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Cinema Soirée - Quadratura Circuli (Squaring the Circle) - films by tooth and othersPost an Event »
Oddball Films welcomes Bay Area artist, filmmaker and archivist tooth to our Cinema Soirée, a monthly soirée featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights and films. This month, we bring you Quadratura Circuli: a program incorporating a recent film cycle of performative and single channel 16mm and super 8mm works by Bay Area filmmaker tooth screened with a collection of pieces by other artists chosen for a filmic conversation that looks at the recurrent cyclic forms of the circle, sphere, and spiral throughout cultural and natural histories as a container for a disparate collision of concepts and beliefs. Taking its title from the Squaring of the Circle (Quadratura Circuli), a concept looked to by the Alchemists as representing the unification of opposites to form a higher synthesis; the program seeks to oscillate between a focus on the micro and macrocosmic recurrence of these forms and their accompanying symbology such as the blood cell, the iris of the eye, the spiral of the galaxies, the shape and rotation of the planets. With particular preoccupation on the Moon (represented in Alchemy by the corresponding metal of silver; a main ingredient used to fix photochemical images on celluloid film) and its phases in relation to various divination practices and the mapping of temporal and biological cycles. The night will begin with a series of films by tooth: the initiating phase in a stroboscopic circumnavigation that begins to trace a line of sensory research through intersecting spheres of history in CYCLOS ATARAXIA (2014), the physical fracturing of the artifacts of personal memory, as the recession of time and dimming light line the spectral sensitivity curve in LOST SIGHT (2015), the printed material of I Ching hexagrams create a point of departure for filmic divination in the two screen performance version of HEXAGRAM which utilizes a method direct animation via xerox printing toner directly onto clear acetate film which also creates the phasing optical sound of the piece (i.e. what you see is what you hear), followed by a piece using this same xerox technique with an eye to the symbology of moon phases and their relationship to the biological order (and disorder) of things in a three screen version of TETRADIC MOONS (2015). A drive through the residue of a city's mythical, "invented", sacred, profane and purposefully obscured histories to mark a planetary rotation in TRIADIC MOONS (2011), the tones and color textures of a rain soaked lunar new year ritual in YEAR OF THE RABBIT (2011), a two channel fever dream trajectory through the decaying archive of THE COLOR OF BLOOD (2015) and an ascent into a mystery of recurrent subtleties in INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN (CRESCENTS) (2015). Also screening, Robert Smithson's 1970 film SPIRAL JETTY, "a poetic and process-minded film depicting a 'portrait' of his monumental earthwork situated in the waters of Utah's Great Salt Lake", will be preceded by three very rarely screened masterworks by an unnameable yet legendary Bay Area filmmaker, painter and mystic.