Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

In 1961, she based The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for native filmmakers that Stanford University known as “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it bought the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal supplied what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for native filmmakers who lacked entry to Hollywood.

In 1966, the identical yr she started finding out ethnography on the University of California, Los Angeles (and the identical yr her son, Eric, was born), Strand introduced a three-minute brief, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” on the New York Film Festival. The movie captured the luminous, psychedelically coloured panorama of Strand’s second residence, in Mexico, by way of a roaming, nearly dancing digicam, with the faces of her buddies collaged seamlessly over fuzzy our bodies, vegetation and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

In 1967, Strand helped begin the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The group — half pop-up cinematheque, half artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental movies by now-famous administrators like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later grew to become a full-time nonprofit, with lots of its members’ works integrated into the National Film Registry.

By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist recognized for his imaginative album covers, have been splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she started to discover assemblage and ethnography extra formally in her artwork, leading to a number of works now thought-about landmarks of West Coast cinema, together with “Fake Fruit Factory,” about ladies who work in a manufacturing facility making picket fruit.