The decision of filmmakers involved with Canyon Cinema to publish a newsletter was crucial to the evolution of the organization. The Cinemanews was Ernest Callenbach's brainchild, though the idea of a news organization serving the local community of filmmakers and film enthusiasts originated with Bruce Baillie. Of course, Baillie's idea was a filmic newsletter, and it did result in the production of several short films, but Callenbach seems to have understood that if Canyon were to function and grow as an organization, word of mouth and/or the sporadic production of cinematic news items would not be as effective as a regularly available publication. The rationale for the Cinemanews, originally called the News, was made clear in the announcement of the new publication in late 1962. The News staff-Ernest Callenbach, Alexandra Ossipoff, and Chick Strand in Berkeley, and Evelyn Bowers in Chicago-explained that their mission was to make available the "large amount of fugitive information about movies" not in general circulation. The announcement asks for items from filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, teachers, anyone interested in the "serious" making, showing, and discussion of films, especially focusing on new or newly available films. The intention was to get information to subscribers quickly and democratically ("anybody who wants to get it must pay. There will be no gratis list, no exchanges"), and to be impartial: to represent "no critical or production clique"-other, that is, than those who were interested in "more than merely commercial projects."

The first issue of the Cinemanews, published in December 1962, provides a useful sense of the North American film scene at the moment when the new periodical arrived, as well as a clear sense of what the fledgling Canyon community considered important. The issue begins with a guide to film festivals, organized chronologically so as "to help film-makers decide how they can best gain attention for their work." Relevant addresses, the dates of the festivals, and an indication of whether particular festivals offered prizes or were noncompetitive are included. Two American festivals-the Independent Film-maker's Festival, held at Foothill College in Los Altos, California, and the Midwest Film Festival, held at the University of Chicago-are listed as "of special interest," largely because they focused on independent filmmaking. A separate item focuses on the San Francisco Film Festival; it ends with a query to readers: "What kinds of coverage of festivals will be of most use to you? Shall we try to concentrate on short films not well covered in the regular film press, for instance?" During the early years of Canyon and the Cinemanews, film festivals were regularly listed and discussed by those who wrote items for the publication or who responded to these items with letters. Then, as now, festivals were seen as one, if not the, primary potential outlet for independent filmmaking, and the refusal of many festivals to include avant-garde and experimental forms of cinema created considerable consternation within the independent filmmaking community.

The original issue, which set the tone for several years of the Cinemanews, also included a listing titled "Distributors Interested in Short Films for Theatrical Release," as well as individual items announcing new catalogs of films available from Cinema 16 and from Brandon International, and the decision of Audio Films to distribute Brakhage's Blue Moses (1962) and four films by Chris MacLaine. The bulk of the individual items in the December 1962 issue, however, were dedicated to announcements relating to individual filmmakers and writers from a wide range of filmic terrains. We learn, for example, that Claude Jutra, "independent Montreal film-maker who helped McLaren make 'A CHAIRY TALE,' is currently editing a feature he shot this summer," and that McLaren himself "is currently at work with Grant Munro on a multiple-superimposition ballet based on musical forms [Pas de Deux, 1967]"; that "SASHA HAMMID's 26 CASALS films, produced by NATHAN KROLL for NET and edited by MIRIAM ARSHAM, are being shown one a week on New York's educational TV channel"; and that "KENT MACKENZIE has been working on TV films while trying to arrange distribution for his feature-length documentary on American Indians living in L.A." Virtually any form of film, other than Hollywood features, seems to have been of interest to those publishing and reading early Cinemanews issues. The first issue also announces the recent activities of author George Bluestone, the appearance of a new issue of Film Culture, the formation of the Catholic Film Center of Chicago, and Stanford University's decision to offer graduate scholarships in journalism, broadcasting, and film.

Early on in the Cinemanews, no special focus was reserved for Bay Area filmmakers, though each issue did provide items relevant to filmmakers working in the area and to Canyon Cinema itself. The first issue announces several films recently completed "at Canyon Cinema" and available from Canyon-including Baillie's Have You Thought of Talking to the Director? (1962), Here Am I (1962), The Gymnasts (1961), Mr. Hayashi (1961), and On Sundays (1961); Ernest Callenbach's Varoom (c.1963-1964); and Dan Mardesich and Charles Larson's North Waterfront-and the availability of "a cutting room for cooperative use by member film-makers" that included "shared, borrowed, and inherited equipment of sufficient sophistication to allow totally professional technical quality in the making of 16mm sound films." Stan Brakhage's move to 650 Shotwell in San Francisco is also announced. During the several issues that followed, the format established in the first issue was maintained: generally the items included were brief and practical, despite the original announcement's indication that the Cinemanews might include "a certain amount of gossip, informal notes, jokes, and other miscellaneous materials."

