Film Categories: Landscape

  • Fresnel

    “Fresnel” is a short super-8 film that explores the optical effects created by the massive inverted fresnel lens at the centre of the Reichstag dome. The Reichstag’s fresnel lens works exactly like a typical light-house fresnel lens – but in reverse, magnifying and projecting the sun’s light down into the Bundestag chambers (the national parliament of German). Fresnel lenses reduce the amount of material required to project light compared to a conventional plano-convex lens of equivalent power, by dividing the lens into concentric prisms, which magnify the light. Following the ramp upwards, the camera’s lens captures splintered reflections of people…

  • Transits of Venus, The

    The two films, the first black and white, the second in color, record the sky when Venus passed across the Sun on June 6th, 2004 and June 6th 2012. Transits of Venus occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits 8 years apart, separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. Each shot is contextualized with data detailing the various technical parameters that determine the peculiarity of the image. This data is an integral part of the work.

  • I Was Here

    Meditation on time, photography and traces.

  • The Thing

    A woman, a transgender man, and their cat travel towards a mysterious roadside attraction known as “The Thing.” Official Selection: Sundance Film Festival, 2012

  • Parallèle Nord (Parallel North)

    “Dans un monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.” – Guy Debord, La société du spectacle Qu’en est-il de la forêt boréale? “In a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false.” – Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle What about the boreal forest?

  • Decroux’s Garden

    A return after many years to the home of a beloved teacher. I am less than a trace returning to this garden, but I am here and my heart turns, hearing again, though differently, the songs that hang here still, in the breath of this place. –Baba Hillman

  • Just Passing Through

    Told through the perspective of a landscape, “Just Passing Through” tells the story of evolution as one image gives rise to the next. The film explores the relationship between permanence and impermanence where familiar subjects are fleeting and we are left to contemplate unfamiliar landscapes.

  • Crashing Skies

    An ordinary rural landscape is transformed into an enigmatic dreamscape. A farmhouse stands in a copper field of scratched emulsion as solarized flares illuminate the sky. Split toned horses amble dreamlike across the frame into inky underexposed blackness. Copper thistles sway in the wind, looming and strangely monumental. The hand-processed 16mm imagery creates an elliptical inner world of memory and dreams. Filmed at the Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Ontario. Atmospheric sound design by Edmund Eagan.

  • This Town of Toronto…

    This short film takes a rather unconventional approach to the city symphony genre, which often depicts the rhythms of the city from morning to night and relies on the symphonic composition of shots that, like in musical symphony, build through various movements until their final conclusion. This Town of Toronto… extends its temporal dimension past the span of one day to 108 years, by including some of the earliest motion picture documentations of Toronto: the Great Fire of 1904 and the traffic scene on Bay Street, including horse-drawn fire trucks and firemen rushing to extinguish the fire, all captured by…

  • Different as Night and Day

    “Different as Night and Day,” shot in the Port Lands of Toronto, Canada, examines the disconcerting coexistence of technology and nature. It cycles through three views of two power plants as light and climate transition (cf. Claude Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral). The views are bridged by long dissolves of smoke streaming from one of the plants. The dissolves are often gorgeous and reminiscent of the Northern Lights, but are composed with images of airborne pollutants (cf. the pollutionenhanced sunsets painted by JMW Turner in the 19th century). “Different as Night and Day” is a dynamic painting.