Before becoming an accomplished painter and blues guitarist, Mike Henderson studied with Robert Nelson in the SFAI Film Department; between the 1960s and 1980s he sustained a filmmaking practice, creating a remarkable body of work that renders black experience and the joys and struggles of making art with humor and idiosyncrasy. He joins us to present his film The Shape of Things alongside canonical work from Nelson and George Kuchar, two of the filmmakers and teachers most closely associated with film at SFAI, and Bruce Conner, whose work and legacy has helped to define alternative cinema in the Bay Area. 

Filmmaker Scott Stark will show a selection of his Super-8mm and Regular 8mm films from the 1980s, screened here as newly-scanned high resolution digital versions that offer scale and detail not always seen in the celluloid originals. These early small-gauge works are experiments in the magical capabilities of the 8mm film camera, and are comprised of images and sounds derived from the commonplace: garish elements surgically extracted from the patina of popular culture. Sometimes shot in public spaces with a wry element of performance, the artifice of the films’ constructions is laid bare, the camera being a participant as much as an observer, making each film a record of its own process of production.

Bay Area-based non-profit film and media arts organization Canyon Cinema has, for 50 years, served as a bastion of “artist-made moving image work” not just as an archive, but as a distributor and champion of experimental, avant-garde, alternative and otherwise underserviced filmmaking voices.

1967 was the year that the Canyon Cinema Co-op was born in San Francisco. Formed as a  distribution cooperative for films made by members, it grew out of the itinerant Canyon Cinema formed a few years earlier by a loose association of Bay Area artist-filmmakers. The Canyon Co-Op was the west coast’s contribution to a growing international network for showing and seeing films that fell outside the bounds of polite manners, censors’ approval, and art-world decorum.