While Santa Fe can always claim an inordinate number of theaters for the size of its populace, there is nothing that quite compares to No Name Cinema, that bastion of experimentalism, shorts, art films, visual arts and, often, popcorn.
This week, No Name hosts Canadian Underground: Films from the Black Zero Collection, an evening of rare restorations and experimental cinema curated by Canadian filmmaker and preservationist Stephen Broomer. Spanning five decades of underground filmmaking, the program transforms the anti-capitalist theater into a space where lost images collide with radical aesthetics. Many of these works haven’t been widely screened since their creation, and some survive only because Broomer personally tracked down privately owned prints—or fragments thereof—and painstakingly restored them. For Santa Fe audiences, that makes this program a fleeting chance to witness forgotten visions while updating and upgrading their cinematic lexicons, and because many of these films don’t “fit into a definitional frame,” according to Broomer, programs like this offer a rare opportunity to experience work that has been lost over time.
Born out of the mid-2000s and officially formalized in 2016, the Black Zero Collection reflects Broomer’s mission to safeguard fragile work. The project began out of necessity: When Broomer encounters a film or filmmaker whose work is at risk of disappearing, he preserves it, often because no one else will. He began this work as a grad student, often preserving films independently and without institutional funding. Where federally funded arts organizations could not keep up, Broomer would step in, but it’s not just about rescue—it’s about resonance. As Broomer puts it, the collection is “idiosyncratic by design,” and guided by what speaks to him as both an artist and historian.
While education and preservation are central to his work, Broomer also says his goal is to bring forgotten gems to audiences who will appreciate them.
“I feel it’s my duty to illuminate the conceptual, thematic and aesthetic structures of these films, but knowledge of all that isn’t necessary to appreciate them,” he tells SFR. “They’re rhythmic and aesthetic, and the response they demand is a sensory one.”
Given No Name Cinema’s affinity for showcasing the type of film you won’t find on Netflix or in the local megaplex, the collaboration with Broomer feels serendipitous; many of these films haven’t ever screened for audiences until now.
“A lot of truly vanguard work doesn’t meet its audience in its own time,” Broomer notes, making Canadian Underground feel even more vital—particularly as streaming services like HBO Max simply disappear films and television programs once licensing deals lapse.
For No Name Cinema co-founder Justin Clifford Rhody, preservation is, of course, part of the cause, and sharing film with others as a jumping off point for generating arts and ideas is still a key aspect of cinema itself.
“This screening provides members of our local community a rare opportunity to experience underground Canadian films created over the past six decades,” Rhody says. “The eclectic range of voices and techniques throughout the short films brings with it a wealth of new ideas and inspiration for anyone interested not only in the arts, but life in general.”
At the heart of this program is a shared preoccupation with the photographic image—a recurring thread in much of Canadian experimental cinema, according to Broomer. Nowhere is this theme more explicit than in the opening film, Rick Hancox’s Wild Sync (1973), an intimate demonstration of Hancox’s playful approach to audio synchronization. Brimming with warm, affectionate interactions between friends and family, the short celebrates cinema as a kind of shared discovery, a gesture that sets the tone for the rest of the evening.
From there, the program drifts into radically different voices and textures. Josephine Massarella’s Green Dreams (1994) offers a rhythmic and beautifully scored meditation on urbanization punctuated by fragments of poetry and sound. The version screening at No Name was meticulously reconstructed from three separate prints after the original negatives were lost, a reminder of just how close these works came to vanishing.
And there is so much more from there. In Christine Lucy Latimer’s Over {Past:Future} Sight (2008), for example, the visceral view through a surgeon’s microscope captures a laser eye surgery performed on Latimer’s father, collapsing gut-wrenching intimacy into abstraction. Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s Fugitive L(i)ght (2005) transforms century-old footage captured by Thomas Edison and the Lumière Brothers (who created the cinematograph, a hybrid camera/projector) into a luminous, entrancing collage, layered with a reworking of Wagner’s Die Walküre by Colin Clark, making the film feel at once ancient and strangely futuristic. Finally, Mark Loeser’s Sugar Beach (2011) uses multiple exposures on a single roll of film to create overlapping windows into shifting instances of time and place, collapsing memory and vision into a single frame.
Through these five works, the photographic image is continually fractured, reassembled and rediscovered. What forms is a meditation on process, aesthetic and the capabilities of film photography as a medium.
Canadian Underground: Films from the Black Zero Collection: 7 pm Friday, Sept. 12. $5-$15 suggested donation. No Name Cinema, 2013 Pinon St., nonamecinema.org
