Film Categories: Architecture

  • Desert Veils

    “Desert Veils” is a personal exploration of images of women filmed in the Chihuahua Desert of north-east Mexico. I was part of a film crew documenting the daily activities of an archeological dinosaur dig; when I wasn’t working with the film crew I was shooting my own images, looking beyond the disarticulated fossils and apparent structures, searching for what seemed elusive, hidden from me in my initial encounters with the women I met in Mexico. Given the cultural differences and structures that existed around me, my original images made me feel no closer to what I was seeing. It is…

  • Man Who Built My Childhood, The (The Epic Story of My Life Appendix B)

    Brian Stockton’s series of humourous autobiographical shorts takes a detour into architecture with this 5-minute “appendix” about renowned Saskatchewan architect Joseph Pettick. Pettick has designed a staggering 500 buildings in Saskatchewan, and his impact on the province and the filmmaker is enormous. “I have lived my life in Joseph Pettick’s buildings” states the narration. Stockton explores three of Pettick’s masterpieces including Grant Road Elementary School which had a huge impact on the filmmaker’s early life and has figured prominently in Stockton’s EPIC STORY OF MY LIFE series.

  • Michael Snow Up Close

    “MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE” was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow’s creative genius, including glimpses of his work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works, performance, installations, and holography. Discussions with Snow, original documentation of his music and performance work, and excerpts from his avant-garde films, are complemented by interviews with filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Bruce Elder, Snow’s dealer Av Isaacs, the architect Eb Zeidler, museum director Pierre Théberge, curator Louise Dompierre, and others. A deliberately conventional documentary about a deliberately unconventional artist.

  • Divine Mannequin

    “‘Divine Mannequin’ combines the media qualities of video and film with the graphic quality of an animated charcoal line drawing. The images – a subjective point of view of a runner, looped images of buildings and spheres, and a high angle close-up of a man’s face – are placed in a matte frame within a film frame. Rimmer’s film also underlines the human experience with the soothing rhythms and sounds of the runners’ stride, pace and breathing. The spectator is swept along with the aesthetic of everyday movement.” – Maria Insell

  • House of Olga, The

    The roots of invasive vines threaten the preservation of Casco Antiguo’s declining heritage buildings in the historic district of Panama City. While the area continues to gentrify rapidly, Olga quietly tends to the plants amidst her home of ruins. “THE HOUSE OF OLGA” documents an unorthodox traveler in search of the perfect dwelling. Spanish with English subtitles.

  • M

    “M” is a film of assemblage, juxtaposition and manipulation of hand-drawn animations that were scanned, manipulated and combined. The resulting images were printed on paper and reworked, then organized according to their level of complexity and the movements that constitute them. Small architectures appear and overlap. Brief nebulas arise, the most complex structures sometimes recalling constellations and other stellar clusters.

  • Ville Marie

    An optically printed dream of falling, both gorgeous and ominous. The body in mid-air. A canyon of high-rise buildings. Jury Prize for Best Canadian Work, WNDX Festival (Winnipeg, MB), 2010

  • Tobacco Shed

    “Tobacco Shed” is a record of the facades of a large agricultural building, housing tobacco-curing ovens. The near-uniform framing, and the relationship of the shots to each other, is determined by the regular forms of the building, and by the intention that the film be a complete record of the building’s outer surfaces. The sound is a single continuous recording made inside the shed from a fixed position. Thus a contrasting relationship between outside and inside is established through a corresponding relationship between image and sound, in such a way that the intrinsic contrast between these two modalities is emphasised.…

  • Generations

    “Generations” is a film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Seventy-year-old acclaimed director Barbara Hammer hands her camera to Gina Carducci, an aspiring queer filmmaker. The women, each shooting her own footage during the last days of Astroland at Coney Island, find that the inevitable fact of ageing echoes in the architecture of the amusement park. Separately editing their respective footage, the filmmakers ultimately blend their work, thereby creating a true generational, experimental document. World premiere at MoMA; winner of the Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the Berlin Film Festival; and winner of…

  • Back View

    The Upper West Side has some of the tallest brick apartment buildings in NYC. The orderly but deserted and aging concrete courtyards, their metal stairs and shafts, register a dramatically changing atmosphere. This is a cinema that seeks to observe, obscure, shorten and protract, and redefine, while remaining open ended. Selected screenings: Views from the Avant Garde, New York Film Festival, 2011; Off and Free Film Festival (Seoul, Korea), 2011