Oddball Films welcomes moving image
artist Kerry Laitala to our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly event featuring
visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema
insights and films. Kerry Laitala is a
media archaeologist who uses analog, digital, and hybrid forms to present
traces of forgotten technologies from the distant and recent past. Laitala's
work resides at the crossroads of science, art, history, and her uncanny
approach to evolving systems of belief through installation, photography,
para-cinema, performance, kinetic sculpture, and single-channel forms. Laitala will be revealing the secrets of her direct film manipulation and experimental imaging techniques and presenting two works from her City
Luminous Series, celebrating the lighting pioneers that gathered a
century ago at the fabulous Jewel City, a 635-acre monument to impermanence
constructed, and soon after, demolished in San Francisco’s Marina district.
These include The City Luminous: Spectacle of Light, which recently received an audience choice award at the 2015
Crossroads Film Festival presented by SF Cinematheque, and The City Luminous: Electric
Salome, a
brand-new work being world-premiered right here at Oddball Films. Both of these
performances will feature live sound from Oakland’s experimental music duo extraordinaire
Voicehandler, made up of Jacob Felix Heule and Danishta Rivero. In addition, Laitala will screen the
slightly salacious The Kali of Technology, and Side
Show Spectacle
with live sound by Brian Darr. Lastly, 3D manifestations will propel the
audience into the screen and beyond the as their retinas get pushed and pulled
through the taffy maker of prismatic chromadepth. These works include: Afterimage:
A Flicker of Life, sound collaboration Between K. Laitala and Wobbly, Chromatic
Frenzy and Nine Lives Measured in Mercury with original sound by Neal
Johnson.
Date: Thursday, July 9th, 2015 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com
Featuring:
The City Luminous: Spectacle of Light (dual-16mm projector performance, 2015)
The City Luminous: Electric Salome. (dual-16mm projector
performance, 2015 WORLD PREMIERE!)
Loie
Fuller was a major innovator in fin-de-siècle dance, costuming and theatrical
lighting design. Her Serpentine Dances became hugely popular, inspired dozens
of imitators, and are best known today through the early films shot by the
likes of W.K.L. Dickson, Alice Guy Blache, Segundo de Chomon, Georges Melies
and others. Towards the end of her career Fuller brought her troupe to San
Francisco’s PPIE, where they performed under the dome of the Palace of Fine
Arts as a fundraiser to allow it to become the only major structure to be saved
from destruction at the end of the fair. Laitala filmed San Francisco dancer
Jenny Stulberg in the act of resurrecting Fuller’s fluttering aura through her
own choreographed interpretations. Then she reproduced Stulberg’s image onto
separate film strips which will rejoin together projected onto a phantom
presence that brings a sculptural element into the proceedings. Voicehandler
provides the sound.
The City Luminous series, which encompasses the realms of installation, performance and photographic works is funded by a third Special Projects Grant from the Princess Grace Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission Grant, California Historical Society, and Maurice Kanbar.
The Kali of
Technology
(multi-16mm projector performance, 2014)
This
brief eye-scorcher involves a minimum of three lubricious loops of 16mm
unspooling simultaneously. Named for the multi-armed Hindu deity of
destruction, power and time, this Kali will have you hypnotized.
Side Show Spectacle (16mm, 2015)
Step
right up, ladybugs and experimentalmen, and see with your very own eyes the
unbelievable Kodachrome sensation that has delighted children of all ages! The
thrills and spills of the big top, dangerous creatures tamed onto celluloid via
colorful images captured while out on safari in exotic El Cerrito. Live musical
accompaniment by electronic keyboardist Brian Darr.
Afterimage: A
Flicker of Life
(chromadepth 3D video, 2010)
Beginning
with an animated wood-cut of a beating heart, Afterimage: A Flicker of Life traces
a trajectory of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey's 19th
Century motion studies using iconic representations of artifacts that they left
behind. It then takes the viewer into the 21st Century using three dimensional
technology. Human beings are reduced to their gestures and movements in space,
becoming forms of pure colored light. Afterimage: a Flicker of Life
employs graphic tracings to create kinesthetic inscriptions that speak to the
physicality of working with the film medium. Just as Marey and Muybridge strove
to make motion visible to the naked eye, this archival/live action
16mm-to-digital hybrid takes a whimsical approach to envisaging human and
animal locomotion by illuminating the traces of their presence. Soundtrack by
Kerry Laitala and Wobbly.
Chromatic Frenzy (chromadepth 3D video, 2009)
“A lapidary
shower of kaleidoscope, Spirograph, and compound eye imagery” – Nick Pinkerton
in Artforum.
“Chromatic
Frenzy is a densely saturated freakout of solar streaks, kaleidoscopic
magma globs, and seared disco vortices”…“incandescent images suggest an
intergalactic mysticism from out of Harry Smith's sketchpad”…“Truthfully, the
film is almost unbearably rapturous even without the effect of the glasses. But
with them, there's an additional and unexpected charm that comes through, one
that makes gains through the naiveté of the technology’s stunted range. Depth
illusions are largely limited to only three planes—just off of, a bit back
from, and flush up against the screen—letting all that is frantic become
tempered by a sense of welcoming simplicity.” – Blake Williams in MUBI’s
Notebook.
Nine Lives Measured
in Mercury (chromadepth
3D video, 2013)
Follow
the adventures of the Chroma-Cat as she moves through spectrum-splitting
terrain on a quest for answers to the cosmic questions. Might her transmigration
be a metaphor for media re-appropriation?
Soundtrack
by Neal Johnson.
About Kerry Laitala:
For more information:
About Oddball Films
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.
Oddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.