Artists Television Access Film & Video Festival is back with its fifth edition. Running on the weekend of October 21-22 at ATA's headquearters (992 Valencia Street, San Francisco), the festival presents two curated programmes of experimental short films by veteran and emerging filmmakers, such as Paul Clipson, Bill Brown, Gina Carducci, Sylvia Schedelbauer or Maite Abellá; as well as other programmes presented as 'window' and gallery installations. This year's edition features two workshops on film exposing and negative processing by hand and found-footage editing lead by filmmakers Kerry Laitala and Craig Baldwin.

Film & Video Programmes

Thursday, October 21, 20h, $7 - $10
Human<->Nature
- Union (Paul Clipson, 2010, 15:00, 16mm, San Francisco)
An exploration of movement, woven into layers of time, and photographed in natural and nocturnal urban spaces, ambiguous within a confluence of lights, colors and darkness.
- Reduction (Sam Barnett, 2009, 5:41, Animation, Los Angeles)
Reduction Is an animated film in which psychological Processes in a man’s subconscious, such as impulses to suppress disorienting thoughts, exist as ameba like organisms in the chaotic ocean of his mind. Thoughts join and new thoughts are born and attempt to take root in the man’s subconscious. When a mutated thought threatens to destabilize the man’s consciousness he must learn how to destroy thoughts by reducing them into a standard form. When he gains the power to reduce thoughts, reduction becomes compulsion, and the world is reduced.
Reduction is the 4th in a series of animations by Sam Barnett that utilize sound as a primary force in the narrative. Simple images are made complex by the sounds that define them
- Chicago Corner (Bill Brown, 2010, 4:50, Video, Madison)
I lived around the corner from the Henry Horner Homes. I once read an article about the place in the New York Times. The title of the article was "What It's Like To Live In Hell." By the time I moved to Chicago, the Horner Homes were empty. The city began to knock down the buildings, one by one, till there was only one building left. It stood there for years. Then the city knocked it down, too.
- Found: Nothing Missing (Patricia McInroy, 2009, 3:00, Video, Denver)
Found: Nothing Missing uses missing pet posters to explore the larger meaning of loss. Still images are cut together to form a loose narrative and signs are deconstructed, using humor, in order to re-construct meaning for the viewer.
- All That Sheltering Emptiness (Gina Carducci & Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, 2010, 7:00, 16mm, Brooklyn & SF
All That Sheltering Emptiness is a meditation on elevators, hotel lobbies, hundred dollar bills, the bathroom, a cab, chandeliers, cocktails, the receptionist, arousal, and other routines in the life of a New York City callboy.
Gorgeously hand-processed in full 16mm glory, this film is a collaboration between Gina Carducci (Stone Welcome Mat) and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly; editor of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation). All That Sheltering Emptiness explodes the typical narratives of desire, escape and intimacy to evoke something more honest.
- Untitled (Perlman Pl.) (Vera Brunner-Sung, 2006, 1:00, Video, Los Angeles)
In Southern California, the housing boom generated a seemingly endless repetition of pastel stucco boxes. This micro-portrait draws attention to the human side of this standardized environment, revealing the intimacy of anonymity in one suburban fortress.
- Disconnected (Karl Lind, 2006, 2:30, Animation/Video, Portland)
A million tiny hearts break. Somehow, everything is much more one sided than we would like it to be
- Who's Afraid (John Palmer, 2004, 4:00, Video, Culver City)
This four-channel video (originally designed as an installation) uses dialog from a scene from the film "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", with me as all four characters. As an installation, this is projected on four opposing walls of a small room, but can also be viewed as a one-channel piece, as shown here.
- Oh, How Sad (O Quam Tristis) (Maite Abella, 2009, 8:48, Video, The Netherlands)
Mother and sister slowly wrestle on a beach, an analogy for their real-life conflicts.

