San Francisco Cinematheque artists’ files collection

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

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

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.

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.