7:30 p.m.	Photographic Memory: Bay Area Student Experimental Film Festival 2010 (U.S., 2009–10)

Ranging from the retro apocalyptics of The Eternal Recurrence, the fractured performance of Dance of Days, and the spare, elegiac video distortion of Portrait of Bonnie, each film in tonight’s program of recent Bay Area student experimental works offers its own particular texturally haunting tone. A persistent sense of mortality and memory suffuses many of the films, and is perhaps most apparent in the “slice of death” documentary observation of The Final Chapter and the meditations on place composing Romance Standard Time and 131 Russ. Grainy, color-saturated rows of cotton candy, stuffed animals, and neon luminescence create a somnambulant impressionism in I Had A Dream I Went To Coney Island. Other formal explorations are interspersed throughout the program, including the striking Gradients, Reflect, and Frontier, while in the rotoscoped sci-fi synaesthesia of Reduction, rough-hewn geometric shapes become implanted mental pictures. However varied in manner and approach, these shorts share a mutual ability to channel and discuss the otherwise ineffable.

—Stanley Lamontagne

Alternative Requirements: Bay Area Student Experimental Film Festival 2010 is curated by UC Berkeley students Christopher Deetz, Daniel Dufficy, Chelsea Gonzalez, Stanley Lamontagne, and Laura Van Alstine, as part of an internship offered by the Film Studies Department and the Pacific Film Archive, under the guidance of Kathy Geritz with the assistance of Jonathan Knapp and Garbiñe Ortega. Presented with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Endowment.

• Gradients (Nick Logan, San Francisco State University, 2010, 2 mins, B&W). Reduction (Sam Barnett, Berkeley City College, 2009, 6 mins). Romance Standard Time (Simone Bailey, California College of the Arts, 2009, 3 mins, B&W). Reflect (Tsen-Chu Hsu, San Francisco Art Institute, 2010, 3.5 mins, 16mm). Dance of Days (Robert Machoian, UC Davis, 2010, 4 mins). The Final Chapter (Mina T. Son, Stanford University, 2009, 4.5 mins, B&W). 131 Russ (Silvia Turchin, SFSU, 2010, 5 mins). The Eternal Recurrence (Charles Chadwick, SFAI, 2010, 9 mins, B&W). I Had A Dream I Went To Coney Island (Sherwin Akbarzadeh, UC Berkeley, 2009, 4 mins). Portrait of Bonnie (Jason Fritz Michael, SFSU, 2009, 4 mins). Frontier (Frederick Kolouch, CCA, 2010, 8 mins).

• (Total running time: c. 55 mins, Color, Digital video, From the artists, unless otherwise indicated)