Film Categories: Landscape

  • Stories from the Land of Cain

    “Stories from the Land of Cain” is a film about Canada in a time of flux. It chronicles a journey from Batoche, Saskatchewan where the Metis under Louis Riel lost their struggle for independence, to the Plains of Abraham at Quebec where the course was set for the country that would become Canada. The journey breaks off in polyphonic reveries on home, landscapes, and stories from the road; casting back in history, moving forward through the landscape, drifting off in memory. A film about trying to hold a country together with stories.

  • Bent Time

    “A visual trip across the U.S. using an extreme wide angle lens that bends time to the edges while Hammer shoots one frame per foot of visual space traversed. The film’s length, 22 minutes, matches the time it takes sunlight to traverse a petroglyph of nine circles inscribed in rock at Ohaco Canyon, New Mexico. The film opens and closes with shots of this process and the minutes between take us from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate. “Hammer concentrates on the condensation of space and time at high energy locations, from the rock passageways of Ohaco Canyon to…

  • Surfacing on the Thames

    “The loveliest Rimmer film (and the cleverest Rimmer title) shows a river boat slowly steaming past the Houses of Parliament – so slowly that it seems not to be moving, and surrounded by such luminous mistiness that one critic is supposed to have thought he was looking at a Turner painting rather than at film footage. Gradually the surface of the film begins to wrinkle slightly, to spot, to show minor blemishes – in a sense to assert itself above and before the rich density it contains. The gesture is tentative and discreet, but it is also unsettling and liberating…

  • Sydney Harbour Bridge

    A visually stunning virtuoso work in its exploitation of the in-camera matting technique. The conception of the film begins with a panoramic view of Sydney Harbour Bridge, popular in many tourist postcards. The beauty of the film lies in the complex transpositions of that image.

  • Temporary Arrangement, A

    The film began as an experiment: to study the human form suspended in a body of water – a search for commonality. It was also an attempt to express with film the complexities within an individual, the multiple points of view of the human psyche. However, during the filming, a shift occurred in the agenda. Individual dramas unfolded as each person had to confront their ability – or inability – to relinquish control to the water. A personal narrative evolved as I intimately observed my friends and family coming to terms with this natural force. Looking repeatedly at these scenes…

  • Terminal City

    “The Devonshire Hotel in downtown Vancouver was destroyed by blasting: Gallagher recorded the event with a camera that shot 200 frames per second and manipulated the sounds recorded at the time so they play back at the same speed as the images. The ‘unnatural’ destruction of the structure is rendered mysterious as explosives accelerate. Camera retards natural rhythms of entropy, a man-made rock implodes into a static ‘heaven’ of smoke and dust: city becomes cloudscape; cheering and whistling, spirit calls heralding the void.” – Tony Rief

  • Thin Ice

    “Thin Ice” is an investigation into a number of dichotomies present within the prairie landscape. The prairies are highly three-dimensional in depth, yet at the same time two dimensional in horizontal flatness, empty and yet full of detail, static and yet always moving. The concerns within “Thin Ice” take on painterly attributes which are enhanced not only through compositional devices but through the use of a video camera, such that the technical aspects become a major tool for aesthetic consideration.

  • Through the Green Fuse

    “Through the Green Fuse” is a winterscape, a journey of rhythms: trees, ice floes, rushing water and a solitary figure. The film is based on a madrigal by Monteverdi that is itself based on a poem by Petrarch. Music and image intermix to speak of passions, beauty and solitude. It is a film in which voices celebrate, ice imprisons, water invites and the figure journeys. “…and so that my suffering may not reach the shore/A thousand times each day I die, a thousand I am born….”

  • Tournesols, Les

    The film presents a field of sunflowers. The focus is adjusted frame-by-frame in succession according to a series of patterns on particular plants situated in different parts of the field. The diverse configurations placed on separate frames of the filmstrip appear, when projected successively, simultaneously on the screen. Thus, filmed one after another at different focal lengths, the sunflowers combine during projection to form one spatio-temporal image.

  • space

    Freeze-frames and radio sounds from a Greyhound bus-trip around the United States in June ’75. Optically-printed images of the Oregon coast, streets of San Francisco, California highways, Tijuana, the Grand Canyon, Texas, Louisiana, Washington D.C. and New York jazz.