Perpetual Motion is the most comprehensive convergence of international performance cinema practitioners ever seen in the Bay Area. Presented over seven evenings September 16–December 7, 2016, with all artists performing in person, this series is curated by San Francisco Cinematheque and will be presented at Gray Area’s historic Grand Theater, located in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Featured artists include the return of legendary experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs (NYC), rising Montréal duo Le Révélateur (video artist Sabrina Ratté & musician Roger Tellier-Craig, of Fly Pan AM and formerly Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and in a rare North American appearance, the spectacular Trinchera Ensamble film-performance collective from Mexico City.

December 11, 2015 – January 10, 2016
With Lary 7, Bradley Eros, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Rose Kallal, Andrew Lampert, Bruce McClure, Joel Schlemowitz

Microscope is extremely pleased to present “Never Twice”, an exhibition of live moving image performance in the context of what is usually referred to as expanded cinema: works free from the constraints or presenting alternatives to the traditional theatrical screening setting – single projection on a screen before an audience. The title of the exhibit, a reference to the quote from Heraclitus “one cannot step into the same river twice”, emphasizes the ephemeral character of this art form, one always intrinsically connected to a “here” and “now”, a multi-sensorial experience that although it may be performed again, it cannot ever be replicated.

Bruce McClure steps off the international stage to treat an intimate audience at Apiary Studios to his durational, banging, attack and decay on overdriven celluloid with an hour long film and sound projection performance. With support from Roberto Crippa providing his special brand of corporeal-aural intensity.

18h - Els Van Riel / Chiyoko Szlavnics / Johan Bossers
- Gradual Speed (Els Van Riel, 2013, 16mm, b&w, 50')
With links to the tradition of structural film making, the work by the Brussels based film-and videomaker, Els Van Riel, explores the fundamental elements for cinema: time, light and the matter of analogue cinema itself.
“Gradual Speed is a work on and for black and white 16mm-film seen as matter, and at the same time as a metaphor for everything we cannot grasp”. (Els van Riel)

- Concert: Constellations I-III for Piano & Sinewaves (Chiyoko Szlavnics, 2011, 15’). Piano. Johan Bossers.
The soundtrack for Gradual Speed was created in collaboration with Chiyoko Szlavnics (CAN/DE). She studied music at the University of Toronto, and privately with the composer James Tenney. Her approach relies on drawings as the basis for her compositions and on observations of the interactions between electric and sine waves and the sounds produced by instruments. Her Constellations will be interpreted by the pianist Johan Bossers (BE), co-founder of Champ d’Action, and active in the ensembles Ictus, QO-2, Spectra and I Fiamminghi.

20h - Bruce McClure
- A Leak in the Thatch (Bruce McClure, 2014)
Projector performance for two modified projectors and two bi-packed film loops
The performances of Bruce McClure (US) are immersive physical experiences with obvious hallucinatory characteristics. Stretched in time they develop an intensity on the level of light and sound, texture and color, blur and flicker while exploring the interference of the images, though McClure (trained as architect) never loses the spectator and the surrounding space out of sight. The sound of the projectors can take on monstrous proportions, deformed by pedals, often used for electrical guitars…. As if the spectator and the cinematic space are sucked into the epicenter of the cinematographic apparatus itself, in the heart of the machine, in a burst of light and the sputtering of the engine. “To me, it’s an experience of nature like a rainy day or being overwhelmed by vertigo in an assault of snow blindness.”