Via the Flaherty Seminar’s Twitter comes the news that West Coast nonfiction filmmaking legend Chick Strand passed away over the weekend at the age of 78. A force behind the formation of art/underground film distributor Canyon Cinema and founding editor of the influential Canyon Cinemanews journal, as a filmmaker Strand (real name: moved fluidly from found footage collages (like Loose Ends, which you can watch on Vimeo) to impressionistic ethnographic documents shot in various parts of Mexico to not-quite-feminist portraits of female experience.
An example of the latter, Strand’s 1979 feature Soft Fiction was a huge early eye opener for me when I first saw it in art school ten years ago. A sort of narrative built out of five women’s first-person stories about their sex lives shot in Strand’s inimitably intimate style, it’s the kind of film that reveals the arbitrariness of the lines that we draw between genres.
There was an excellent story about Strand in the LA Weekly a couple of years ago which offers a sense of her personality; I’ve excerpted a section about her teaching style after the jump.
Strand, who stayed in Los Angeles after graduating from UCLA in 1971, taught at Occidental College for 24 years, where she would sit in the back of the room next to the projector, showing films such as [Bruce] Conner’s A Movie and smoking like a chimney. “I sort of made up the program as I went along,” she muses, explaining that she basically was the film program for many years. A class with Strand generally started with each student describing his or her first sexual experience; after that, no one had anything more to hide and they could get on with the business of making movies
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