The other night, I went to a concert at the Greek, in Berkeley. I couldn’t stop looking at the crowd. I think I’m young until I’m around young people, then I’m a curious interloper watching twenty-one year olds interlink fingers and shout to and for each other, returning my gaze with innocuous smiles. At times we were illuminated by roving balls of light that grouped strangers in red, melodic enclosures. Here you are, I thought. Out from behind the screens. One doesn’t go to a concert to hear the music. And much the same, one didn’t go to the movies simply to watch. It’s an active thing. It’s a location. It’s supposed to be fun. But, many of the old forms are dead.

“In the last few years,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1964, “there has appeared a new kind of filmgoer: he isn’t interested in movies but in cinema.” She was concerned about the undervaluing of pleasure, about people focusing solely on content, and foregoing experience. Watching a movie, in her time, was understood as expressly social. Media could not be stripped from context. Pauline wrote about returning to San Francisco as a form of teleportation. Travelling home incubated her from the film industry, marketed tastes and commercial interventions. “In San Francisco,” she wrote, “vulgarity, ‘bad taste,’ ostentation, are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from the outside.”

Born in Petaluma, and after a brief stint in New York with a lover, Pauline lived in Berkeley and "led a bohemian life,” running an experimental art house cinema, writing plays, and cavorting with experimental filmmakers on the scene like Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence member James Broughton, with whom she had a daughter. She introduces her book of collected reviews, I Lost It at the Movies, with an essay concerned about their future. Her main worry, come upon while painstakingly listening to a movie producer celebrate “the culture” sitting poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, is simple; “the vulgarity of the powerful is ugly, but not boring.”

You need only to look around to see her prediction proved. Driverless cars circle the block aimlessly, TikTok feeds endlessly loop image streams, un-parsable billboards proselytize new AI which will collapse entire industries.  Here, we resist the idea that movies are simply sights and sounds, and insist instead on being made to feel, on story-telling, and most of all on communion. With this as the impetus, our exhibition hopes to return to a previous version of San Francisco, one that’s alive in the work made by artists who genuinely love movies.

Yours faithfully,                                                     Theadora Walsh

In Concert, San Francisco.                                                 [2023]