Canyon Cinema 50: Decodings
This event took place on Feb 21, 2018
$12 General Admission
$9 Student/Senior
$7 Members of NWFF and Grand Illusion Cinema
On Film
** Both nights of screenings will be entirely on 16mm! **
About
* Co-presented with Grand Illusion Cinema! G.I. members receive the NWFF member discount on tickets *
Feb. 3
Associations (Grand Illusion)
Feb. 8
Studies in Natural Magic (NWFF)
Feb. 17
Continuum (Grand Illusion)
Feb. 21
Decodings (NWFF)
Decodings (87 min)
Decodings is named after Michael Wallin’s found-footage masterpiece, “a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory” (Manohla Dargis). The program begins with Duo Concertantes, a classic animation by one of Canyon’s earliest filmmakers, Lawrence Jordan, and Billabong, an under-appreciated impressionistic documentary of a boys’ youth camp by another key Canyon figure, Will Hindle. Tom Palazzolo’s 1973 film, Love It/Leave It, offers a portrait of the USA that feels particularly relevant to our current political moment. Also featured are Lie Back & Enjoy It, JoAnn Elam’s lucid examination of the representation of women in film, and Naomi Uman’s classic 1999 found-footage film Removed, which deploys nail polish, bleach, and 1970s pornography to fashion a film where the female figure exists only as an empty, animated space.
In the Canyon Cinema 50 project, four 16mm programs, composed of 43 films drawn from Canyon’s circulating collection of more than 3,400 titles, will provide an opportunity audiences to encounter some of the defining works of American avant-garde cinema as they were meant to be seen, while also recuperating forgotten voices and casting a contemporary eye on Canyon’s collection. Many of the films in the tour are recent restorations and new prints. The programs have been curated by David Dinnell. As a component of the Canyon Cinema 50 project, the touring program is meant not only to celebrate Canyon’s history but also to point the way towards the organization’s continued relevance as both a purveyor of and advocate for artist-made cinema, seeding the next generation of what founding filmmaker Bruce Baillie described as “a federation of willing devotees of the magic lantern muse.” For complete information and film listings for all programs on the tour, visit canyoncinema50.org/tour.
About the Canyon Cinema 50 project
Canyon Cinema is a nonprofit film and media arts organization that serves as one of the world’s preeminent sources for artist-made moving image work. 2017 marks its 50th anniversary. The organization celebrates this milestone through the Canyon Cinema 50 project, which includes a screening series in the San Francisco Bay Area, US and international touring programs showcasing newly created prints and digital copies, and an educational website including new essays, ephemera, and interviews with filmmakers and other witnesses to Canyon’s 50-year history.
The Canyon Cinema 50 project is organized by the Canyon Cinema Foundation and supported in part by the George Lucas Family Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Owsley Brown III Foundation, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and The Fleishhacker Foundation.