Film Categories: film studies

  • Non-Zymase Pentathlon

    “Non-Zymase Pentathlon” makes use of the commercial imagery of post-war North America, culled from the pages of Life, Maclean’s, National Geographic, and their ilk, animating these pictures in absurd and arbitrary juxtapositions. Animals, people, consumer goods, military equipment, and other detritus float across different planes in an ambiguous film-space. The film is structured into five “events,” preceded by a brief introduction.

  • Nothing Happened This Morning

    The film shows three levels of reality during the ordinary event of arising in the morning: physical reality – the senses and moods felt by the sleeper; psychological reality – the sleeper’s dreams, fantasies, and memories; and the reality of the sleeper’s surroundings. “Nothing Happened This Morning” attempts to make these levels of reality meaningful in themselves, without the necessity of the usual “dramatic action” which constitutes the content of most films.

  • ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)

    Music by Tucker Zimmerman. “Philip Hoffman’s ‘?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)’ uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else’s filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed & Two Noughts’), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. ‘Pure’ is both the right and the wrong word: Hoffman is a man addicted to the hermetic thisness of filmed images, and plagued by the suspicion that these images, far from being pure, are really scabs torn away from the sores of the world. Found footage shot by his grandfather (a newsreel cameraman) is the starting point…

  • On the Marriage Broker Joke

    “‘On the Marriage Broker Joke’… turns upon an opposition of Freudian analysis and Christian hermeneutics… Two pandas, who exist only because of a textual error, run a shell game for the viewer in an environment with false perspectives. They posit the existence of various films and characters, one of which is interpreted by an academic as containing religious symbolism. Sigmund Freud’s own explanation is given by a sleeper awakened by an alarm clock.” – P. Adams Sitney

  • On the Pond

    Essential to the making of the film was an examination of still photographs. Stills were used as clues to the past. Clues that would bring order and meaning to significant memories. (PH) “Hoffman’s film is in the experimental film tradition of the personal diary, although in this case a beautifully paced mixture of family photographs and dramatic reconstruction interwoven into a narrative creates an objective distance. ‘On the Pond’ reveals skills of editing, sound and story telling which evoke in ten minutes a complex and emotional study of a family, its past and present, its young dreams and its affections.…

  • One Second in Montreal

    “In Snow’s… ‘One Second in Montreal’ and ‘Dripping Water’ (made with Joyce Wieland) we are brought to consider the force of time stripped of spatial interest. A collection of snow scenes, all still photographs of potential sites for a monument in Montreal (thus distinctly not ‘artistic’ photographs) follow one another for 22 minutes. The film is aggressive, yet haunting. It is too at the edge, at the point where an image of an actuality provides a firmer ground for meditation than an abstract image or no image at all. “This particular film provides the subtlety of Snow’s genius, in his…

  • One Side, Left Corner

    “The one I liked best was ‘One Side, Left Corner’, which could be described equally well as a drama, documentary, or experimental film. If it can be said to have a plot it’s about a couple who drive out to a cottage in the country, then back to the city – but that really doesn’t matter. It’s about people failing to communicate! What counts is the experiments in filmmaking that were an integral part of what the film was saying. I liked Neal Livingston’s innovations. They worked. Experimental success.” – Catriona Talbot, The 4th Estate, Halifax, Nova Scotia

  • One Way Boogie Woogie

    “…sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual contrast but is also felt as a dialectic between permanence and impermanence…” – Noel Carroll, Soho Weekly News

  • One Woman Waiting

    “One Woman Waiting” evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film. “Massarella uses the fixed camera shot in her enigmatic film of a symbolic encounter between two women in a beautifully shot desert location. Its cryptic form is a good example of how an idea can be treated most effectively by simple means, for instance in the use of the frame as a point of entry and exit for characters…

  • Optic Nerve

    Of this film Hammer says, “It is about the fragility of both film and life as the sterility of a nursing home is memorized with veils and faded patterns of the past by the filmmaker imagining what her grandmother is seeing.” The film won first prize in several film festivals, was chosen for the 1987 Whitney Museum of Art Biennial and was premiered at the London International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1988.