Film Categories: film studies

  • One Foot In The Grave

    The questions of freedom and the cost of society’s overconsumption are raised in a graveyard where dead military men have been buried.

  • Process

    Experimental texture dictates the plot of Process, which explores male/female relationships in crisis.

  • Sarnia 1

    Lights dance to a beat filling the screen with colour and simile while travelling through Canada.

  • Shopping Cart

    Humankind’s penchant for overindulgence is explored through images of a shopping cart in a vast deserted parking lot.

  • The Films of Jack Chambers (Vol. 1-3)

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. This 3-volume set brings together for the first time the complete film works of Jack Chambers (1931-78), largely regarded as one of Canada’s most important visual artists. With a well-established career as a painter, he embarked on a short-lived but significant career as a filmmaker in the mid-1960s. Chambers’ artistic practice was described as “perceptual realism” and stood in counterpoint to the dominant abstract styles of his day. He completed five films in his lifetime.

  • Persistence of Vision

    Persistence of Vision is the story of a man who, against his doctor’s advice, was determined to make short films while he still could. From age 16 to age 30, Lorne Marin embarked on a burgeoning career as an experimental filmmaker. Now, thirty years later, his body dictates most of his life choices, yet his artistic urges remain. Lorne has lived the past fifty odd years with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease often described as “tunnel vision.” Today, his vision is limited to a circle about one inch in diameter. Persistence of Vision showcases the films Lorne made thirty…

  • Doom

    Doom is a slapstick caper of a kidnapping turned on its head; a farcical take on Stockholm Syndrome. A group of businessmen and bankers are corralled from the streets of their work for the purpose of detention, observation and ultimate indoctrination by a group of unlikely bandits. Their captivity initially frightens them but through the treatment by their strange yet benevolent captors, the men quickly view their corporate transgressions with disdain as they reject the freedom they are eventually offered.

  • Scratch, Crackle & Pop!

    SCRATCH, CRACKLE & POP! by animator and filmmaker Steven Woloshen highlights 30 years of aesthetic discoveries made in the production of Super 8, 16mm and 35mm animated/experimental films. Written for aspiring animators and film lovers alike, SCRATCH, CRACKLE & POP! is a one-of-a-kind guidebook that explores the techniques, processes and tools of the trade through in-depth case studies of thirteen of Woloshen’s best-known films. A companion DVD and two 35mm filmstrips are included in the book. “A whole grains approach to making films without a camera.” – Steven Woloshen Foreword by Marco de Blois, animation curator and programmer at Montréal’s…

  • Le Phare

    Unlike the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building, Montreal’s iconic urban landmark is horizontal and spectral, not vertical and solid. Le Phare is a filmic portrait of the Montreal’s nocturnal marker, a spinning beacon that has been raking four long beams of light across the city’s environs since 1972. The nightly presence of these intense, rotating rays is reassuring for many, and yet also oddly perplexing: the illuminating machine does not provide reconnoitering for aviation; it is not synched to act as a time-keeping device; nor does it commemorate a specific historic moment or personage. Indeed, the lights serve…

  • Trailer

    The same duration as a standard promotional film trailer (two and a half minutes), Trailer documents the mechanical and support systems that are present at most large film productions.