A rare visit from a festival favorite

Bill Domonkos comes to Boston for retrospective

Spooky. Hypnotic. Lush. Witty. Sublime. The extraordinary films of San Francisco-based artist Bill Domonkos call up a descriptive vocabulary that never seems to capture the fluidity, the aesthetic metamorphoses, of the director's vision.

Since the early 1990s, Domonkos has been making short films and multimedia installations out of Cold War-era archival footage, found photographs, live-action video, and his own highly accomplished computer animation. (He's worked in the past as a video-game designer.) This Friday, the filmmaker will be at Space 242 in the South End (www.space242.com) from 6 to 8 p.m. for a retrospective of his work, sponsored by the Boston Underground Film Festival (www.bostonundergroundfilmfestival.com).

"I'd describe him as gothic futurist," said Anna Feder, festival director. "There's a kind of 1950s visual idea of the future, of science, of outer space. He uses older footage, so there's something retro about it. It's a nostalgic look at the future, if that makes any sense."

Although the Underground festival has been screening Domonkos's short films for the past three years, Friday's event will mark the artist's first visit to the city in over a decade. For the occasion, Space 242 will be divided into a theater with a loop of Domonkos's films - including two recently completed pieces that will be screened for the first time - and a bar area fitted out with his media installations. And the retrospective isn't the last Boston will see of Domonkos: Lumen Eclipse in Harvard Square will be showing a selection of his films and installations throughout the month of October.

For Domonkos, who seldom attends screenings of his work, the festival event offers a rare chance to gauge the audience's reaction.

"I send my films off to festivals and I never hear back from them," Domonkos said. "It's weird not to get any feedback, so this will be nice. The venue is more intimate than a movie theater, and I think my films are suited nicely to that."

Educated at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Domonkos supports his experimental filmmaking by designing websites for clients ranging from Levi Strauss & Co. and Sony to the San Francisco Ballet and the Library of Congress. Although he tries to keep his commercial and artistic ventures separate, Domonkos admits there's more than a little cross-pollination.

"In my day job I work with new technology all the time, so there are all kinds of new animation techniques and styles that I also use for my films. And definitely the software I use is the same. But clients don't want something as dark in sensibility as my video work."

That's not surprising, given that Domonkos's most famous short film is entitled "The Fine Art of Poisoning." Released in 2004, the work has screened at 30 different festivals and won five awards - just about one per minute of film. Fortunately for Boston film buffs who missed it the first time around, "Poisoning," along with the rest of Domonkos's bewitching oeuvre, will be included in Friday's exhibition. To see excerpts of Domonkos's work, go to www.bdom.com.

SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The Brattle Theatre offers an exclusive presentation of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western "Once Upon a Time in the West." The Brattle's new 35mm print includes 20 minutes that were cut from the original 1968 release, bringing the epic to a nearly 3-hour runtime. (Friday 4:30 and 8 p.m.; Saturday 1, 4:30, and 8 p.m.) (www.brattlefilm.org, 617-876-6837.)

The Museum of Fine Arts' Milos Forman retrospective continues this week with screenings of "Taking Off" (Today at noon and Thursday at 6 p.m.), "Black Peter" (Thursday at 4:15 p.m.), "Goya's Ghosts" (Thursday at 7:45 p.m.), "The Firemen's Ball" (Friday at 5:30 p.m.), "Amadeus" (Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2:15 p.m.), and "Loves of a Blonde" (Saturday at 12:30 p.m.). (www.mfa.org, 617-369-3306.) And for those whose summer isn't complete without it, Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" plays at Coolidge Corner tomorrow night at 7. (www.coolidge.org, 617-734-2500.)