Friday, October 22, 20h, $7 - $10
Lo-Fi Future
- Wasteland (Kathleen Quillian, 2010, 3:05, Animation, Oakland)
Through stop-motion animation, “Wasteland” follows the path of the industrial food system from field to table and back and shows how the industry operates at the expense of the health of the society it was designed to nourish.
- Fun's Over (Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman, 2006, 5:30, 16mm, San Francisco & Brooklyn)
A low-fi, sci-fi after-school special set in a New York City that has been reduced to a beach, where feral terriers run wild and hot dogs grow on trees.
- way fare (Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2009, 6:20, Video, Germany/San Francisco)
A layered tone poem of found images and constructed soundscapes renders a shifting psychogram; a nomadic passage across spaces in and out of time.
- Principia (Jeff Guay, 2010, 15:00, Video, Portland)
Many years in the future, what is called “Widespread Psychological Fallout” has decimated life as we know it; and those left in a disparate population are without jobs, mostly because there “is no civilization.” Mr Roboto, a former underwear model, must navigate a new landscape of hopelessness, unemployment, an ominous puppet driving a Buick, and the possibility that he may in fact drifting into psychosis
- A Time Shared Unlimited (Zachary Epcar, 2010, 9:58, Video, Czech Republic/San Francisco)
Brief moments of sense experience in a near-future nearly passed; the simple pleasures, like good dental hygiene habits, inner-thigh exercises, and a glass of refreshing squeezed juice.
- 2005 Census (Bryan Boyce, 2005/2010, 2:00, Video, San Francisco)
A fragment of a stumbled-upon vértité street scene is transformed into a mysterious meditation.
- Somewhere Only We Know (Jesse McLean, 2009, 5:00, Video, Chicago)
What can a face reveal? Balanced between composure and collapse, individuals anxiously await their fate.
- Afterimage: The Flicker of Life (Kerry Laitala, 2010, 11:00, Film/Video Hybrid in Chromadepth, San Francisco, Chromadepth Glasses will be provided
"Afterimage: Flicker of Life" incorporates etchings, archival photographs, inter-titles, found footage and live action material to create cinematic image sequences of recomposed still frames. This work is an homage to the 19th century photographer Edweard Muybridge and scientist Etienne Jules Marey as a lyrical exploration of their motion studies providing a crucial link from still image to moving pictures. Beginning with an animated wood-cut of a beating heart, "Afterimage- A Flicker of Life" traces a trajectory of Muybridge and Marey's works using iconic representations of artifacts that they left behind. "Afterimage:" 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 in a self-reflexive way. Making motion visible to the naked eye was something that Marey and Muybridge strove to achieve and "Afterimage:.." takes a whimsical approach to envisaging human and animal locomotion by illuminating the traces of their presence.

Installations

Window Installations - October 1-31, dusk to midnight
- Loop Loop (Patrick Bergeron, 2008, 5:00, Video, Montreal)
- Wrestling With My Father (Charles Fairbanks, 2010, 4:00, Video, Lexington)
- Barcodes (Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, 2008, 2:30, Video, Norway)
- Hadley Grass (Zachary Iannazzi, 2009, 3:00, Video, San Francisco)
- Princess Diana's Soul Carriage (Nightmare City, 2009, 4:46, Video, San Francisco)
- Sexy Noir (Ben Popp & Kenny Reed, 2009, 2:30, Video, Portland & Chicago)
- Kentucky Kingdom (Nancy Jean Tucker, 2008, 6:00, Video, Los Angeles)
- Touche (Maarit Suomi-Väänänen, 2010, 1:00, Video, Finland)

Gallery Installations- October 21-22, on display screening nights!
- The ?? Box aka. The Multiplicity of Perception (Sam Manera, 2010, San Francisco) - Interactive multi-media installation
- Liquid Light (Shalo P, 2010, Video, San Francisco)

Workshops

Tuesday, October 19, Rayko, 17-21h - $25
Lightstruck - by Kerry Laitala
In this workshop, participants will be exposing 16mm, B&W film stock by hand. They will make 16mm "Cinegrams" directly onto the film and creating hand-exposed moving images by placing objects and material directly onto the film and casting their shadows upon the film with light. The workshop will also cover hand-processing the film as a negative in buckets.

Saturday, October 23, ATA, 14-16h - $6
Flix Remix - by Craig Baldwin

Here's a HANDS-ON workshop for makers who opt to re-purpose found, orphan, or archival 16mm film material. Whether for historical citation (compilation doc), inter-textual quotation (appropriation art), polymorphous perversity (time-based collage), situationist parody (culture jam), or ultra-low budget (cinema povera), recycling the flotsam from an earlier media disaster (or mediocrity) can prove effective, affordable...and DOWNRIGHT FUN!