Film Categories: Landscape

  • Aura-Gone

    The film centres around one still shot that documents the movements of a city, which is seen in a multi-layered reflection of passing street action. ‘Aura-Gone’ is a serious, mature experimental film. The front of the hospital has the appearance of a giant mirror with double doors set into it. The effect of watching this extended single shot is to gradually discover the layers of real and reflected space occupied by moving people. It has a particularly fascinating complexity.” – John Locke, Cinema Canada  

  • On Land Over Water (Six Stories)

    “In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought” (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of “On Land Over Water.” “On Land Over Water…” was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, “On Land Over Water…”…

  • 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 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…

  • Our Trip

    “Feminist filmmaker and performance artist Barbara Hammer has celebrated her recent trip to Peru with her friend Corky Wick through a diaristic animation of photographs they took during their travels. Landscapes and portraits are given growing patterns of framing and texture with magic markers and tempera paint, expressing the richly evocative folk art of the Incan people they saw as we hear their native music resonate on the soundtrack.” – Anthony Reveaux

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Plein Air

    This abstract travelogue flies just over the surface of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario. “Plein Air” is an engrossing sonic and visual trip and a continuation of Kerr’s fascination with landscape cinema.

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • Digital Evangelism

    Set in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, where religious monuments and the remains of colonization can be found everywhere, Digital Evangelism observes technology’s increasing presence and replacement of religion in society. Juxtaposing catholic iconography, filmed on a vintage camera, with overlays of technology-themed GIFs notes how technology is worshipped, and internet usage feels like a religious experience, from AI being the all-knowing source, online figures being praised, and devoting hours a day to our phones.

  • diario de verano

    diario de verano is an exploration of neighborhood flora in Tkaronto, focusing on Kensington Market, Parkdale and Wallace – Emmerson, areas we live and move through. Experimentation with abstract movement and the physical, compositional properties of foraged materials, strengthened our community/kinship to the land and each other. Artistic practices were explored and shared through gathering rituals, stop motion animation and phytograms, creating complex layers of ourselves intertwined through our latinx identities in this short film. Language: plants