By Johnny Ray Huston

'AVANT-GARDE film can be the greatest thing you've ever seen, and it can change your life," Michelle Silva says. "Or it can be the worst thing you've ever seen, and you want to erase it from your mind forever – but you can't."

Normal love: Michelle Silva's films - including, from left, How the West Was Hung, Amor peligrosa, and Cum Shots and Field Goals - range from carnal to skeletal desires.

We're sitting on a long white pleather couch in the enormous Mission District loft space, lodged above a discount store, where Silva lives. It's a place where she works too, and a place she worked hard to make, filled with the tools of her trade. Someone recently stole one of Silva's cameras, leaving her with a grand total of four, as well as a video projector, a 16mm projector, a mixer, a flatbed, a green screen, a nine-foot projection screen, rewinds, and what she calls "garden variety software." The shelves of her bedroom are stacked with reels.

"I think people can get the wrong impression about experimental or avant-garde art," Silva continues. "They think it shouldn't be fun, it should be very serious, but [it] ends up pretentious. That's what drives a lot of people away."

Silva prefaced a recent San Francisco Cinematheque screening by saying that her films are "less like cinematic poetry and more like dirty songwriting." But a viewer couldn't be blamed for thinking she pulls off both. Passing from raunchy humor through diary moodiness into an abstraction that can be transcendent – all in a half hour – this is personal filmmaking with a wide thematic and technical range. A candy-tinted rendering of an Indian girl's tomahawk-throwing rage, some up-close and bleary-eyed scrutiny of San Francisco bum antics, a visual equivalent of Otomo Yoshihide's hypnotic sonic adventures, skeletons performing stripteases – it's all in a day's camerawork for Silva.

She acknowledges this diversity can be a problem: "If people can't categorize or label you, it makes them uncomfortable." "Daughter of Kuchar" is one such tag I'm tempted to apply, based on such shorts as the "barely erotic" bratwurst-blow job cowboy yarn How the West Was Hung and Daddy's Home – an ink-pooled portrait of a schoolgirl with a psycho father fixation. Silva's former teacher George Kuchar, the world's greatest writer of hyperbole and the man who inspired John Waters to pick up a camera, even plays the part of a voyeur in Daddy's Home, laughing as a plaid-miniskirted schoolgirl and her pa get down and dirty – in flesh-colored bodysuits with parts drawn on them.

"George has this kind of innocent quality to him that's really beautiful," Silva says, her voice growing warmer at the mention of her mentor's name. "He says, 'Just make movies, and don't worry about where they end up. Make them for yourself, because a lot of the time you might be the only one who is going to see them anyway.' That's the truth – even at the top, it's not a glamorous life. I know that, and it hasn't discouraged me."

Not a glamorous life, but a rewarding one. Along with another of her "film heroes," Dominic Angerame – whom she credits with teaching her "the nuts and bolts" of the medium – she holds down the fort at Canyon Cinema, the home of experimental and avant-garde film in America, which maintains and distributes work by icons such as Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage. None other than George Lucas has recently taken to name-checking Canyon as an influence in places ranging from Wired to The Charlie Rose Show. When I joke that the Georges Kuchar and Lucas have a love of green screens in common, Silva says Kuchar once showed her a picture of the two shaking hands.

Silva has been working at Canyon since the summer of 2003. "There are plants there older than me," she jokes. Nonetheless, she's gotten a lifetime's education, thanks to Angerame and her own curiosity. She cites Peter Kubelka (particularly his 1958 beer-ad-gone-mad Schwechater), Oscar Fischinger, and tic orchestrator Martin Arnold as inspirations. "I get to stretch these films across the bench and see them frame by frame," she says. "It's like being the gatekeeper to filmmakers' secrets. I think [that] since I've been there, I've had more of a fetish for the tactile qualities of film."

This fetish takes a variety of forms. The skeletal eternal love story Amor peligrosa plays with negative and superimposed images. Mating Season also makes comedic use of superimposition, opening with the spectacle of a scientist peering through a microscope at a caterpillar – as it crawls over an erect cock. The athletics of the well-named found-footage frenzy Cum Shots and Field Goals tend toward the camouflage-clad water sports variety, as Silva edits the action – at one point a bored cat wanders past a rutting couple – with a stand-up's sense of timing.

