Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
San Francisco Cinematheque artists’ files collection
#SFC-AF
No online items
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: San Francisco Cinematheque artists’ files collection
Dates: circa 1970-2020
Collection Number: #SFC-AF
Creator/Collector:
San Francisco Cinematheque
Extent: 20 linear feet
Repository:
San Francisco Cinematheque
San Francisco, California 94102
Abstract: The collection contains files on individual artists whose works have been screened in or otherwise considered by curatorial
staff for Cinematheque’s public screening programs.Materials include written correspondence with artists, press clippings,
promotional fliers, writings, photographs, biographical material, filmographies, bibliographies and other ephemera collected
during the course of Cinematheque’s exhibitions work and curatorial research.
Language of Material: English
Collection is open for research.
[Identification of item]. San Francisco Cinematheque artists’ files collection. Collection Number: #SFC-AF. San Francisco
Cinematheque
Biography/Administrative History
San Francisco Cinematheque is a film society founded in 1961 by a group of filmmakers that included Bruce Bailie and Chick
Strand. Together the group, known then as Canyon Cinema, presented underground film screenings at various locations across
the San Francisco Bay Area, including Glide Fellowship Hall, Mills College, Intersection for the Arts and Sonoma State University.
Canyon Cinema also served for much of the 1960s as an informal filmmaking collective and information hub, and by the mid-1960s
had become a formal distributor of underground films. Eventually this distribution activity splintered off into a separate
organization that continues to this day as the Canyon Cinema Foundation.
In the 1970s, Cinematheque expanded its curatorial vision to be more inclusive of film and video from international filmmaking
communities, acquired 501(c)3 non-profit status in 1977, and began the ongoing year-round schedule of public film screenings
that continues to this day. Cinematheque has partnered with an array of Bay Area film and arts institutions including Artists’
Television Access, the Center for New Music, the Canyon Cinema Foundation, the Exploratorium, the Film Arts Foundation, Gray
Area, Headlands Center for the Arts, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, New Langton Arts, No Nothing Cinema, Other Cinema,
the San Francisco Art Institute, SFMOMA, Shapeshifters Cinema, Total Mobile Home Microcinema, and Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts.
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection contains files on individual artists whose works have been screened in or otherwise considered by curatorial
staff for Cinematheque’s public screening programs. Materials include written correspondence with artists, press clippings,
promotional fliers, writings, photographs, biographical material, filmographies, bibliographies and other ephemera
collected during the course of Cinematheque’s exhibitions work and curatorial research.
Experimental films
Art
San Francisco Bay Area (Calif.)