Golden State Freeway: Restored California Psychedelia from the Academy Film Archive

In collaboration with Atelier Nord, we are proud to present two programmes curated by Mark Toscano, a filmmaker, curator, and film preservationist based in Los Angeles. Since 2003 he has worked at the Academy Film Archive, where he specializes in the curation, conservation, and preservation of artists’ films. He is a programmer with Los Angeles Filmforum, and has lectured at various universities on experimental film and archiving, as well as teaching in the Experimental Animation department at CalArts. Mark will be present to introduce the screenings.

Golden State Freeway: Restored California Psychedelia from the Academy Film Archive

Maybe it was something in the water, but California produced some of the most ambitious, influential, and visually distinctive cinematic psychedelia of the 1960s and ‘70s. Artists utilized ingenious, homemade techniques for transforming their images into wildly unreal phantasmagoria, and also employed highly sensitive and expressive filmmaking ideas to investigate alternative states of mind, culture, and consciousness. This program is but a drop in the (Pacific) Ocean compared to the total array of far-reaching experimental cinema of the era, but perhaps it will give a glimpse – all in restored 16mm prints! – of some of the otherworldly personal filmmaking happening in California at the time.

Mark Toscano

Filmene som vises

• Invocation, regi Amy Halpern, 1982, 16mm, farge, stum, 1.5min
• Anselmo, regi Chick Strand, 1967, 16mm, farge, lyd, 4min
• War Zone, regi Neon Park (aka Martin Muller), 1971, 16mm, farge, lyd, 3min
• Mirror People, regi Kathy Rose, 1974, 16mm, farge, lyd, 5min
• Psychosynthesis, regi Barbara Hammer, 1975, 16mm, farge, lyd, 6min
• Evolution of the Red Star, regi Adam Beckett, 1973, 16mm, farge, lyd, 7min
• Twelve, regi Beth Block, 1977, 16mm, farge, lyd, 9min
• Aether, regi Daina Krumins, 1972, 16mm, farge, lyd, 4min
• Later That Same Night, regi Will Hindle, 1971, 16mm, farge, lyd, 10min
• 7362, regi Pat O’Neill, 1967, 16mm, sort-hvitt & farge, lyd, 10min
• The Star Curtain Tantra, regi Peter Mays, 1969, 16mm, sort-hvitt & farge, lyd, 18min

Program and text by Mark Toscano.

Psychosynthesis was restored by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. Evolution of the Red Star was restored by The iotaCenter and the Academy Film Archive with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. All other films restored by the Academy Film Archive.