San Francisco Cinematheque presents Makino Takashi: Space Noise. Makino Takashi is one of the most prolific and adventurous filmmakers working in Japan today and is known world wide for his complex, immersive and overwhelming film experiences. Treating image and sound as elements of equal importance, Makino produces immense and infinite non-narrative and abstract film works, at once cosmic and organic, which activate the screening space in powerful and dynamic suggestions of depth and infinity. As part of a special West Coast tour, Makino Takashi appears in person at San Francisco Cinematheque to present and perform live soundtracks for two recent works: Space Noise, “a duel between the all-dominant immaculate digital and the irregular organic material dissolves in multiple layers of chaos,” and Phantom Nebula, “a changeable ethereal gaseous mass with no definite form” (S8: Mostra de Cinema Periférico).

Bay Area treasure George Kuchar—sorely missed since his untimely death in 2011—is celebrated worldwide for his wild and wooly lo-budget melodramas and voluminous meandering video diaries. To know George was to love George, and to be ever warped by his inspiring irreverence and sardonic wit. San Francisco Cinematheque celebrates Primary Information’s publication of The George Kuchar Reader, an expansive 340-page compendium of the legendary raconteur’s writings, ramblings, recommendation letters, scripts, UFO visitation narratives and more. The book’s editor (and Anthology Film Archives’ Curator of Collections) Andrew Lampert appears in person to read excerpts and discuss this legend. The program will include a screening of Kuchar’s 16mm Corruption Of The Damned and video The Exiled Files Of Eddie Gray.

Duchamp du film offers a new and challenging reading of the work and influence of Marcel Duchamp on modern and contemporary filmmaking, inviting to reconsider some experimental practices of film in terms of aesthetic proposals made by the artist throughout his career. Although the artist produced a single film, Anemic Cinéma (1925-1926), the figure of Marcel Duchamp appears throughout the history of the filmic avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in postwar American art, up to productions that fall within the category of experimental and artist's film. Conceived by the Centre Pompidou film department, and curated by Enrico Camporesi and Jonathan Pouthier, under the supervision of Philippe-Alain Michaud, this program consists of six screenings as a complent to Marcel Duchamp's exhibition (La Peinture même, curated by Cécile Debray) held at the museum from September 24, 2014 to January 15, 2015.