Is for Phony, a program of films in conjunction with Jesse Lerner and Alexandra Juhasz’s new book, examines the balancing of fact and fiction in fake documentaries. The remaining films, short and long alike, will have you thinking outside the breadbox and asking Twenty Questions.
Kathy Geritz
Film Curator
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
7:30 p.m. Best in the West
Maryam Kashani in Person. Kashani catches up with a group of men who left Iran in the 1960s and ’70s and made lives for themselves in San Francisco. Interweaving industrial and archival footage with intimate interviews and family portraits, Kashani skillfully negotiates between the personal and the global, individual lives and Iran/U.S. relations.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
7:30 p.m. Milk in the Land: Ballad of an American Drink
Milk, long a staple of the American diet, gets a cool, refreshing examination in a film by Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum. Interviews with farmers, activists, and historians, together with a rich array of collaged and animated materials, reveal a contested, unexpected history. With Gerstein’s short Alice Sees the Light.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
7:30 p.m. we will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass
Julia Meltzer in Person. The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) provide a perspective on Syria at a time of tension and uncertainty, using an array of disparate approaches to envision the future. With short not a matter of if but when.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
7:30 p.m. F Is for Phony
Booksigning and Presentation by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. Juhasz and Lerner present films that work the boundary between fact and fiction, from Spanish-American War newsreels through Buñuel’s Land Without Bread to works by Mitchell Block and Elisabeth Subrin.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
7:30 p.m. Here Is Always Somewhere Else
Rene Daalder in Person. Daalder seeks the inexplicable in his portrait of Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea when he was thirty-three, and whose work has inspired a new generation of artists. With shorts by Ader.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
7:30 p.m. Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television
Maria Juliana Byck in Person. It’s 7:30 p.m. Do you know where your brains are? The latest communiqué from the pioneering radical media collective Paper Tiger TV mines the organization’s archive of bold, sassy DIY activism. With classic Paper Tiger shorts.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
7:30 p.m. casting a glance
James Benning casts his keenly observant eye for landscape over Robert Smithson’s great artistic intervention in the landscape, the Spiral Jetty.
Presented with support from the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley.
