TONEY W. MERRITT / Anthology Film Archives

https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/61925

Anthology is overjoyed to bring filmmaker Toney W. Merritt from the Bay Area to New York City for the first-ever extensive East Coast retrospective devoted to his 16mm films and digital video work. Merritt began his career in the late 1960s, and created films prolifically throughout the 1970s-80s. While there were occasional screenings of individual films in later years, it’s only more recently – following a devastating 2020 wildfire that destroyed his studio and archive, and the subsequent invaluable preservation of ten of his earlier films by

Canyon Cinema and the National Film Preservation Foundation – that his work has begun to attract the latter-day attention that it deserves.

Merritt’s films boast a highly distinctive set of concerns and stylistic/formal approaches, even within the realm of experimental cinema. Thematically and symbolically, they’re marked by a proliferation of imagery suggesting multiple, fluid, and often contradictory identities, perceived, imposed, or adopted (reflective of the experience of a Black artist negotiating a society permeated by prejudice). Structurally they’re distinguished by a striking proclivity towards loosely associated sketches and fragmentary imagery, while formally they feature innovative, evocative, and often puzzling uses of onscreen text (in a way that calls to mind the films of Robert Nelson, Joyce Wieland, Owen Land, and others). And through all of this, they explore questions of race, political engagement, and the artist’s role in society in ways that are subtle, slippery, and surprising.

“Merritt’s unique corpus of personal films and videos draws upon and subverts numerous experimental, narrative, and documentary strategies and techniques, 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, Lynn Marie Kirby, 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. Iconoclastic, performative, and disarmingly funny, his work belongs to a broader repudiation of the aesthetic seriousness that dominated experimental cinema culture in the 1970s. Utilizing a reflexive comedic sensibility, films such as EF (1979), ASIAM (1982), and LONESOME COWBOY (1979) elaborate a recurring character (played by the artist); Merritt’s tongue-in-cheek, 30-second REVOLUTION – part of the longer CONQUEST PIECE (1982) – subverts the romanticized iconography of the Black political radical by way of an unexpected pirouette as a pun on ‘revolution.’ As Merritt explains, these films ‘place emphasis on the individual’s place in the world; Who a person is as opposed to What they are. These films contain a measure of angst, irony and humor. Without the latter, it would all be bullshit.’” –Brett Kashmere, Executive Director, Canyon Cinema

Organized in collaboration with Lynne Sachs and Canyon Cinema. Special thanks to Toney W. Merritt and Brett Kashmere (Canyon Cinema).

Toney W. Merritt will be here in person to present each screening, with Q&As moderated by Lynne Sachs and other special guests!

Upcoming Screenings