Film Categories: environment

  • Architectures Landscapes

    Although made in 1993, this film languished for several years as the filmmaker attempted various remakes during 1994-95. Eventually he decided to preserve the original version and to allow the new experiments a place in the subsequent films, “You Take The High Road” and “We Are Experiencing ….” Luckily the filmmaker’s parents had kept a VHS video version of the original film, otherwise it would have been impossible to cobble together the various film elements from memory alone. The film marks the filmmaker’s first use of the optical printer as a tool for image manipulation and layering. The film is…

  • Minomen Harvest

    “Minomen Harvest” is a documentary of the traditional native method of harvesting wild rice which takes place outside the town of Ardock in Ontario. The August harvest begins with cutting the wild rice by hand, then the drying and winowing. No mechanization is used throughout the entire process. The film ends with a sunrise ceremony that honours Mother Earth, the creator of wild rice.

  • Monarch

    The poetic story of a butterfly’s life from his beginnings in a meadow, through his metamorphosis and his 3000 mile journey to the enchanted forest where Monarchs have gathered for centuries. The exceptional photography and the ethereal flute music by Paul Horn intensify the rainbow ballet of the Monarch’s life.

  • Mondrian Voor Rebecca

    I’m very certain it’s about the 30 km dyke in the north of Holland, the “Afsluitdijk.” I’m sure that the lines, the colours and the horizon figure heavy into grids, squares and rectangles. I’m positive it’s about being on an exquisite land/water edge and I’m assured it involves Rebecca, whom I barely know, and Mondrian, whom I barely know, and windmills. So I’m decided that much that is beautiful of Holland, apart from Rebecca, lies in the instinct that has refined the elements, and has become Science – not the other way around. (JG)

  • Monuments

    Utilizing the poetic voice to give language and meaning to the downtown monuments of Halifax, Nova Scotia, we discover that, if they could, our monuments would destroy the human race rather than face the onward thrust of history.

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past

    “Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, “Moose Jaw” is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along with a giant moose), and schemes to restore…

  • 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.

  • My Quills Click When I Walk

    The porcupine and the wolf converse in a forest underwood where light literally strobes through the trees. The porcupine delights in the clicks of her quills when she walks. When the wolf attempts to compete, she cleverly works him into a duet and all is well until the two are perturbed by a bee. An animated film which takes a subtle look at sources of aggression.

  • Name Your Poison It’s a Scream Channel No. 5

    A nasty little movie about violation and contamination – physical, geographical and ideological. The sound, built and mixed on a 4-track cassette recorder, was culled from shortwave radio, Italian B-movies, and a perfume advertisement. Chernobyl, AIDS, and sexual assault in a lament for our times.

  • Atmosphere

    “In ‘Atmosphere’ the camera pans back and forth over a body of water at a varying tempo and most people assume that a camera operator is in charge. The final image of the film carries a great deal of significance. It opens up a gap between the film’s appearance and its reality; what it appears to be – what it imitates – is not an object or scene from everyday life, but a film. ‘Atmosphere’ is not just an imitation, but an imitation of an imitation, a metafilm that plays with the viewers’ expectations about cinematic form.” – R. Bruce…