New Artist Member: Jim Jennings
Posted November 21st, 2022 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Films, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is delighted to welcome the films of prolific New York filmmaker Jim Jennings to the collection. This major new acquisition includes 32 titles made between 1969 and 2008, all on 16mm. For a full list of the Jennings films currently in distribution at Canyon, see: https://canyoncinema.com/catalog/filmmaker/?i=506
About Jim Jennings
James Robertson Jennings, usually referred to professionally as Jim Jennings (1951-2022), was an American experimental filmmaker and photographer. His films have been screened at some dozen solo shows in the United States and Europe, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the San Francisco Cinematheque to the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany, International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and the Viennale in Austria. His work has also been included in group shows at the Whitney Museum, The Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant Garde.” Jennings’s work has been shown at major venues since 1973, beginning at the Collective for Living Cinema. His black-and-white, silver gelatin photographic prints have been exhibited in gallery shows in New York City and are included in at least one, major art collection. jimjenningsfilm.com
“From Long Island City to Chinatown, from the Garment District to Times Square, through Rome-Venice-Haarlem-Bruges-Prague, Jim Jennings is an active participant and observant guest, as itinerant as Baedeker or Weegee but with a finer eye for life in transit and a world waiting to be recomposed.” – Mark McElhatten, notes for The New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant Garde,” 2007
“New York filmmaker Jim Jennings has been making lyrical, contemplative films since the early 1970s, several of which have screened at Cinematheque. Combining an abstract and richly textural exploration of space (the two- dimensional space of the frame as well as the three-dimensional space seen ‘through’ it) with the poetic evocation of place (in and around New York, Mexico, Rome, San Francisco), Jennings’ films are always delicate and delightful adventures in seeing. In the subtle and suspenseful interplays of light and dark, flatness and depth, the abstract and the manifest, Jennings’ camera transforms the banal into the sublime and us along with it. “ – Kathy Geritz, 43rd San Francisco International Film Festival catalog
“Jennings has been one of the un(der)sung heroes of experimental cinema for decades now; his body of work clearly shows him to be equal in stature to acknowledged masters such as Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Warren Sonbert.” – Michael Sicinski
“Jennings’ camera feeds the eye and then the spirit, never pausing to ‘inform.’ There is a sense of play here and unselfconscious fun that immediately charms the viewer out of any dialectic frame of mind….” – Gail Camhi, The Downtown Review, 1980
