Effecting Repair: A Canyon Cinema Report on the "Rediscovery" of Toney W. Merritt

Abstract

The Bay Area– based independent filmmaker Toney W. Merritt has been creating work for over fifty years. His unique corpus of personal films and videos draws upon and subverts numerous experimental, narrative, and documentary strategies and techniques. Like the work of acclaimed African American visual artist David Hammons, who rose to prominence in Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s and 1980s, Merritt’s work shares some of the same allegorical and selfreferential aspects and obscure humor 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, 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.1 Iconoclastic, performative, and disarmingly funny, Merritt’s films belong to a broader repudiation of the aesthetic seriousness that dominated experimental cinema culture in the 1970s.