Canyon Cinema 50

Continuum is named for Dominic Angerame’s silent and exquisitely filmed black and white 1987 city portrait. The program also features Bay Area filmmaker Karen Holmes’ underappreciated late 1970s l…

Associations is titled after John Smith’s 1975 film, a joyfully dense rebus-like image-word construction. Smith’s film is preceded by Sara Kathryn Arledge’s rarely seen 1958 work What is A Man, …

Decodings is named after Michael Wallin’s found-footage masterpiece, “a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory” (Manohla Dargis). The program …

Studies in Natural Magic features recent films by Saul Levine, Charlotte Pryce, and Christopher Harris; rarely screened films by Standish Lawder and Jean Sousa; sublimely filmed and acutely perceived …

     As a part of the Canyon Cinema 50 celebration, artists and filmmakers Adrianne Finelli and Bryan Boyce created this mesmerizing trailer. It’s a kaleidoscopic tour through Canyon’s 50-year history and a testament to the continued vitality of our collection.

SELECTED PRESS “In an era when it seems like most every piece of recorded media is available online, Canyon Cinema at 50 reminds us that there are still reels of film accessible only in the dark confines of a communal screening room.” (Matt Stromberg, Hyperallergic, July 10, 2018) “Spread across four programs, this all-16mm showcase […]

Canyon Cinema 50 Film Tour Beginning in November 2017 and continuing through 2018, the Canyon Cinema 50 Tour included four film programs and two digital packages, which traveled across the United States and beyond; reaching audiences in more than 25 cities, at venues ranging from universities to restaurants, major museums to microcinemas. Continuum Associations Decodings […]

Silkscreened commemorative poster designed by Nathaniel Russell for the occasion of Canyon Cinema 50 (edition of 100, 2-color / 18 x 24 silkscreen prints), printed at Bloom Screen Printing Co. in Oakland, CA. A limited quantity is available for purchase.

Celebrate the Middle Ages, Anniversary and Benefit Party took place on March 9th, 2017 at the Starline Social Club in Oakland,CA. The evening included performances by The Mutants, The Mike Henderson Band, DJ Phengren Oswald of the Saturday Night Soul Party, and projections by Paul Clipson. It was attended by many Canyon Cinema filmmakers, past and […]

Canyon Cinema 50 launched its local programming with Barbara Hammer in person presenting a program of expanded cinema works. The Changing the Shape of Film event took place on Thursday, February 16th, 2017 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Audio recording from “A Tribute to Canyon Cinema: Founders and Beginnings” event at the Pacific Film Archive on July 5, 1983, in celebration of Canyon Cinema’s 25th anniversary. Includes an introduction by Edith Kramer and features James Broughton, the “grandfather” of independent San Francisco filmmaking, discussing the early years of independent filmmaking in the Bay […]

Photographs taken at the Canyon Cinema Inc. office on 3rd Street in San Francisco for the July 1983 issue of the University Art Museum, Berkeley publication. These images were found in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive collection have been made available courtesy of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film […]

On April 11, 2017 Abigail Child sat for an interview with Canyon Cinema’s Director Antonella Bonfanti at the Owsley Brown Presents offices in San Francisco, California. They discussed Child’s early years as a filmmaker, moving to San Francisco, working at Canyon Cinema, editing the Cinemanews as well as her contemporary moving image works.    […]

On February 13, 2017 Barbara Hammer sat for an interview with Tonya Zimbardo at the Owsley Brown Presents offices in San Francisco, California. They discussed Hammer’s early years as a filmmaker, moving to San Francisco as well as her activism as a pioneering lesbian filmmaker.     A special thank you to Barbara Hammer, Tanya […]

  In April, Canyon Cinema invited Guy Maddin to curate an evening of films from our collection for the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival. Maddin presented The Great Blondino and Other Delights, featuring work by Robert Nelson and William Wiley, Abigail Child, Daina Krumins, and Gary Goldberg. Though he was not able to attend […]

