Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Film, Video, Installation, Performance
Website: scottstark.com
Scott Stark grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and moved to San Francisco to pursue his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he later taught. His introduction to experimental film came through a screening of Hollis Frampton’s work, which shaped his commitment to structural and non-narrative approaches and influenced his use of loop-printing, flicker effects, and durational manipulation. He has made more than 85 films and videos since the early 1980s, working across Super-8mm, Regular 8mm, 16mm, 35mm, video, and digital formats, as well as moving image installations, live expanded cinema performances, and photo-collages.
Stark served on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Cinematheque from 1984 to 1991, during which time he co-founded the organization’s journal of film and media art, Cinematograph. He also created and maintains Flicker (hi-beam.net), a long-standing web resource for experimental film and video. Following a period in Austin, Texas, where he co-founded the avant-garde screening series Experimental Response Cinema in 2012, he returned to live and work in San Francisco.
His film Angel Beach (2001) was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a four-time MacDowell Fellow (2007, 2012, 2017, and 2024). His work has screened nationally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art/Cineprobe (New York), Anthology Film Archives, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum, the London Film Festival, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Stark describes each of his films as a “first film” with its own cinematic language, one that the viewer learns and engages with as the piece unfolds. His practice is built on an ongoing investigation of cinema’s formal properties — duration, repetition, the physicality of the frame — through techniques that include rapid image alternation (drawing on the phenakistoscope principle), loop-printing, flicker, and dual-projector live performance. He works extensively with found and appropriated imagery: film trailers, instructional footage, department store windows, amateur photographs, and the surfaces of everyday environments such as hotel carpets, abandoned train yards, and bowling alleys.
His structural approach is often counterpointed by surprising emotional charge. The Realist (2013) animated department store mannequins into what critics described as a doomed love story through the left-eye/right-eye alternation technique first developed for Angel Beach, while Love and the Epiphanists (2018) combines Hollywood trailers and other media into a kinetic multimedia performance. Throughout his career Stark has resisted the dominance of narrative cinema, instead asking what film might have become had it taken a different formal path.
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