49 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality: The City Envisioned by Canyon Cinema
6:15pm Wednesday, October 14, 2026
The Roxie Theater, San Francisco

Part of The Roxie’s Arthouse 50 series

Event tickets here

In celebration of The Roxie Theater’s 50th year as an Arthouse, this program assembles films made by former and current Canyon staffers, offering manifold views of our shared Bay Area home. Urban landscapes familiar and defamiliarized; flipped upside down, reversed, layered, blurred, shrouded, screwed and glued, but unmistakably SF. Together, these irreverent depictions evince the city’s charm, complexity, and transformation across five decades.

Screening Line-Up:

Pacific Far East Line (Abigail Child, 1979, 12 minutes, color, silent, 16mm)

An urban landscape film constructed from materials gathered over two years looking out at downtown San Francisco. The elements “folded” and mixed, Time redefines Space: the erector and helicopter appear as toys within a schizy motor-oil-ized ballet mechanique.

By the Sea (Toney W. Merritt, 1982, 2 minutes, color, silent, 16mm)

A film made from my old studio apartment on Telegraph Hill. A portrait of sorts.

Cable Car Melody (Charles Wright, 1986, 26 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)

You will look down Hyde Street and see San Francisco Bay in the background. In the foreground a cable car will move across the surface of the screen, while almost everything else will change, from shot to shot, to create a melody.

Premonition (Dominic Angerame, 1995, 10 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm)

“Roads, bridges, street lamps and underpasses are all harbingers of an untold urban tale, set in the vacant San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway before its destruction. We are led through a desolate cityscape as if we were actually penetrating it. A bridge covered with graffitied sperms heading towards downtown, is a metaphor for the man-made womb that is the city. Premonition’s approach is as lucid as it is perplexing.” (Images Festival)

Revolver (David Sherman, 1992, 9 minutes, color, sound, 16mm)

Revolver incorporates diary observations, found and physically manipulated images as well as experiments of shooting through handmade pinhole lenses. This film is an attempt to come to terms with the isolation and displacement that confronts the contemporary urban dweller; a personal journey through social, physical and psychic landscapes that are both beautiful and tragic. Light motivates growth and decay. Abstractions push and pull in the passage of time toward an exceedingly anxious future.

Decked Out (Linda Izcali Scobie, 2014, 1 minute, color, sound, 16mm)

seconds at sea

Return to Forms (Zachary Epcar, 2016, 10 minutes, color, sound, digital video)

A constellation of objects, each emerging into the soft peach-light void of an indeterminate condominium space.

Approximately Running Time: 70 minutes