Here's to You, Mr. Robinson

Michael Robinson is a poet, a prankster, a moving target. Heralded as one of the rising stars of avant-garde cinema, Robinson is that rare artist whose sometimes pensive, sometimes invasive films look nothing like each other. Rather than honing a distinctive, recognizable style and sensibility, the Chicago-based filmmaker skips between digital video and 16mm, from painterly compositions to pop-culture excavations. The lovely, soothing Chiquitita and the Soft Escape is a seductive wash of textured images that border on the abstract. Light Is Waiting, which premiered at last year's New York Film Festival (along with another work in this program, Victory Over the Sun), opens with a scene of excruciating precociousness from the TV series Full House before diving headlong into a red-and-blue strobe-lit nightmare. And We All Shine On begins with an ominous nocturnal wind shaking tall trees, then segues into a candy-colored broadcast from some mysterious, unknown locale. (The dark side of the moon, perhaps?) The mysterious Mr. Robinson will be in the house for this overdue one-man show, "Shine On: Films by Michael Robinson," which wraps the S.F. Cinematheque's winter-spring season.
Sun., April 27, 7:30 p.m., 2008