Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000

Abstract

RADICAL LIGHT: ALTERNATIVE FILM AND VIDEO IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, 1945-2000 Edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Gerite and Steve Seid Berkeley: University of California Press / University of California, Berkeley Museum / Pacific Film Archives, 2010, 351 pp. Reviewed by William C. Wees Since the 1950s the most active centres for experimental/avant-garde/alternative film and video in North America have been New York and San Francisco (or more precisely, the San Francisco Bay Area). In other urban areas - notably Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Vancouver- experimental film and video have also flourished, but none of those cities come close to matching the concentration of film and video artists, exhibition venues, distribution centres, publications, archives, and clued-in audiences to be found in New York and San Francisco. While this is understood by long-time observers of the alternative film and video scene, it has yet to be adequately documented. Nevertheless, San Francisco has fared better than New York thanks to the book under review and two that preceded it. In 2006 Scott MacDonald published in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Temple University Press), a documentary history of San Francisco's Art in series that ran froml946 to 1954. Next came MacDonald's Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (University of California Press, 2008) , a fatter and livelier book, thanks to the diversity of interviews, images and texts (published and unpublished) assembled by MacDonald for a history of the San Francisco-based Canyon Cinema Cooperative, one of the two major American distributors of experimental/avantgarde films - the other being the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York. Now we have Radical Light: Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-2000. (Much earlier, the San Francisco experimental film scene was the subject of a special issue of Wide Angle: A Quarterly Journal of Film History, Theory, Criticism and Practice [14:3-4, 1992].) A bit of pre-history precedes the five sections of Radical Light, each covering a little more or a little less than a decade between 1945 and 2000. Within that chronological structure the editors have attempted to produce what one of them calls a portrait that includes thoughts, reclaimed documents, backward glances, pointed scholarship, and rescued ephemera. More precisely, this handsome, large format book of 350 heavy-weight, glossy includes seven different kinds of material: historical, critical and descriptive essays written with varying degrees of scholarly rigour; brief, appreciative descriptions of and comments on specific films and videos (twenty-nine in all) ; autobiographical reminiscences; interviews; artist pages with drawings, photographs, collages, and other kinds of graphic and textual material provided by film and video artists; cutaways composed chiefly of ephemera such as posters, flyers, program notes, and newspaper clippings; and film stills, video grabs and other kinds of graphic and photographic illustrations. Further testifying to the editors' thoroughness and endless hours of labour, the final of the book include a Glossary of Technical Terms, an extensive index, three of acknowledgements, a lengthy list of credits, and brief introductions to the book's sixty-eight contributors, including the editors, each of whom contributed at least one substantial essay. Radical Light is, in short, the best available for discovering how and why the San Francisco Bay Area has nourished one of the most vibrant alternative film and video cultures in the world. I emphasize resource because as rich as it is in detailed information of many kinds, the book's collagelike structure works against synthesis and sustained analysis. An authoritative, integrated, and interpretive history of alternative film and video in the Bay Area remains to be written, but certainly Radical Light gives the reader a feel for what it is/was like to be part of the Bay Area alternative film and video scene. …