Film Categories: Landscape

  • Plein Air Etude

    An ecstatic, kinetic formal study of light, colour, and movement shot in the region of the Montreal River which so inspired members of the Group of Seven.

  • Ranch: The Alan Wood Ranch Project

    “Ranch” is about The Alan Wood Ranch Project, a massive environmental art piece built on 320 acres in the foothills of the Rockies. Combining time-lapse photography, old Hollywood Westerns, television news and aerial photography, “Ranch” offers the viewer a refreshing new appreciation of the work. A film of breathtaking beauty and a document of surprising humour, “Ranch” is part experimental cinema, part documentary.

  • Reading Canada Backwards

    A travel log of a technical object keeping time on a big train. Camera: never is the camera looked through during the making of this film; most shots are hand held, kept level with the horizon & always points east with the train’s direction. Sound: 2 train tracks looped, 2 tracks blues guitar by Erich Fox. Opening: Vancouver at Nanaimo St. Bridge with a motorcycle mirror. Movement: 12000 frames. 4000 miles from Vancouver to Halifax with 3 frames of film shot for every mile. (90 telephone poles every 30 miles – 5 second sequences). Closing: Halifax at Young Ave. bridge…

  • Real Italian Pizza

    Selected moments from eight months of street life outside a Manhattan pizza parlour, as seen from a fourth-floor loft. People coming and going, changes in weather, light. My first dramatic film. (DR) “A cheerful, slightly crazy jauntiness prevails that may be as close as film form can come to really capturing a mood of the city.” – Roger Greenspun

  • Reason Over Passion

    “Joyce Wieland’s films are among the most endearing I have ever seen, making her point and sealing the issue in a womanly way without any concern for ragged edges. ‘La Raison Avant la Passion’ is a whirlwind view of Canada with an anti-dialectical premise.” – Douglas Pringle, ArtsCanada “REASON OVER PASSION… is Joyce Wieland’s major film so far. With its many eccentricities, it is a glyph of her artistic personality; a lyric vision tempered by an aggressive form and a visionary patriotism mixed with ironic self parody. It is a film to be seen many times.” – P. Adams Sitney,…

  • Red Church

    “Red Church” opens with a lush, red-toned image of a church altar before a stained-glass window. On the soundtrack is an awesome roar. The rest of the film involves a complex transposition of that image through multiple exposures within the camera. Over the course of 200 exposures, the image becomes more abstract and as the emulsion wears down, the image becomes lighter and achieves a glowing, translucent quality.

  • Région Centrale, La

    “This new, three-hour film by the Canadian Michael Snow, is an extraordinary cinematic monument. No physical action, not even the presence of man, a fabulous game with nature and machine which puts into question our perceptions, our mental habits, and in many respects renders moribund existing cinema: the latest Fellini, Kubrick, Buñuel etc. “For ‘La Region Centrale,’ Snow had a special camera apparatus constructed by a technician in Montreal, an apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral. The film is one continuous movement across space, intercutting occasionally the X serving as a point…

  • Revival

    A vivid cinema-verité documentary on street-corner revivalism in Toronto, this film probes the compulsions of self-appointed voices in the wilderness. Fast-paced, beautifully edited.

  • Rhapsody on a Theme from a House Movie

    “…creating a subtle, shifting collage of static dwellings and abstracted, moving dwellers. Focusing in, yet never invading, suggesting depths by softly touching surfaces, the film concentrates on the exterior yet indicates an interior in which houses become homes become community…” – Helle Viirlaid When I first conceived the film, I saw it as a purely formal investigation of the visual effect(s) of creating a constant rhythmic series of lap dissolves. My original expectation was that by dissolving together overlapping static-camera shots, an illusion of movement might occur. After viewing the initial film footage, I realized that, apart from the intended…

  • Rhythms of the Heart

    “Cinema weaned from the monogamy of sound and image in a film equal to one’s capacity for wonder… In ‘Rhythms of the Heart,’ Steve Sanguedolce’s affinity for expressionistic documentaries turns to the depiction of a ruined relationship. “Sanguedolce belongs to the Escarpment School- a loosely knit group of filmmakers born and raised along the craggy slopes of the Canadian shield. Their work typically joins memory and landscape in a documentary based production. Inheritors of the 19th century Lake poet romantics, ‘nature’ is typically figured as a metaphor for consciousness. ‘Rhythms of the Heart’ typifies many of these Escarpment School concerns…