The Magic of Cinema: Solo Show for Dominic Angerame
Sat Mar 21:
$15 General Admission
$10 Student/Child/Senior
$7 NWFF Member
Dominic Angerame
United States
1995-2025
1h 6m
About
(Dominic Angerame, 1995-2025, United States, 66 min, in English)
This program celebrates the recent work of Dominic Angerame, a prolific, award-winning filmmaker, educator, programmer, cinephile and former Executive Director of Canyon Cinema. Known for his broad interests, inventiveness, keen observations of social realities and genuine passion for experimental filmmaking, Angerame has made over sixty films that have received critical acclaim and worldwide recognition. With the career spanning over fifty years, Angerame has produced a vast and remarkably diverse body of work, from his monumental city symphony series, travelogs and landscape films to highly personal diaries, portraits, found footage films and comedy shorts. Angerame’s films are magical: a powerful marriage of image, sound, movement and technique, they are both realist and surrealist, documentary and poetic, strange and familiar, concrete and ephemeral, dark and illuminating. Angerame has taught film production and cinema studies at several leading universities and art schools, educating future generations of artists, scholars, critics and curators. From 1980 to 2012, he served as Executive Director of Canyon Cinema. Under his visionary leadership, Canyon Cinema has become one of the largest distributors of avant-garde and artist-made films. In November 2019, Re:Voir released nine of Angerame’s films on a DVD, entitled “Cityscapes.” – Kornelia Boczkowska
FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM:
THE WAIFEN MAIDEN (2003, 16mm, black and white color, sound, 1 minute)
Starring Zhanna. Gamaya (“Lead Us”) a Sanskrit mantra performed by Zhanna, recorded and mastered by Zak May. This is a haiku and offers a prelude to CONSUME. — Dominic Angerame
PREMONITION (1995, 16mm, black and white, sound, 10 minutes)
The San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway comes to life in this elegy for modernity. The Freeway was deemed a triumph of engineering, a monument for human inventiveness. With the 1989 earthquake, however, the freeway was severely damaged and with it all the industrial-technological promises it held. Premonition shows the situation before the crisis, a deceptive moment of industrial harmony. (Viennale)
PROMETHEUS (2022, 16mm to digital, black and white, sound, 3 minutes)
This short film is a continuation of my “City Symphony” series. Let there be light! — Dominic Angerame
FILM DIARY#2—NO NOTHING CINEMA (2024, 16mm to digital, black and white, 2 minutes)
Dedicated to friend and one of the co-founders of No Nothing, Dean Snider, Film Diary #2: No Nothing Cinema documents the beginnings of San Francisco’s radical microcinema, which became a landmark venue for showcasing the work of independent and experimental cinema. — Kornelia Boczkowska
THE SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE (A GHOST STORY) (2024, 16mm to digital, black and white, sound, 9 mins)
The San Francisco Art Institute (A Ghost Story) is Dominic Angerame’s unique tribute to the history and present-day of San Francisco’s long-running legendary film school and the oldest art institution west of the Mississippi River, which closed permanently in July 2022. (…) Once a hub of creativity and a birthplace of ideas that have shaped the SF Bay Area experimental film scene, the SFAI is now replete with ghostly figures, specters, shadows and memories, but perhaps it is not the final chapter of the school’s rich history. — Kornelia Boczkowska
HABANA 2006 (2025, video, color, sound, 9 min)
In 2006, Angerame was invited to Havana, Cuba, to present his City Symphony Series at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana, which marked the beginning of his 13-year collaboration with the festival as a programmer. HABANA is a record of that visit, tracing Havana in Fidel Castro’s final year as Cuban leader and the ongoing propaganda war between the U.S. and Cuba. — Kornelia Boczkowska
FILM DIARY#7—PSALM SUNDAY (2024, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 5 minutes)
Dedicated to my dear friend Suzanne Kelliher. This is a portrait of a camping trip to the Cottonwood Mountains and Joshua Tree and the Sultan Sea. — Dominic Angerame
A SMALL FRAGMENT OF A DAY THAT BELONGS TO 20 YEARS AGO (2025, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 8 min)
Memories of lovers’ past. A glimpse of the erotic emotions that linger in the mind as it changes with each moment of time passing. — Dominic Angerame
**FILM DIARY #10—EYEFULL PORTRAITS (2025, 16mm to digital, black and white/color, sound, 3 min)
Brief, impressionistic portraits of many of Angerame’s friends and acquaintances who live in San Francisco. Set to Toney Merritt’s haunting sound design and superimposed with NASA images and footage of Angerame’s coming down the elevator at the Eiffel Tower, FILM DIARY #10 EYEFULL PORTRAITS is a descent into the depths of the subconsciousness, transforming into a complex, densely layered exploration of friendship, loneliness, city dwelling and the unknown — Kornelia Boczkowska
LUMINAE (2022, 16mm to digital, black and white, sound, 4 min)
For years I had been shooting with an iris attached to my lens creating a circle. The sun seemed to be a natural progression of the circle, especially its revolutions. The film is an accession into the heavens. This film was magically created from the soul of my spirit. The music was also magic that it glides the imagery into its many manifestations. This film is definitely the result of the magic of cinema capturing a spirit of space that would make George Melies cry in wonder. — Dominic Angerame
AEON (2024, 16mm to digital, black and white, sound, 12 min)
In Aeon, Dominic Angerame draws parallels between the earthly and the heavenly, linking the San Francisco cityscape and city dwellers to outer space. Filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aeon celebrates Angerame’s reunion with friends and responds to the new ways of interacting with the world on different levels. (…) Aeon is one of Angerame’s major and most mature works to date, which demonstrates the potential of experimental filmmaking in superimposing images that are seemingly disparate, yet uncannily familiar. — Kornelia Boczkowska
WORK-IN-PROGRESS
TRT: 66 minutes
Presented by Interbay Cinema Society
Our mission is to provide material support for filmmakers working experimentally with celluloid film.
Click for Accessibility Info
Ticketing, concessions, cinemas, restrooms, and our public edit lab are located on Northwest Film Forum’s ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. All doors in Northwest Film Forum are non-motorized, and may require staff assistance to open. Our upstairs workshop room is not wheelchair accessible.
The majority of seats in our main cinema are 21″ wide from armrest to armrest; some seats are 19″ wide. We are working on creating the option of removable armrests!
We have a limited number of assistive listening devices available for programs hosted in our larger theater, Cinema 1. These devices are maintained by the Technical Director, and can be requested at the ticketing and concessions counter. Also available at the front desk is a Sensory Kit you can borrow, which includes a Communication Card, noise-reducing headphones, and fidget toys.
The Forum does NOT have assistive devices for the visually impaired, and is not (yet) a scent-free venue. Our commitment to increasing access for our audiences is ongoing, and we welcome all public input on the subject!
If you have additional specific questions about accessibility at our venue, please contact our Patron Services Manager at suji@nwfilmforum.org. Our phone number (206-329-2629) is voicemail-only, but we check it often.
Made possible due to a grant from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with Sensory Access, our Sensory Access document presents a visual and descriptive walk-through of the NWFF space. View it in advance of attending an in-person event at bit.ly/nwffsocialnarrativepdf, in order to prepare yourself for the experience.
⚠️ COVID-19 Policies ⚠️
NWFF patrons are encouraged to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. Disposable masks are available at the door for those who need them. Recent variants of COVID-19 readily infect and spread between individuals regardless of vaccination status.
Read more about NWFF’s policies regarding cleaning, masks, and capacity limitations here.