Événement

the word, my dear, is piecemeal: films on the visualization of text

Presented as part of Litquake 2013, San Francisco Cinematheque presents a screening of film/video works in which written text is visualized and plasticized, explored and displayed. Battering, caressing and seducing viewers/readers while exploring syntactical forms (including poetic lyric, introspective essay,, journal, harangue, laundry list, love letter and song), the seven film/video works on this program form a thumbnail catalog of the diverse expressive potentialities of language's graphic notation displayed as light moving in time. Screening: Jeanne Liotta's Dark Enough (2011), a celestial contemplation, "a virtual proscenium stage for the poetry to play itself upon," a collaboration with poet Lisa Gill; Stan Brakhage's I Dreaming (1988), a sound film visualizing the lyrics of Stephen Foster; Word Movie (1966) by Paul Sharits, a radically flickering, optical/conceptual sound/text conflation, a three-and-a-half minute word; Stephanie Barber's letters, notes (2000) a melancholy compendium of lost correspondence and found photography; David Gatten's silent love letter How to Conduct a Love Affair (2007); Su Friedrich's harrowing dream journal Gently Down the Stream, Jesse Malmed's sound/image/data morass Supernym (2013) and a very rare screening of Michael Snow's 1982 epic monolithic film/text essay So Is This, a direct confrontation/repudiation of the very notion of cinematic language itself. (Steve Polta)