Ronald Chase

1972 Documentary about a yearly event in San Francisco. What makes San Francisco different? In the 70's you could invite your friends to Christmas Breakfast and make a musical. Everyone pitches in-artists, models, society ladies, gays, straights, lawyers, bohemians, international types--all the colorful crew that makes the city so memorable.

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A short film on the first Gay Pride March in San Francisco in 1971 the year after the Stonewall Riots. This film was lost for 50 years before it was found and restored by SF Art & Film.

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A true story, fillmed in Rome with both actors & non actors. in the 1500's Roman life was often a nightmare - Count Cenci tortured his family, raped his daughter, murdered his sons, created general havoc. Beatrice got her revenge, before she lost her head. A hectic, hysterical nightmare built of intercutting, movement & emotion.

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Sally Simpson played to a song rendered by Bette Midler (one of the cast) behind the proscenium curtain. Filmed in San Francisco in collaborated with a friend, Wilfred Satty, who had gained a reputation for illustrations of rock posters. Satty was one of San Francisco's most colorful personalities, a German artist who lived near Bay street, and would throw extravagant parties in the basement of his studio. He died prematurely, cracking his head when he fell off a ladder in his studio. His memorial was held in the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts and attended by over 400 mourners.

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It is one of the earliest of the gay films after Stonewall, and one that refused to see touch, affection, and sensuality only in pornographic terms. The films final scenes use footage filmed in the St. Chapel, Paris, and connect the sensual with the spiritual. The patterns of movement and the inter-cutting align the film to dance.

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Filmed in a remote location at Land's End, San Francisco. The film is constructed around a formal central idea. The scenes are constructed to suggest a number of popular European directors of the period, but these styles morph into a free-for-all of film genres. A quasi-personal voice over dovetails with minimum dialogue scenes. The film winds up being something of an essay, illustrating the major life choices and laid-back values of the hippie-era . The brief appearance of members of the Cockettes (the reigning company of drag queen camp at the time) and a cast happy to discard their clothes when asked adds to the general mayhem.

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Doomed lovers visit a country fair, spend a long afternoon in the forest before they drown themselves in the river. FIlm thought lost for 30 years, as been restored with new sound.

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A woman remembers the moments with her lover and believes she's made herself ridiculous. She's become a clown.

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A young man (Jean Yves Pitoun) keeps awakening from a nightmare in which he kills a young child (Kim Beeson).

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Dance film of work by choreographer Elizabeth Harris with original score by Pauline Oliveros. The score is for prepared piano and was performed live during the filming. Harris was a frequent collaborator with Oliveros at the Tape Music Center in San Francisco.

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A woman remembers the love affairs with an artist and a fisherman that led her husband to suicide.

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