Film Categories: found footage

  • Letters From Vancouver

    Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.

  • Officer Tuba Meets Happy Ghost

    soJin Chun combines characters appropriated from two Hong Kong films and digitally rotoscopes them into contemporary Super 8mm film footage shot in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. Pulled from their Hong Kong settings, these characters are recast as Koreans, playing with western perceptions of Asian identity. The ruptures and continuity of culture within diasporic communities frame these figures displaced in time, space, language, and culture. The principal characters in this new film are the titular Officer Tuba (of Where’s Officer Tuba 1986) and an actress taken from the Happy Ghost Franchise (five films 1984-1991). Although they never meet, Chun…

  • Sammy

    Toronto, July 27, 2013, shortly after midnight. Sammy Yatim is standing inside an empty streetcar, a small knife in his right hand. A Toronto Police officer will shoot him dead. From a mixture of gunpowder, blood and acrimony: the portrait of a boy who didn’t have to die.

  • Mrs. Deborah Corde

    A spam email tells the story of a colonial couple and their search for someone to claim their millions. Using archival footage and the melodrama outlined in an email from a junk inbox, worlds of isolation and desperation collide in an ultra short film that brings to life a tale designed to scam someone.

  • Expo Film (this film is my memory)

    Using anonymous home movie footage of Expo ’67 in Montreal, the artist sets out to recreate a memory that perhaps never existed. Celluloid manipulation and sound decay techniques coalesce to transform a mythic landscape into a sublime expanse of disintegrated memory. Image description: A Grainy and nostalgic image from an amusement park. A red gondola of a sky ride is in the foreground and crowds and a ferris wheel are in the background. 

  • Mach Stem

    Part one in a series, Mach Stem is an essay about skincare, depression, memory loss, and the atomic bomb. Formulated from a discarded master’s thesis film, Mach Stem records the shadow of a long depression and the process of convalescence. Exploring sites of research, memory, and legacy, the film travels between continents to piece together one’s own identity that was previously lost at sea.

  • Broth of Vigour

    A different kind of bone broth. A boiling broth stewed from science fiction, competitive cooking shows and the erotic recesses of the imagination, Broth of Vigour is a tonic for the body and mind.

  • How To Clean Your Closet

    How To Clean Your Closet combines glitched clips from adult films with sound bites from an old tape cassette with the same title. Cleaning your closet couldn’t be more fun!

  • Damaged

    “A retrospective based on an introspective vision, this stream of still pictures, unfolding to the rhythm of the voice-over (delivered by Steve Reinke), portrays a man who visually exposes his psychological “faults.” Recounting eighteen decisive moments in his life, and dissecting both his genetic and cultural heritage, the work delimits a transitory space in which each image crystallizes one of these indistinct marking points. Bringing together a number of collectively shared experiences, Damaged presents a series of significant events — some pleasant, others less so — evincing the complexity of the stages of life and offering models of childhood, sexuality…

  • Originate and Recompile

    In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot “La Taranta”. A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering…