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

[Scott Stark]

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
L at TE: 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 L at TE 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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