Alternative Visions 2018

September 5–November 28, 2018

This expansive season of our avant-garde showcase extends from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, with many filmmakers and other luminaries in person.

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  • Kelly Sears: A Tone Halfway Between Lightness and Darkness

  • The Washing Society

  • As Above, So Below

  • Empty Metal

  • Tomonari Nishikawa: Tokyo - Ebisu

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors: Three Films

    • Wednesday, November 28 7 PM

    Three works bear personal witness to collective histories, from Auschwitz to the Japanese internment to postwar Japan: Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory, Abraham Ravett’s The March, and Jeffrey Skoller’s recent The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors.

    Jeffrey Skoller in Person

  • As Above, So Below

    • Wednesday, November 14 7 PM
    Larry Clark
    United States, 1973

    Clark’s drama of post-Watts resistance and black power is a rediscovered masterpiece and a key work of the L.A. Rebellion. With Frances Bodomo’s short Everybody Dies!

    Larry Clark, Ra Malika Imhotep, and Jamal Batts in Conversation

  • Underground International: Kurt Kren and Tomonari Nishikawa

    • Wednesday, November 7 7 PM

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    Interweaving works by a pioneering Austrian and a contemporary US-based Japanese filmmaker, this program highlights connections across continents and generations animating the structural filmmaking tradition.

    Tomonari Nishikawa, Patrick Harrison, and Megan Hoetger in Conversation

  • Afterimage: EMPTY METAL

    • Wednesday, October 31 7 PM
    Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer
    United States, 2018

    Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy—as it follows the lives of several people attempting to bring about change. With short The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets.

    Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, and Diana Ruíz in Conversation

  • The Washing Society

    • Wednesday, October 24 7 PM
    Lizzie Olesker, Lynne Sachs
    United States, 2018

    Olesker and Sachs fold the history of labor and immigration into this intimate chronicle of the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat. With Sachs’s Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor and Gunvor Nelson’s Old Digs.

    Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs in Person

  • Ism, Ism, Ism: Recycled Film in Latin America

    • Wednesday, October 10 7 PM

    A trip through Latin American films, from polemics to poetics, that use appropriation as a form of critique and a strategy of decolonization. Featuring found-footage works by Luis Ospina, Alfredo Salomón, Enrique Colina, Marisol Trujillo, and others.

    Introduction by Jesse Lerner

  • Out of the Vault: Luminous Procuress

    • Wednesday, October 3 7 PM
    Steven Arnold
    United States, 1971

    Restored 16mm Print

    The legendary, gender-obliterating funfest unleashed by the cantankerous cross-dressing Cockettes shines on in this immaculate restored print.

    Introduction by Steve Seid

  • The Book of Wonders: Films by Stan Brakhage and Georges Méliès

    • Wednesday, September 26 7 PM

    Seemingly poles apart, Brakhage and Méliès were both independent spirits, explorers of the mythic and the everyday. This program features the rarely screened The Loom and other works by Brakhage as well as Méliès’s The Kingdom of the Fairies.

  • Poor Little Rich Girl

    • Wednesday, September 19 7 PM
    Andy Warhol
    United States, 1963/65

    Revisit Warhol’s famous Factory with this portrait of young heiress Edie Sedgwick, who “was, quite simply, a dazzling film presence” (New York Times). Preceded by a selection of Warhol’s screen tests.

  • Afterimage: Collage Animations by Kelly Sears

    • Wednesday, September 12 7 PM

    Sears’s experimental animations, collaged from materials ranging from first aid handbooks and high school yearbooks to military newsreels and exercise tapes, are “witty, savvy, ironic, poetic, exhilarating, even cosmic” (Craig Baldwin).

    Kelly Sears and Rick Prelinger in Conversation

  • The Smiling Madame Beudet and Abstract Shorts by Germaine Dulac

    • Wednesday, September 5 7 PM

    A program of films by a pioneering French avant-garde filmmaker who aimed “to give more space to sensations and dreams,” including short experimental works and her masterpiece, The Smiling Madame Beudet.