Michael Wallin, Outside In @ SFMOMA, June 7, 2026
Posted May 5th, 2026 in Announcements, Co-Presentations, Events and Screenings, News / Events
Michael Wallin, Outside In
2pm Sunday, June 7, 2026
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Floor 1, Phyllis Wattis Theater
Co-presented by Canyon Cinema
Free with RSVP
Related Exhibition: People Make This Place: SFAI Stories
Join us as we celebrate the work of longtime Canyon Cinema artist member Michael Wallin (1948-2016). A stalwart figure of the Bay Area film community, Wallin’s contributions to experimental film culture and LGBTQ+ cinema both locally and internationally are vast and varied. Wallin began making independent films in 1968 while apprenticing with Canyon Cinema co-founder Bruce Baillie. Following undergraduate film studies at Yale University and University of California, Berkeley, Wallin received an MA in Film from San Francisco State University in 1976. During this period, he emerged as a pioneer in the radical, queer San Francisco avant-garde cinema of the 1970s and 80s. Alongside the work of Barbara Hammer, James Broughton, and Joel Singer, among others, Wallin’s films bridged a gap between the issue- and identity-based New Queer Cinema, and the formalist experimental film practices of the time.
This program brings together four films made across three decades. Kali’s Revue (1972) and Fearful Symmetry (1981) chart a path from Wallin’s early, lyrical portraits of people and places to his stunning investigations of structural landscape cinema. These expressionistic visual studies are followed by a pair of Wallin’s intensely-personal, critically-acclaimed autobiographical essays. Presented here in new preservation prints, Decodings (1988) and Black Sheep Boy (1995) continue a journey first set forth in Wallin’s 1975 breakthrough The Place Between Our Bodies. This self-described “Psycho-Sexual Trilogy” traces the filmmaker’s exploration of his sexuality as a gay man before and in the wake of the AIDS crisis, drawing upon his training as a licensed therapist. Together, these films broadened the scope of the first-person poetic cinematic form that made his work relevant to a range of communities.
Please note: This screening includes mature content.
Screening Line-up:
Kali’s Revue (Michael Wallin, 1972, 8 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)
Kali is the goddess of physical form and transformation in Hindu mythology—thus, the varied textures, colors, and shapes of our transitory existence: the many from the one… A de-attachment from conventional seeing, with its naming, values and judgments. Weight lifters, drill teams, skyscrapers, majorettes, forests, trains, Pacific Ocean, military schoolboys, conveyor belts, fog… A structural use of dissolves, fades, and layered sound to carry the momentum of the film. Felicity Facility. (M.W.)
Fearful Symmetry (Michael Wallin, 1981, 15 minutes, color, silent, 16mm)
Uses precisely (mathematically) determined single-framing to give movement to static space, to give life and energy to solid objects, to duplicate/mimic the eye’s true movements, to forcefully bring to consciousness an inherent symmetry and balance in the visual field. Images: deadened railroad tracks, ice plant fields, Bethlehem Steel smokestack, Canyon Cinema office, back porch clouds and sky, PG&E plant at Moss Landing… (M.W.)
Decodings (Michael Wallin, 1988, 15 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm)
“Michael Wallin’s Decodings is a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory, in this case, found footage from the ’40s and ’50s… The search for self ends in aching poignancy with stills of a boy and his mother at the kitchen table, catching the moment that marks the dawning of anguish and loss; desire becomes imprinted on that which was long ago.” (Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice)
Preserved by Canyon Cinema through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Black Sheep Boy (Michael Wallin, 1995, 37 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)
A rumination of desire, the construction of sexual fantasy, obsession, the yearning for connection, the allure of the younger man, the pursuit of the idealized other, its rewards and pitfalls. Erotic, playful, perhaps disturbing; many questions are raised, few are answered. (M.W.)
Preserved by Canyon Cinema through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Approximate running time: 75 minutes
