Dean Snider's days of being wild

By Michael Fox

The last time I saw Dean Snider, sometime in the early ’90s, he surprised me with a gift. I say “surprised” because I considered myself a professional acquaintance, not a friend; further, what he handed me felt both personal and private. It was a limited-edition book that he’d self-produced, a thick-bound collection of his photographs that he’d manipulated and pixilated on his computer and printed out on 8 1/2 by 11” copy paper. It may have been the last artwork Dean created, it occurs to me now. His Parkinson’s disease had progressed to the point that he no longer had the stamina to make experimental films. But he was still impelled to communicate, to reveal, to provoke.

Frankly, I was more familiar with Snider’s role in the local film community at that time than with his films. He was one of the founders of the no nothing cinema, a terrifically inviting little space that Michael Rudnick, Rock Ross and he created next to their apartments/studios in a quiet, post-industrial corner of SOMA. Any filmmaker could organize a program, so long as he or she also handled publicity (flyers taped to light poles, that is), beer, sausages and the grill. The unheated screening room was intimate and comfortable, though you had to bundle up on foggy nights. If you got too chilled — or weren’t into whatever was on the screen at that moment — you just wandered out into the courtyard to warm up with some conversation over a bite and a brew.

Snider and his cohorts had started the no nothing as a reaction to the direction they saw the S.F. Cinematheque adopting.

It may have had something to do with the institution’s new director, Steve Anker, taking a stronger curatorial hand (i.e., raising the standard) for showing local work, and showing more films made outside the Bay Area.

Dean struck me as an outspoken renegade who didn’t hesitate to make his voice heard but wasn’t satisfied merely registering his opinion. He was all about challenge and change, not diplomacy and compromise. He had a prankish sense of humor, but he was also impatient and abrasive. If someone’s feelings got bruised, that was inconsequential. Let’s put it this way: Snider was the kind of iconoclastic artist that has largely vanished from San Francisco in the last decade and a half. He was a restless, probing individual, and those qualities define his films.

Steve Polta of the Cinematheque has programmed a show of work by Snider and Greg Sharits this Sunday, March 25 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that he describes as an effort to revive two of the more shadowy figures in the Bay Area avant-garde. He zeroed in on Snider’s early ’80s films, which range from punky to sensitive to seriously irreverent. A few of the pieces are breathlessly brief, like “Ish and Vinnie,” a single tight shot of two people in a car (Ish and Vinnie, presumably) smiling at the camera. On each frame, Snider handpainted the outline of the car window in a squiggly pastel, an inspired touch that gives the piece the loving feel of a homemade greeting card.

Snider’s longer films, naturally, are deeper and richer. “Stink” is an entertaining fictional autobiography made from found footage and anonymous home movies that the filmmaker quasi-pretends to pass off as his own through his ironic narration. The therapists in the crowd may wonder if the cheap-shot one-liners were the Milwaukee native’s way of getting back at his parents, while the film theorists may figure that he was simply having fun with the clichés and grammar of home movies.

“Rock Falls Mud Slides” begins with a moody, introspective series of shots of friends bathed in red light and seated for the camera, fellow filmmaker and Canyon Cinema director Dominic Angerame among them. Snider then shifts to war footage he apparently filmed off of a TV, and a scratchy, bluesy version of “Bye Bye Love” bleeds onto the soundtrack. The last shot is a touristy glimpse of a road sign that corresponds to the film’s title. One gets the sense the artist forced three separate films together into one, not because the piece doesn’t work but because it seems propelled by willfulness rather than interior logic.

The most intriguing work on display, the nocturnal “Motel L,” all but invites the viewer to imagine any of a dozen back stories. The filmmaker cuts back and forth between a woman walking briskly across town-from empty SOMA streets to Broadway’s neon strip-and the same woman entering her room and taking off her jacket. Maybe she works as a stripper, though how many strippers keep a bicycle in their room? Or perhaps she’s Snider’s lover, or a would-be lover. Whatever the truth, the film sucks you in with its vibe and mystery, and you find yourself examining every shot for clues.

I was surprised to discover that Snider’s films lacked the air of subversive provocation that I had accrued to his personality. The work was lighter on its feet, more playful and often less aggressive than I anticipated.

“Motel L” is a cousin of sorts to the films that Greg Sharits shot up, down and around the streets of San Francisco around the time that Karl Malden and Michael Douglas were patrolling the same turf. Sharits liked to shoot one frame at a time, and “Untitled #6,” the one piece I was able to preview, contains lots of rapid-fire blitzes of images. Sharits recognized that an entire film like that, even a short one, would be assaultive, so he gives us plenty of longer shots that allow us to marvel at his vitality and sense of composition. Somehow he made our mellow town look as busy and important as Manhattan.

Dean Snider’s Berry St. abode and the no nothing cinema were bulldozed to accommodate the ballpark where the Giants now play. The cinema carries on in a more comfortable space south of Market, but Dean is long gone. Unwilling to live on anything but his own terms, he took his own life in 1994 before the Parkinson’s incapacitated him.

As for Dean’s book, I got rid of it a few years later when I changed apartments. I think I included it in a box of press kits and stills that I gave to the Pacific Film Archive, rather than tossing it in the recycling bin, but of course that’s what I’d like to think.

03.22.2007