Complete Dominic Angerame Series, Including his CITY SYMPHONIES, at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, CA

Since 1968 Dominic Angerame has produced more than 30 films on 16mm and several newer works in digital format. Some of these films have never had a public screening. Many of Angerame’s films show San Francisco, the city he has lived and worked in since 1979, and its varying cityscape as it looks and changes over time. These city films show urban deconstruction and cinematic construction as two sides of the same coin, as de-construction, even. The filmmaker’s work searches for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, bodies. The filmmaker’s desire is to make everyday images unfamiliar, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses. Angerame stylizes his urban landscapes into half-abstract, extremely painterly compositions; his films are often layered as collages through double and triple exposures.

For the second program of his films to be screene on Feb. 25th, Shapeshifters Cinema will present the five original films of his highly-acclaimed City Symphony series, made between 1984-1997, projected in their original 16mm film format, including: CONTINUUM (1984) with live guitar accompaniment by Kevin Barnard, DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT(1990), PREMONITION (1995), IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS (1995) and LINE OF FIRE (1996). Each of these films, and several others, are distributed on the DOMINIC ANGERAME - CITYSCAPES DVD to North American educational markets by Gartenberg Media. They are also available as downloadable DSL files.

In the Course of Human Events (Dominic Angerame, 1997)

During the 1920s, painters, photographers, and other artists in Europe and the United States, through the medium of film, furthered their ideas about the kinetic and plastic qualities of art. A genre of “city symphony” films emerged. These films were structured around the day in the life of a metropolis, from sunrise to sunset. Primarily employing techniques of straight photography, privileged camera positions and rhythmic editing patterns were employed to visualize representation of the objective world. Includes films by Walther Ruttmann, Dziga Vertov, Jay Leyda, José Val del Omar, James Benning, Vivian Ostrovsky and others. GME has organized a selection of films that we distribute into a thematic course guide on the subject of City Symphonies, along with several other thematic programming suggestions available here as part of it’s offering of Featured Collections.

In “NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films,” Jon Gartenberg’s related 2014 article in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Jon defines the framework for thinking about such motion pictures from an enlarged perspective, encompassing a variety of genres (early cinema, documentary, experimental, animation, independent, political films, etc.).