Film Categories: Architecture

This project is envisioned as an experimental film that will seek to challenge the modern-day purveyors of culture: Hollywood and Madison Ave. The philosophical urging of this piece will be that man’s over-reaching tendencies are based on human ego, and are out of balance with the natural world. The workings of a man’s ego can bring about greatness in art and architecture, science and medicine, but can also bring about catastrophe. Willed obliviousness to impending disaster is a human flaw readily exploited by corporate culture and media. This film will challenge the 1990’s credo: “Don’t think about it, just do…

Designed as a companion piece to “Canadian Pacific.” Shot from a window two storeys higher, on the fourth floor of the next building east from the artist’s studio of the previous year: December 1974 to February 1975. Can be projected alone or in double-screen format with Canadian Pacific.

The imagery of “Canal“ captures the activity of freighters, ship’s crews, dock workers and the historical masonry that the original Welland Canal was constructed from… The film is about going into my “own world of youth” and spontaneously documenting the canal environment as an adult. “Through Kerr’s use of both colour and black and white film stocks, selectively chosen to contrast present with past events, and also through his combination of imagery and text, he invokes the canal as a living presence. The canal itself becomes witness to all events that have occurred or will occur along it. Returned to…

Inspired by a lesson from Erik Satie; a film in the form of a street – Castro Street running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California … switch engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks and buildings on the other – the street and film, ending at a red lumber company. All visual and sound elements from the street, progressing from the beginning to the end of the street, one side is black-and-white (secondary), and one side is colour – like male and female elements. The emergence of a long switch-engine shot (black-and-white solo) is to the filmmaker…

A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see Chartres Cathedral. I, who had studied picture books of its great stained-glasswindows, sculpture and architecture for years, having also read Henry Adams’ great book three times, willingly complied and had an experience of several hours (in the discreet company of French filmmaker Jean-Michele Bouhours) which surely transformed my aesthetics more than any other single experience. Then Marilyn’s sister died; and I, who could not attend the funeral, sat down alone and began painting on film one day, this death in…

This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak – a memory piece, a “piecing-together” of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focused visual music – not to arrive at snapshots, as such, but rather to “sing” the city as remembered from daily living…complementary, then, to an earlier film, “Unconscious London Strata.”