Canyon Cinema Featured in SF360

Posted November 6th, 2011 in Announcements, Events and Screenings, News / Events

SF360 Feature on Canyon Cinema

As part of the San Francisco Film Society’s Essential SF event, Michael Fox describes the impact, history, and future of Canyon Cinema:

Legend has it that Canyon Cinema’s first shows in 1961 were projected on a sheet in Bruce Baillie’s backyard. Let’s print the fact, since it takes little away from the DIY attitude Baillie espoused: It was an army surplus screen. Canyon quickly grew from those ad hoc gallon-jug beginnings into the exhibitor and distributor of Bay Area experimental films, providing crucial support for a fertile avant-garde film scene that came to rival New York in inspiration, ingenuity and influence.

The article also includes comments from Executive Director Dominic Angerame on the unstable future:

“Our financial future is a murky crystal ball because there’s no way of predicting our market,” [Canyon Cinema Director Dominic] Angerame explains. “There’s no way of doing a business plan. Some of our biggest renters of 16mm celluloid are university instructors, and as they retire their replacements are not renting films. When Chick Strand ran the film department at Occidental College, she was giving us thousands and thousands of dollars. Now we receive nothing.”

Read the whole article here:
http://www.sf360.org/events/?pageid=13922

More on Essential SF events and screenings:
http://www.sffs.org/content.aspx?catid=928,943,1022&pageid=2481