Film Categories: film studies

  • Mouthpiece

    The work of art in the age of genetic reproduction. Based on the practice of lip-reading, this short animated film explores the visual “code” of verbal pronunciation by animating pairs of lips cut out from magazines according to the position of the mouth in pronouncing a sound of spoken language. But, beyond a mere demonstration f lip-sync, this film employs the 24 frames per second cinematic “code” of motion to also explore Alexander Calder’s goal of achieving “a sense of motion on sculpture…where just as one can compose colours, or forms, so one can compose motions.”

  • Moving Bicycle Picture

    Duchamp once said about his bicycle wheel piece, “One day I had the happy idea to mount a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool and watch it spin.” One summer I had the happy idea of taking a bicycle trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay. The bicycle trip was recorded with a tiny “Keystone” camera. I leave out important events like eating and camping and concentrate mainly on what is seen from the moving bicycle. After a time the camera, bicycle and myself become entangled, involved, friends and enemies. A film on moving. As a film I often mount it…

  • My Own Obsession

    “My Own Obsession” is a film interested in the implications of identity and the archeology of those mental layers that represent our identities. It is a journey through the identity of an Armenian-Canadian woman during a specific period, which is documented through interviews with various individuals about their encounters and experiences with the protagonist. The line between documentary and fiction is blurred. The cinematic impact unfolds into poetic visual metaphors, which weave themselves throughout the film. It is a film which explores the relationship of the viewer to the film. An unknown archivist/filmmaker structures the cinematic experience through the guise…

  • Narziss und Echo

    A film in the form of a riddle is a special kind of entertainment film, whereby the film’s content must be deduced from the film’s formal structure. “Long seemed invalid the Prophet’s word, – But honored it was, – By the outcome at last: – How odd the madness, how strange a death!”(Ovid, Metamorphoses).

  • Naughts

    A series of five hand-painted, step-printed films, each of which is a textured, thus tangible, “nothing.” A series of “nots,” then, in pun, or knots of otherwise invisible energies. 1) The first begins with a semblance of fog clouds rising vertically, an upward lifting waterfall likeness which screens an ephemera of painted shapes that come, at end, to a rhythmic and formal hardness. 2) A progression of blue surreal shapes vanishing in forward movements. 3) A gathering of crystalline forms in primary colors emitting upward-moving flares of multicolored lights, all gradually suggesting an outward momentum. 4) An orange rock-beseeming wall…

  • New Improved Institutional Quality…

    An attempt is made to escape from the oppressive environment of a test – a test containing meaningless, contradictory, and impossible-to-follow directions – by entering into the imagination. In this case it is specifically the imagination of the filmmaker, in which the test-taker encounters images from previous Land films.

  • New York Eye and Ear Control

    “One of the major achievements of the sixties. Mike Snow postulates an eye that stares at surfaces with such intensity… The image itself seems to quiver, finally gives way under the pressure. A deceptive beginning – silent: a flat white form sharply cut to the silhouette of a walking woman…More human images, love-making – a human epic now still ruled by the after image of the Walking Woman. As in no other film yet seen, its alternately soft and granite images lift us toward the year 2000; capturing not events, not objects, but again and again registering a ‘placement’ of…

  • Nice Girls Don’t Do It

    “Nice Girls Don’t Do It” is a not-quite-conventional documentary about female ejaculation. While referencing some of the codes of pornography (i.e. out-of-focus, leather, explicit close-ups), the film clearly works against conventional pornography in its use of black and white film, text, and in its positioning of the spectator. The film serves less as a treatise than as an invitation to its spectators to fill in the gaps created by the film – to query, challenge, investigate, object, corroborate, perhaps inveigh against, but ultimately to create a space for others to speak about a part of female experience long-shrouded in silence.

  • No Mime Game

    An effective mime-skit showing the perils of drinking and driving. A mixture of mime, camera work, and special effects prepares us to expect the inevitable crash. An excellent film for use in driver and health education or dramatic arts classes.

  • No Sad Songs

    This is the director’s cut of the first Canadian film on the subject of AIDS. In 1985-86 it was featured in festivals and theatres around the world. “No Sad Songs” attracted much critical attention for its sardonic dramatic performances which are interwoven throughout the documentary footage. The film centres on Jim Black, 37, and his views on the premature death in store for him. Catherine Hunt, who has a brother in the U.S. with the illness, speaks with remarkable emotion of the values such a crisis brings out in families and friends. An important film to document the Toronto gay…