JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

The Bay Area–based independent filmmaker Toney W. Merritt has been creating work for over fifty years. His unique corpus of personal films and videos draws upon and subverts numerous experimental, narrative, and documentary strategies and techniques. Like the work of acclaimed African American visual artist David Hammons, who rose to prominence in Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s and 1980s, Merritt's work shares some of the same allegorical and self-referential aspects and obscure humor and is distinguished by an unusual combination of playfulness, opacity, and formal concision. As a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in the late 1970s, Merritt was part of a thriving subculture of personal cinema and radical individualism. Like many of his teachers and peers of the time, such as James Broughton, Mike Henderson, George Kuchar, Robert Nelson, Dean Snider, Babeth M. VanLoo, Marian Wallace, and Al Wong, Merritt made art firmly rooted in a San Franciscan bohemian tradition and style.¹ Iconoclastic, performative, and disarmingly funny, Merritt's films belong to a broader repudiation of the aesthetic seriousness that dominated experimental cinema culture in the 1970s. [End Page 170]

This repudiation of aesthetic seriousness and cultural gatekeeping is further borne out in Merritt's involvement with the No Nothing Cinema group, which posed a challenge to the institutional hierarchies and professionalization of the Bay Area's avant-garde film establishment by advocating for more inclusive, transparent, and democratic programming. However, despite being an active, long-term presence in the San Francisco Bay Area film community, Merritt remains an underappreciated contributor to the postwar American avant-garde film movement and alternative media culture. He has been left out of most of the significant histories of regional, national, and international experimental media. Scott MacDonald's Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor and Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000 barely mention him.² How to account for Merritt's absence from the American avant-garde canon?

I assert that Merritt's recent reemergence after decades of neglect is emblematic of the current curatorial infatuation with "overlooked" and "forgotten" artists—artists who, for reasons of race, sexuality, gender identity, class position, or geography, were marginalized or ignored for the majority (if not the entirety) of their careers. In a recent discussion about the French West Indian filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, Another Gaze founding editor Daniella Shreir points out that "[t]he idea of 'rediscovery' in [Maldoror's] case basically signifies her long overdue discovery by white curators and programmers … the vocabulary around this sort of curation evokes the idea of an archaeological dig. It's a kind of fetishism of the unfindable, of the 'forgotten.' But forgotten by whom?"³ Set against 2020's sweeping protests of racist state violence, Shreir's analysis of "rediscovery" discourse provides an urgent call-to-action for institutions that have historically operated in the interests of white artists and audiences.

The organization I work for, and of which Merritt has been a decades-long member, is one such example. Founded by the filmmaker Bruce Baillie in Canyon, California, in 1961, Canyon Cinema began as an alternative exhibition venture created by and for friends. Baillie's backyard microcinema emerged in response to the top-down, centralized American media monoculture of the 1950s. Established amid a hotbed of countercultural activity and revolutionary politics, and in a spirit of do-it-yourself, community-based organizing, Canyon Cinema began as a forum to share locally made films (and other small-gauge fare) in a neighborhood environment. Intimacy, flexibility, and a rejection of formality and normality were its defining principles. The series quickly became semi-nomadic, hopping across a heterodox assortment of Bay Area locations, from an anarchist restaurant in Berkeley, to the Oakland Art Institute, to Chick Strand's backyard, drawing additional artists into its orbit as it went. In late 1966, this flourishing network of Bay Area independent filmmakers founded Canyon Cinema Co-op as a member-owned [End Page 171] and -operated distribution company and film service organization.^4...