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Doors 7pm / Screening 7:30pm
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Presented by San Francisco Cinematheque at The Lab.
There is something of a weaver’s purpose in sewing together a film with images from previous times; likewise with the images we look at daily and come to know through sensory, intimate experience. All those images are caught in the fabric of the world: raw material for the imagination. […I]t’s the contact with the material, with the visual world manifested in the flesh—the flesh of ideas and feelings, of dreams, of gestures, spaces and objects fixed in time—which prompts […] artists and filmmakers […] to reuse images and express a need to create in their urges, hopes and hesitations. Alongside is this notion of what is sought, since one who does not know what one is looking for never knows what one will find; in other words, looking for memories, collecting, rearranging images to question or engage with, seeking to shake reality from one’s own perspective[…]. The art of recycling images, by observation and experiment, awakens the imagination… (César Ustarroz: Preface to Found Footage & Collage Films: The Artist’s Voice)
Since 2015, Found Footage Magazine has served as a vital resource for artists and filmmakers, scholars, researches and cinephiles interested in the theoretical, historical and aesthetic dimensions of found footage filmmaking, providing a forum for the dissemination of information, critical thinking and discussion of the broad genres of its various manifestations—from film collage to essay film to formalist experiment—giving speculative voice to artists, academics and ideologues worldwide in consideration of this endlessly fascinating field of practice. Following the October 2024 publication of the magazine’s 10th Anniversary edition FFM’s 336-page Found Footage & Collage Films: The Artist’s Voice (2025, César Ustarroz, ed.) compiles personal statements from 40 contemporary artists currently working in this mode.
This evening’s screening celebrates this publication by presenting five works discussed in the text whose imagery draws from the pre-digital image banks of the twentieth century, films assembled from personal and anonymous home movies, newsreels and industrial films and more. This screening is dedicated to the memory of filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice (1940–2024) and includes his rarely screened double-16mm film Castle Two (1968).
SCREENING:
Bye Bye Now (2022) by Louise Bourque (Canada/Acadian); digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes. Exhibition File from the maker.
Surface Noise (2000) by Abigail Child (US); 16mm, color, sound, 18 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema.
The Color of Love (1994) by Peggy Ahwesh (US); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema
Polaroids (2015) by Péter Lichter (Hungary); digital video, color, sound, 14 minutes. Exhibition File from the maker.
Castle Two (1968) by Malcolm Le Grice; double screen 16mm, b&w, sound, 32 minutes. Print from LUX
Screening presented by San Francisco Cinematheque. Full details here.
TRT: 83 minutes