Mar 30, 2011
SFFILM
The San Francisco Film Society’s daily online magazine, SF360.org, recently celebrated five years as a resource for quality writing about film and filmmaking. Since its launch on March 1, 2006, SF360.org, the country’s only independent regional film publication, has served a local and national audience of filmmakers, industry professionals and aficionados by broadcasting a Bay Area perspective on film culture, with reports on exciting films-in-progress being made here, opinionated reviews of art-house, independent and mainstream films screening in the Bay Area, entertaining interviews, analytical essays and a growing manual of how-to articles on the filmmaking process.
“Five years ago when we launched SF360.org in partnership with indieWIRE, we sought to foreground the alchemical genius at work in the Bay Area film community and publish writings with a perspective that is uniquely our own,” said Graham Leggat, executive director of the Film Society. “The recent redesign and retooling of the site has facilitated access to the vast archive of seminal writing about film by a stable of superb writers assembled by editor Susan Gerhard. We’re particularly grateful to the enlightened patronage of SFFS board president Pat McBaine, for funding SF360, giving us an early stake in the new world of nonprofit journalism.”
For five years SF360.org has offered a new model for journalism and arts writing, one that’s online, philanthropically funded and utilitarian, with the inclusion of both citizen journalists and experienced writers, a model practiced in part or whole by other relatively new publications including the locally created Bay Citizen and Bold Italic. Like New York’s Moving Image Source and Australia’s Senses of Cinema, it appeals to sophisticated followers of art and independent film. Like the other Bay Area online sites such as Flavorpill, Mubi, Fandor and the Rumpus that deliver cultural content and more (films, books, conversation, listings), it reaches out to new audiences.
A distinguishing feature of SF360.org is that its stable of accomplished, widely published writers includes some of the Bay Area’s most notable voices as well as international critics, among them B. Ruby Rich, Dennis Harvey, Michael Fox, George Rush, Hannah Eaves, Max Goldberg and Judy Stone. SF360.org speaks to a worldwide audience interested in what this literate, industrious corner of the world has to say about film and filmmaking.
Five years of daily publication have created a vibrant archive of more than 1,000 feature stories and the ever-expanding filmmaker’s manual Indie Toolkit, which gathers all in one place informative columns about the basics of creating a film and bringing it in front of audiences, offering insight into funding, screenwriting, story structure, legal issues and digital networking as well as access to an entire community talking about film. The distinctive upcoming screenings and events noted on Events and in SF360’s twice-weekly newsletter highlight the variety and vitality of the San Francisco Bay Area film and media scene.
SF360.org is helping shape ideas about the unique film industry of the San Francisco Bay Area, looking not just at one niche (animation, documentary, independent, art-house) but covering them all and finding correlations between them. Last summer SF360.org launched its Essential SF series of in-depth articles (sf360.org/essentialsf) about the idiosyncratic, multifaceted Bay Area filmmaking canon starting with Michael Fox’s look at three indispensible SF documentaries (The Times of Harvey Milk, Crumb and The Cockettes) and continuing with features on veteran visionaries: documentarian Les Blank, filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson, cinema/performance artist Anne McGuire, archivist Rick Prelinger, creative consultant Gail Silva and (posthumously) documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs.
An exciting development this year is SF360’s partnership with SFFS’s KinoTek program to bring key academic or literary figures to film writing through a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Novelist Mary Gaitskill’s in-depth feature on multimedia artist Laurel Nakadate (sf360.org/articles/in-depth) was the inaugural entry in an ongoing series that continues in June with an article about generative artist Marius Watz.
“The collaboration between SF360.org and the KinoTek program is especially exciting to me,” said Film Society Programmer Sean Uyehara. “The commissioned articles promise to be great reads, but more importantly, they extend one of the primary objectives of public programming which is to position new work and to give audiences access to artists’s concepts and methods.”
“I’m thrilled SF360 has emerged in tough media times as a vibrant forum for writing about film,” said Editor-in-Chief Susan Gerhard. “We’re looking forward to building our audiences nationally and internationally, promoting the Bay Area’s film and media industries and expanding access to our growing archive of features and resources.”
Susan Gerhard has been a working journalist and cultural critic for two decades. Her journalism and critical opinions have appeared in international, national and local publications, from Salon.com and Cinema Scope to Film Comment and indieWIRE. She was chosen as a Sundance Institute Arts Writing Fellow in 2002, and was a senior editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian for many years. She has edited SF360.org since its founding.
SF360.org was designed by Method and built by the Spider.
For information visit sf360.org.