From West and East: Canyon Cinema Meets the Coop

Co-curated by Dominic Angerame and Kornelia Boczkowska, the program presents the legacy of some of the most widely celebrated (and also largely overlooked) filmmakers who lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the critically acclaimed Decodings, the long forgotten Dufus and the work of former Directors of Canyon Cinema, Dominic Angerame and Michael Wallin (1948- 2016). Selected by Angerame (Angerame, Henderson, Peterson) and Boczkowska (Hindle, Jordan, Strand Wallin), the films featured in this program have been preserved and cataloged by both Canyon Cinema, a bastion of artist-made and experimental film distribution in the Bay Area, and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, New York’s legendary and world largest distributor of avant-garde films, celebrating and reviving the historical and cultural links between these two institutions.

Tracing the history of the Bay Area experimental film culture from surreal psychodramas of the 1940s (Peterson) and Beatnik-era film poems (Jordan) to personal (Angerame, Hindle, Strand), “talkin blues” (Henderson) and found footage films (Wallin), the program demonstrates not only the pioneering free spirit of the local film community, but also a unique diversity of their filmmaking practices. Inspired by both European and New York experimental film scene, some of these films feature the misadventures of a detached eyeball, the first project of Peterson’s Workshop 20 (The Cage), Henderson’s blues-driven musings on Black and African-American identity (Dufus) and Wallin’s intimate search for queer identity at the height of AIDS hysteria (Decodings). Others take a more serious tone, featuring Jordan’s lyrical portrait of Beatniks’ prominent poet Michael McClure (Vision of a City), Hindle’s mystical journey through the Death Valley (Saint Flournoy Lobos-Logos), Strand’s haunting mediation on light on water (Kristallnacht) and Angerame’s experiments with live action and NASA footage (Aeon, Luminae). Be it narrative and abstract or realistic and absurdist, the films selected for this program represent the key trends in the Bay Area vibrant film scene with a special focus on the San Francisco Renaissance, the cinema of the Beat generation, lyrical abstraction, queer films and city symphonies, paying homage to the region’s exceptionally rich and distinctive history of moving image experimentation. – Kornelia Boczkowska

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Dominic Angerame, MFA, San Francisco Art Institute, BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Former Executive Director, Canyon Cinema (1980-2012). Part time Professor Cinema Studies and 16mm Film Production at numerous colleges and universities in San Francisco and the University of Nevada/Reno. Compiled a filmography of more than 45 experimental films. Programmer of Avant Garde films from the United States at the Latinoamericano Cine Del Nuevo Internancianole Cine in Havana, Cuba from 2006-2019. Professor at the Escuela Interncional de Cine y Televis in Cuba.

Kornelia Boczkowska, PhD (AMU, Poznan), is a scholar, curator and educator with a special interest in American avant-garde cinema. She has received several research grants and is the author of two books and over forty other publications on independent, experimental and documentary film. Her most recent papers have appeared in Feminist Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Mobilities, Studies in Documentary Film and other peer-reviewed journals. In 2022, she received the scholarship from the Polish Minister of Education and Science for outstanding young researchers.