An evening of trance-cinema, films that mine the liminal space between illusion and mystery, history and nightmare, terror and delight; "heaven, blazing into the head." Featured artists include Bruce Conner, Phil Solomon, Mark Wilson, Harry Smith and Eve Heller.

Tensile 5min, 16mm, 1994
Director: Mark Wilson

TENSILE: This is a distillation of an entire series of very short independently recorded pieces down to ten that are organized as a film designed to push the tensile strength of a structure that can exist simultaneously as a whole work yet retain the individual qualities of each piece. TENSILE is both a deeply personal film and a coolly distant observation of ordinary, everyday landscapes and objects in San Francisco. Color and rhythms created by varying intensities of exposure are used to give this silent film a visual musicality.

Her Glacial Speed 4min, 16mm, 2001
Last Lost 14min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Eve Heller

A slightly hypnotic and open-ended parable about coming of age in a shifty world of slipping terms. Last Lost is a silent film in spirit, trying to speak without words, like some dreams. 'This picture can't stop looking at me.' Robert Kelly

Her Glacial Speed: The world as seen in a teardrop of milk. I set out to make a film about how unwitting constellations of meaning rise to a surface of understanding at a pace outside of worldly time. This premise became a self fulfilling prophecy. An unexpected interior began to unfold, made palpable by a trauma that remains abstract. First words’ since my mother and father died. EH Premiered at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde on October 14, 2001.

Mirror Animation 10.5min, 16mm, 1979
Director: Harry Smith

"Smith's cinematic genius is also made manifest in his ultra-rare Mirror Animation No.11, with recorded music of Thelonious Monk. Connah's combo opens the cabaret with cocktails and original compositions, before tipping us to a short and sweet medley of vintage jazz on film: Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Gerry Mulligan, Sun Ra, and numerous others." - http://www.othercinema.com/spring2002.html

Harry Smith was an artist whose activities and interests put him at the center of the mid twentieth-century American avant-garde. Although best known as a filmmaker and musicologist, he frequently described himself as a painter, and his varied projects called on his skills as an anthropologist, linguist, and translator. He had a lifelong interest in the occult and esoteric fields of knowledge, leading him to speak of his art in alchemical and cosmological terms... For the full biography, visit http://www.harrysmitharchives.com/1_bio/index.html

Report 13min, 16mm, 1963-1967
Director: Bruce Conner

"Society thrives on violence, destruction, and death no matter how hard we try to hide it with immaculately clean offices, the worship of modern science, or the creation of instant martyrs. From the bullfight arena to the nuclear arena we clamor for the spectacle of destruction. The crucial link in REPORT is that JFK with his great PT 109 was just as much a part of the destruction game as anyone else. Losing is a big part of playing games." - David Mosen, Film Quarterly

Born in McPherson, Kansas, in 1933, Conner studied art at Wichita University and University of Nebraska, where he received a B.F.A. in 1956. He continued his studies at the Brooklyn Art School and the University of Colorado. In 1957, attracted by stories of a vibrant art and literary scene, he and his wife, Jean, moved to San Francisco. Conner subsequently became a key figure in the burgeoning Beat community, along with visual artists Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, and Manuel Neri, and poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia. After sojourns in Mexico City and Brookline, Massachusetts, Conner resettled in San Francisco, where he continues to work today. Conner first attracted public attention in the 1950s with his nylon-shrouded assemblages -- complex sculptures of found objects such as women's stockings, costume jewelry, bicycle wheels, and broken dolls, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces. Simultaneously during the late 1950s, Conner began making short movies in a singular style that has since established him as one of the most important figures in postwar independent filmmaking.

The Exquisite Hour 14min, 16mm, 1989 (revised 1994)
The Secret Garden 23min, 16mm, 1988
Director: Phil Solomon

The Exquisite Hour: Partly a lullaby for the dying, partly a lament at the dusk of cinema. Based on the song by Reynaldo Hahn and Paul Verlaine.

"No filmmaker reveals the faith in the multiple layers of visual images that the eighties have re-affirmed more than Phil Solomon. Solomon continues the Brakhage tradition of creating a succession of images whose logic comes from a number of sources, rhythmic, formal, and associational, and whose coherence constantly switches from one source to another. As with Brakhage, one must abandon oneself to the trance-like authority of a Solomon film, and be sure-footed enough to follow a structure that relies on overtones as well as melody, on sudden flashes of metaphor as much as narrative line. THE SECRET GARDEN is one of Solomon's most exquisite films. As with Thornton and Khlar there is the shadow of a story here, one which deals with the passage from innocence and experience and invokes equally terror and ecstasy ...." - Tom Gunning, Mecano Touring Program Catalogue

Phil Solomon teaches film aesthetics and film production at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 1998. Since arriving in Boulder in 1991, Mr. Solomon has produced, among other films, several collaborations with colleague Stan Brakhage, including Elementary Phrases (1994), Concrescence (1996) and Seasons... (2000-01). He is currently working on a feature length series of short films entitled The Twilight Psalms, a cinematic poem to the 20th century. The second film of the series, Walking Distance premiered at the New York Film Festival and won the Juror's Award (First Prize) at the Black Maria Film Festival. Mr. Solomon's work resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Massachusetts College of Art, Binghamton University, Hampshire College, The Chicago Art Institute, San Francisco State University, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and the Oberhaussen Film Collection. He has been honored at many festivals, including Three First Prize awards at Black Maria, The Oberhaussen International Short Film Festival and Ann Arbor for his experimental films. Mr. Solomon received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994 and an Artist's Fellowship form the Colorado Council on the Arts in 1996-7. He has exhibited his films in every major venue for experimental film in Europe and the U.S. over the past twenty years, including the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the Viennale, the Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Stadkino Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium, and three Cineprobes (one man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art.