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.
![black-and-white image of a fresco of a man chained to a pillar](https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/01-Angerame-Dominic-SFAI-A-Ghost-Story-2024_2000.jpg)
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.