Canyon Cinema is proud to announce the launch of canyoncinema50.org, a new web resource for lovers of experimental film. For the site's debut, we celebrate Barbara Hammer with a video interview conducted in 2017 and a beautiful essay on her work by curator, writer, and friend Susannah Magers -- in time for a tribute screening we're helping to prepare here in San Francisco next week.
Bay Area-based non-profit film and media arts organization Canyon Cinema has, for 50 years, served as a bastion of “artist-made moving image work” not just as an archive, but as a distributor and champion of experimental, avant-garde, alternative and otherwise underserviced filmmaking voices.
This program of works from San Francisco experimental-film distributor Canyon Cinema, one of DIM’s favourite partners, is curated by David Dinnell, visiting faculty at CalArts and former program director at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Gunvor Nelson/Dorothy Wiley: As friends living in Marin County, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley began making films together in the 1960s that foregrounded their personal experiences while examining issues of family, parenthood, partnership and domestic life in the In the context of artist filmmaking in Northern California. Featuring original soundtracks, their collaborative and solo films explore the poetics of everyday life, from portraits of motherhood to close studies of various bodies.
Dates:
Thursday, November 16, 2017 - 19:00 to Friday, November 17, 2017 - 18:55
1967 was the year that the Canyon Cinema Co-op was born in San Francisco. Formed as a distribution cooperative for films made by members, it grew out of the itinerant Canyon Cinema formed a few years earlier by a loose association of Bay Area artist-filmmakers. The Canyon Co-Op was the west coast’s contribution to a growing international network for showing and seeing films that fell outside the bounds of polite manners, censors’ approval, and art-world decorum.
Dates:
Friday, July 14, 2017 - 19:00 to Saturday, July 15, 2017 - 18:55
Canyon Cinema 50 programming continues this month with a screening of cityscape films curated by local filmmaker Dominic Angerame. The program, Cityscapes with Dominic Angerame, draws on his longtime history as Executive Director of Canyon Cinema and extensive knowledge of the histories and affinities of experimental film to present an evening of meditations on a diverse array of metropolitan milieux.
In 1980, Gordon Ball adopted a phrase from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, "technical sincerity," as a touchstone for his first-person filmmaking. In the next iteration of our regular Salon series, the filmmaker will arrive in San Francisco to show and discuss six films from his body of work that exemplify this mode. This event follows a reading Ball will be doing at the legendary City Lights bookstore from his collection On Tokyo's Edge on Wednesday, May 17 at 7:00 PM.
Canyon Cinema travels to Berkeley this week for a special screening of pivotal works from its collection. As a part of Canyon Cinema 50, its celebration of half a century in continuous operation, and together with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s ongoing series Hippie Modernism: Cinema and the Counterculture, 1964-1974, the distributor will co-present Elegy To Ecstasy, an evening of films made by some of the most influential figures in the history of avant-garde cinema.
Dates:
Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 19:00 to Friday, May 12, 2017 - 18:55
Canyon Cinema has joined together with SFFILM to welcome renowned Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin to the Bay Area. As a part of the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival, Maddin will present a program of rarely seen works from Canyon’s collection of over 3,200 artist-made films.
