Museum of Arts and Design Presents Panel Discussion on Canyon Cinema collection July 28 at 7pm

by Brian Burns

00 Main ImageAs part of its Eye on a Director series, the Museum of Arts and Design is currenting highlighting the collection of the legendary film distributor and archive Canyon Cinema.  This will include a panel discussion at the Theater at MAD on July 28 at 7 pm. The panel is led by Scott MacDonald with Dominic Angerame, Jonas Mekas, Seth Mitter, and Lynne Sachs.  The panel discussion will celebrate the collaborative spirit and tradition of communal production, exhibition and distribution that are synonymous with Canyon Cinema. The unity of the organization’s catalogue is less about genre, medium or curatorial cohesion, than about lineages, histories and artist communities. Film artists, scholars and curators who have been key participants and witnesses to Canyon Cinema’s evolution will share memories, recount its history, discuss the challenges faced by the community and speculate about its future.  Tickets are $10 general and $5 for members and students.   Purchase

Working directly with MAD, Canyon’s staff and board of directors served as co-curators for this series, selecting films that reveal the history of an artistic community and its lineage today and focusing on experimental documentaries from Canyon Cinema’s archive that parallel American cinematic movements.

madWith a focus on experimental craft, MAD’s Eye on a Director cinema screening series spotlights underrepresented voices in film and video history, featuring artists who actively test the limits of the medium and challenge viewers to expand their concept of the moving image. The series provides a platform for directors who resisted mainstream conventions and created unique bodies of work deserving of a retrospective.

Eye on a Director: Canyon Cinema is co-curated by Antonella Bonfanti, Rebecca Meyers, Seth Mitter, Michael Renov and Jeffrey Skoller of Canyon Cinema, in conjunction with Katerina Llanes, Manager of Public Programs, and Carson Parish, Audio-Visual Coordinator, of the Museum of Arts and Design. Special thanks to Max Goldberg and Scott MacDonald.  Presenting Partners include Anthology Film Archives, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Millennium Film Journal.  More information can be found at this link.

 

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In the late 1950s, Canyon Cinema brought together independent film artists whose work reflected a remarkable diversity in style and content. Variously called avant-garde, underground and experimental, these artists shared a vision of filmmaking as a form of personal expression, free from the demands and constraints of commercial conventions.

Canyon Cinema began in Bay Area experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie’s Canyon, California home. Initially an informal gathering for filmmakers to share their work with a 16mm projector and a bed sheet hung in the backyard, Canyon Cinema, Inc. was officially founded in 1967 by Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Chick Strand and others as a collective-run distribution company dedicated to educating the public about independent artist-made moving images and providing access to its collection of more than 2500 works to universities and cultural organizations worldwide. In 2012, the group voted to become a nonprofit, and today it is one of the few remaining organizations providing access to works in one of the essential forms of twentieth century art: celluloid film. Canyon Cinema is home to a unique collection of Super 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film prints from 260 artists, a collection that represents the most comprehensive history of the experimental and avant-garde filmmaking movement from 1921 to today.

Scott MacDonald

Author of the series A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press, 1988–2006) and eleven other books including Purchase The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place(California, 2001), Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times (California, 2008), and most recently Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford, 2014) and Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department Purchase (a nonfiction novel) cost of femara at costco (SUNY Press, 2015). Scott was named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2012. He is a Professor of Film History at Hamilton College.

Dominic Angerame

A filmmaker and educator who served as Executive Director of Canyon Cinema from 1980–2012, Dominic teaches filmmaking and cinema studies at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet and artist. He is the founder ofFilm Culture Buy magazine and Anthology Film Archives, and the author of more than twenty books and the maker of hundreds of films across six decades. Mekas co-founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in 1962, providing the model and inspiration for the creation of Canyon Cinema in 1967.    Pills Seth Mitter joined Canyon Cinema as Collection Manager in 2015. He is a trained audiovisual archivist and projectionist. He studied filmmaking at The New School in New York.

Lynne Sachs 

Maker of film essays, experimental documentaries and live film performances, Lynne has been a Canyon Cinema filmmaker for over twenty years. She teaches experimental film and video at Princeton University and lives in Brooklyn.