March 1995
The origin of San Francisco avant-garde film started in bed. A white sheet strewn across the backyard of an East Bay house in the early 1960s showed what both the Yerba Buena Gardens and San Francisco Art Institute feature each Sunday and Thursday evenings today: personal, experimental film created by filmmakers as far away as Vienna and as close as San Francisco State University.
"Cinematheque" is one of the oldest showcases of personal film in the nation. "These films question and challenge filmmaking," says Irina Leimbacher, Cinematheque curator, administrative manager, and SFSU film production graduate student.
As the desire for ticket sales sometimes determines the creativity of Hollywood filmmakers, the vision of experimental filmmakers is often driven by storytelling through artistic and unique modes of expression.
"These films are not made with expectations. There is not much commercial viability," says Steve Anker, director of Cinematheque. "These films tend to be very eccentric and idiosyncratic."
Filmmakers showcased in Cinematheque often come from musical, literary and artistic backgrounds, and approach filmmaking "the way a poet might approach words," Anker says. Leimbacher also acknowledges that scenery, camera angle and even costume design may tell a story just as well as dialogue.
"They convey new ways of telling and speaking that are [sometimes] personal and lyrical," says Leimbacher. Experimental film also demands the viewer to abandon preconceived notions of conventional film while participating in the art.
Monotonous blinking of primary and monochromatic hues, single words growing from small to big type and slow-motion blooming flowers illustrate the first part of "Interior Spaces," the final show in Cinematheque's seven-part Austrian film series in February. A viewer's eyes and ears must prescribe to echoing sound, artful yet sometimes assaultive photography and editing that provoke thought, wonderment and often questions about the unorthodox images on the screen.
"Sometimes it [experimental film] is intimidating," says Leimbacher. "But if it is, it's because our culture hasn't been given access to it."
Yet anybody appreciative of movement, light, image and education can enjoy and participate in the celebration of what film Cinematheque offers. Austrian filmmaker Marc Adrian said at the showing of "Interior Spaces" of his own lifelong career in filmmaking, "It is simple enough [that] one can easily follow the structure."
Supported by an enthusiastic Bay Area film community and artistic grants from various corporations and foundations, Cinematheque offers viewers a vision other than Hollywood's. The three-season-a-year showings are coordinated in a Portero Avenue office that is filled with televisions, video cassettes and film literature from across the nation, and six staffers.
Anker and Associate Director Joel Shepard curate national and international films in the form of shorts, retrospectives and films brought together under specific themes. The films of Bruce Baillie, one of the first filmmakers in San Francisco's avant-garde movement, and Gunvur Nelson highlight April's Cinematheque calendar.
Other than providing the Bay Area with a different vision of film, one of Cinematheque's roles is to serve as inspiration and an outlet of creativity for aspiring filmmakers.
After the showing of a documentary and experimental film centered around the theme of parents and family dynamics, San Francisco filmmaker Gail Miller said she "went home crying, called all of my friends and said, 'See, there is something really good out there.'"