Film Categories: film studies

  • Stardust

    While others are quick to declare that film is dead, this film celebrates its dust and scratches, and its magic powers for time and space travel. It is an imaginary plea to preserve our dying celluloid past and to fight the takeover by digital technologies.

  • Sniffing Glue?

  • Strap Teasing Terror 2

  • End, The

  • Tamalpais

    Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing – to transfer vision to a sheet of paper – is used for an opposite effect – to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time.

  • 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.

  • B-Film Keeper, The

    A 1940’s damaged silent instructional filmshows good bee-keeping and film practice, while alluding to the nearing extinction of both 16mm film and honey bees.

  • Charles Gagnon: 4 Films

    DVD + Catalogue For the first time the experimental films of renowned multidisciplinary artist Charles Gagnon are available in digitized form through a DVD collection and accompanying catalogue. “Charles Gagnon: 4 Films” unites Gagnon’s 1960s experimental films and highlights the intersections between film, painting, photography, and music in his artistic œuvre. 4 Films resonates with the countercultural consciousness of the 1960s and is exemplary of avant-garde experimental collage and structuralist filmmaking aesthetics, which are evident throughout these four 16mm works produced between 1966 and 1972. Created within the vibrant social and cultural context of 1960s Québec, this collection begins with…

  • Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman

    “Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman” is a stylized and lyrical coming-of-age portrait of Derek Jarman’s artistic, sexual, and political awakening in post-War England. Part biographical narrative, part experimental collage, part personal meditation on the most controversial and important modern British artist and activist, the film finds in Jarman’s childhood the stirrings of creative and individual epiphany that inspired a remarkable life. Written and directed by Matthew Mishory, the film was shot in Super 8 and HD by cinematographer Lili Wilde and features an original score by Arban and Steven Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Glove.…

  • Recipes for Reconstruction: The Cookbook for the Frugal Filmmaker

    Special Book and DVD Set Veteran animator and filmmaker Steven Woloshen introduces a variety of simple artistic strategies to create decay and to re-assemble damaged film prints into new experimental visions. This book includes a special DVD (NTSC) with nine short films created specially for this do-it-yourself, “hands-on” manual. An excellent resource for film production courses and workshops. Featuring nine chapters & accompanying films: 1. Chronicle Reconstructions: Creating Reconstructions 2. Zero Visibility: Reproducing Decay and Damage 3. La Dolce Vita: Hasty Archaeology 4. Scrapbook: Correcting Correlations 5. Fleeing Rotland: Revitalizing Obsolete Gauges on 35mm Film 6. The Homestead Act: Using…