By the May 1963 issue, there had apparently been enough curiosity about the nature of Canyon Cinema that the editors decided to open with "What Is Canyon Cinema???":

A vicious nihilist threat to the Established Order? A giant international syndicate of independent production? A secret society dedicated to the overthrow of all that is decent in American life?

People do sometimes seem to be mystified, and we herewith present a brief summary of what Canyon is, more or less.-In a phrase, a floating underground theater also active in production. Bruce Baillie, in the summer of 1961, decided that if there were to be new films made, there must be a theater to show them and possibly help finance them. Since there is no place in the San Francisco Bay Area which seemed appropriate, he began showings in a backyard in the tiny town of Canyon, in the redwoods about 5 miles from Berkeley. Since then, Canyon Cinema has floated from a Berkeley cabaret to a restaurant to a private home, on a pad of hot air supplied by the city authorities, looking for a physical environment that would pull people together as an audience. During the summer of 1962 a new effort was made to find a place of showing that would meet the requirements of the fire, health, and other city regulations, and also serve as a studio. It turned out that there was no existing, available, private building in Berkeley which would meet these regulations. In September, however, a sympathetic student president of the University YMCA (Stiles Hall, long noted for its sympathetic support of dangerous causes) altered their rules to let Canyon book biweekly showings there. But the antiseptic campus atmosphere doesn't create the desired intimacy, so Canyon is now seeking a new place to show, in San Francisco.

Together with its program of showings, Canyon has acquired, by begging and borrowing, a variety of editing equipment, which is available for use by members and friends. (A moviola or comparable device is now being sought.) Since last summer, when this was brought together into one place, about a half-dozen films have been completed, and several are in production currently.

Canyon also, of course, publishes this NEWS, in an effort to get information circulating quickly to similar groups and persons all over the country. There is surely a possibility of such groups as Canyon in a score of American cities, and we hope that independent film-makers may gain a sense of common purpose and possibilities through reading of what goes on elsewhere.

By the end of 1964 some changes in the Cinemanews were under way. These included somewhat more focus on the now-burgeoning Bay Area film scene-the September 1964 issue includes an "Index of Filmmakers" working in the San Francisco area (nineteen are listed); and the October/November 1964 issue begins with an open letter announcing, "The CANYON CINEMA NEWS has now increased its coverage to include still photos (from both experimental and industrial films), a continuing index of film-makers, plus editorials, articles, letters, interviews, and statements about the New Film-thus adding to its regular coverage of news about equipment and film festivals, films in progress, and other cinema events." As if to demonstrate this new expanded coverage, the issue includes an extended essay by Saul Landau about the attempted suppression of Jean Genet's Un Chant d'amour (1952) by the San Francisco police department. Landau's essay, which opened the way for longer essays in the Cinemanews, remains an important document of the era and about the fortunes of a remarkable film.

The October/November issue of the Cinemanews also includes an announcement of a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe to help with the costs of the trial instigated by the showing of Un Chant d'amour (at least one of these benefits involved another screening of Genet's film), a benefit for Kenneth Anger to be held at The Movie on Kearny Street, and several letters from filmmakers. Gregory J. Markopoulos contributed notes "after a trip across country lecturing, and finally meeting fellow filmmaker Jack Smith in Los Angeles to judge the filmmaker's festival [the third Los Angeles Film-makers Festival] with Michael McClure at the Cinema Theater." Larry Jordan describes an audience's reaction to a program of his films: "Sometimes they shouted applause (usually during the fast parts), and sometimes they booed and hissed and made jokes (usually during the slow parts)." And Bruce Baillie reported from the road during the process of filming material for what would become Quixote (1965). Letters from filmmakers would soon become a Cinemanews staple.

