Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde

For those of yiz all out in the Bay Area of California, tonight kicks off the beginning of the series Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde, which I programmed for the San Francisco Cinematheque. The shows take place at the Roxie Cinema.

Tonight's dedicated to Ed Emshwiller and features some rarely-screened films on glorious original 16mm! Here's the whole program and more will be blogged about each later...

Thursday, October 11 at 7:00pm
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street
Ed and Peter Emshwiller
Ed Emshwiller won five Hugo awards for his science fiction magazine covers and involved notable science fiction authors in his moving image work. Carol is a short portrait of Emshwiller's wife, an award-winning science fiction writer. Image, Flesh and Voice, a feature-length experimental work, weaves together conversations by New Wave science fiction authors, including Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Keith Laumer, Gordon Dickson, James Blish and many others talking about society, politics and philosophy with carefully shot near-abstract monochrome images; Shot by the Emshwillers' then-11-year-old son Peter, Jr. Star Trek is an all-kid remake of the legendary TV show—complete with Ed himself as an alien monster.

Thursday, October 11 at 9:30pm
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street
Max Almy / Roddy Bogawa
Combining an early-80s New Wave androgynous flair and a plugged-in proto-cyberpunk sensibility, Almy's delirious data-trip, Leaving the 20th Century, remains one of the most formidable experimental videos of its decade. For his 16mm feature, Junk, Roddy Bogawa turns to a later set of musical influences: the post-apocalyptic tendencies of post-punk noise.

Thursday, November 8 at 7:00pm
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street
Anne McGuire's Strain Andromeda The
Anne McGuire re-edits Robert Wise's 1971 film The Andromeda Strain (based on Michael Crichton's novel) into Strain Andromeda The so the shots run backwards, end to beginning, creating an awesome and spellbinding film that throws everything from story structure to character motivation into question.

Thursday, November 8 at 9:30pm
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street
Craig Baldwin / Ximena Cuevas
In Cinepolis, the Film Capitol, Mexican artist Ximena Cuevas, spins a video from the other side: a meta-metaphor of American economic imperialism, told through CGI multiplex trailers and masochistic Hollywood fantasies. Culled from Bay Area legend Craig Baldwin's infamous personal archive of obscure cinephemera—gladiator flicks, newsreels, travelogues, James Bond films, B-grade horror and Mexican thrillers—Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America implodes an SF universe into the hot core of the New World Order psyche.

Thursday, December 13 at 7:00pm
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street
James Fotopoulos / Leah Gilliam
Leah Gilliam remixes the racial politics of The Planet of the Apes in Apeshit and a free-form sense of foreboding and invasion inhabits James Fotopoulos' ontological horror-film The Nest.

Thursday, December 13 at 9:30pm
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street
Victor Faccinto / James June Schneider
James June Schneider's 1, 2, 3, Whiteout, making its US premiere, offers up a low-fi retro-futurist romance while in Victor Faccinto's last cut-out film, Shameless, is an underground-comix-inspired animation set in a multidimensional space pad; a pervy, groovy, adults-only, erotic romp.