Crossroads Offers the Most Extraordinarily Idiosyncratic Films You’ll See All Year

When I landed in San Francisco in 1985, avant-garde cinema was everywhere. San Francisco Cinematheque presented weekly screenings in the San Francisco Art Institute auditorium, while institutional heavyweights SFMOMA (whose vaunted Art in Cinema program began in 1946) and BAMPFA regularly showed experimental films.

Thriving on the cultural fringe outside the mainstream, experimental film was a fixture at scruffy venues on the geographical periphery, i.e., the Mission (Other Cinema), China Basin (the no nothing cinema) and the Haight (the Red Vic Movie House, which booked a night of student films every semester). The Castro and the Roxie chipped in with screenings of transgressive underground filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Curt McDowell and George Kuchar.

We won’t rehash how San Francisco and the world have changed in the ensuing decades (for one thing, SFMOMA terminated its film program in 2021). In response, longtime SF Cinematheque director Steve Polta shifted several years ago to a lighter calendar of ad hoc screenings augmented by a major annual festival.

The 15th edition of Crossroads, screening Friday, Aug. 30 through Sunday, Sept. 1 at Gray Area in the Mission, comprises 10 skillfully curated programs of short works from around the world. They are the most extraordinarily idiosyncratic and uncompromising films you’ll see this year, even taking into account the featured contributions of cinematographers, composers and other collaborators.

The opening film of “utopia springs from fertile soil,” Program 1 — Side 1, Track 1, as it were — is San Francisco stalwart Dominic Angerame’s The San Francisco Art Institute (A Ghost Story). The title is self-explanatory if you know SFAI shuttered two years ago; Angerame blesses us with nine haunted minutes of black-and-white, Dziga Vertov–inflected shots of faces, film gear and unpopulated vistas of the brutalist-yet-inviting campus.

Most of the works in Program 1 play like an elegy for lost human contact in a sea of concrete and glass. Here’s where the artists’ synopses are instructive in appreciating avant-garde cinema: Ross Meckfessel describes the protagonist of his Spark From a Falling Star as an “odd, unseen alien presence … that transforms people [and] public spaces [and] floats unmoored through the real and virtual alike.”

My interpretation didn’t correspond exactly to Meckfessel’s intention, but that’s all right. I got the mood of indifference and alienation. Experimental films often work on the viewer like poems, or abstract paintings, which is to say that it’s more important, and more satisfying, to experience them than to explain them.

That said, numerous festival films express a social and/or political critique. A highlight of Program 2 (“we spoke of dust”) is Sunflower Siege Engine by Crossroads regular Sky Hopinka. The filmmaker anchors his richly evocative 21st-century contemplation of reservations, resistance and spirituality in 1969 newsreel footage of Richard Oakes delivering his “Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People.”

Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for a reservation, Oakes said during the Indigenous occupation. “It would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian Land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation.” Hopinka (who packs a great deal into 12 minutes) makes a subtle, pointed comment by including the reporter’s off-screen directions to Oakes; even when the revolution is televised, it must conform to that medium’s format.

Polta set another important piece, London filmmaker Morgan Quaintance’s fascinating Efforts of Nature, as the capstone of Program 3 (“depending on the light to make a difference”). Like Hopinka, Quaintance reaches into the past for powerful words, those of renowned poet and Vietnam War veteran Yusef Komunyakaa. Among other things, the film asks us to consider the relationship between the past and the present in terms of the pace of progress.

Crossroads’ core audience is the still-significant Bay Area population of experimental filmmakers and artists of all stripes, as well as the savvier corporate worker in advertising and graphic design. For those moviegoers who have never immersed themselves in an hour-long program of non-narrative film, in the rhythm of light and shadow, the mysterious magic of pure cinema, there is no better place to begin than Crossroads.

Crossroads takes place Aug. 30–Sept. 1 at Gray Area (2665 Mission St., San Francisco). Click here for tickets and more information.