Experiments in Solitude

In addition to their many other virtues, Jennifer Reeves' avant-garde films are a poetic response to a violent, deranged world. Lest that sound soft and squishy, rest assured that the thirty-something New York filmmaker is neither precious nor Pollyanna-ish. You won't find her picking daisies when the apocalypse comes, or sketching unicorns on onionskin. She'll be out on the streets with her 16mm camera -- that's celluloid, people -- capturing scenes of individual and collective ruin. Reeves' sublime eye for the crystalline image goes hand in glove with her fascination with our society's effects (both micro and macro) on the female psyche. Her breakthrough 1996 work, the 38-minute Chronic (screening March 16) takes us inside the head of a messed-up Midwest teenager on the eve of destruction. The Time We Killed (screening tonight), Reeves' 2004 experimental feature starring poet Lisa Jarnot as a Brooklyn writer too scared to venture beyond her front door, draws its anxious undercurrent of apocalyptic destruction from the brawling couple next door, Sept. 11, and the occupation of Iraq. In the three-day series Jennifer Reeves: Light Work, S.F. Cinematheque brings the filmmaker to town for all shows in a salute to poetry, psychosis, and unabashed beauty.

Jennifer Reeves: Light Work begins March 15 at Artists' Television Access.
Tue., March 18, 7:30 p.m., 2008