Fifty years after incorporating as an artist cooperative in 1967, Canyon Cinema continues to champion avant-garde and experimental filmmaking in the Bay Area and beyond. Today the internationally renowned distributor cares for a collection of some 3,500 works representing the full range of experimental cinema from the 1930s to the present. A celebration of bodies, film, and light, this program features a selection of works made by several of Canyon’s founding members and their contemporaries. From the mournful lyricism of Mass for the Dakota Sioux to the transcendent kisses of Amphetamine, the rapturous commingled bodies of Dyketactics to the sensory bliss of Straight and Narrow, these films embed elegy and ecstasy in the emulsion of 16mm film.

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