Film Categories: art & artists

  • Punch Me in the Stomach

    “Life imitating art” is how comic Deb Filler describes the connection between her real life family and the characters she depicts in her offbeat 36-character solo show “Punch,” which balances humour, love, passion and pathos. Recreating the diverse eclectic experiences of her far-flung family by magically transforming herself into character after character, this is the story of a Holocaust survivor wih a difference. These stories mould themselves into a comic repertoire which is daring and delicate. Her comic talent is best described as Jackie Mason meets Tracey Ullman, with the British comedienne’s flair for mimicry and the Lower East Side…

  • R34

    “Begun with a softly focused series of close-ups, London artist Greg Curnoe is unfurled in an impressionistic hue that gives way to a cataloguing of his Schwitters-like collages. Chambers proceeds with a strict attention to rhythm, chaining together recycled fragments in a round dance that swings in and out of closing doors, image winking out of darkness, the products of Curnoe’s labour intertwined with his own cooking, combing, taking out the garbage. His montage is not merely content to show an artist at work, but actively mimes the very work it is witness to. “A fragmentary confessional ensues, broken lines…

  • Rage Net

    A hand-painted film which deals with the mind’s visual absorption after the fact of blind rage. (Printed twice on the reel.)

  • Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen

    “Until ‘Rameau’s Nephew…’ no one has exhibited a film that deals so thoroughly with the range of perceptual problems elicited by the sound cinema.” – M. Keller, Chicago Film Centre “…an achievement of the originality and brilliance of ‘Wavelength.’ Snow embraces the problems on intimacy of language and thought with such variety, clarity and invention and high humour that again he seems to have made a film out of which an entire future movement could be mined.” – P. Adams Sitney, Soho Weekly News I started scripting this film in February 1972 and writing, shooting, mixing, editing and continued till…

  • Ranch: The Alan Wood Ranch Project

    “Ranch” is about The Alan Wood Ranch Project, a massive environmental art piece built on 320 acres in the foothills of the Rockies. Combining time-lapse photography, old Hollywood Westerns, television news and aerial photography, “Ranch” offers the viewer a refreshing new appreciation of the work. A film of breathtaking beauty and a document of surprising humour, “Ranch” is part experimental cinema, part documentary.

  • Rat Life and Diet in North America

    “I can tell you that Wieland’s film holds. It may be about the best (or richest) political movie around. It’s all about rebels (enacted by real rats) and police (enacted by real cats). After long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of prison and escape to Canada. There they take up organic gardening, with no DDT in the grass. It is a parable, a satire, an adventure movie, or you can call it pop art or any art you want – I find it one of the most original films made recently.” – Jonas Mekas “The film is…

  • Ray Gun Virus

    Although affirming projector, projection beam, screen, emulsion, film frame, structure, etc., this is not an “abstract film”/projector as pistol/time-coloured pills/yes – no/mental suicide & then rebirth as self-projection (sound: full volume, full bass). ” …I really do think you have a very fine film there of magnificent subtlety in its by-play with the texture of film and eye’s grain…” – Stan Brakhage “The retinal retention of after-images is remarkable.” – Ed Emshwiller Screenings/Collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Royal Film Archive, Brussels; Kolmischer Kunsteverein; United States Information Agency

  • Ball in California, A

    I took along a beach ball on my trip to California; it is bounced, rolled, tossed, kicked and carried by a motley collection of complete strangers who express a great range of attitudes towards the camera, the ball and me. This film incorporates an unusual improvised soundtrack for solo bassoon.

  • Red Car, The

    A cinematic demonstration of an antiquated form of “additive” film colour, in which alternate black-and-white frames are filtered red and blue-green, or red, blue, and green. Kinemacolor was patented in 1906, and its derivations were in use until the ’30s when “subtractive” colour systems were perfected. Colour television, which consists of luminous red, blue and green spots, is also “additive.”

  • Reflections on Black

    “Male-female interactions in a bleak and oppressive New York tenement; includes scratching on the film’s surface, as an early Brakhagean ‘metaphor on vision.’” – Marilyn Jull