Film Categories: art & artists

  • MM Myth Myth-A Collage

    An animated film exploring the myth of Marilyn Monroe. Amusing and sad. “One of the most remarkable and dedicated amateur filmmakers in the world…” – Movie Maker 10 Best, 1986

  • Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland

    Joyce Wieland was, for well over thirty years, one of Canada’s most exciting and innovative artists. She worked in virtually every artistic medium, including cloth works, pastels, coloured pencils, oils, bronze, watercolours, and films of all gauges. One of the founding group of what came to be known as structural filmmakers in New York in the late 60s, she was also one of the first artists of this century to break into women’s traditional crafts as an art form, and used both film and cloth works as platforms for her principal political subjects – ecology, Canadian nationalism, and feminism. This…

  • Mosaic

    “Mosaic’s carefully tuned strategies of montage are already present in its opening title sequence. Isolating the individual letters of its entitlement, it shows them in succession before gathering them all together. Likewise, Chambers recasts details from his surroundings in a symbolic lyricism that joins the rhythms of mortality and rebirth. Its fragmented collage collects a fly infested corpse, a woman strewing flowers, a runner, an old man standing, and a child nursing from his mother’s breast. An elegant and sophisticated reshuffling of domestic temporality, ‘Mosaic’ boldly anticipates the themes of Chambers’ well-known later work.” -Mike Hoolboom “It was in the…

  • Mother Marilyn

    This film is animated in the rough collage style that James MacSwain has made his own. Utilizing a series of vignettes, the film traces the story of the child born to Marilyn Monroe and President Kennedy. As the satire unfolds, the story becomes a metaphor for the collapse of the American Empirre due to mysticism and drugs. Also available on DVD on the compilation “James MacSwain Retrospective.”

  • Moving Bicycle Picture

    Duchamp once said about his bicycle wheel piece, “One day I had the happy idea to mount a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool and watch it spin.” One summer I had the happy idea of taking a bicycle trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay. The bicycle trip was recorded with a tiny “Keystone” camera. I leave out important events like eating and camping and concentrate mainly on what is seen from the moving bicycle. After a time the camera, bicycle and myself become entangled, involved, friends and enemies. A film on moving. As a film I often mount it…

  • Murder Psalm

    “In my novel ‘The Devils’ I attempted to depict the complex and heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in an absolutely monstrous crime.” – Dostoyevsky’s “The Diary of a Writer” “‘Murder Psalm’ is a vision of blood on the tracks, a response to the daily diet of T.V. death, to death in the raw, to childhood terror … a dense texture of swiftly crossing viewpoints, image placed against image, in a film of impassioned intensity.” – A. L. Rees, British Film Institute

  • Music for Wilderness Lake

    Twelve trombonists station themselves around the shore of a wilderness lake. At dawn and dusk, they play meditative music across the water to one another. The quiet and the water allow the sounds to echo back and become part of this piece of wilderness music written by the Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer. The event, as conceptualized by Schafer, is documented in “Music for Wilderness Lake”. The film shows plans, preparations, and the event itself.

  • Myth of Sisyphus, The

    In the language of collage, this experimental animation film is a visual interpretation of a story by Albert Camus. It concentrates on that moment when Sisyphus watches his rock fall. “At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning to his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that the series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under the memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has…

  • Narziss und Echo

    A film in the form of a riddle is a special kind of entertainment film, whereby the film’s content must be deduced from the film’s formal structure. “Long seemed invalid the Prophet’s word, – But honored it was, – By the outcome at last: – How odd the madness, how strange a death!”(Ovid, Metamorphoses).

  • Naughts

    A series of five hand-painted, step-printed films, each of which is a textured, thus tangible, “nothing.” A series of “nots,” then, in pun, or knots of otherwise invisible energies. 1) The first begins with a semblance of fog clouds rising vertically, an upward lifting waterfall likeness which screens an ephemera of painted shapes that come, at end, to a rhythmic and formal hardness. 2) A progression of blue surreal shapes vanishing in forward movements. 3) A gathering of crystalline forms in primary colors emitting upward-moving flares of multicolored lights, all gradually suggesting an outward momentum. 4) An orange rock-beseeming wall…