Micro Spells: Expanded Cinema & New Music Performance is a quarterly series of live collaborative exchanges between artists working within the areas of performance cinema and the sonic arts, curated by John Davis & Steve Polta and presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and Vallejo Experimental Arts. Each live event will offer audiences an opportunity to share in the multisensory integrations and temporal shifts unique to the juxtaposition of moving images and sound, featuring artists from California and beyond.
Float into COSMOGENESIS, a weekend-long journey of transcendental films, lectures, and live performances celebrating the visionary art and cosmic cinema of Jordan Belson.
Presented in partnership with SF Cinematheque and BAMPFA.
Dates:
Friday, September 26, 2025 (All day) to Sunday, September 28, 2025 (All day)
Founded by filmmaker Bruce Baillie in 1961, San Francisco Cinematheque is the Bay Area’s premier venue for avant-garde/experimental, underground and personally expressive film, video and media performance, inspiring aesthetic dialog among artists, stimulating critical discourse, and encouraging appreciati
Dates:
Friday, August 30, 2024 (All day) to Sunday, September 1, 2024 (All day)
Artist Valie Export (b. Linz, Austria, 1940) is known for a body of film, video, performance and installation work focusing on the embodied position of the female artist situated in the contemporary patriarchal dystopia. Emerging from the same post-war context of generational reckoning that spawned Viennese Aktionism, Export’s work eschews the Aktionists’ self-abusing quests for catharsis, creating instead intimately mediated performances, that, while just as confrontational and assertively body-based, present darker critiques of media and representation while exploring the politics of eroticism and presenting subtly bitter attacks on bourgeois consumption and relations.
As an echo to Luther Price: New Utopia and Light Fracture (presented Sunday, March 24 at CounterPulse) and in celebration of the life of filmmaker Luther Price, Cinematheque proudly presents this rare screening of early works by the artist’s pre-Price avatar Tom Rhoads.
On the occasion of Bay Area Now 9, Cinematheque returns for two special screenings at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the month of October. Running October 6–31, CROSSROADS at 14 looks back on the first fourteen years of Cinematheque’s annual festival. San Francisco Cinematheque: Contemporary Views from the Bay Area, featuring work by ten Bay Area filmmakers created 2020–2023, screens October 21.
