Come through for a teleportation to West Coast arts impresario Craig Baldwin’s Nth Dimension. We’re honored to host him for two programs that bookend a multi-venue survey of his variegated and far-reaching body of work. If you aren’t familiar with the fabled status of Baldwin’s Other Cinema, it is a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in the mission district in San Francisco. ,Jim Knipfel in The Believer helped to capture this energy in saying, “one way to think about San Francisco-based filmmaker, archivist, and artist Craig Baldwin is as the dialectical result of a collision between the Dadaists, the Situationists, the Beats, and the punks. He exists today as a kind of figurehead, a holdover anarchist beatnik from the Bay Area’s pre-tech boom days.”

Here’s the whole week run down:

It starts on Saturday at UnionDocs with this one! CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH CRAIG: ORBITING OTHER CINEMA,  a tribute to those who have dug through this infamous archive, gleaned his influence, and been part of the community at this legendary cinema. An examination of the artistic impact of this place, the program includes work by Adam Khalil, Lynne Sachs, Soda_Jerk, Jennifer Reeves, Katherin McInnis, Bill Morrison, and Ben Folstein, as well as the premiere of a new short performance by Sam Green. All will be in attendance!

3/3 and 3/4,  don’t miss a retrospective of Baldwin’s own “post-pop ever-punk” 16mm documentaries will play Metrograph; and 3/6 find him at Light Industry for a multimedia artist lecture.

Wrapping up Thursday back at UnionDocs, FRISCO GRIT: BALDWIN SELECTS OTHER CINEMA, a classic live A/V program with work by Martha Colburn, Bryan Boyce, Greta Snider, Gibbs Chapman, Thad Povey, Jeremy Rourke, James Hong, Jeanne C. Finley, John Muse, Kerry Laitala, Tommy Becker, Anne McGuire and Sylvia Schedelbauer.

Don’t miss these rare opportunities to see this archive in action and to catch Craig on the East Coast.

Other Cinema is a place where artists are inspired and sustained by the ongoing practice of fine-art filmmaking, as well as engaged essay and documentary forms. Not only sticking to these more lauded practices, Other Cinema also embraces marginalized genres as media-archeological core-samples, and blows against consensus reality and the sterility of museum culture. SF Cinematheque curator Steve Polta, who will be co-publishing with Incite: Journal For Experimental Media a historical compendium of Baldwin and Other Cinema, describes the last twenty years of programming as an “insane amalgam of underground cinema, genre film, media and community activism, performance and sound art, and unique and astounding lost-and-found orphan works from Baldwin’s infamous film/video archive as well as hosting a dizzying array of artists, curators, community activists, conspiracy freaks, and other indescribable and wonderful wackos.”

Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker and curator whose interests lie in archival retrieval and recombinatory forms of cinema, performance, and installation. He is the recipient of several grants, including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award, Creative Capital, Phelan, AFI, FAF, and California Arts Council. Over the last two decades, his productions have been shown and awarded at numerous international festivals, museums, and institutes of contemporary art, often in conjunction with panels, juries, and workshops on collage and cultural activism. His own weekly screening project, Other Cinema, has continued to premiere experimental, essay, and documentary works for over a quarter century, recently expanding into DVD publishing.

Bill Morrison’s films typically source rare archival footage in which long-forgotten, and sometimes deteriorated, imagery is reframed as part of a collective mythology. His work has been recognized with the Alpert Award, Creative Capital, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a mid-career retrospective at MoMA. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be selected to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. The Great Flood (2013) was awarded the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award of 2014 for historical scholarship. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) won a Critics’ Choice Award for the most innovative documentary of the year, and was named the best documentary of 2017 by the Boston Society of Film Critics.

Katherin McInnis makes digital video, installations, and participatory artworks that focus on the multi-layered nature of history viewed through the prism of images. Her video projects explore the convergence of still and moving images, through animating and layering either original or archival photographs. Her work has screened internationally at festivals (New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, European Media Arts Festival) and in museums (Pompidou Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and NGBK Berlin).

She has also worked with art collectives Neighborhood Public Radio and Round Robin Collective on participatory art projects and non-traditional exhibitions.

McInnis teaches at Queensborough Community College (CUNY) and Pratt Institute. She lives in Queens, NY.

Formed in Sydney in 2002, Soda_Jerk is a two-person art collective who work at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images: how they circulate, whom they benefit, and how they can be undone. Predominantly working with video and lecture performance, their sample-based projects have also taken the form of cut-up texts, manifestos, screensavers and public interventions. They have been based in New York since 2012.

