Film Categories: Architecture

  • Husbandry

    Mary Imrie (1918 – 1988) and Jean Wallbridge (1912 – 1979) operated their architecture firm—the first run by women in Canada—at Six Acres, the home they built for their work and life together overlooking the North Saskatchewan River in west Edmonton. When Mary Imrie passed away, she bequeathed the records of their remarkable architectural practice and adventurous life, along with their home, to the province of Alberta. With a title borrowed from a telegram in the collection, GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY is Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s immersive exhibition that playfully imagines and speculates in…

  • The City And

    On a bleak day in midwinter, a girl travels to her city’s bus station to meet someone. She travels familiar streets and moves confidently. Her relationship with her city changes when no one arrives on the expected bus. She wanders out of the bus station, noticing her city in a new way.

  • Home Movie

    Mostly close-up views of my house and family. (PL)

  • Home Was Never Like This

    Step-printed images of a “home” – a suburban house, no people in sight – combine with a children’s story, told in saccarine tones, about the country mouse who discovers that “there’s no place like home.” A gently told tale of alienation.

  • Hot Pepper

    “Hot Pepper” plunges the viewer deep into the music of Clifton Chenier and its sources in the surroundings of rural and urban Louisiana. The great French accordionist mixes rock and blues with his unique version of Zydeco music, a pulsating combination of Cajun French with African undertones. In addition to scenes of Clifton belting it out at sweaty dance halls, the film winds his music through the bayous and byways of the countryside and into the streets and homes of his people.

  • House Movie

    “House Movie” is a direct autobiography, with events interpreted as they were in progress. It is about living intimately with another person, in a rented house which never becomes home, due to an unavoidable separation. At times the camera almost takes the point of view of the architecture, as witness to the kind of transient emotions common to houses like this. Using a Rachmaninoff excerpt, the film is edited symphonically, with theme and subordinate theme, development and re-capitulation, echoed in the recurring visual motifs and rhythmic cutting. “The extravagant camera movement that marks ‘House Movie’ is not so much lyrical…

  • In the Alcove, at the Place

    For “In the Alcove, at the Place” Davis went back to the alcove (a private place in her room) and the place (the four corners of an intersection in Toronto, consisting of a house, two grocery stories, and a coin wash) every couple of weeks for nine months. In her alcove she filmed herself sitting in a chair; at the place she filmed aspects of its everyday life, making discoveries about it and becoming friendly with some of its inhabitants. In both alcove and place, there is change but also repetition. Among other things, the film concerns her growing familiarity…

  • Interieur Interiors (To A. K.)

    Halls, doorways, and walls in a room are shot in such a way (employing focus changes, reframing, introducing outside objects) as to confound and puzzle the viewer about the represented space. “‘Interieur Interiors (To A.K.)’ creates a cinematic space that remains separate from representation, severed from the profilmic but nevertheless presenting an illusion of space. It is a film that hovers between conceiving the interrupted projection beam as an image… and conceiving it as a non-image, a mere illumination of the surface on which it falls. The gap between these extremes is posed by Grenier’s film as the raw data…

  • Mary Mary

    Presented as an autobiography, “Mary Mary” interweaves the political with the mythical; visual and textual “quotes” from other films with fragments of children’s stories; and dreams and memories with history. “M” is an ambiguous figure: an English-Canadian woman filmmaker struggling with the representational structures that form and are formed by her as she tries to make a film. At first her script eludes her. Locked in her room, she becomes tangled in a web of memories, images and stories, quotations and histories. Yet even within these confines (narrative and psychic, as well as architectural) the possibility of new readings is…

  • Mid Span and Parallel Views

    These two complex visual puzzles were shot over several months on two of Vancouver’s many bridges – the Lion’s Gate and Burrard Street Bridges. Shots taken at different times are optically printed to produce an unusual portrait of each bridge.