ART In CINEMA

Acknowledgments

I AM GRATEFUL to a number of colleagues and organizations for assistance with this project.

Most obviously, as is evident on the title page and in the general introduction, Robert Haller’s

input was crucial: had he not begun an Art in Cinema project, I could not have continued. And

Kathy Geritz and Nancy Goldman made the Art in Cinema papers, housed at the Pacific Film

Archive in Berkeley, available to me; fortunately, the Art in Cinema archive has been well taken

care of and has been organized for easy access. A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Scholars, which I held from January through August of 2004, allowed

me to get the manuscript into its final form.

I am also grateful to Ruth Bradley, editor of Wide Angle. At one point, it looked as if Wide Angle

would publish a substantial portion of Art in Cinema: Documents toward a History of the Film Society, as it had published a substantial part of what became Cinema 16: Documents toward a History

of the Film Society. Before this failed to pan out, Bradley generously made her staff available to me,

and much of the labor of getting the Art in Cinema documents word-processed took place at the

Wide Angle office at Ohio University. That Bradley, during her final years as editor of the journal,

had made Wide Angle available to scholars interested in documenting the histories of institutions

responsible for creating and maintaining public spaces for alternative media was crucial support

for both the Cinema 16 project and this one.

Thanks, too, to Micah Kleit at Temple University Press for not giving up on this project; to Amos

Vogel for his enthusiasm (Amos has been as excited about an Art in Cinema book as I am); to

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon for her willingness to allow me to reprint Frank Stauffacher’s letters

and program notes; to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for permission to include the

Art in Cinema catalogue; to Dominic Angerame, Terry Cannon, Kate Hartman, Terry Grimmer

Krumbach, Keith Sanborn, Rani Singh, and Jack Stauffacher; to my typist Elizabeth Spaziani; and

to all those whose lives intersected with Frank Stauffacher’s and Art in Cinema and who showed

their enthusiasm for a project remembering his fine work. Finally, thanks to my sons, Ian MacDonald, Art Burg, and Ed Burg, for helping to keep me grounded, and to my wife, Patricia Reichgott O’Connor, for a lifetime of loving support.

Background

Over the past half-century, no American city has been more consistently identified with alternative cinema than San Francisco and environs. There are a variety of reasons for the Bay Area’s preeminence in the independent media scene. Obviously, a good many filmmakers (and more recently

videomakers) have made the Bay Area their home for extended periods: Sidney Peterson, James

Broughton, Jordan Belson, Harry Smith, Bruce Conner, Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand, Robert Nelson, Gunvor Nelson, Nathaniel Dorsky, Stephen Beck, George Kuchar, Mike Kuchar, Ernie Gehr,

Warren Sonbert, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Craig Baldwin, Marlon Riggs, Cauleen Smith, and Greta Snider,

to name just a few. But what has lured so many makers to the Bay Area and has kept them there

is the region’s tradition of institutional support for alternative media-making. The San Francisco

Art Institute (formerly known as the California School of Fine Arts), Canyon Cinema, the Pacific

Film Archive, the Center for Experiments in Television, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and

other institutions have maintained a vital independent film/video culture in the region during the

past generation. But before any of these organizations began to make major contributions to

independent media, the Art in Cinema film series, founded by Frank Stauffacher and Richard Foster in 1946 and run by Stauffacher with the help of friends and family through 1954, had demonstrated not only that there was an alternative film history and an audience for it, but that the

Bay Area could be one of its nodal points.