Proto- and Possible Cinemas: Ernie Gehr
Cotton Candy, Ernie Gehr, 2001, 64 min., video
Introduction by Ernie Gehr

Critic J. Hoberman has described Gehr's celebrated avant-garde film work as "a tale of three cities": Berlin, his parents' home; New York, where he became known for his structuralist films in the late 1960s; and San Francisco, where he lived and taught from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s. COTTON CANDY visits the beloved Musee Mecanique before its move from the Cliff House to Fisherman's Wharf; relishing the proto-cinematic devices there, Gehr recaptures the dream of cinema before it found its big screen. Gehr introduces the film and joins us for a post-screening discussion.

Admission for this event will be $9.00. Advance tickets on sale soon.

Part of Infinite City: Cinema City – A Few Dream Palaces of San Francisco
On the occasion of SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary, we’ve invited San Francisco’s own Rebecca Solnit to tour us around this Bay Area we call home. Solnit’s forthcoming book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, re-imagines traditional map-making to chart not just space but people, places, and time. From July through December, SFMOMA will issue six broadside copies of seven maps from the forthcoming book Infinite City. Each map launch will be joined to a series of Live Art events. In September we look at "Cinema City" which charts the genesis of cinema at the hands of Eadweard Muybridge in 1870s San Francisco; the making of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo here in 1957; and the 71 movie houses that were open in 1958, the year Vertigo premiered.

Join SFMOMA for a film crawl through San Francisco’s independently owned movie houses, urban gems that have delighted San Franciscans for generations. Visit www.sfmoma.org for more details.