Film Categories: film studies

  • The European Rooms

    An unhurried camera glides by bedrooms, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and entrance halls filled with finely crafted furniture and carefully selected objets. While displaying a familiar world of privilege, class, and prestige, these well-appointed rooms appear in the film as inescapably uncanny and oneiric. A slow unraveling of cinematic, sonic and architectural space played out in real time, The European Rooms is as confounding as it is elucidatory.

  • The Transformable Moment: The Films of Stephen Broomer

    “The Transformable Moment” is a collection of essays on the films of Stephen Broomer, edited by Scott Birdwise and Tom McSorley. Contributors include R. Bruce Elder, Dan Browne, Clint Enns, Zoe Heyn-Jones, Brett Kashmere, Scott Miller Berry, Cameron Moneo, Andrea Picard, and Michael Sicinski. “Having devoted his life to the art of cinema in his various capacities as a filmmaker, scholar, preservationist, and poet, Stephen Broomer is on his way to establishing himself among the most aesthetically and historical engaged experimental filmmakers in Canada. His practice is indeed ‘experimental’ in the best sense of the term: his films are imbued…

  • Scenes From Another Marriage

    Alex and Chris are a couple who take it upon themselves to remake Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage for the LGBT world. While the pressures of co-directing sometimes fuel tensions between them, they grow even more concerned about some irregularities that seem to befall the set. Namely, they become suspicious that there may in fact be an outside party skulking around. This is confirmed one day in a lull between shots, with a director-like person appearing behind their gear, crew in tow. As this new reality takes hold, and they find themselves pushed and pulled by this ‘other director,’…

  • Far Shore, The

    Set in 1918 Ontario. Eulalie, a Quebecoise, marries a Toronto engineer but finds life with him oppressive. She falls in love with Tom, a painter who is an acquaintance of her husband’s and, with him, escapes briefly to Northern Ontario before they are hunted down by her jealous husband. “For something like two decades, Joyce Wieland – the Toronto painter, filmmaker, quiltmaker and lay ecologist – has been creating an individual sensibility and then displaying it, piece by piece, in the various art forms that have suited her purposes. In ‘The Far Shore’, her feature film, she articulates that sensibility…

  • memento mori

    A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime’s compendium of images, memento mori is a layered time-lapse exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of the filmmaker’s life – over 120,000 in total. This all-seeing archive is blended into permutations and combinations of subjects, objects, percepts, dreams, and experiences, to form an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight. “A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies,…

  • Animals in Motion

    Between 1877 and 1885, an English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, conducted detailed experiments analyzing human and animal motion using rapid photography. In 1968, John Straiton took the published works of Muybridge and created from them a fascinating and hilarious film. A tribute to the serious maker of the first nudie before the invention of movies.

  • Nude Descending

    A video reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting, “Nu descendant un escalier n° 2”, that updates the work’s inter-media and temporal concerns into a contemporary frame, one century later.

  • Variations on a Theme

    Just / faintly / a corner / was / seen there / trying / to look / like an edge.

  • Blair’s Last Day

    Blair Maddox has been projecting IMAX films at the Space & Science Centre in Edmonton, Canada for almost 30 years. ‘Blair’s Last Day’ documents his last day on the job before the IMAX theatre switches to a digital projection system, leaving Blair unemployed after projecting over 30,000 films.

  • The Films of David Rimmer

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. This three-volume set brings together some of David Rimmer’s most seminal early works. Born in Vancouver, BC, Rimmer has been a pivotal figure in the city’s art scene since the early ’70s. Known for his experimentation with superimposition, looping and optical printing, Rimmer’s aesthetic reflects a “West Coast sensitivity to landscape, poetry and psychedelia” (Chris Kennedy). Volume One Square Inch Field -1968 / 13 min / 16mm / CLR / Sound Migration – 1969 / 11 min / 16mm / CLR / Sound Landscape -1970 / 8 min /16mm / CLR /…