WEDNESDAY MARCH 1, 7:30PM

Hybrid Autos, Part 1



Jordan Biren and Lewis DeSoto in Person

DeSoto’s Show Car on Display at the Theater!



Before Chrysler’s DeSoto auto line was put to rest in the early sixties, a prototype was created called the DeSoto Conquest. The brand was already a spurious tribute to Hernando de Soto, the sixteenth-century conquistador who “discovered†the Mississippi River, but to Native American artist Lewis DeSoto it was a bit of perverse poetry. After all, the Spanish explorer was infamous for his abuse of the native people he encountered. Appropriating details from the prototype, DeSoto tricked out a like-looking 1965 Chrysler and the Conquest was ready for the road. Jordan Biren’s hard-driving DESOTO CONQUEST (2005, 21 mins, Color, DVCAM) is the story of DeSoto’s postcolonial ride. Also on the program, classic auto films by artists: in RHYTHM (1957, 5 mins, B&W, 16mm), commissioned by Chrysler, Len Lye uses stock footage of an assembly line to create a car in no time. Dig in with HOKEY STOKE (Bill Daniel, 1988, 7:30 mins, B&W, 16mm), a sand dragging short from East Texas. To the strains of "Dream Lover," a beleathered man polishes his roadster with a powder puff in Kenneth Anger’s KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS (1965, 3:30 mins, Color, 16mm). The WORLD`S FASTEST HIPPIE (John Knoop, 1975, 12 mins, Color, 16mm) is a gut-wrenching look at local funny-car driver Mark Mitchell tearing up the quarter mile. In HOT LEATHERETTE (Robert Nelson, 1967, 5:30 mins, B&W, 16mm), a car races along the palisades, then plummets in perpetual ecstasy.





WEDNESDAY APRIL 19, 7:30PM

Hybrid Autos, Part 2: Cinnamon

Kevin Jerome Everson (U.S., 2006)



Bay Area Premiere!



Between the starting tree and the gearshift is an eternity of little moments, some filled with the bulky growl of revving fuelies, others, the intense silence within the driver’s stare. Using a style best described as theatrical documentary, Kevin Jerome Everson’s punchy Cinnamon scopes Erin, a young African American woman, as she waits out the endless moments until the next quarter mile pits her reflexes against the clock, the track, and the uncertain mechanics of a pro-stock dragster. Her mentor John, the rare African American racing pro, reads the drag strip like a complex topo of shifting viscosities. Away from the track, Erin is a desk jockey, a loan officer held in a limbo of businesslike distraction. Behind the wheel of John’s fuel-fed monster, she is pure focus, waiting for a surge of horsepower to propel her toward redline. Detailed like a precision machine, Cinnamon is a quiet film that roars.