A Canyon Cinema Salon with Lynne Sachs and MFJ Editor Nicholas Gamso in person!
This selection of short moving image pieces—all discussed in recent issues of the Millennium Film Journal—will celebrate the release of MFJ no. 81, “Dedication.”
The new edition testifies to the grief we’ve felt over the last several months, amid drastic cuts to vital social services, worsening climate disasters (most acutely the LA wildfires), and dimmed hopes of humanitarian justice. These struggles are especially hard to bear in the absence of those artists who’ve helped us to see and better understand ourselves, and whose work remains a comfort even as it challenges and provokes. We want, then, to meet the experience of loss with renewed commitments at the scale of a battered world, certainly, yet also among our community of moving image artists and writers.
The screening will include film and video works by Vincent Grenier, Gunvor Nelson, Lynne Sachs, Steve Reinke, Eva Giolo, Jenni Olson, Chris Kennedy, as well as the West Coast premiere of Kevin Jerome Everson’s Practice, Practice, Practice (2024), which takes place at San Francisco City Hall.
We are pleased to be joined by Lynne Sachs, who will speak on her friendship with Gunvor Nelson.
As always, this Salon event is free and open to the public, with refreshments served beginning at 7pm and the doors closed for the start of the show at 7:30.
Screening Line-Up:
Blue Diary (Jenni Olson, 1998, 7 minutes) – 16mm
Go Between (Chris Kennedy, 2024, 6 minutes)
Practice, Practice, Practice (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2024, 10 minutes)
The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (Eva Giolo, 2022, 12 minutes)
Sundown (Steve Reinke, 2023, 7.5 minutes)
Tabula Rasa (Vincent Grenier, 1993-2004, 7.5 minutes)
Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor (Lynne Sachs, 2018, 9 minutes)
One and the Same (Gunvor Nelson, with Freude, 1973, 4 minutes) – 16mm
Approximate running time: 65 minutes, with discussion to follow
About Millennium Film Journal
The Millennium Film Journal is the longest-running publication devoted to artists’ cinema. Its mission is to provide in-depth writing on a field that has, in recent decades, been recognized as the most generative and exciting area of contemporary art. MFJ’s coverage extends to experimental film in all formats, digital media projects, museum installations, festivals, and public artworks from the earliest days of the pre- cinematic into the possibly non-objective future.
Since its inception in 1978, the journal has served as the premier forum for cinema criticism in America, and at the forefront of film writing as a creative practice, with contributions by leading voices such as Amy Taubin, J. Hoberman, Peter Wollen, Joan Copjec, Ed Halter, and Laura Marks, alongside contributions from filmmakers Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, Cauleen Smith, the Kuchar brothers, and many, many others. Though we operate across multiple platforms, our journal is committed to print publishing, and to grappling with the ever-evolving relation between moving images and the stable surface of the printed page.
MFJ is affiliated with the Millennium Film Workshop, a center of production and exhibition activity in New York City. The Workshop was founded in 1967 by a group of artists with a vision to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios.
The Canyon Cinema Salon series is made possible with generous support from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation, and the City of San Francisco Grants for the Arts.
