Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000 (review)

This volume is part of a larger project that included an extensive film and video series, mounted primarily by the Pacific Film Archive but also encompassing screenings at the San Francisco Cinematheque (and continuing at venues across the United States in smaller programs) as well as an exhibition of photographs, programs, flyers, posters, and other ephemera at the Berkeley Art Museum. Had the project been completed by 2000, it might have been compared to other end-of-century summations at American institutions of art and cinema; these included the bicoastal series Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Film (1998-99), which began at the San Francisco Cinematheque and continued at New York's MoMA, and The Cool World: Film and Video in America 1950-2000 (1999-2000), the Whitney Museum of American Art's survey of the postwar history of American avant-garde film and video. As is so often the case in the world of nonprofit programming, the arbitrary marker of a date on the calendar served as an opportunity to generate institutional funding for a retrospective undertaking, serving to reintroduce, recover, and recuperate the work of various practitioners in film and video. Like the remarkable Big as Life series, which was accompanied by an unprecedented anthology of texts about 8mm, the Radical Light project is also distinguished by a unique publication, one that offers a valuable survey of micro-and macrohistories within experimental film and video.

This anthology will doubtless be assessed alongside Scott MacDonald's books on two key contributors to Bay Area film culture, Art in Cinema and Canyon Cinema, and while it does overlap with those collections in some areas, it also seeks to be more far-reaching in its scope and diverse in its subject matter. As Steve Anker points out in one of the book's introductions, the collection continually returns to two "networks" of activity: "screening series and venues" (including the Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Artists' Television Access) and "college art-making programs" (such as the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts). A number of articles in the anthology also trace the development of media arts organizations, film and video distributors, and various small publications. Interwoven throughout all these are discussions of the subcultures and communities of the region—cinephilic, beatnik, queer, punk, and so on—which appear not only in interviews and practitioners' statements but also in specially commissioned articles such as V. Vale's fairly pedestrian piece on the punk scene and Michael Wallin's illuminating take on queer film of the seventies.

Radical Light addresses itself to two main groups: those with little knowledge of Bay Area experimental film and video, who would presumably use the book as a point of access, and more specialized readers seeking out detail-oriented, research-based accounts of specific histories, practices, and concepts. Needless to say, bridging the interests and needs of both readerships presents a substantial challenge, and as Steve Seid puts it in the book's second introduction, the editors' strategy was to "diversify . . . [to] cut loose from the unified text to embrace a style of collagelike portraiture in which studied critical writings . . . share the field with vintage posters and graphically intriguing newsletters . . . [as well as] first-person recollections by distinguished media artists . . . counterpointed by artists' pages, production stills, and pithy Focuses zeroing in on seminal films and videoworks" (13). The considerable upshot of this approach is to allow for multiple histories of conceptualization, production, distribution, exhibition, and reception to emerge within an assortment of texts. Opting for variety does run the risk of sacrificing substance, but in my estimation, the book offers enough material to consistently engage newcomers and specialists alike.

In each of their longer contributions, the three editors set the highest standard for the book's historical accounts of the Bay Area scene. Seid traces the history of...