Film Categories: film studies

  • Immoral Memories 1

    A morass of memories begun in a Paris cafe in 1895, a side-tracked train from the mother’s womb, mewing and puking its own history by the light of Dr. Frankenstein’s lamp. A history of cinema as twilight sleep, a shroud for the entr’acte between birth and history. A horse embraced as the last act of an active mind falling to sleep, ushering in the new century.

  • Impromptu

    This piece of film was initially shown at the 1989 Toronto Experimental Film Congress and was not destined to be screened again in its present form. Thus the title “Impromptu” refers partly, due to people having asked to screen the reel, to the distribution of a print. However, each scene being a combined image, filmed frame-by-frame alternatively at two or more periods during a given day, a procedure depending for its exact execution on the manner in which the film situation evolved, “impromptu” also refers to the tendency of reality to veer towards the unexpected. The sound was supplied fortuitously…

  • In the Cinema No One Speaks Unless They Have Something to Say While in Real Life It’s Just the Oppos

    “Michael Hoolboom’s curtain raiser sets the tone for what goes on – In the Cinema.” – Vancouver International Film Festival The main character is the title in this film about naming, actors and paternity.

  • In the Form of the Letter ‘X’

    This film is predicated upon the quasi-fictional discovery that Melville’s name and my name mean the same thing: both came from an old French verb “meler” meaning “to come together, to meet, to intersect” and both are names of towns at crossroads. By exhaustive translation, I reduce them both to “X,” the Greek letter chi (as in chimera), and the rhetorical trope “chiasmus.” The structure of the film is chiasmic (that is, it contains two parallel sections, but the second is reformed/deformed in reverse) and functions as a signature. The text is from Melville’s “Pierre” and is written chiasmatically in…

  • Kisses

    “Betty Ferguson’s ‘Kisses’, an hour-long anthology of film clips presented without titles or voiceover, is the sweetest and, in avant-garde terms, the most conventional film on the program. Although the kiss reached its supreme expression as the on-screen replacement for copulation in post-Code Hollywood, Ferguson’s material is drawn largely from silent classics and the less-fetishized European cinema of around 1960. She compares her film to a patchwork quilt, but it’s basically morphological, cataloguing clusters of shots where kisses are delivered to the hand, the neck, rained down on a beloved face, perfunctorily bestowed on a spouse, awarded to dogs, dolls,…

  • Machine in the Garden

    Shot in Hi8 video using a high-speed shutter and a spinning turret camera mount, “Machine in the Garden” is inspired by, and an homage to, apparatus-oriented work such as D. Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera” and Michael Snow’s “La Region Centrale.”

  • Archaeology of Memory (silent)

    Beginning in scratches of light, this film evolves through colour, rhythm and multiple images tracing a history of cinema from mythical beginnings to the thread of personal memory, peering into the everyday pathology of family, sex and death. “A kind of double history that intertwines autobiography with the development of cinema, it’s a stunning, enormously seductive array of images …” – Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine

  • Maltese Cross Movement, The

    “The film reflects Dewdney’s conviction that the projector, not the camera, is the filmmaker’s true medium. The form and content of the film are shown to derive directly from the mechanical operation of the projector – specifically the maltese cross movement’s animation of the disk and the cross illustrates graphically (pun intended) the projector’s essential parts and movements. It also alludes to a dialectic of continuous-discontinuous movements that pervades the apparatus, from its central mechanical operation to the spectator’s perception of the film’s images… (His) soundtrack demonstrates that what we hear is also built out of continuous-discontinuous ‘sub-sets.’ The film…

  • Man in the Box, A

    Rather than looking outward, and creating a spherical universe around itself (e.g. Michael Snow’s “La Region Centrale” ), the camera is introspective, defining itself by how it “sees the world”; it never sees anything but itself. “A Man in the Box” is a camera’s photographic memory, trying to focus upon its own image. We realize that we see only what we want to see – that how we decide to see determines how we will see. Dedicated to Bill Wees, my eye’s mentor. Film to be screened twice, once forwards, and once backwards. (RR)

  • Archaeology of Memory (sound)

    Beginning in scratches of light, this film evolves through colour, rhythm and multiple images tracing a history of cinema from mythical beginnings to the thread of personal memory, peering into the everyday pathology of family, sex and death. “A kind of double history that intertwines autobiography with the development of cinema, it’s a stunning, enormously seductive array of images …” – Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine