Date: Friday, June 9 2017
Screening: 8:30 pm
Location: LaborBerlin, Prinzenallee 58, 13359 Berlin
LaborBerlin is proud to host Steve Polta, who will join us in person to present a screening of his films on Super 8 and 16mm.
“Bay area artist Steve Polta, who has been producing a body of films, mostly on Super 8, over the past two decades that are as exquisitely nuanced as they are rarely seen. Each film presents a narrow window onto the ordinary world, prodded by subtle observation until it yields images of ethereal beauty.” (Rick Bahto: Echo Park Film Center)
Program:
Red Sketch (1997); Super 8, color, sound, 6 min
Interval Oakland 99 (2000); Super 8, color, silent, 3 min
Departure (1997); Super 8, color, sound, 7 min
Picture Window (1996); Super 8, color, sound, 10 min
Minnesota Landscape (1997); 16mm; color, silent, 10 min
Estuary #1 (1998); Super 8, color, sound, 10 min
The Berries (2000); Super 8, color, silent, 3 min
Summer Rain for LMC, side A (2007/2011); Super 8, color, silent, 3 min
Summer Rain for LMC, side B (2007/2011); Super 8, color, silent, 3 min
A House Full of Dust (2007); Super 8, color, silent, 10 min
Steve Polta —sometimes filmmaker, former San Francisco taxi driver— is the Artistic Director of San Francisco Cinematheque. He holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters of Library and Information Science degree from San Jose State University. His writings on film have been published in INCITE! A Journal of Media and Radical Aesthetics; Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945–2000; and UnDependently Yours: Imagining a World Beyond the Red Carpet. His own films have screened in film festivals and alternative film venues all over the place, including Anthology Film Archives, Black Hole Cinematheque, the Echo Park Film Center, Chicago Filmmakers, the Images Festival, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde, SFMOMA, Pacific Film Archive, the Pusan Film Festival the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2014 he was awarded a fellowship by the Andy Warhol Foundation in support of research on contemporary and historic performance cinema; a yearlong series based on this research was presented by Cinematheque in 2016.
Steve Polta’s presence is supported by