ATA: The Magic of Cinema – The Films of Dominic Angerame

Curated by Kornelia Boczkowska. Live music by Kevin Barnard This program celebrates the recent work of Dominic Angerame, a prolific, award- winning filmmaker, educator, programmer, cinephile and former Executive Director of Canyon Cinema. Known for his broad interests, inventiveness, keen observations of social realities and genuine passion for experimental filmmaking, Angerame has made over sixty films that have received critical acclaim and worldwide recognition. With the career spanning over fifty years, Angerame has produced a vast and remarkably diverse body of work, from his monumental city symphony series, travelogs and landscape films to highly personal diaries, portraits, found footage films and comedy shorts. Angerame’s films are magical: a powerful marriage of image, sound, movement and technique, they are both realist and surrealist, documentary and poetic, strange and familiar, concrete and ephemeral, dark and illuminating. Angerame has taught film production and cinema studies at several leading universities and art schools, educating future generations of artists, scholars, critics and curators. From 1980 to 2012, he served as Executive Director of Canyon Cinema. Under his visionary leadership, Canyon Cinema has become one of the largest distributors of avant-garde and artist- made films. In November 2019, Re:Voir released nine of Angerame’s films on a DVD, entitled “Cityscapes.” — Kornelia Boczkowska THE WAIFEN MAIDEN, 1:00, 2003, US. 16mm. Starring Zhanna. Gamaya (“Lead Us”) a Sanskrit mantra performed by Zhanna, recorded and mastered by Zak May. This is a haiku and offers a prelude to CONSUME. — Dominic Angerame PREMONITION, 10:00, 1995, US. 16mm. The San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway comes to life in this elegy for modernity. The Freeway was deemed a triumph of engineering, a monument for human inventiveness. With the 1989 earthquake, however, the freeway was severely damaged and with it all the industrial-technological promises it held. Premonition shows the situation before the crisis, a deceptive moment of industrial harmony. (Viennale) PROMETHEUS, 3:00, 2022, US. 16mm. This short film is a continuation of my “City Symphony” series. Let there be light! — Dominic Angerame FILM DIARY#2—NO NOTHING CINEMA, 2:00, 2024, US. 16mm. Dedicated to friend and one of the co-founders of No Nothing, Dean Snider, Film Diary #2: No Nothing Cinema documents the beginnings of San Francisco’s radical microcinema, which became a landmark venue for showcasing the work of independent and experimental cinema. — Kornelia Boczkowska THE SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE (A GHOST STORY), 9:00, 2024, US. 16mm. The San Francisco Art Institute (A Ghost Story) is Dominic Angerame’s unique tribute to the history and present- day of San Francisco’s long-running legendary film school and the oldest art institution west of the Mississippi River, which closed permanently in July 2022. (…) Once a hub of creativity and a birthplace of ideas that have shaped the SF Bay Area experimental film scene, the SFAI is now replete with ghostly figures, specters, shadows and memories, but perhaps it is not the final chapter of the school’s rich history. — Kornelia Boczkowska HABANA 2006, 9:00, 2025, US. In 2006, Angerame was invited to Havana, Cuba, to present his City Symphony Series at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana, which marked the beginning of his 13-year collaboration with the festival as a programmer. HABANA is a record of that visit, tracing Havana in Fidel Castro’s final year as Cuban leader and the ongoing propaganda war between the U.S. and Cuba. — Kornelia Boczkowska FILM DIARY#7—PSALM SUNDAY, 5:00, 2024, US. 16mm. Dedicated to my dear friend Suzanne Kelliher. This is a portrait of a camping trip to the Cottonwood Mountains and Joshua Tree and the Sultan Sea. — Dominic Angerame A SMALL FRAGMENT OF A DAY THAT BELONGS TO 20 YEARS AGO, 8:00, 2025, US. 16mm. Memories of lovers’ past. A glimpse of the e…