Film Categories: Literature

  • Beach Events

    This film completes a trilogy of landscape/poetry films, which include “Waterworx” (1982) and “Landfall” (1983), and was shot near the family home on the Northumberland Strait in Prince Edward Island. In writing the text for “Beach Events”, I wanted to challenge the cinema’s dominant present tense by imitating primitive “event” poetry, referring superficially to action present on the screen, but gradually slipping out of synchronization with its referent. This practice, together with reading a kind of sub-conscious, internal monologue (also based on the film’s events, but only those past and future), helps the viewer transcend the spectacle of the present,…

  • Seadrift

    “Seadrift” is based on a story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft, and was shot partially in Marblehead Mass. Each section represents a synthesis of the various aspects and moods of the story. The sum total of the fragments expresses the atmosphere of the whole. With Mike Kuchar, Robert Cowan, Donna Kerness, Walter Gutman and others.

  • Scenes from Macbeth

    “Scenes from Macbeth” is a pared-down version of Shakespeare’s tragedy of ambition, set in the world of contemporary Toronto’s business elite. Macbeth’s rise is spurred by the prophecy of three bag ladies; his fall is planned over a power lunch. The story is filmed in a hyperbolic style with no respect for tradition.

  • Sappho

    Using the sixth century B.C. lyricist’s poetry, a group of women unwrap the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara and six students, together at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.

  • Remedial Reading Comprehension

    “The whole of ‘Remedial Reading Comprehension’ is a film of short phrases in an ambiguously didactic sequence. Dream inspiration and academic education are conflated and the viewer is constantly reminded of his status as a reader.” – P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film

  • Prologue: Infinite Obscure

    The film began with the idea of doing a “remake” of “Moby Dick” using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted from his version. A number of other issues began to take precedence however: the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic writing; the possible intersections of (auto) biography and fiction; the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo) sexuality. (MC)

  • Pressures of the Text, The

    “The Pressures of the Text” integrates direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language, and simultaneous translation to investigate the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness. A parody of art/critspeak, educational instruction, gothic narrative, and pornography, it has been performed as a live work at major media centres and new music festivals nationwide. The piece was written, directed and delivered by Peter Rose; co-directed by Jessie Lewis; with sign language and ideographic symbols by Jessie Lewis; and with English simultran by Fred Curchack.

  • Firefly, A

    Based on a poem by Souvankham Thammavongsa, “A Firefly” plays with words, letters and optical sound. Produced for LIFT Poetry Projections 2007.

  • im sommer sitzen die alten (in summer they sit, the elderly)

    Prompted by the death of her grandmother, Magdalena, she visits Gertrud, her grandmother’s life partner. Gertrud gives Petra an old suitcase full of memorabilia. Petra, in an attempt to protect memories from fading, decides to make a filmic ode to the love Magdalena and Gertrud shared. Based on the poem “im sommer sitzen die alten” by Ulrike Almut Sandig. German with English subtitles

  • Song of the Suicide’s Daughter

    Kaja Johnson was one of the few female beat poets who managed to become known to the general public. In this film, Johnson’s poem Song of the Suicide’s Daughter (1964) is articulated and reanimated using stills and animation. “I met Kay by accident in Athens and we talked a lot over coffee-we tried to start a little poetry magazine. She came back to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. I think she became a kind of street guru. This animation is based on a poem in her book. Very loose style: photos Xeroxed and hand-coloured, bits of coloured cels and a few drawings.”…