Mission

History

When Filmforum’s first screening took place in an Altadena living room in November of 1975, organized by Terry Cannon, alternative media was at one of its aesthetic, technological, and social high points. Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Joseph Cornell, Chick Strand, Sara Katherine Arledge, and James Whitney, to name a few, were expanding the boundaries of film. Nam June Paik was exploring the first video synthesizer and multi-media had emerged from the relative primitivity of the 1960s, spawning a whole new interdisciplinary genre. A few visionary prophets were predicting such absurdities as shopping via television and videophones and, lurking in sci-fi cellars and the darker corners of academe, a handful of closeted geeks were whispering words like “cyberspace.”

Since then, Filmforum has chronicled changes in social attitude towards the medium and society’s media-vision of itself. Those changes have been reflected in media-makers’ concepts of their art as a social force, evolving from purist aesthetics into today’s media, with the power to make and promulgate images shaping the future of our society. On the Information Superhighway, media is at the forefront between pluralistic, free access to the tools of information dissemination and profit-motivated commercial exploitation by multi-national conglomerates.

Filmforum continues as the longest-running showcase for independent, experimental and progressive moving-image art in Southern California. Filmforum presents and supports work by artists in all stages of their careers. Filmforum has shifted its primary venues through the years, moving from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood to Westwood and back to Hollywood. It currently screens 30-40 programs per year at our primary venue, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, most with the filmmakers in attendance, and co-presents several other shows at other venues.

Among Filmforum’s programming highlights over the past 32 years:

Filmforum has given the world, national, or local premieres of almost every significant experimental/personal, non-commercial film of the last three decades. Many went on to garner national or international attention, such as:

1. ✦Jon Moritsugu’s Der Elvis
   

2. ✦Nina Menkes’ Queen of Diamonds
   

3. ✦Greg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up
   

4. ✦Betzy Bromberg’s cinematic plea for corporeal sanity, Body Politic: God Melts Bad Meat
   

5. ✦Stan Brakhage’s controversial narrative, Faustfilm
   

6. ✦James Broughhton’s Devotions
   

7. ✦Abigail Childs’ Mayhem
   

8. ✦Ernie Gehr’s Signal: Germany on the Air
   

9. ✦Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucci’s From the Pole to the Equator
   

10. ✦Todd Haynes’ breakthrough Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
    

11. ✦Jonas Mekas’ He Stands in the Desert Counting…”
    

... to name only a few. New works by these artists are presented whenever possible, along with works by contemporary media artists whose aesthetic grows from or comments on their work. Most of these premieres were attended by the filmmakers who discussed their work with the audience.

Show for the Eyes, from 1982, the first international mail art film project, reassembling short films from many of the world’s most prominent makers into 2 now-legendary 90 minute films, one in super 8, one in 16mm.

Another significant series from Filmforum’s early years was El Ojo Apasionado, a month-long showcase for alternative film by Mexican and Mexican-American artists. It was among the first festivals bringing together Latino artists in a forum elucidating the common threads of a culture in flux.

In spring 1993 Filmforum and the Getty Center presented Urban Activism: Notions of a New L.A., a city-wide series of screenings and panel discussions about the process of rebuilding the city, from the perspectives of community leaders and under-recognized voices.

In fall 1993, Filmforum produced Dirty Movies: A Peak at the Underground from the 60’s to the 90’s. This series of rarely seen films and videos were enormously popular, attracting a large audience of newcomers to contemporary media arts and its historical antecedents.

Filmforum’s major festival in winter 1994, Scratching the Belly of the Beast: Cutting-Edge Media in Los Angeles, 1922-94, was an unprecedented celebration of the rich tradition of alternative media in Southern California. Including 27 evenings of screenings, tributes, and roundtable discussions over seven weeks, this city-wide festival was guest-curated by a diverse committee and co-presented by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the humanities, the Central Library, LA Municipal Gallery, MOCA, UCLA, and Beyond Baroque. The festival’s catalog included key historical and critical essays, providing the first substantial study of the role of alternative media in the capital of the commercial film and entertainment industry.

In 1997, Filmforum received a special award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for its role in exhibiting experimental films.

Programming over the last few years has included eclectic series of historical and contemporary work, with many in-person presentations by local and visiting artists.  Some of our major recent accomplishments include several shows introduced by David James in conjunction with his important book The Most Typical Avant-Garde: Geography and History of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles; a tribute to the late artist Nam June Paik, held at LACMA and co-presented with the Korean Cultural Center; and three nights of the documentary work of world-renowned Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski.

In 2008, Filmforum received a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980 initiative.  Filmforum is researching the history of experimental film in Los Angeles from that period, conducting many oral histories, organizing a symposium in 2010, and curating a series of screenings of works both well-known and long-forgotten.  Please visit our blog to read more about the progress of this project.

Highlights of the 2008-09 season include the sold-out North American premiere of Driving Men, the newest work internationally acclaimed and Los Angeles-based video artist Susan Mogul; experimental animation by Robert Breer; two programs of animated documentaries; rare visits to Los Angeles by less-known filmmakers from the east coast such as Coleen Fitzgibbon, Ted Lyman and Walter Ungerer; and three screenings of video art by Southern California video artists Allan Sekula, Jordan Biren, and Bruce & Norman Yonemoto in conjunction with the Getty’s exhibition California Video.  We also held the first West Coast version of the Orphan Film Symposium, a program featuring ‘orphaned’ works such as 1920’s newsreels, forgotten video art, and other ephemeral films and video.  Over the 2009-2010 seasons, we are hosting the first complete retrospective in Los Angeles of the films of Yvonne Rainer, as well as two shows with Ken Jacobs, and the second evening of our Festival of (In)appropriation: Contemporary Found Footage Filmmaking.

Filmforum is also one of the only low-budget non-profit arts presenters that guarantees an honorarium to every artist, regardless of attendance. All these activities have happened with only a volunteer staff, including the current Executive Director Adam Hyman. Filmforum has survived 33 years almost entirely on a volunteer basis, where other similar organizations have dissolved.

NOTE - We are not related to Film Forum in New York, nor to Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, two other excellent venues that screen alternative work.

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