I was disheartened — but not surprised — this morning to read an open letter from Canyon Cinema Executive Director Dominic Angerame, in which he paints a fairly dire picture of the filmmaker collective’s immediate future. To make a long story short, the abandonment of film projection in favor of DVD screenings, especially in academic environments, has accelerated to the point where it’s nearly impossible for a company like Canyon Cinema, whose catalog represents a veritable who’s-who of avant-garde filmmakers, to continue operating on even razor-slim profit margins. Something has to happen, perhaps a radical shift in Canyon’s mission, and Angerame wants the filmmaking community to help decide what direction the company should take.

Organizations like Canyon Cinema have long been important pillars of the experimental filmmaking community. Similar entities include New York’s Film-Maker’s Cooperative, Paris’s Light Cone, and the Canadian Filmmaker’s Distribution Centre in Toronto but, as Angerame points out, those operations tend to be subsidized by government funds. Canyon apparently has a hard time getting the same kind of funds because of its status as a for-profit shareholder corporation that typically returns more than 40 percent of its gross income to the participating filmmakers. In turn, that money is meant to help artists continue making new films.

Filmmakers whose works are distributed on film by Canyon include Stan Brakhage, Oskar Fischinger, Bruce Conner, and other mainstays of the experimental-film canon. If you’re not familiar with their work — quick-cut found footage montages, evocative animations, miniature paintings on film stock — a quick Google search or visit to YouTube will give you a sampling of their accomplishments, many of which resonate to this day in mainstream filmmaking. (The opening titles to David Fincher’s Seven, for instance, were in part an homage to some of Brakhage’s techniques.)

Actually, that’s part of the problem. Once upon a time, if you wanted to know what Len Lye got up to in “Free Radicals” you had to see it in a film class or seek out a special screening of the film. These days, you can find copies of the most important experimental films online and, in some cases, on DVD. I’m sure it’s tempting to watch a film like Stan Brakhage’s “Mothlight,” which he made in 1963 by sandwiching arrangements of leaves, twigs, and insect parts between long strips of splicing tape and then running them through an optical printer, on Blu-ray and think you’re intimately familiar with the work. But there’s something different about seeing “Mothlight” on 16mm, in a dark room glowing with projector light and humming with the regular thrum of the film projector near the back wall. It’s the difference between seeing a very nice, full-size replica of a Picasso or a Van Gogh printed on fine paper and actually standing in front of the painting itself at the Museum of Modern Art, tracing the brushstrokes with your eyes.

Is it a bad thing to make experimental film more accessible with releases on DVD and Blu-ray? Surely not. Might an organization like Canyon Cinema be strengthened as economic realities force it to embrace the digital age? Perhaps. But in terms of film history and film essence, something gets lost. As digital cinema moves forward, it necessarily abandons the experience at the base of cinematic art and technology — watching shadows cast across the wall by a clockwork lantern shining light through celluloid in a darkened room. That’s an experience worth preserving, especially where film-as-fine-art is concerned.

It’s not actually that much money that’s keeping Canyon Cinema from remaining a going concern. Angerame’s letter seems to indicate that $25,000 per year is all that would be needed to keep the company alive in its present state. And he cites a “resurgence” of interest in these films from young people — maybe the cinephile equivalent of those audiophiles that have kept vinyl alive in the age of CDs and MP3s. I’m holding out hope that Canyon Cinema will be able to adjust to the times — maybe securing a wealthy, film-loving benefactor in the process — and keep 16mm prints of “Mothlight” in circulation for another 50 years.