"In five silent 'sketch' films, introduced by San Francisco morning’s newspaper and its date, Japanese filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa assembles single-frame constructions of cityscapes, of walks down streets, which take on their own quietly spastic frenzy even while evoking other things, such as the many-eyed camera of a Google Street View street car gone into a drunken, propulsive swoon. Lines, circles, numbers, windows, doorways, oval windows and buildings that persist only as angled precipice. Fragmentary glimpses are patterned to create an illusion of persistence of vision, but they are shards upon shards. Weirdly, the effect is both limpid and soothing.

In the mini-DV 'Clear Blue Sky,' ordinary traffic sounds of a warm day rise up against images slightly out-of-focus, or reflected across metal, like a funhouse mirror fashioned from macular degeneration."

Filmmaker in attendance!

This program of films, installations and performances focuses on the use of film as a living material. In mainstream cinema every trace of physical contact is removed from the film material, but with the disappearance of film from the industry, the medium is liberated from this armour. 

Living Film presents a selection of works made through the practice of touching film, applying bodily fluids, and chemically and/or physically altering it's surface. These works take the form of single screen films, performative action, installation and expanded cinema. 

At stake here is not just an artistic concept or method but the formation of a strategy towards an alternative filmmaking ecology: working with cheap or out of date film stocks; bartering knowledge for materials; finding cooperative forms for using resources and equipment.