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.

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.

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.

Please join Canyon Cinema for another installation of our Salon series, with Bilbao-born, California-based filmmaker Laida Lertxundi.