Film: Alcatraz | Eberbach

A video screening of two remarkable photography slideshow works with custom soundtracks, collaborations between American photographer Jim Bengston (b. 1942; active in Norway) and American electroacoustic composer Ingram Marshall (1942-2022). Both videos in conjunction with the music are suggestive of the history of their subjects.

Alcatraz is a stark and eerie portrait of our local iconic island and its empty prison ruins. This video may change the way you see Alcatraz, and even beckon you for another visit.

NR, 30 min., 2013. No dialogue.

Eberbach is a survey of a Cistercian monastery with striking Romanesque and Gothic architecture, located in the Rheingau, Germany.

NR, 18 min., 2013. No dialogue.

Composer Marshall lived and worked in the SF Bay Area from 1973 to 1985, then moved and taught at Yale from the '90s onward. He is often associated with San Francisco, in part for one of his most well-known works, Fog Tropes (1981), which incorporates a field recording of SF Bay's foghorns. His musical style has been described as post-minimalist, immersive, mystical, influenced by non-Western sources and experimental techniques.

“Alcatraz, a multimedia installation done with the photographer Jim Bengston, uses a famous San Francisco site with a long complex history to evoke that special sense of dream and melancholy that is so characteristic of his [Marshall’s] work.” — composer John Adams

This screening made possible with the kind permission of alternative classical record label Starkland.org.