Film Categories: Abstraction

  • My Canada Train Journey

    50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?

  • Sister Mother Lover Child

    A house of women adjusts to life in the aftermath of an event unnamed.

  • Dark Star Entropy

    A black hole, first thought to be “dark stars” that we couldn’t see, are the most powerful objects in existence which bends light, time and reality to its will. Dark Star Entropy is a handcrafted on 35mm film made to be a short meditation on the impossibility of truly being able to comprehend on an intuitive level these galactic behemoths.

  • ELEMENTAL VISION or a film for the rest of my life

    “Elemental Vision or a film for the rest of my life” is ‘about’ light and time – moments captured in their passing, light events shot in various rhythmic patterns. It is about light and not particularly about the objects lit. The congruence of film’s basic properties with how we experience reality (in time/motion, through light) has been a guiding factor in my approach to filmmaking. Of course, there are people and other natural subjects filmed – incorporated -coming into view – a surprise. Intertitles mark sections, create pauses and breaks. They come from various sources suggestive of film terminology and…

  • Buses don’t stop here anymore

    Buses don’t stop here anymore is a chronicle on Super 8 of the closure, abandonment, and demolition of the Greyhound bus station in Ottawa, Canada. Once an important site for coming and going, an emotive epicenter, the camera observes the building’s erasure, dismantled by machines that writhe in the dust of demolition. Optical printing translates the act of observation into a requiem for a building, once so present and vital, now a ghost of the past. Filmed on Ektachrome Super 8 over a three year period from the sudden closure of the Greyhound station in April 2020 to its demolition…

  • La noirceur souterraine des racines

    Shot in Quebec (Canada), La noirceur souterraine des racines (The subterranean blackness of roots) is a 16 mm film triptych which uses several processes specific to analog cinema (hand processing, optical printing, photochemical alteration). The film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us.

  • consider

    bombs like fireworks, the artifice of televised war in a soft, black sky, perforations of light in the film’s velvet for any serious reflection the sidereal consider in memory of the fallen in Gaza, the stars

  • Both, Instrument & Sound

    Both, Instrument & Sound employs tension as an aesthetic strategy, to explore solidarity, collective struggle, and the transformation of these values under neoliberalism. The film follows the life of Tony over 3 years as he describes his process of political activism from the 1970s onwards, which cannot be disentangled from his friendships and his lovers. The film’s score – co-written with musicians, the film’s cast and crew – sonically explores different interpretations of tension—both in response to Tony’s narration and to the musicians’ existing approaches to tension as a musical, cinematic, scientific, and political experience. Everyone translates, performs and remixes…

  • A Fiscal Life

    Capital is unavoidably ingrained into every day life. Influenced by the quote attributed to Fredric Jameson; “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” A film created from the frustration and struggle of how it’s nearly impossible to imagine surviving without money in the world today. It’s such a necessary part of living that that you could say it’s part of our DNA, and for art it’s no different. It’s physically, violently, part of everything we do and see.

  • Rabid Beach

    This psychedelic and traditionally animated music video for hardcore band Pig Pen was created out of 600 hand painted animation frames.