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Introduction
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction 1 1 By the 1920s, once the commercial narrative feature had established its economic preeminence, the pervasive experimentation that had characterized the first two decades of film history tended to be redirected, roughly speaking, along two different avenues. Many of those who had explored the possibilities of cinematic form and style in the wake of the early experiments of the Edison Studio, the Lumière brothers, and Georges Méliès became lieutenants in the service of the generals of industry feature films. Others established an alternative history of cinema that explicitly and/or implicitly critiqued the growing hegemony of the commercial feature and the audience it was creating.1 This alternative history developed in various places and at various moments. In Europe and in the United States during the 1920s, many visual artists explored the possibilities of using the movie camera as an instrument to extend their forays into expressionism , abstraction, dadaism, and surrealism. In Russia, new, experimental forms of film editing were attempts to celebrate and cinematically embody the “dialectic materialist” underpinnings of the Revolution of 1917 and of the new Communist government. During the 1930s in the United Kingdom and the United States, filmmakers frustrated with the problems of unbridled capitalism worked at creating new worker-oriented forms of cinema. In the United States the 1940s saw the emergence of the “psychodrama”—cinematic dramatizations of disturbed states of mind—and a wide variety of new forms of abstraction; by the 1950s and 1960s a full-fledged critical cinema movement (variously called “avant-garde film,” “experimental film,” “the New American Cinema,” or “underground film”—depending on the orientations and interests of particular critics and chroniclers) had emerged. In retrospect, we can read the development of alternative forms of cinema as something like a coherent aesthetic history, and as a history that reveals particular relationships with the social developments that surrounded it. Each form of alternative cinema that emerged at a particular moment seems to relate in a variety of ways to the alternative forms of cinema that preceded and succeeded it, and each form seems to have responded in a somewhat different way to the realties of modern society.2 However, whatever social or aesthetic influences now seem formative, it is important to remember that the evolution of alternative cinema was determined not simply by the quantity and quality of the films that were produced within any given moment and set of circumstances, but also by the extent to which whatever films did get produced were seen by audiences, and by the nature of these audiences. Further, both the production of films that provided an ongoing critique of the film industry and modern society and the evolution of audiences for alternative forms of cinema were largely dependent upon the efforts of a very few farsighted and often courageous individuals who believed that alternative cinema was important enough—ideologically and/or aesthetically and/or economically—to deserve regular, dependable distribution, and saw various forms of alternative film distribution into being. Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor is an attempt to honor and historicize what became Canyon Cinema, a remarkable achievement in film distribution that evolved during the 1960s in response to the repressive and conformist tendencies of 1950s America and especially in response to the way in which the mainstream media of that moment, particularly film and television, tended to confirm these tendencies. Beginning as an informal exhibition alternative, Canyon Cinema developed into a three-pronged attack on the conventional film scene. Alternative exhibition—that is, the exhibition of forms of cinema not available in commercial theaters or on television— remained an important component of Canyon’s work until the 1970s, when its exhibition function became the San Francisco Cinematheque.3 Canyon’s efforts to create a nationwide network of cineastes through its publication of a newsletter that supplied information about alternative film production and exhibition practices helped to establish the “underground” that for a time during the middle to late 1960s seemed poised to offer a challenge to the struggling Hollywood film industry. But most important for our purposes here, Canyon’s establishment of an artist-run film distribution organization in San Francisco that could serve Bay Area independent filmmakers and, later, filmmakers from across the country and across the globe created a lasting model for those who are committed to alternatives to commercial culture. During the past forty years, Canyon has evolved into the most dependable distributor of alternative cinema in...