FILM SCREENING—Xin Ding: Blood Beneath

As prelude to Cinematheque’s Fall 2017 exhibition season, we are thrilled to present this urgent last minute screening! Please join us for this extremely rare presentation of sights and sounds by Beijing filmmaker Ding Xin (aka Sandy Ding)!
Using hand-made film techniques (including hand-processing and DIY printing and a beautiful (and at times abject) sense of visual poetry, Ding’s films explore the permeable boundaries between being and non-being and the cinematic paradox between photochemical materiality and the transcendent qualities of immaterial light and sound. The anatomical and ever-rising home-printed The Radio Wave of Blood Beneath the Dirt Ice and Flowers (2006; view excerpt) is a “celebration of active chemistry in the blood vine underground” (Ding) while The Moon (2006) portrays our planets partner in flickering emulsive abstraction. The stately landscape study Mancoon (2007) presents lush forest views with a sense of an abiding presence (“the camera looks at the world and worships what it sees***”) while Kolijevka (2016), a dark incantation filmed in a Croatian cemetery, suggests peace in both the cradle and the grave. Dream Enclosure (2014) uses (to quote the Syros Film Festival) “looping, flickering imagery and echoing sound create an immersive and hypnotic space that hovers constantly between reality and dream.” NOTE: For this very special in-person screening, Ding is joined by XXXX to perform live electronic soundtracks to his films River in Castle (2016) a hand-made found footage horror film assembled from Croatian film lab leftovers and Prisms (2012; view excerpt), a scintillating amalgam of abstract lens-work and microscopy. (Steve Polta)
***Yang Qiao: “Of Sorcery and Playtime: Understanding Ding Xin,” included in Sandy Ding: Psychoecho, a DVD/Book publication of RE:VOIR Vidéo.
This screening is a co-presentation of San Francisco Cinematheque, Canyon Cinema Foundation, the Center for Asian American Media and Godwaffle Noise Pancakes. Sandy Ding appears live (music only) at Godwaffle Noise Pancakes, Saturday August 12 at noon (sharp!) at Noisebridge SF.