Series Site
BAMPFA’s long-running annual series of avant-garde and experimental film, Alternative Visions celebrates the work of cinematic innovators from throughout film history and around the world. The series begins with new restorations of Man Ray’s foray into cinema in the 1920s, scored by Jim Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL. New restorations of Black Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s long-unavailable films from the 1960s are screening in conjunction with Cuban Cinema without Borders. The documentary Landrián provides fascinating context about the life and work of one of Cuba’s most unique filmmakers. Pat O’Neill’s ingenious merging of optical printing and time-lapse cinematography, Water and Power, screens alongside Cities & Cinema: Los Angeles. Animator Lewis Klahr presents a compilation of collage films that imbue two-dimensional mid-century ephemera with atmospheric drama. Jennifer Reeves’s dual-projector performance, The Gloria of Your Imagination, also repurposes twentieth-century materials, including a film documenting three different approaches to psychotherapy. Artist-in-Residence with UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center, Michif (Métis) stop-motion storyteller Amanda Strong presents a program and artist’s talk about her three-dimensional puppet animation reflecting contemporary Indigenous concerns. Also in person, Taiwanese American artist Shu Lea Cheang presents UKI; set in 2060, the sci-fi viral alt-reality feature combines digital animation and live action to imagine possibilities of resistance in an eerily familiar future dystopia. Accompanying the opening of the exhibition Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry, a program of works by the anonymous video collective Abounaddara—with representative Charif Kiwan in person—chronicles daily life in Syria in times of revolution and war. Alternative Visions welcomes back Scott Stark to present a program of films, videos, and a dazzling dual 16mm projector performance that transform everyday materials into fascinating cinematic experiences.