Oddball Films welcomes Bay Area artist, filmmaker and archivist tooth to our Cinema Soirée, a monthly soirée featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights and films. This month, we bring you Quadratura Circuli: a program incorporating a recent film cycle of performative and single channel 16mm and super 8mm works by Bay Area filmmaker tooth screened with a collection of pieces by other artists chosen for a filmic conversation that looks at the recurrent cyclic forms of the circle, sphere, and spiral throughout cultural and natural histories as a container for a disparate collision of concepts and beliefs. Taking its title from the Squaring of the Circle (Quadratura Circuli), a concept looked to by the Alchemists as representing the unification of opposites to form a higher synthesis; the program seeks to oscillate between a focus on the micro and macrocosmic recurrence of these forms and their accompanying symbology such as the blood cell, the iris of the eye, the spiral of the galaxies, the shape and rotation of the planets. With particular preoccupation on the Moon (represented in Alchemy by the corresponding metal of silver; a main ingredient used to fix photochemical images on celluloid film) and its phases in relation to various divination practices and the mapping of temporal and biological cycles. The night will begin with a series of films by tooth: the initiating phase in a stroboscopic circumnavigation that begins to trace a line of sensory research through intersecting spheres of history in CYCLOS ATARAXIA (2014), the physical fracturing of the artifacts of personal memory, as the recession of time and dimming light line the spectral sensitivity curve in LOST SIGHT (2015), the printed material of I Ching hexagrams create a point of departure for filmic divination in the two screen performance version of HEXAGRAM which utilizes a method direct animation via xerox printing toner directly onto clear acetate film which also creates the phasing optical sound of the piece (i.e. what you see is what you hear), followed by a piece using this same xerox technique with an eye to the symbology of moon phases and their relationship to the biological order (and disorder) of things in a three screen version of TETRADIC MOONS (2015). A drive through the residue of a city's mythical, "invented", sacred, profane and purposefully obscured histories to mark a planetary rotation in TRIADIC MOONS (2011), the tones and color textures of a rain soaked lunar new year ritual in YEAR OF THE RABBIT (2011), a two channel fever dream trajectory through the decaying archive of THE COLOR OF BLOOD (2015) and an ascent into a mystery of recurrent subtleties in INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN (CRESCENTS) (2015). Also screening, Robert Smithson's 1970 film SPIRAL JETTY, "a poetic and process-minded film depicting a 'portrait' of his monumental earthwork situated in the waters of Utah's Great Salt Lake", will be preceded by three very rarely screened masterworks by an unnameable yet legendary Bay Area filmmaker, painter and mystic. tooth will be in person to present the program and to speak briefly about the process of the cycle and the conceptual linkage between the works.
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com
Films by tooth:
cyclos ataraxia (16mm/5 mins/2014)
lost sight (super 8mm/7 mins/2015)
hexagram (double channel 16mm/7 mins/2015)
tetradic moons (triple channel 16mm/ 6 mins/2015)
triadic moons (super 8mm/6 mins/2011)
year of the rabbit (super 8mm/3 mins/2011)
the color of blood (double channel 16mm/5 mins/ 2015)
invisible mountain (crescents) (16mm/10 mins/2015)
Spiral Jetty (Color, 1970, Robert Smithson)
Directed by Smithson himself, this remarkable film documents the construction of the massive earthwork in the Great Salt Lake. Smithson used all natural materials to construct a giant spiral extension to the land that juts into the lake. This 15 foot wide and 1,500 foot long artificial peninsula still remains today, although the black rocks have turned white from salt encrustation. As the lake rises and lowers, the jetty is obscured and revealed. Follow Smithson from plans to construction in this landmark film.
About the Filmmaker:
tooth is a bay area artist that works in film, sound, performance and other time-based disciplines. His work primarily concerns itself with the phenomenology of trance states and their function within a collision of cultural, political and personal realities. His films and performance and installation work has screened locally at The Lab, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive,The Exploratorium, Artist's Television Access/Other Cinema, Shapeshifters Cinema, Temescal Arts Center, Krowswork Gallery, Center for New Music, San Francisco Cinematheque's CROSSROADS Film Festival, and internationally at Mindpirates Gallery (Berlin), NDSM Treehouse Gallery (Amsterdam), and others. Since 2009 he has been operating Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland, a microcinema and archive which since 2011 has held free weekly screenings focusing on international experimental/avant-garde moving images.
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.