COMMUNITY PARTNER
AMP! Student Org
Curated by Diana Sánchez Maciel
Celebrating the meticulous craft of direct animation and handmade cinema, Celluloid Body offers a glance at an inventive type of experimental cinema that grows beyond its painted, scratched, and manipulated techniques. This curated program is a journey from celluloid to digital, surveying personal, sexual, and political narratives on screen. Rather than providing a historical overview of handmade cinema techniques with familiar figures such as Man Ray and Stan Brakhage, this program examines how subsequent filmmakers have adopted handmade forms to capture singular portraits of themselves, their spaces, or simply to detangle complex ideas. These films articulate subject matters into spontaneous colors, sketches, and irregular scratches. Celluloid Body celebrates the textural experience between filmmaker and medium and the sensory experience between spectator and the creative process.
Cocktail de Rayas
Eduardo Darino
Montevideo, Uruguay | 1964 | 2 | Digital File
Law student and member of the Cine Club in Uruguay in the 1960s, Darino began to experiment with filmmaking by painting and stretching film stock. Cocktail de Rayas is a cameraless film inspired by the animation of Norman McLaren.
landing
Cecilia Araneda
Ottawa, Canada | 2021 | 5 | Digital File
Shot at Bate Island in Ottawa, landing is made from hand-processed B&W 16mm film (hand-colored with organic and photochemical tones), video, and found sound. landing examines moments of respite in between flight and movement, where landing becomes a refuge.
A Small Place
Greta Snider
San Francisco, CA | 2019 | 6 | Digital File
A Small Place is an homage to those surviving solitary confinement and was inspired by the survivor testimonies collected by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd in the book Hell Is A Very Small Place (2016).
Detalles de un Atardecer
Adriana Lopez Garibay
Mexico City, Mexico | 2020 | 2 | Digital File
Sunset details from our window, passing fast through our eyes and yet as motionless as our pandemic loneliness.
Her Silent Seaming
Nazli Dinçel
Milwaukee, WI | 2014 | 11 | 16mm
A transcription of what I have been told during intimate experiences while separating from my husband. Sections consist of destroyed originals from Leafless (2011), motifs of the “feminine” alluding to Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), and the reconstruction of a pomegranate.
Giverny (Négresse Impériale)
Ja’Tovia Gary
Brooklyn, NY | 2017 | 6 | Digital File
This filmic collage, shot on location in Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, aims to examine the precarious nature of Black women’s bodily integrity, the ethics of care as resistance work, and how class position shapes the contours of violence.
Gently Down the Stream
Su Friedrich
Brooklyn, NY | 1981 | 13 | 16mm
Gently Down the Stream is constructed from fourteen dreams taken from eight years’ worth of my journals. The text is scratched directly onto the film so that you hear your own voice as you read.
First Version
Mariana Daniela Torres
Mexico City, Mexico | 2020 | 5 min | Digital File
… Overwork makes you unable to sleep, your life is immersed in work, without fun and leisure. Suffocating like in a submarine. The only escape seems to be imagining yourself looking at the sky because you have already forgotten what the sun looks like.
Golden Ghost Gone
Zane Timpson
San Francisco, CA | 2019 | 3 | Digital File
A fond and faded portrait of memories of the road.
Close the Lid Gently
Ariana Gerstein
New York, NY | 2013 | 6 | Digital File
Close the Lid Gently is a video made entirely from two home desktop scanners—one a photo scanner, the other a refurbished low-end document scanner. Each has its own texture and sees the domestic environment in its own particular way, one scan at a time.
Diana Sánchez Maciel is a producer and curator born in Mexico City and raised in California. Her work ranges from experimental films to producing documentary films. She is an advocate of artist-made, non-commercial cinema through projects such as the Archive Project at SFSU’s School of Cinema, in her role as board president of San Francisco Cinematheque, and as a programmer and educator at the California Film Institute.