San Francisco Cinematheque is a San Francisco-based

film society A film society is a membership-based club where people can watch screenings of films which would otherwise not be shown in mainstream cinemas. In Spain, Ireland and Italy, they are known as "cineclubs", and in Germany they are known as "filmclubs" ...

for artist-made cinema. It was created in 1961 by a group of filmmakers, including Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand. This screening program grew into Canyon Cinema before being split off into a sister organization, originally named the Foundation for Art in Cinema, during the 1970s. San Francisco Cinematheque is one of the

Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gov ...

's longest-running outlets for exhibiting experimental film. It produces the annual film festival Crossroads.

History

Canyon Cinema began as a film exhibition outlet in Canyon, California. Its early programs were programmed Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand, and Emory Menefee and featured a mixture of experimental work and conventional narrative films. After starting in Baillie's backyard, they struggled to find a regular venue until Stiles Hall at UC Berkeley became its first long-term venue. As Canyon grew during the 1960s to include a distribution office and nationwide newsletter, its exhibition program came to focus on experimental film and appeared at new venues around the Bay Area. It moved into a church on

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in 1967 and took on the name Canyon Cinematheque. The film department at

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

had a theater built in 1969, which became the primary venue for Cinematheque screenings for several decades. Canyon Cinema obtained

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status in California but was denied by the federal government because its distribution program made a profit for its members. As a result, Canyon restructured its operations, and in 1976 the Foundation for Art in Cinema was formed as a sister organization. Under Steve Anker and David Gerstein in the 1980s, the foundation took on the name San Francisco Cinematheque. The organization expanded its scope with its first video art programs in 1984 and ''Cinematograph'', a journal edited by local artists, the following year. The Cinematheque moved to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as its primary venue in 1994 and then to California College of the Arts in 1999.

Description

San Francisco Cinematheque exhibits artist-made cinema with around 35 screenings each year in the Bay Area. It publishes the ''Cinematograph'' journal of film and media art. It also has a collection of thousands of publications, periodicals, and files in its research archive.

Crossroads

In April 2010, San Francisco Cinematheque presented the first Crossroads, a film festival for artist-made film and video work. Crossroads has since become an annual festival offering a major platform for performance-based work and younger or lesser-known filmmakers.

References

External links

*
San Francisco Cinematheque program notes from 1984 to 2000
on the Internet Archive {{Authority control Cinema of the San Francisco Bay Area Organizations established in 1961 Experimental film Film organizations in the United States Non-profit organizations based in San Francisco