Stan Brakhage & Bruce Conner

Wed. August 21st, 6pm, 2024

We’re back for another installment of Renegade Cinema in North Beach. Join us for the following films, curated by Dominic Angerame:

Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars In The Human Mind (1998)

Stan Brakhage

This film, a combination of hand-painting and photography, is a fulsome exposition of the themes of DOG STAR MAN. In that early epic I had envisioned The World Tree as dead, fit only for firewood; and at end of DOG STAR MAN I had chopped it up amidst a flurry of stars (finally Cassiopia’s Chair): now, these many years later, I am compelled to comprehend YGGDRASILL as rooted in the complex electrical synapses of thought process, to sense it being alive today as when nordic legendry hatched it. I share this compulsion with Andrei Tarkovsky, whose last film The Sacrifice struggles to revive The World Tree narratively, whereas I simply present (one might almost say “document”) a moving graph approximate to my thought process, whereby The Tree roots itself as the stars we, reflectively, are. (source: The Film-Makers Coop)

Crossroads (1976)

Bruce Conner

In 1976, Bruce Conner released “Crossroads,” assembled from National Archives footage of the 1945 atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll (Operation Crossroads Baker). That event was one of the most thoroughly documented in history, with footage of the test recorded from multiple angles. From the slowed-down footage, and featuring an electric organ soundtrack by Terry Riley, Conner created a “…a thing of terrible beauty and haunting visual poetry” (IMDB).