Film Categories: Architecture

  • Living Space

    “Living Space” is a film about the relationship between architecture and illness which follows the construction of a new cancer care centre designed by architect Frank Gehry. It traces the process of creating a space specially designed for people affected by cancer, a patient-centred approach which attempts to counter the alienating atmosphere of the hospital. This was Gehry’s first commission since the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and his first building in the U.K.

  • Colonnade

    “Colonnade” is a visual essay on architecture and movement. Sparsely shot in black and white, the film seeks to capture both the perception of moving through space and feeling associated with space as the viewer is transported through a series of colonnades. The centrepiece of the film is the colonnade of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. This ramped colonnade, designed by Moshe Safdie and built in 1988, is an architectural splendour that leads the patron on a procession that is itself both ritual and ceremony, filled with exhilaration and anticipation. Available on VHS only.

  • Tabula Rasa

    “Revisiting footage he shot more than ten years ago in an American high school, Vincent Grenier combines deftly manipulated and layered images with oblique commentaries delivered by students and instructors. The socializing process of education is made visible in the architecture, surfaces and colours of the school, ‘in the ambiguous quality of appearances so assiduously cultivated by institutions’ (Grenier).” – Images Festival, 2005 Initial footage shot with the helpof a production grant from the Canada Council. Selected screenings & awards: Jury’s Citation (2nd Prize), Black Maria Film & Video Festival; 2nd Prize, Media City 11, Windsor, Ontario; Views from the…

  • Material Incidents: A Collection of Digital Videos

    MATERIAL INCIDENTS is a DVD compilation of work featuring the following titles: TABULA RASA (1993-2004) 7:30 min. Filmed in a South Bronx high-school, “Tabula Rasa” explores the ambiguousness of appearances cultivated by institutions, the clues that tell the history of objects, colours, textures, architecture and, ultimately, psychological states. Second Prize, Media City 11; Jury’s Citation, Black Maria Festival HERE (2002) 7:00 min. “Here” plays as some form of synthetic/organic haiku or renga (Japanese linked poetry), linking semblance to semblance working with the primal power and suggestiveness of transient colours. Gold for Best Experimental Film, New York Film Expo COLOR STUDY…

  • Condo

    “Buildings modeled on mausoleums, filled with retirees. What can we make of this? The word ‘condo’ has become charged with meaning in our culture. “The question of where to live has recently reached a fever pitch for many people in the richer Western industrialized nations. People are moving with greater and greater frequency, as if desperate to find the perfect ‘resting place’. At the end of the road is a gilded question mark. Is this what we worked so hard for?” Music by Jason Tait.

  • Business as Usual

    Vision. Leadership. Expertise. Monster. Who the hell is running things anyway? Is he man or beast, machine or god? Toronto, New York, London, Tokyo – “BUSINESS AS USUAL” invites you along for a psychotic ride through the financial power capitals of the world. Witness the omnipresent executive citizen as he (it) imitates you with his bizarre rituals of behavioral dysfunction. Description – “BUSINESS AS USUAL” If a Corporation were to be embodied in a human being, how would it act? What would it do? What would it look like? Described as an art-film version of ‘The Corporation’, “BUSINESS AS USUAL”…

  • Imprint

    “Louise Bourque’s ‘Imprint’ focuses obsessively on home-movie images of her family’s house, which seems gloomily oppressive, almost filling the frame; she repeats the images with various alterations – tinted, bleached, partly scraped away – as if attacking the place, turning its darkness into light.” – Fred Camper, The Reader, Chicago, April 16 1999 “‘Imprint’… throttles and exhausts a particular memory-image (a family on a porch in an ambiguous position – good-bye/hello, reuniting/reinforcing/celebrating?) and traces its corrosion and dissolution even as it intensifies it physically. Dyes, zip-a-toning, a weird daguerrotype shiny effect, and ripping makes for a very concrete trip.” –…

  • Along the Way

    A visual journal or diary, an experimental “travelogue,” where the signposts of interest are equally elements of architecture and plant life as people and events. Imposition of formal compositional strategies vies with the revelation of off-hand personal gesture to continually regenerate interest and belie expectation. Both a reminiscence and an ongoing investigation, the intent is to communicate the essential quality of “place,” which is always an amalgam of the visual and emotional. Friends who populate the images provide personal anecdotes for the soundtrack. Powerful (and painful) events in my life during the period of the film’s completion certainly influenced its…

  • In Every Dream Home a Heartache

    Kids on TV and Johannes Zits have together created a music video art piece based on Johannes’ visual work and the song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” performed by Kids on TV. The video takes the song’s plotline of a rich man falling in love with a rubber doll and uses it to critique queer consumerism and the advertising industry’s targeting of the gay-demographic — turning peoples desires into a fetishization of newly built condos and lavish funishings. The rubber doll is portrayed by KOTV member John Caffery is covered with green-screen paint and super-imposed with gay male pornography…

  • Block B

    A building becomes a living painting. The concrete homes and contradicting soundscapes frame the lives of an expatriate Indian community in Malaysia. “The grand scale of an aging modernist apartment block in the Brickfields neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur sets the stage for a macroscopic analysis of the quotidian activities of its inhabitants. Seemingly trivial actions assume significant meaning as lives entwine between the rigid lines of the building. Observational cinema at its extreme, ‘Block B’ reveals much about the social structure of the Indian working class in the outskirts of a Malaysian metropolis.” – Alex Rogalski, Toronto International Film Festival…