Canyon Cinema Foundation

Canyon Cinema 50 celebrates the legacy of Canyon Cinema through a multifaceted thirty-month project encompassing a screening series in the San Francisco Bay Area; touring digital and 16mm film programs showcasing newly created prints and digital access copies; and an educational website including new essays, ephemera, and interviews with filmmakers and other witnesses to Canyon’s 50-year history. By sharing the artistic achievements and participatory culture that have made Canyon Cinema such an enduring bastion of independent cinema, CC50 will celebrate Canyon’s rich historical legacy while also pointing towards new possibilities for artist-made cinema.

February 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the incorporation of Canyon Cinema Co-op, the famed filmmaker-owned and operated distribution cooperative founded in San Francisco by influential cinema artists including Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand, Bruce Conner, Lawrence Jordan, Robert Nelson, Ben Van Meter, Earl Bodien, Tom DeWitt, Scott Bartlett, James Broughton and Will Hindle. From its earliest beginnings in 1961 as a community gathering and screening series in filmmaker Bruce Baillie’s backyard, Canyon Cinema quickly developed into the West Coast’s leading outlet for experimental cinema. In 1967, the filmmakers formally incorporated Canyon Cinema, Inc. as a distribution cooperative owned and operated by filmmaker members. The organization further evolved in 2012, when its membership voted to become a nonprofit. An irreplaceable resource for filmmakers, educators, curators, scholars, students, and cinema enthusiasts, the Canyon Cinema's mission to educate the public about independent, experimental, avant-garde and artist-made moving images.