For a time the Cinemanews ceased publication entirely. No issues appeared from late 1964 until May 1965, though, for a brief moment, there seem to have been two publications: a Canyon newsletter and the Cinemanews. Bruce Baillie's editorial in the May 1965 issue indicates that regular publication was resuming. The reappearance of the Cinemanews confirmed the changes in the format and coverage that had begun at the end of 1964. The May issue includes two polemics on the new excitement about underground film, by a Dutchman, John W. Chr. Muller, and Marshall Anker-both of them unconvinced about the value of the new movement as an alternative to commercial cinema. The same issue includes another letter from Bruce Baillie on the road. Judging from this and other letters included in the Cinemanews, especially during the early years of the publication, Baillie and the others compiling the newsletter seem to have assumed that part of their function was to model new ways for a film artist to function in the world. Baillie, for example, seems to have seen himself as a wandering film-poet, someone aesthetically akin to Matsuo Basho, the seventeenth-century Japanese haiku master, in his Narrow Road to the Deep North and other travel sketches.

The June/July 1965 issue returns to the issue of film festivals; included are excerpts from a series of letters solicited by the Cinemanews on the subject. The focus is on judges, who, Stan Brakhage argues, should be able to function as individuals rather than as parts of "a voting machine" (that is, as members of a committee or institution). There is also much concern in these letters with the difficulty of retrieving films from festivals without physical damage to the prints, especially in a repressive censorial climate. The suspicions about film festivals are nowhere more evident than in an article, originally printed in Jonas Mekas's column in the Village Voice (March 25, 1965) and reprinted in the Cinemanews, in which Gregory Markopoulos launches an attack on the Ann Arbor Film Festival, then in its third year, to which Ann Arbor founder and director, George Manupelli, responds. This was the first of a good many extended controversies that unfolded in the Cinemanews, and like several others, it reveals how filmmakers, driven by idealism and the presumption that as film artists they needed to confront complacency and conformity whenever they thought they recognized it, could underestimate the commitment and intelligence of others working to serve the field.

The Cinemanews continued to be largely made up of smaller items (announcements of films being completed, scheduled screenings, new publications, funding opportunities, and the like), but the indication, early on, that the Cinemanews would also include "a certain amount of gossip, informal notes, jokes, and other miscellaneous materials" was also, by the end of 1965, resulting in a variety of items that help to create a sense of Canyon as a kind of village with its own small-town newspaper. One item from the August 1965 issue provides information about breaking up dog fights ("approach one offending animal from rear, grab quickly-lightly, deftly-about the rear haunches and pull upward and away from opponent; swing him slowly to left or right. Other dog will cool down in a moment; meanwhile your dog will not be able to reach back and bite you. Works better with two guys. If people are around there are usually no dog fights"). Another indicates that smoked fish is available from Mendocino: "Inquire: Blackberry Tarts Div., Box 11, Caspar, California." And poetry was often included: the October 1965 issue, for example, included poems by Bruce Baillie, Ken Burns, George Manupelli, and Esther Peterson. This small-town aura seems to have been largely a result of Baillie's influence, an echo of Canyon's earliest days, but this echo would continue to be heard in the Cinemanews. The "Blackberry Tarts Division," for example, would remain the nominal source for a wide variety of information for years.

Schedules for screenings of independent films or of film series that included independent films, in the Bay Area and around the country, were increasingly in evidence. Indeed, judging from the Cinemanews a change was under way: film festivals remained important but were, less and less, the primary exhibition venue for alternative film. Increasingly, the focus was on screening series that could feed the growing interest of some audiences for alternatives to commercial film and television. The January 1966 issue includes listings for the Gate Theater in Sausalito and Intersection, at 150 Ellis in San Francisco (screenings sponsored by the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Canyon Cinema), and at Firehouse Films in Minneapolis (Tom Olson, director). The September/October issue includes listings for the MIT Film Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts (founded and directed by Fred Camper), and for the Aardvark Cinematheque in Chicago (directed by Jeff Begun). In general, the Cinemanews had become both more national and more local: the focus of Canyon, at least as it was represented by the Cinemanews, was increasingly on the Bay Area independent film community as part of a national and international network of individuals and organizations with similar interests and goals. In October 1965, P. Adams Sitney reported on his trip to the Buenos Aires Exposition to present avant-garde cinema. A November 1966 item reviewed Willard Van Dyke's opening of a film exhibition of avant-garde film at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo; the item indicated that of the films Van Dyke took to Japan, two-Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963) and Robert Nelson's Oh Dem Watermelons (1965)-were stopped by Japanese customs.

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Excerpted from Canyon Cinema by Scott MacDonald Copyright © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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