Apr 2, 2013
Festival
The 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 25-May 9) is proud to present the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award to the distinctively insightful filmmaker and media artist Jem Cohen, Sunday April 28, 5:30 pm at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Cohen will be presented with the award followed by an onstage conversation and a screening of his latest feature Museum Hours (USA 2012).
“We’re thrilled to be presenting the Persistence of Vision award to Jem Cohen, an artist who has charted his own path of cinematic exploration and whose work often achieves the miracle of allowing us to see the familiar in an entirely new way,” said Rachel Rosen, San Francisco Film Society director of programming. “The scope and variety of his work defy classification which is one of the qualities this award was designed to recognize.”
Working in his own territory, somewhere in the borderlands of documentary, essay, musical composition, cultural commentary and city symphony, Cohen often blends disparate material to create singular filmed pieces. An intrepid explorer of the quotidian of both the far flung and backyard variety, Cohen has worked extensively with musicians including Patti Smith, Terry Riley, Fugazi, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Vic Chesnutt, Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, Jonathan Richman, Blonde Redhead and the Orpheus Orchestra with Gil Shaham. He has directed six videos for famed American rock band R.E.M., including the SFIFF Golden Spire-winning E-Bow The Letter (1997).
Over the past 30 years, Cohen has made over 60 films. His feature-length projects include CHAIN (2004), Benjamin Smoke (2000), Instrument (2003) and Building a Broken Mousetrap (2006). Other long-form projects comprise a number of film shows made to be screened with live music soundtracks: We Have an Anchor, Evening’s Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin and Chance Mexico City. Cohen is also known for his multi-channel installations and still photography displays. His installation works include Black Hole Radio (1992, Worldwide Video Festival, Den Hague), Buried in Light (1994, High Museum, Atlanta), CHAIN X THREE (2002, Eyebeam, NY) and Gravity Hill Newsreels (2012, TIFF Lightbox; Artspace, Sydney). Little Flags (2000) was installed as part of the September 11 show at PS1/MoMA and Lost Book Found (1996) is in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2005, Cohen curated the four-day Fusebox Festival “at the crossroads of film, music and activism” in Ghent, Belgium. He has taught Documentary at the State University of New York at Purchase and the ICP (International Center of Photography).
About Museum Hours:
In Austria’s most famous museum, a guard watches patrons as they peruse the priceless paintings he’s entrusted to keep safe. When a cash-strapped woman asks him a question, what ensues-conversations about their lives, strolls through the museum, walks around Vienna, visits to the woman’s hospitalized cousin-is a beautiful exploration of lives that are artful and art that is full of life. Both meditative and entertaining, Museum Hours is a visual treat that brings new meaning to the idea of “art cinema.” (USA 2012)
Established in 1997, the Persistence of Vision Award each year honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work is outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking, crafting documentaries, short films, television, animated, experimental or multiplatform work.
Previous winners of the Persistence of Vision Award include documentarian Barbara Kopple (2012), multimedia artist Matthew Barney (2011), animator Don Hertzfeldt (2010), documentarians Lourdes Portillo (2009), Errol Morris (2008) and Heddy Honigmann (2007), cinematic iconoclast Guy Maddin (2006), documentarians Adam Curtis (2005) and Jon Else (2004), experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill (2003), Latin American cinema pioneer Fernando Birri (2002), avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger (2001), animator Faith Hubley (2000), documentarians Johan van der Keuken (1999) and Robert Frank (1998) and animator Jan Svankmajer (1997).
Tickets – $15 for SFFS members, $20 for the general public. Box office opens online April 2 for members and April 5 for the general public.
For tickets and information visit festival.sffs.org.
To request screeners or interviews contact your SFIFF publicist.
For photos and press materials visit sffs.org/pressdownloads.
56th San Francisco International Film Festival
The 56th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 25-May 9 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, the Castro Theatre and New People Cinema in San Francisco and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Held each spring for 15 days, the International is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation in one of the country’s most beautiful cities, featuring 200 films and live events, 14 juried awards and $70,000 in cash prizes, upwards of 100 participating filmmaker guests and diverse and engaged audiences with more than 70,000 in attendance.