Sam Green received his Master’s Degree in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His most recent projects are “live documentaries” including  A Thousand Thoughts (2018) in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, The Measure of All Things (2014), and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012), which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. All three works are performed live, with Green narrating and musicians performing the soundtrack. A Thousand Thoughts will tour throughout 2018-19.Green’s 2004 feature-length film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, tells the story of a group of radical young women and men who tried to violently overthrow the United States government during the late 1960s and 70s. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS, included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.Green’s previous long documentary, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, follows the bizarre rise and fall of a man who became famous during the 1970s by appearing at thousands of televised sporting events wearing a rainbow wig. The film premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and has screened at festivals worldwide. “More than an exploration of life, The Rainbow Man is a parable about alienation, the media, and the meaninglessness that often defines American life.” – Trevor Groth, Sundance Film FestivalGreen’s short documentaries include Julius Caesar was Buried in a Pet Cemetery, lot 63, grave c, Pie Fight ’69 (directed with Christian Bruno), N-Judah 5:30, and The Fabulous Stains: Behind the Movie (directed with Sarah Jacobson).

Jennifer Reeves (b. 1971, Sri Lanka) is a New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm film. Reeves was named one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” in the film journal Cinema Scope in the spring of 2012. Her films have shown extensively, from the Berlin, New York, Vancouver, London, Sundance, and Hong Kong Film Festivals to many Microcinemas in the US and Canada, the Robert Flaherty Seminar, and the Museum of Modern Art. Full multiple-screening retrospectives of her work have been held at Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, Anthology Film Archives in New York, and San Francisco Cinematheque. Currently, her 2014 film COLOR NEUTRAL has been making the rounds of the international film circuit. A new collaboration with Composer/Performer Marc Ribot premiered at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York in August 2015. Ribot and Ikue Mori perform a live score to Reeves’ SHADOWS CHOOSE THEIR HORRORS, LANDFILL 16, and HE WALKED AWAY. Marc Ribot performed his original score to the program of Reeves’ films at DIA: DETROIT for their Day of the Dead Celebration in 2015.

Reeves has made experimental films since 1990. She does her own writing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. Her subjective and personal films push the boundaries of film through optical-printing and direct-on-film techniques. Reeves has consistently explored themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism and sexuality, landscape, wildlife, and politics from many different angles.

Since 2003 Reeves has worked with some of the finest composer/ performers, including Marc Ribot, Skúli Sverrisson, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Anthony Burr and Eyvind Kang. As the daughter of a trumpeter, gravitating toward film and music collaborations was quite natural for Reeves. Her most ambitious film and music performance, the feature-length double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE (2008), premiered at Toronto International Film Festival with live music by composer/collaborator Skúli Sverrisson. Her multiple-projection films with live music have been performed internationally, from the Sydney Opera House and the Berlinale to RedCat in Los Angeles and the Wexner Center in Ohio.

Reeves has also made a number of experimental narratives, most notably her highly acclaimed feature THE TIME WE KILLED. The Village Voice Film Critic’s poll (2005) honored THE TIME WE KILLED with votes from six film critics for categories including: Best Film, Best Cinematography, and Best Performance.

Reeves is presently working on a new film for which she has been awarded the 2016 Princess Grace Awards Special Project grant.

Reeves also teaches animation part-time at The Cooper Union.

Adam Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Khalil’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Arts Center, Lincoln Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including but not limited to: Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Sundance Institute Indigenous Film Opportunity Fellowship, UnionDocs Collaborative Fellowship, and Gates Millennium Scholarship. Khalil received his BA from Bard College.

Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Strongly committed to a dialogue between theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project. Between 1994 and 2006, her five essay films took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer, Craig Baldwin and Trin T. Min-ha. Recently, she began integrating live performance into her work. Both Your Day is My Night (2013) and The Washing Society (2018) evolved from two-year New York City performance tours.

Sachs has made over 25 films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival among others. Her films have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana and the China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of Sachs’ films. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband filmmaker Mark Street. www.lynnesachs.com

Born in Baltimore, Maryland on April 6, 1979, Ben Folstein is an actor, musician, producer, and carpenter living and working in New York City. He attended film school at College of Santa Fe, after which he moved to San Francisco, California in 2001. There he made about 80 short films, while studying and working with filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Upon moving to New York city in 2006, he turned towards music and performance, playing with his band, Level 2. In 2010, he wrote and produced “Love is like Mud”, a puppet rock opera. By 2013, he was working for Sleep No More, and producing a serial science fiction radio drama entitled “Neon Sun”.