Animation at the SF Jewish Film Festival:

“Der Soldat (directed by Max Cohen) is a hand-drawn short about a young man who carries an injured companion out of an empty battlefield to look for help. July 26th 1:45 PM, Castro (SF), Tues. Aug. 5, 2 PM, Berkeley Roda Theater and Thurs. Aug. 7, 2 PM at the Palo Alto Cine Arts.

“Quest for the Missing Piece” (directed by Oded Lotan, pictured above). “Once upon a time in a small land by the seashore, a baby was born. Eight days after the birth, the baby’’s parents celebrated a mysterious ancient ceremony… The Missing Piece is a thorough investigation of the tradition and implications of circumcision under a humorous pretext: the director is looking for his missing piece.” Sat. Aug 2, 2 PM at the Berkeley Roda Theater and Sun Aug 3 at 9 PM at the Jewish Community Center in SF.
 
“A Trip to Prague” (directed by Neil Ira Needleman). “There aren’t enough happy endings in the world, so the director decided to create his own. This short, sweet, and touching story is simply told and illustrated with wonderful sketches of Prague. The story may be fiction, but the feelings are real. Thurs Aug. 7th 9:30 PM, Berkeley Roda Theater and Sat. Aug. 9th, 1 PM at the Jewish Community Center in SF.

Of course, there’s lot’s of non-animated work on view as well; for more information visit www.SFJFF.org.

It’s been three months since ASIFA-SF launched the CableCartoon, and your conductors are figuring out all the switches and levers in the driver’s seat. So it’s time to remind members of a benefit you can take advantage of.

One of the missions of the CableCartoon is to strengthen our community and make connections easier. The Member Gallery on the ASIFA-SF website is a place for you to post a link to your website or blog. More links increase traffic to your site and make it easier for search engines to find you. Mainly, it’s a great way for all members of ASIFA to get to know each others’ work in between meetings. (And if you used to have a link on last year’s page but it’s missing now, please send us an update. Stuff happens.)

Just send a 96 x 96 pixel gif (like the ones shown above) along with your url to editor@asifa-sf.org and we’ll add you to the page. C’mon in, the internet’s fine!

Back in the day, you could sit in your car, or bring a chair to sit outside, and watch movies "magically" projected onto a giant screen. Now you can relive those halcyon days of yesteryear with a decidedly 21st century bent. The 14th Annual Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Movie Festival is showing a wild variety of shorts this weekend including:

The Drill by Dan Seneres (Survival, control, and revenge in a post-apocalyptic world.)
Psych Burn by J.X. Williams
Human Park by Mick Cusimano (Dinosaurs go to the human zoo.)
Wiffle Ball by Jim Ford (It’s just a game. Seriously.)
Dead Boyfriends by Xstine Cook (Fire! Blood! Puppet Death!)
Severely Spaced by Mark McGothigan & Ure Thrall (The Cosmos redistributed.)
Optech 1 by Dan Monceaux (Deceptively simple Op Art-inspired audio-visual immersion.)

Sound is broadcast into your car or boom box using the wonder of frequency modulation ("FM")—in stereo! Admission is $9 each nite and each program is different. While not strictly an animation festival, it ain’t mainstream fare, either. Shows start at 9:00 p.m. this Friday & Saturday, July 25th & 26th. Visit here for program details. Go to the Alliance for West Oakland Development Parking Lot, 1357 5th St. at Mandela Parkway, Oakland, CA. See a map with directions here.

The Adventures of Prince Acmed (1926, Germany, Lotte Reiniger) is the earliest surviving feature-length animated film. Reiniger created an intricate cutout silhouette animation technique to depict the fantastic adventures of Prince Achmed on the magic island of Wak Wak. And let’s not forget—in an industry dominated by men—it’s a rare film created by a woman. You can see it on the big screen this weekend, one day only, at the Castro Theater!

