Now Available in Digital Format: 13 Films by Curt McDowell

Posted December 13th, 2021 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events

Canyon Cinema is pleased to announce the addition of new digital scans of all the Curt McDowell films preserved by the Academy Film Archive, never before in distribution. This new acquisition includes exhibition files of the following 13 films: Beaver Fever, Dora Myrtle, Kathleen Trailer (for Underground Cinema 12), A Night with Gilda Peck, Ainslie Trailer, Peed into the Wind, Ronnie, Stinky Butt, Taboo (The Single and the LP), The Mean Brothers Get Stood Up, True Blue and Dreamy, Truth for Ruth, and Wieners and Buns Musical.

As Glen Helfand writes, “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 Weiners 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 16mm 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.” (Artforum)

For more on McDowell’s work, check out Jon Davies’s “Introduction to the Films of Curt McDowell” on Canyon’s Patreon.