In 1961, filmmakers Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand, Larry Jordan, and film critic Ernest Callenbach founded Canyon Cinema for weekly film screenings of a diverse selection of avant-garde, experimental and art-house films, newsreels, cartoons and animations as well as commercial Hollywood movies. Canyon screenings took place on locations expanding from San Francisco into Oakland, San Jose, and Berkeley as many as three times a week. This gravitation toward mobility, variation and flexibility also showed itself in the prolific film production of the members of the collective. Through use of methods such as appropriation, fragmentation, and reflexivity, Canyon filmmakers developed more intimate (memory), immediate (experience), and imaginative (fantasy) ways of engaging with the past. At the same time, their search for historic and ethnographic realities constantly question the conventional methods, genres, and medium-specific elements of filmmaking. In my dissertation, I re-evaluate the ways in which Canyon filmmakers approached the ethical, political, and cultural issues inherent in the representation of culture and history through the help of three concepts: performance in Strand\u27s ethnographies and found footage films, allegory in Baillie\u27s newsreels, and indexicality in Jordan\u27s animations.
In the first chapter, I focus on the evocation of issues of sexuality, minority politics, and history in Bruce Baillie\u27s films. Reflecting on Baillie\u27s approaches to representation of race, culture, and gender, I consider how and what type of minority movement allegories transpired in Baillie\u27s cinema. My second chapter concentrates on Chick Strand\u27s films in its entirety comprising both found footage and documentary works. I analyze Strand\u27s citational, reflexive, and performative uses of pleasure, desire, and humor as productive strategies of bridging the then-wide gap between experimental and feminist cinemas. Larry Jordan\u27s animations and live-action films, which explore the dynamic tensions between still and moving imagery, visual and tactile sensations, and surrealist, lyrical and ethnographic modes of filmic expression, constitute the focus of the third chapter. Considering the notions of repetition, transformation, layering, and materiality that dominates Jordan\u27s films, I question how his films resist linear narratives by revealing alternative paths, multiple voices, and cyclical repetitions of histories