Lotte Reiniger is the auteur of all of her films, but she is barely remembered today. She loved kids, and rewarded her youthful audiences with challenging but sensitive interpretations of classic fairy tales, new stories and even operatic motifs—all of which played well in the early years of cinema and on television. While in England she performed live shadow-puppet performances, and wrote a definitive book about the art of silhouettes. This is a rare and wonderful opportunity to see a film not only remarkable for its achievement as children’s entertainment, but for its animation craftsmanship, and its creator’s vision.

Presented by the Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theater in S.F., it screens this Sunday, July 13, at 10:30am. “Live Piano Accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Hey friends and fans of animation, don’t forget ASIFA-SF is having a private screening tonight, Wednesday July 9, at the Exploratorium starting 7:30pm! We don’t mean to be coy, but this feature-length documentary about an important bit of animation history has not yet secured its distributor—so we need to be somewhat discreet. But members can bring a guest and if you want to see what’s going on you can also join ASIFA right here!

Bruce Conner, a San Francisco-based artist known for his assemblages of found objects as well of stock film footage, passed away Monday afternoon. Conner moved to S.F. in 1957 and quickly found his place within the city’’s vibrant Beat community, often borrowing from the town’s Victorian history and mashing-up the the two worlds with assemblages of scraps salvaged from various found materials. He worked in the visual arts, in both 2 and 3 dimensions, but CableCartoon readers will no doubt best remember his legacy in film. While he did not create original footage, Conner still manipulated his found images with the timing and precision required of animation.

Connor’s first film, entitled A Movie (1958), was an avant-garde creation that juxtaposed footage from B-movies, newsreels, soft-core pornography, and other fragments, all set to a musical score. (A Movie was selected in 1991 for preservation by the U.S. National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.) His pioneering work broke many of the rules in traditional narrative film, and set the stage for future generations to experiment with film storytelling and art. Along with his friend Stan Brakhage, Conner paved the way for filmmaking that was more visceral and intuitive than anything old Hollywood could imagine (but that style would eventually be co-opted and rendered almost—-if not quite—commonplace by the subsequent sound and fury of MTV music videos and ADD-editing for summer blockbusters.)

By way of comparison, his 1981 film Mea Culpa, is a work of sampled (before that word existed) animation for a sound collage by David Byrne and Brian Eno. It is serene, amusing, thoughtful and ahead of it’s time—even as is it refers to footage from decades past. (Conner’s films are ditributed by Canyon Cinema, a S.F.-based, independent film cooperative.)

Conner was active in the 1960s Bay Area counterculture scene, designing light shows for performances by Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom, and in the ’’70s focused on drawing and photography. Art-world recognition resumed in the ’’80s and continued to the present: Conner was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the subject of a touring survey in 1999–2000, and is featured in the current Carnegie International. At Conner’s request, there will be no funeral. He is survived by his wife, American artist Jean Conner, and his son, Robert. (Thanks to K.C. and Art Forum for assistance with this post)

The Animation Show is a showcase for some of the world’s greatest independent animated short films.  They currently license animated short films for a variety of programs including theatrical and DVD collections, iTunes and web channels and for television (via MTV). Launched in 2003, the Show is the first festival of animation created and produced with actual animators at the helm. A sister series of high quality Animation Show DVDs now supplement the theatrical tour with additional insights and brand new lineups of films–while the main Show remains a unique and unforgettable annual program that is usually gone forever once it is out of theaters.

Every year the Show works diligently to put animated shorts into more theaters than any festival in American history: giving these filmmakers the wide exposure their work deserves and sharing their short masterpieces on the big screen, where they belong. The Animation Show was started as an annual feature-length theatrical compilation of short films from
around the world, originally curated by Mike Judge and Academy Award nominated animator Don Hertzfeldt.

And now it’s coming to the Bay Area for one week only. Starting July 4, the Lumiere in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley will be running the Show; filmmakers are rumored to be in attendance on Saturday July 5. Films include the U.S. premiere of shorts from the prestigious French animation college Gobelins, animation great Bill Plympton premiering Hot Dog, stop-motion superstar PES with instructional cooking treat Western Spaghetti, Corky Quakenbush with his irreverent Yompi, Georges Schizgebel with the gorgeous Jeu–and more!

For the full story, check out www.animationshow.com