Please note that this Thursday’s Living Writers reader, Konrad Steiner, wanted to respect the graduate student strike and not cross the picket lines. His reading/performance will be rescheduled for next year. 

Konrad Steiner is a San Francisco based experimental filmmaker. He has been making 16mm films since 1981, and since 2004 has been working with musicians and poets on live cinema. From 2004-2006 he was a curator at SF Cinematheque and from 2007-2009 co-produced the Kino21 film series which specialized in documentary and performative cinema. From 1999 to 2012 he made a collaborative film with Leslie Scalapino, creating a feature length film cycle from her reading her book-length poem, “way,” which was the soundtrack. Between 2003 thru 2017 he worked with writers to produce a series of events in SF, Oakland, Santa Cruz, LA, NY, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, and Providence RI around the practice of live film narration, or “neobenshi” or “the new talkies” or “cinema cabaret.” This is a practice exemplified by the Japanese tradition of the benshi, or live-narrator to silent films. He will discuss the many braids of this tradition moving off in different forms, and demonstrate a live method of taking over modern films with the sound turned off using only language.

More information about Konrad Steiner is available here