By Max Goldberg In the first place, that’s what Canyon was—a place, which even now has a way of falling off the map. It was here, in 1961, that Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand, and other “devotees of the magic lantern muse” gathered to watch movies. Curatorially speaking—though surely that is not how they were speaking—these […]

By Gregory Zinman You don’t need a camera to make a moving image. You can paint, scratch, and chemically alter celluloid, as Storm de Hirsch did to make portions of her psychoactive paean to female power in Peyote Queen (1965). You can bury your film in irradiated soil overnight outside the site of a horrific […]

By Claudia Gorbman Revised and updated version of an essay originally published in Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984, pp. 48, 70. JoAnn Elam’s Lie Back and Enjoy It (1982) gets a lot done in eight minutes. It’s a dialectical film about the politics of representation of women under patriarchy. In the image, all we […]

By Holly Willis This is what I study: an image in Julie Murray’s short film Orchard (2004), near the beginning: from inside a car, the black street tapering toward the horizon, the sky awash above, the trees a series of blurred black and grey brush strokes against sepia clouds, and there is a softness, a […]

By Jon Davies If the brain becomes disorganized, a person may forget how to eat. He may walk in circles or become rooted to a single spot. Some, for convenience sake, choose to live inside boxes. Others receive messages from tiny molecules of air. Living in the world is not so very difficult. There are […]

By Holly Willis How long was I angry? Definitely all the way through the ’80s. There were a dozen good reasons why, and at least as many stabs at getting around that anger: drinking, prowling through the night, writing, or trying to write, and generally making a mess of things. It took a spate of […]

By Tess Takahashi I came to Canyon Cinema with the project of researching little-seen experimental work by women made on 16mm between the 1960s and the 1980s. Having long wondered how the history of the avant-garde cinema might shift if a different group of filmmakers had been taken up by critics and scholars as the […]

By Brett Kashmere   In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home, Their women cluck like starved […]

By Elizabeth Block Describing the work of Lynn Marie Kirby is like trying to grasp a slithery snake sliding around to catch its newest art prey, always exploring and never easy to pin down. Lynn is one of the most rigorous and devoted artists I know. She was my advisor through two MFA degrees at […]

By Susannah Magers As is all too typical for female artists, Barbara Hammer is enjoying a major, extended moment of recognition later in her career, with a comprehensive exhibition, Evidentiary Bodies, realized at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in 2017. Her 1976 16mm film, Multiple Orgasm, graced the cover of the April […]

By Jesse Cumming For all its tactility and materiality, filmmaker Sandra Davis’ use of 16mm film is rarely left a question of form. Throughout a body of work produced from the late 1970s through the present – an oeuvre at once intimate and elusive – Davis has repeatedly returned to physicality and touch as key […]

By Dustin Zemel A Tibetan Lama. His disciple. The disciple’s wife, young boy and terrier. An old tugboat crossing the Mississippi River. A man in his seventh month of solitude. His hermitage built by his own hands. The man’s bloodhound; his cat. Clouds crossing the Continental Divide. A mountain stream. A girl. The sun. (Description […]

By Samuel La France   …and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland   When Charlotte Pryce won the Douglas Edwards Experimental/Independent Film/Video Award from the Los […]

By Dominic Angerame Naked City was a television show that aired in the 1950s. Each episode ended with the statement, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” From 1980 until 2012, I worked as the Executive Director of Canyon Cinema. This position was very difficult, as I […]

  This invitation was shared with Canyon Cinema by Barabara Hammer in February 2016 as part of a tribute to Michael Wallin, who died in December 2015. Michael Wallin is a key figure in Canyon Cinema’s history having served as manager and then as a board member during 1970s through 1990s.

Recently, our friend Gerry Fialka sent a questionnaire he had conducted with Robert Nelson shortly before Nelson passed away in 2012. Consisting of Nelson’s handwritten responses to 49 questions, the document offers poignant observations on art, film, aging, memory and quite a few things in between. Read it in its entirety here:    

Associations Program Notes

Continuum Program Notes

Decodings Program Notes

Studies in Natural Magic Program Notes