Focus (2009)

WHO: Christine Lucy Latimer made this.

WHAT: When we think of "animation" most of us usually think of cartoons, anthropomorphic characters, or both simultaneously. But animation is not so much a genre as a process, one that is distinguished from other filmmaking methods by its frame-by-frame approach. The camera is not integral to the animation process as it is to live-action and documentary filming, but rather serves as a means by which to capture pattern arrangements in a way that can be then screened using other, non animation-specific technologies. Winsor McCay could have made Gertie the Dinosaur using flipbooks instead of film, if he hadn't been as invested in that particular form of presentation. D.W. Griffith did not have another option like that (however impractical).

To that end, Christine Lucy Latimer has made a film that demonstrates the essence of animation much better than I can describe it. She has re-photographed super-8 footage of what looks to be a vacation in Africa- or perhaps just Florida- using a 16mm camera, treating each super-8 frame as a unit of animation. From the imdb description apparently written by Latimer herself.

Using glue and 16mm splicing tape, I place over 1500 individual super 8 film frames from a decimated home movie one-by-one on to clear 16mm film. The resulting floating film-within-a-film becomes a jarring landscape that prioritizes the structure of the super 8 frame over its photographic contents.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight as part of a program starting at 8:00 at Artists' Television Access

WHY: Tonight is another edition of the GAZE series of film & video work by female filmmakers, which has been periodic A.T.A. event for about a year and a half now. Tonight's is an all-animation program also including the local premiere of Jodie Mack's Let Your Light Shine, which has been the talk of viewers in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere this Fall. 

More short films films and videos by female filmmakers (as well as some by males) will screen Sunday at the Roxie as part of a San Francisco State University alumni program in this weekend's Cinema By The Bay series. Mothertongue is one film on that program made by a woman whose work has screened at GAZE before: Irina Leimbacher. Saturday night's Other Cinema program at A.T.A. also includes a high proportion of woman-made work.

HOW: I expect this to be a digital presentation.