Canyon Cinema 50: Continuum

Legendary experimental film distributor Canyon Cinema celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with a national tour of four programs that represent a rich panoply of independent artist-made films. 

Program Four: CONTINUUM is named for Dominic Angerame’s silent and exquisitely filmed black and white 1987 city portrait. The program also features Bay Area filmmaker Karen Holmes’ underappreciated late 1970s landscape and performance film, Saving the Proof; Los Angeles effects artist and filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s 1973 masterpiece Down Wind; Gunvor Nelson’s My Name is Oona, one of the canonical works of the American avant-garde; and two works from the mid-2000s: Tomonari Nishikawa’s frenetic single-frame city portrait, Market Street, and animator Janie Geiser’s Terrace 49. The program is bookended with Valentin De Las Sierras and Mujer De Milfuegos, films by Canyon Cinema founders Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand that continue to resonate as vital, adventurous film art. Total running time: 85 minutes

Program includes:

Valentin de Las Sierras* (Bruce Baillie, 1968, 10 min.)
My Name Is Oona (Gunvor Nelson, 1969, 10 min.)
Down Wind (Pat O'Neill, 1973, 15 min.)
Terrace 49 (Janie Geiser, 2004, 5 min.)
Market Street (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2005, 5 min.)
Continuum (Dominic Angerame, 1987, 14 min.)
Saving the Proof (Karen Holmes, 1979, 11 min.)
Mujer de Milfuegos* (Chick Strand, 1976, 15 min.)

*recent restorations and new prints

David Dinnell has curated and organized several hundred film programs, artist retrospectives, moving-image exhibitions and live performances. He was film programmer at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for ten years and its Program Director from 2010 to 2016. He has guest curated film programs for the Flaherty Film Seminar NYC Series, the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento in Buenos Aires; Animator Festival in Poznan, Poland; UnionDocs in Brooklyn; and the Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. He is currently Visiting Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts.