From September 19-21, the Studio 8 Film Festival will celebrate the visionary spirit of the film department at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), a core part of the development of experimental film on the West Coast for decades. Studio 8 wasn’t your typical classroom. In many ways, it operated more like a production studio. Classes spanning across film, photography, and performance art were held within its walls, and the black box was made available to students for their own projects nearly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The space served as a key incubator for young filmmakers developing their visual vocabularies and finding their voices as artists. Organized by SFAI alumni, the festival’s second year is dedicated to two of its most influential figures: the late Gunvor Nelson, a Swedish filmmaker who taught at SFAI for more than two decades, and Lawrence Jordan, a pioneering presence in collage film and founding member of the Canyon Cinema cooperative. Their innovative works anchor a program of more than 30 films made by SFAI staff & alumni, continuing the school’s tradition of curiosity and bold experimentation despite the school’s closure in 2022.
A true alchemist of the moving image and faculty member at SFAI through the ‘70s and into the early ‘90s, Nelson crafted stunning, deeply personal films exploring the human body’s relationship to its environment, the passage of time, and our ceaseless quest for identity. Her work is characterized by a masterful, rhythmic sense of editing, thoughtful multi-exposures, rich color, and an intuitive understanding of how sound and music can elevate the moving image into raw emotion. Nelson passed away this last January and her absence is deeply felt, making this retrospective all the more significant.
Screening at the historic Roxie Theater on Saturday, Moon’s Pool (1973) is a tender examination of body politics evolving from ideas Nelson presented in an earlier work from the previous year, Take Off (1972). Shimmering textures of light dancing on nude bodies swimming underwater are captured in vivid blues, giving the piece an otherworldly atmosphere. Her images are paired with masterful sound design by Jack Criglar and Roger Kent to hypnotic effect, further emphasizing Nelson’s understanding of the impact sound and language can have on the moving image. The film speaks to the duality of masculinity and femininity, the arbitrary nature of our culture’s way of defining gender, and a rejection of categorization based on the bodies we inhabit. Despite tackling themes orbiting feminist movements throughout her career, Nelson notably preferred to be referred to simply as an “artist,” rejecting the label of “woman artist.” Following Moon’s Pool is a rare screening of Field Study #2 (1988), a collage film that blends live action, cut-out animation, and found footage. It manages to be even more abstract than Moon’s Pool while retaining a complex sense of rhythm.
While Nelson’s techniques left an indelible mark on SFAI, the film department itself wouldn’t exist without Lawrence Jordan. Jordan founded the department in 1969, a year before Nelson joined its faculty, and taught at the school for more than 30 years. Prior to this, Jordan played a significant role in the San Francisco art scene beginning in the late 1950s. As a founding member of the Canyon Cinema cooperative, Jordan has exhibited and distributed avant-garde and artist-made films since the 1960s. The festival features a well curated selection from the more than 70 experimental films he has made throughout his career, including The Egg, a recent cut-out collage work completed in 2024, that demonstrates his ongoing dedication to Victorian engravings and 19th-century print imagery. His animated films have a distinct visual style that has influenced more widely known filmmakers, drawing inspiration from alchemical myths, classic science fiction, and other esoteric sources. Jordan’s collage style is perhaps best expressed in Our Lady of the Sphere (1969), a hallucinatory, psychedelic tale that blends baroque surrealism and science fiction. Featuring frequently abrasive sound design, the film follows a cast of oracular characters: a mysterious woman with an orb for a head, a deep sea diver, and a young boy, on a dreamy journey through time and space.
Many of the works by SFAI alumni featured in this year’s Studio 8 Festival echo the thematic explorations and studies of these two foundational filmmakers. An artist member of Canyon Cinema, Rock Ross’s Autumnal Diptych (1981) harnesses experimental effects and direct animation to playfully depict seasonal cycles of change, prioritizing emotional resonance with the audience over a concrete narrative. Michael LaRocco’s Lullaby to my Father (2019) has an intimacy comparable to Nelson’s works, piecing together found footage and family films to examine his father’s absence through his military service during the Vietnam War. Overlapping and coalescing images are thoughtfully synched to a gentle, soothing soundtrack to a peaceful, yet brooding effect.
Made in long-distance collaboration between John Muse & Brandamaris Rodriguez during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Giroscopio (2021) examines the way time moved during lockdown for many of us, focusing on the collective disorientation and loss of control over one’s own autonomy and mobility. Objects are filmed as protagonists, bodies are filmed as objects. Stone bricks remain still in the center of the camera’s frame as the world rapidly orbits around them, and Rodriguez’s body struggles to remain balanced on the edge of a dining room table. Many superimpositions are reminiscent of Nelson’s, but where her footage is calm, here it’s disorienting and manic.
Lightly (1979) was made by the final head of the Film Department, Christopher Coppola, who held the position from 2013 until the school’s recent closure. Created with a rigid structure to preserve creative equality between the three participating artists—Christopher Coppola (composer/filmmaker), Crispin Glover (actor), and Craig Clever (painter)—the droning electronic score and soft-toned backdrop were made prior to filming according to a democratically selected theme, and the footage of Glover’s improvised performance was left unedited.
Coppola earned his degree in 1987 while studying under the legendary independent filmmaker George Kuchar, who taught at Studio 8 for more than 40 years until he passed away in 2011. His work was honored in the first iteration of the Festival last year. After his death, his twin brother Mike continued teaching. George Kuchar made more than 200 films during his lifetime, the overwhelming majority with his students, passing down a form of artistic generational knowledge and wisdom to aspiring filmmakers. Coppola carried many of those principles forward in his own teachings within the walls of Studio 8.
The power of the Institute’s film department extends far beyond Studio 8. In its notoriously haunted sister studio, down seemingly endless flights of stairs leading deep into the school’s basement, Studio X was where students hand-processed reels of black-and-white reversal film, spliced their footage, and had access to mountains of found footage to make their own collage films or experiment with direct animation. Students hosted film screenings in the lecture hall and empty classrooms, filmed performance pieces on the roof, and exhibited their work in local galleries and theaters across the bay area. Though the school may have shuttered its doors, the legacy of the SFAI film department and legendary faculty endures, its influence radiating far beyond San Francisco through the generations of artists it nurtured. The films curated in this year’s Studio 8 Festival prove that the visionary spirit of the school, enthusiastically guided by pioneers like Nelson and Jordan, remain a vital force in independent cinema.
Studio 8 Festival 2025 is at Shapeshifters Cinema on Friday evening, September 19; the Roxie on Saturday afternoon, September 20; and SFMOMA on Sunday afternoon, September 21.
