Filmforum is Los Angeles' longest running venue for experimental film and video art, documentaries, and animation. Filmforum was incorporated in 1975 'to promote a greater understanding of film as an art form and the filmmaker as an artist by providing a forum for independently produced, experimental films, which have little opportunity of reaching the general public through normal channels of commercial distribution.' When Filmforum's first screening took place in an Altadena living room in November of 1975, organized by Terry Cannon, alternative media was at one of its aesthetic, technological, and social high points. Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Joseph Cornell, Chick Strand, Sara Katherine Arledge, and James Whitney, to name a few, were expanding the boundaries of film. Nam June Paik was exploring the first video synthesizer and multi-media had emerged from the relative primitivity of the 1960s, spawning a whole new interdisciplinary genre. A few visionary prophets were predicting such absurdities as shopping via television and videophones and, lurking in sci-fi cellars and the darker corners of academe, a handful of closeted geeks were whispering words like 'cyberspace. Since then, Filmforum has chronicled changes in social attitude towards the medium and society's media-vision of itself. Those changes have been reflected in media-makers' concepts of their art as a social force, evolving from purist aesthetics into today's media, with the power to make and promulgate images shaping the future of our society. On the Information Superhighway, media is at the forefront between pluralistic, free access to the tools of information dissemination and profit-motivated commercial exploitation by multi-national conglomerates.Filmforum continues as the longest-running showcase for independent, experimental and progressive moving-image art in Southern California. Filmforum presents and supports work by artists in all stages of their careers. Filmforum has shifted its primary venues through the years, moving from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood to Westwood and back to Hollywood. It currently screens 30-40 programs per year at our primary venue, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, most with the filmmakers in attendance, and co-presents several other shows at other venues.

[Source: Los Angeles Filmforum Website]