The Place Between Our Bodies
Early Monthly Segments is pleased to present a program in tribute to San Francisco filmmaker Michael Wallin who passed away suddenly this past January. Wallin was an active member of SF’s experimental cinema community including a stint directing and co-directing Canyon Cinema from the late-70s to late-80. He also taught film at SFAI, California College of the Arts and Antioch College and later went on to become a psychotherapist. His landmark 1988 found footage essay film Decodings, made at the height of AIDS hysteria (shown previously at our 4th anniversary in 2013) will be screened alongside two other lesser known works: 1975’s autobiographic sexual + relationship exploration The Place Between Our Bodies and 1983’s travelogue Along The Way.
“The Place Between Our Bodies seems to come from another planet, another epoch, in its frank and tender extrapolation of gay sexual hunger and the kindling of a first relationship. The film is stridently pre-AIDS…This is partly because it is a personal film that discusses sexual hunger and love in a context that endows them with transcendent powers…Sexual love overcomes the light of gay alienation and sexual hunger. And that is what begins to turn the film around, so that its most beautiful moments become its most painful.” – Todd Haynes, Afterimage
“Along the Way is a visual journal or diary, an experimental “travelogue,” where the signposts of interest are equally elements of architecture and plant life as people and events. Imposition of formal compositional strategies vies with the revelation of off-hand personal gesture to continually regenerate interest and belie expectation. Both a reminiscence and an ongoing investigation, the intent is to communicate the essential quality of “place,” which is always an amalgam of the visual and emotional. Powerful (and painful) events in my life during the period of the film’s completion certainly influenced its emotional tone. It seems at times an elegy to my relationship with a lover.” – Michael Wallin
“Michael Wallin’s Decodings is a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory…the search for self ends in aching poignancy with stills of a boy and his mother at the kitchen table, catching the moment that marks the dawning of anguish and loss; desire becomes imprinted on that which was long ago.”– Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
Programme:
The Place Between Our Bodies, Michael Wallin (1975, 16mm, 33 min, USA)
Along The Way, Michael Wallin (1983, 16mm, 20 min, USA)
Decodings, Michael Wallin (1988, 16mm, 15 min, USA)
@ Gladstone Hotel, 2nd floor | 1214 Queen Street West
Monday April 4, 2016 | 8:00 PM screening | $5-10 suggested donation
Decodings
EMS #84 = Monday May 2 = Alex MacKenzie in person!