More somber is Fluorescent Influx, an atmospheric black-and-white nighttime view of New York in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, which happened the day after Silva had secured a sublet for a visit. "People would say, 'I'm a world traveler, and I wouldn't go to a place where they're sending jumbo jets through skyscrapers,' " Silva says. "But I wanted to be there. It was history." Her record of the time includes William Klein-like captures of subway messages, and a glance at Wall Street digital scrolls about "12 million tons of World Trade rubble." President George W. Bush's face is set to "Taps," which segues into Randy Sellgren's effectively tense electronic score.

Sellgren is just one electronic musician Silva's collaborated with – she's also working on a feature-length video of Yoshihide in performance, to be released by Naut Human's Asphodel label next year. "He's a tinkerer," she says about the Japanese turntablist. "I like to think of him as a sculptor, because of the objects he uses." The Yoshihide project was partly shot using wide-angle surveillance video cameras, an approach that allowed Silva and her collaborators a close-up view of the various objects the musician dances across vivid red, blue, and green records, creating symphonies of drones and subsonic rumbles.

"Light through emulsion and ones and zeroes are never going to look the same," Silva says when asked about the thorny topic of film versus video. "We face this time when there's a huge technological divide. Will film still exist as a cult art medium? I hope so. I think it will because there's a relationship you can have with film – you can touch it, you can handle it, you have an intimacy with it. You manipulate it, it manipulates you. It makes you do crazy things like lose sleep, not eat, and spend lots of money. In the end, for no real gratification – except what it gives to you."

Silva's drawn to the challenge of working on celluloid. "There are so many ways to destroy a film," she says. "You have to be very tech savvy to pull it off – or rich enough to hire someone. But the kind of films I make are not about money – they're about the lack of it." One chief example would be BUMS, a 16mm street-life portrait she shot from a former apartment at Sixth Street and Tehama during a spate of unemployment. The blasted-out film quality adds an arctic weirdness to glimpses of toothless grins and booze guzzled from bottles in paper bags. At one point a man puts on a bizarre hooded winter coat that makes him look like a cone-hatted wizard.

During the S.F. Cinematheque screening, when BUMS ended, people hesitated before applauding. "It's been called mean-spirited," Silva admits. "But I'm not doing anything to make bums do what they do – this is all just what I saw from my front window." She says copious editing was required to keep the end result from becoming a two-hour "film about people peeing." The movie's final passage – in which a man drunkenly holds and beholds a black plastic bag, letting it float in the wind – takes on unexpected poetic pathos, recalling the windblown plastic bag of Nathaniel Dorsky's Variations, an image infamously stolen by Hollywood for American Beauty.

Money is something Silva will need for her first feature-length project, a planned trash-cinema epic about the fall of the Aztec empire. She's been working on a script for two years. "There will be a lot of religious sacrifices and war scenes," she enthuses, acknowledging the movie will have to be shot on digital video. "What happened with the Spanish and the Aztecs is the collision of the beginning of the modern world with the peak of ancient civilization, right there in Mexico. It has everything – religion and love stories and sex. It'll be campy and ridiculous, dubbed in Spanish with English subtitles."

In the meantime, Silva's true love should keep her occupied. She's been painstakingly accumulating "China girls" – women who appear between numbers in film leader – for an optically printed short work she likens to a rubber band ball or card collection. "They were called 'China girls' because at one time, only Chinese girls were used as skin-tone references in the color charts of films," she explains. "That was declared racist. Then it became mostly white women – you rarely saw the Chinese girls anymore. They really didn't find the balance with that."

Silva is also working with Bruce Conner on a large project he has planned. "Bruce Conner is a serious cat, but he has the greatest sense of humor," she says affectionately about the filmmaker, who is notorious for not gladly suffering fools. "Now, Bruce is just Art – everyone steals from him. He's defined what art is; it's not even Bruce's anymore, it's part of the art world. He's one step ahead of everyone, even today. I think I get along so well with people like George and Bruce because we're not looking to anybody for approval, we're just doing the work. You want this thing to exist. You think, I wanted to see a film like this, and there just wasn't one – so I made it.' "