Film Categories: literary

  • Villanelle

    Elizabeth Lewis’s “Villanelle” is based on a poem of the same name by Earle Birney, one of Canada’s best-known poets. In a live action segment preceding the animation, Birney introduces the poem, describing the circumstances that led him to write it. He tells of how he spent one summer of the 1960s at Bowen island, north of Vancouver. During the week he was alone. But on the week-ends, friends and students would join him. Only one of those friends, a promising young student named Betty Lamert, was able to join him on his two-mile swims in the icy bay water.…

  • When the Light Grey Man Carries Your Luggage

    Based on the poem of the same name by Joe Rosenblatt (Governor-General Award Winner) and read by the poet in the film. Environmental and electronic sounds, found footage and footage shot for the film combine with the poet’s voice to evoke the eerie landscape of the poem in an original interpretation. The usual poetic questions regarding existence, love, death and bureaucracy are cleverly broached.

  • You Are Watching: A Film on Brecht

    “You Are Watching: A Film on Brecht” is an experimental, documentary-style animation that explores the life and ideas of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in both a historical and contemporary context. This film/video was shot on Super 8mm film and finished on video.

  • Intrigue of Manners, An

    A short restoration comedic drama set in England’s 17th Century. Loosely adapted from Sir George Etherege’s restoration comedy “Man of Mode,” “An Intrigue” revolves around the grandeur lives and sexual innuendos of the upper classes of England. Our Protagonist, and renowned womanizer, Dorimant (Mahonen) is in pursuit of the fair lady Emilia (Dwyer). Through his scheming, Dorimant learns that “a certain Sir Fopling Flutter has recently arrived from Paris,” the en vogue city of the arts and high fashion, and has “certain designs on the fair Emilia…” Determined to be deemed the more favorable in the lady Emilia’s eyes, Dorimant…

  • Term, The

    A lovely and spare animated film illustrating the poem, “The Term,” by William Carlos Williams. The film is an homage to the work of Williams and to the school of Imagist Poetry, which he founded and best exemplifies. The filmmaker chose this particular poem because of the power of the imagery, the constant metamorphosis, the musicality of the words and the gentle humanistic quality of the message. All these things lend themselves well to film: particularly to the style of animation she has developed. The animation is hand-drawn pencil on paper, fully animated twelve drawings per second. The drawings illustrate…

  • breath

    A beautiful cameraless film based on the text and structure of a haiku, “breath” explores the interplay between sound, image and written word. The soundtrack is created by an optical light reading of three haikus and one short poem, all written by ninth-century Japanese poetesses. The film’s structure is based on the five-seven-five syllabic composition of a typical haiku.

  • Ode to a Sparrow

    “Ode to a Sparrow” is a profile of Canadian poet Peter Van Toorn. Van Toorn’s book “Mountain Tea” was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1984. The film celebrates Van Toorn’s poetic insight and language, and captures the concentration and labour of Mountain Tea’s creation. “Ode to a Sparrow” includes readings from Van Toorn, conversations with some of his friends, and lyrical visuals to accompany a reading of Van Toorn’s essay about the importance of the title of a poem, “Handy Handles.” “Mountain Tea” was unavailable for many years, but was reissued by Signal Editions in 2004.…

  • Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels

    This compelling film profile of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart uses archival material, interviews with family and friends, readings and dramatic re-creations to portray a writer who was mythologized in her own lifetime. Elizabeth Smart died in England in 1986, at the age of 72. She is best known for her novel “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” published in 1945, a story of passion and obsession inspired by her love affair with the English poet George Barker. The years subsequent to that dramatic period – the complex relationship she developed with Baker, the period of literary exile…