of it. I had no occupation. I couldn't get a job anywhere. So, I thought, I'll invent my own occupation. I set up a little part of the house as an office. I had to call it something: I put up a little sign, and it turned out to be 'Canyon Cinema' with a light bulb next to it. Fairly soon, we had weekly showings. Kikuko made popcorn. The kids around the neighborhood gathered the community benches and chairs, and we'd sit under the trees in the summer with all the dogs and
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people and watch French or Canadian Embassy films and National Film Board of Canada stuff, along with our own. I let it be known immediately that I had a place to show films, if any filmmakers were coming through town. I let Jonas [Mekas] know right away. At first we were in touch with only Larry Jordan, and later, Jordan Belson.
Stan Brakhage came to town after a while and tried to make a home in San Francisco with Jane. And other filmmakers were scattered here and there; we didn't really see each other very much. There weren't many films to show, but toward 1962 it began to build up rapidly. We'd send out postcards, and soon the mailing list was too long. Then Chickie Strand was in town, at Berkeley, and we got together and ran Canyon together. There were a few other people around: her husband, Paul Strand, took care of the screen and the Volkswagen bus, and later Emery Menefee joined us. Chickie was working at the university, and we would show in Berkeley at various places, whatever was available. By then we were showing our newsreel and everything else we could find: Brakhage's films, and Mekas's . . .
There was a generation of Bay Area filmmakers in the late forties: Peterson and Broughton . . .
We would order those films from the Audio Film Center catalogue and show them. James Broughton was a kind of father figure. He didn't come around much, but we knew he was in the area. We'd show all his films. Marie Menken, Sidney Peterson, Maya Deren, Frank Stauffacherwe'd have a festival once in a while. Later, we showed in North Beach in San Francisco, in the late beatnik era. So we were pretty busy, putting up signs everywhere, keeping our equipment in shape, and renting films and trying to pay for them, shipping them, returning chairs to the mortuaries, sending announcements to the paper, which they'd
print. Nobody would ever write anything about us. But the Berkeley police would come constantly and run us out, right at the last minute, as a fire hazard or something.
Why?
I don't know. This was in prerevolution times. Berkeley was quite conservative in the early sixties. They just didn't like the spirit of it. We'd have the Finnish Hall as a backup and a bunch of Volkswagen buses out front (Paul Strand in charge). The police would come and tell us to leave, and we'd say OK, and everybody would get on the bus, go to the next place, and we'd set up again. It was like von Richthofen's Flying Circus. We got really adept at setting up a nice theater anywhere. It was never sloppy. We taught all the people who would come to work for usvolunteersto set everything up precisely, the right way. We had a good projector and good programs, and we tried to pay attention to the timing of the interludes between films.
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How many people came to screenings?
At the University of California, or nearby, we'd always have from twenty-five to seventy people. I'd guess the average was thirty-five to forty-five. Over in North Beach, there might be twenty people. We showed all over the Bay Area. We were very concerned about the tone of the events.
What tone were you looking for?
We wanted a nice family mood. We knew we were going to show things that were likely to upset people's expectations. They were prepared for the conventions of a literary kind of movie,
and they weren't going to be seeing much of that. So we wanted to be kind to them. Mainly, we wanted them to relax. That's why we had pies and fruit and door prizes.
One time I gave a show in Los Angeles, with our normal relaxed mood, but people came in expecting a lot of excitement: ''Experimental Films!' Since they weren't getting that out of
they threw food at me! I had spent months collecting my old paintings for a show in the lobby, and they drew moustaches on them! If you get 'em worked up, it can go the wrong way. But we always tried to work with the audience.
Choosing programs, however, was like making films: we didn't take audience preference into consideration. Our decisions were totally personal and aesthetic. Putting a program together is like making art. It's one of the few places where a person can function without damage to others, with personal power, self-centeredness, ego, whatevertheir own vision. Our theater was like that. During the tea ceremony in the old Japan, nobody would ever ask could you bring out the
scroll, please? [laughter]. Or could we maybe have some
tea? No, you'd come and there it was, and because the master of the ceremony, the master of ceremonies, is a particular person, with all the limitations of being particular, the master would do it his or her way. And as a result, this particular ceremony would have a universal touch.
Teaching for me should be done the same way. If a student approaches me, implicitly assuming that I should be concerned with the same politics she is, or he issome fashionable dogmaI always fade out immediately. That's not education. I don't like to please students and I don't like to please audiences. If I did, I'd make Coke ads or porn films, and right now we'd have a fat income. College students are so fashion conscious. These days, they're very concerned about how you're supposed to treat each other, 'correct politics.' I've always taken to the Zen way, where you make a big joke of what everybody thinks is serious and you're very serious about what everybody thinks
