Film Categories: film studies

  • Plein Air Etude

    An ecstatic, kinetic formal study of light, colour, and movement shot in the region of the Montreal River which so inspired members of the Group of Seven.

  • Politics of Perception, The

    Selected for the 11th Paris Biennale of Modern Art and included in the collection of numerous museums and universities, “The Politics of Perception” is a film essay concerned with the language of the film medium. At its point of departure, it is a meditation on the images, sounds, rhythm and sub-text of the “entertainment” film. A Hollywood discourse is stripped of its fleshly covering to reveal the mechanics of its manipulations, at the same time liberating the kinematic and photochemical energies “trapped” in its representational content/form. At its apogee it is an invocation of the forms and textures of film…

  • Presents

    “The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens ‘Presents’ literally opens into a film within the film. When its figures awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a Plexiglas sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to…

  • Process, The

    LIGHT was primary in my consideration. All senses of “process” are (to me) based primarily on “thought-process”; and “thought-process” is based primarily on “memory re-call”; and that, as any memory process (all process finally) is electrical (firing of nerve connection) and expresses itself most clearly as a “back-firing” of nerve endings in the eye which DO become visible to us (usually eyes closed) as “brain movies” – as Michael McClure calls them. When we are not re-constructing “ a scene” (recalling something once seen), then we are watching (on the “screen” of closed eye-lids) the very PROCESS itself. (SB)

  • Prologue: Infinite Obscure

    The film began with the idea of doing a “remake” of “Moby Dick” using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted from his version. A number of other issues began to take precedence however: the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic writing; the possible intersections of (auto) biography and fiction; the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo) sexuality. (MC)

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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

  • 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.”