For nearly 50 years, the Bay Area filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin has been an inspiring figure in contemporary media arts. His acerbic, densely-packed found footage films have traveled the globe, encouraging scores of nascent collage-essayists, culture jammers, and mockumentarians to action. A welcoming presence and steadfast fixture of San Francisco’s Mission District, Baldwin has been holding it down at 992 Valencia Street for decades, in defiance of sweeping gentrification, presenting his Other Cinema microcinema screenings in its street-level storefront theater while maintaining his legendary film archive/hoarder cave/work studio in the building’s basement. Ever seeking to revise and hybridize existing modes and genres, and invent and name new ones, Baldwin’s filmmaking amalgamates cinephilic literacy and voraciousness, a sharp understanding of political and cultural history, and a sly critical polemics.
At dawn, Jen Casad digs for clams on a coastal mudflat in Maine. At dusk, on that same mudflat, with the same low tide, she digs for clams again. In just two static shots, multimedia artist and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart captures not just the hard work of clam digging, but also everything about the environment surrounding it that words could not express.
Real-time cartographic improvisations using projected, manipulated digital maps by Eric Theise in collaboration with Trē Seguritan Abalos improvising soundscapes with flutes, samples, and looping electronics. A visual wash of street grids, land masses, water bodies, and curiosities from built and natural environments. A sonic wash of winds. Orphaned labels and free-floating symbology. Elusive melodic lines. Saturated colors and the subtlest of tints. Rhythmic textures. Jittery zooms, pans, and traversals. Glitches in crowdsourced data.
Microscope is very pleased to welcome back to the gallery Belgium-based filmmaker Boris Lehman to present the New York premiere of his latest feature film “A Tale of Hair.” The evening will also include a few “surprise” short 16mm films.