Allen Ross: I was a camera

Personal cinema and documentaries alike tend to clarify the people at their center. But that's not quite the case with a two-part SF Cinematheque program that only deepens the mystery around a figure whose death raised a whole lot of questions — most still unanswered a decade later.

Allen Ross was an omnipresent participant in Chicago's film scene from the ’70s onward, as cameraman, director, and organizer. A quintessential ready-for-anything boho type, he surprised his many friends and collaborators in 1993 by abruptly leaving for Oklahoma after marrying a woman he'd met just three days before. (It was his first wedding but her fifth.) His communications grew increasingly cryptic and paranoid before he simply vanished in 1995. Efforts by police and private investigators led nowhere.

Nearly five years later, Ross's partner on several film projects, Christian Bauer, decided to do his own investigating. The resultingMissing Allen: The Man Who Became a Camera finds Ross's relatives and intimates now expecting the worst — particularly since Allen's wife, Linda Greene (a.

k.a. Genevieve and various other pseudonyms), was revealed as the charismatic leader of the Samaritan Foundation, a religious cult tied to Waco's Branch Davidians. One member of the doomsaying flock fatally flung herself in front of a train, purportedly because Greene advised that was the only way to extinguish negative spirits.

Bauer eventually lands a couple phone calls with the elusive Greene, whose credibility has been colored by her belief that cutting off one's genitals is a way of curing vampirism. Let's just say there is no happy ending.Missing Allen 's fascinating story sustains a so-so documentary whose faults suggest Bauer was too emotionally invested to be the best judge of his material.

Yet if the occult-obsessed latter-day Ross baffled those people, such as Bauer, who knew him as a Chicago prankster and party animal, that earlier persona seems even further away while watching Ross's own 1979 through ’81 magnum opus,The Grandfather Trilogy. This hour-long series of experimental shorts profiling his North Carolina grandpa is so casual, it can feel like a collection of home movie outtakes. At the same time, it conveys an utter emptiness that suggests everyday life is no less a void than the grave it hurtles toward.

THE GRANDFATHER TRILOGY and MISSING ALLEN: THE MAN WHO BECAME A CAMERA

Sun/16, 7:30 p.m. (The Grandfather Trilogy) and 8:50 p.m. (Missing Allen)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

$5–$8

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

www.ybca.org