SF Cinematheque presents Choreographies of Creation and Destruction: The Live Cinemas of John Davis and Greg Pope

Choreographies of Creation and Destruction: The Live Cinemas of John Davis and Greg Pope
Joshua Churchill, John Davis, and Greg Pope In Person
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 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)
Distortions, ghostly reverberations, and ambient notes hang in the air and ethereal chords plunge into darkness before the moving images on screen, adding drama to frames that appear on fire. Fleeting sun shadows move across the film. The two elements together create a simply captivating experience, completely immersing the audience into a land of airy projector light with sounds that fill the space like a weather pattern. (Amanda Roscoe Mayo, on John Davis and Joshua Churchill)