Platform

Canyon Cinema's Dominic Angerame

Filmmaker Dominic Angerame, the executive director of experimental/avant-garde film distribution company Canyon Cinema, seems that rarest of artists: someone who can level-headedly run a business and keep it profitable, as well as create highly personal, dynamic art. It’d be hard to find anyone willing to take on the everyday labor of film inspection, office work and filmmaker politics for as little compensation as he does: When he joined in 1980, "everyone was getting paid about $3 an hour," while in 2006, he had to battle to renegotiate his salary to an amount barely in line with San Francisco’s cost of living. But his commitment to the company, and the experimental art form, is 27 years strong and still going.

Originally from Albany, New York, Angerame lives in North Beach (the subject of two of his upcoming films, "two short comedies about coffee-shop living") and is a visiting faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute. His film Anaconda Targets (2004), footage of a 2002 military operation recorded aboard a United States gunship helicopter, screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006 as part of the Whitney Biennial. He participated in an email exchange with SF360.org this past winter.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, documentary, experimental film, features, gay lesbian cinema

Insider

Bruce Conner, remembered

Editor’s note: In response to Bruce Conner’s death Monday, SF360.org asked those who knew him and cared about his work to reflect on the artist/filmmaker. Responding, below, are filmmakers Craig Baldwin and Lynne Sachs, curator/CalArts dean Steve Anker and New York curator/archivist Mark McElhatten.

"I was saddened by the news of Bruce Conner’s death, but not surprised, as he had been suffering for years. Of course he was an inestimably large influence on my own work, but, so much more, an intense, brilliant beacon for both the art and cinema worlds internationally—in fact, and importantly—a West Coast agent who did a whole lot to bring those two realms together. Across media, that rail-thin beatnik exercised a marvelous mastery of both concept and execution, driven by an obsessive and contrarian mind. But beyond his creative output, for me it was his subcultural sensibility that was cause for wonder—that within this cracker-white Kansas-comes-to-the-City could roil such dark and dangerous and anti-authoritarian impulses….As I think Greil Marcus said, he was the flip-side of American Gothic—had seen the Holy Ghost in the midnight sky above the stark prairie, and that terror was ever celebrated in the apocalypses of his Art."

Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema, filmmaker, Mock Up on Mu, among others

topics: art, avant-garde, bay area