is not. You mix it all together and throw it out backward. It stays new that way.
What else do you remember about the early Canyon days?
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After we moved over the hill from Canyon to Berkeley, we were a small, impoverished, but very alive collective, a few people who put together some equipment that other people could borrow (and that we could use to make our own films). We came up with
the Canyon Cinema newsreel. It was like in the old days at the movies when they had a feature and a cartoon and a serialand a newsreel. We used outdated, reversal, black-and-white 16mm film. Ernest Callenbach [editor at University of California Press and of
author of
(New York: Bantam Books, 1975)] had a little house in back of his place that we used. We couldn't mix sound at that point, so we made wild sound and used a quarter-inch tape recorder. The news itself would sometimes be the guys laying some pipe somewhere, mundane information, or it might be a totally cinematic piece. When new people came through, we'd tell them, 'Don't feel obliged, but if you want to make a newsreel, just make whatever you want to make, and we'll call it 'The News.'
[1966], the film about Indians in Laytonville, and
[1961] were 'news items,' right?
Yes.
is like an ad. It gives Mr. Hayashi's hourly rate, a dollar twenty-five an hour.
It had an immediate basis in necessity.
When I was going through
the catalogue for the Swedish show of American experimental film put together by Jonas Mekas and Claes Soderquist for the Modern Museum in Stockholm in 1980, I noticed that your filmography lists several films not included in the Canyon or Film-makers' Cooperative catalogues:
[1961],
[1962],
[1962],
[1962],
[1962],
[1964], and
[1966]. Were those Canyon newsreels?
Mostly. Those are either in my negative archive box in the house here or were part of what I shipped to Jonas to be stored at Anthology.
was one of my first films, a newsreel of David Lynn's big log sculpture, made for the first Canyon Cinema up in Canyon. I was leaving Canyon one day to go on a little trip, so I made a little film for everybody:
. I think
is about the testing of the bomb on one of the South Seas Islands during the early sixties.
was made in the early days for an Oakland school for children with mental disorders of various sorts. It was quite a nice film. I gave them one print, and I made a print for myself. I don't know if I ever got the original reversal back; the San Francisco lab folded. The Brookfield Recreation Center was another school, and I made them a looser, rougher film than
was made at a time
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when we used to stand out by the naval base when they were shipping napalm to Vietnam. At first I went out there just to film the demonstrators, but then I joined them. People who had sons or brothers in the war would come by and throw stuff at us from their cars or shoot at us. I don't remember too much about that film.
I don't know! It's funny to forget my own films! I think there's at least one print of all of those films. Some of them were with Willard Morrison, a friend who loved films and for a time was the manager of the San Francisco Audio Film Center. He moved to Costa Rica, I haven't heard from him. His distribution became Macmillan Films in Mount Vernon, New York.
How long did you do the filmed newsreel?
Maybe two yearsit gradually merged with/into our personal filmmaking. A little later, Chick [Ernest]
