It is often noted that men and women inhabit space very differently, as evidenced by the popular Tumblr account, Men Taking Up Too Much Space on the Train. Photo after photo show male passengers with legs maximally splayed and arms raised to grasp a Very Important Newspaper, while women demurely cross their arms and legs with visible signs of discomfort. It doesn't take a professional philosopher or sociologist to realize that this stark contrast between spatial expansion and contraction is not a fact of biology but a set of learned behaviors. For most women, something has broken in the unifying chain of consciousness/body/world; an institutionalized double standard ensures that men enjoy the lion's share of free, unhindered, fluid movement in space.

The films in this program demonstrate various ways in which women filmmakers have sought to engage more fully with their world, oscillating between the savage critique of social norms and the affirmation of new powers and pleasures. It goes without saying that cinema, with its disjuncture of image and sound, its capacity for metamorphosis and even the grotesque, is one of the most powerful tools we have for the reconfiguration of body and voice.

Curated by Seth Watter

Joshua Churchill, John Davis and Greg Pope In Person
Presented in association with ShapeShifters Cinema and Stanford University’s Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery

In Apparent Motion 2012—the performance cinema centerpiece to that year’s Crossroads film festival—British artist Greg Pope brought down the house with the 16mm Cipher Screen, his two-projector masterwork of erasure and construction. For a follow-up appearance Pope returns to the Bay Area for a series of expanded cinema performances with live sound collaboration at Stanford University, ShapeShifters Cinema and Cinematheque. Tonight’s program features Pope’s his dual-slide projector piece Celluloid, a slide projector-based flicker film, a “celluloid ghost,” a proto-cinematic excursion through the detritus of industrial cinema. Live soundtrack to Celluloid to be performed by local electroacoustic ensemble Voicehandler. Single-channel films by Pope—including Mass Observation, Moon Walk and Incidence Room—will also screen. Preceding Pope is the Bay Area’s own John Davis with his sound/image amalgams and live slo-motion image analysis, presented with the live sonic accompaniment of Joshua Churchill. (Steve Polta)

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.”