3/11/19 // SFAI Film x Canyon: Stinky Wieners and Dreamy Beavers with Mark Ellinger

Posted February 28th, 2019 in Co-Presentations, Events and Screenings, News / Events

SFAI Film x Canyon: Stinky Wieners and Dreamy Beavers with Mark Ellinger
Monday, March 11th, 2019 // 7:30 PM (doors 7:00 PM)
San Francisco Art Institute // 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco
Facebook Event

The San Francisco Art Institute Film Department and Canyon Cinema Present a series of 50th Anniversary Screenings

Celebrating 50 Years of Filmmaking at SFAI

STINKY WIENERS AND DREAMY BEAVERS
***SPECIAL REPRISE SCREENING!**
free and open to the public

With Mark Ellinger in person.

“Curt McDowell worked in San Francisco from the late 1960s until his death in 1987- a period that witnessed the Summer of Love, gay liberation, and the onset of AIDS, to which he succumbed at the age of forty-two. The author of numerous films that recast the American dream of plenty in pansexual terms, McDowell, like so many artists of his generation, indulged in the era’s carnal abundance, and his appetites and experiences are reflected in the work, which alternates between the revealing and the puerile. His short films, such as Wieners and Buns Musical (1972) and Loads (1980), celebrate sex as well as genre riffing and autobiographical narratives (McDowell’s insatiable desire for seducing straight men is explicitly documented in his 16-mm works), and bear the influences of Jack Smith’s lush, DIY camp aesthetic, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s explosive melodrama, and Nan Goldin’s glimpses of countercultural bohemia.” – Glen Helfand, ArtForum

“…Life for [McDowell] was a fast track to fast times that included devilish detours into forbidden erogenous zones. He explored all those zones with a zealous zeal: painter, pornographer, poet of the plebeian and the perverse…” – George Kuchar

The San Francisco Art Institute Film Department and Canyon Cinema are pleased to present a special second screening of Stinky Wieners and Dreamy Beavers, a film program of short works by trailblazing queer filmmaker, artist and SFAI alumnus Curt McDowell. All films are recently restored by the Academy Film Archive, shown on newly created 16mm prints. San Francisco was Curt McDowell’s adopted home and the site of much of his raunchy, autobiographical, comic, playful and unabashed work; standing as essential portraits of Curt’s milieu and one of the city’s many vanishing cultures, these films possess a life and vibrance that continues to endure. The program is introduced by Mark Ellinger, Curt’s longtime collaborator and star.

Program features:

Ainslie Trailer (1972)
Confessions (1971)
Wieners and Buns Musical (1972)
True Blue and Dreamy (1973)
Dora Myrtle (1973)
The Mean Brothers “Get Stood Up” (1973)
Stinky-Butt (1974)
Beaver Fever (1974)

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This screening is the first of four taking place at the SFAI Lecture Hall in March and April to celebrate the legacy of SFAI’s Film Department. Each screening will feature the work of artists who have studied or taught at the college, along with films they select from the Canyon Cinema catalog.

March 11 – Curt McDowell with Mark Ellinger
March 25 – Scott Stark
April 3 – Kerry Laitala
April 10 – Mike Henderson

Canyon Cinema’s public programs are generously supported by the George Lucas Family Foundation, the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation, and Zellerbach Family Foundation’s Community Arts Program.