Lone Mountain College’s San Francisco Dance Film Festival 1976-1978

This paper tracks the history and development of the history of dance and film practice and collaboration in the San Francisco Bay Area from the early 1900s to the mid-1980s. It focuses on dance and film collaboration that emerged during the Art in Cinema Series presented by SFMOMa in the mid-1940s and how these collaborations informed the work created in the San Francisco Bay Area in the decades that followed. It highlights Lone Mountain College’s San Francisco Dance Film Festival, a series of multi-day curated dance film screenings and events that took place between 1976-1978 in San Francisco. It situates the festival within the context of the histories of the San Francisco dance community, the West Coast Experimental Film movement and interdisciplinary collaborations between the two. It examines the festival’s distinct curatorial approaches to both film screenings and accompanying events, as well as its significance in the world of dance film practice at the time. It also examines how the festival’s legacy was lost to history and surveys additional measures of preserving and spotlighting curatorial work in order to present a further expanded history of screendance practice and exhibition.