Film Categories: media studies

  • The Propagation of Uncertainty

    Emily DiCarlo’s three-channel video installation The Propagation of Uncertainty (2020) explores the friction that occurs between, what she termed, “the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration.” The work focuses on time frequency standards and how our accelerated, networked world relies on the foundation of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). With airports, stock markets and telecommunications operating through precise temporal orchestration, UTC reigns authoritatively omnipresent, but in actuality, is anything but absolute. Through a month-long “post-real time” process, collected asynchronous data from 82 master atomic clocks around the world is reckoned at the International Bureau for Weights and Measures (BIPM)…

  • Entre la langue et l’océan

    A psycho-sexual poetic politico historico and reflective film document about the Canadian identity and the failed revolution of 1837 – 1838. To understand the disease’s origins is not equivalent to finding an effective therapy, but it is undoubtedly a crucial prerequisite. Entre la Langue et L’Océan. Surréaliste, radical, esthètiquement riche et techniquement ambitieux, ceci est un film qui résiste toute classification. A man tries to invent a liberated state and ends up in a penal colony. After awhile he hesitates to remember the cause of his incarceration. He only remembers what he left behind not what he was hoping to…

  • One Thing I Can Afford

    Louie Sanchez is the performance moniker of Filipinx artist Eirene Cloma. Cloma has recently completed a small collection of songs that broadly reflects on their working-class Filipinx upbringing in North Vancouver and the entanglements of diaspora, interracial relations, and queer desire that texture their everyday experiences. The video for their song One Thing I Can Afford broadly addresses queer and trans friendship in the diaspora, Filipinx masculinities, and everyday enactments of transgenerational care.

  • Building Heaven, Remembering Earth: Confessions of a Fallen Architect

    “Filmmaker Oliver Hockenhull’s shockingly beautiful digital video essay on the philosophy of architecture.” Mari Sasano Building Heaven, Remembering Earth offers a cross-cultural, pan-historical reflection on how the spiritual and intellectual aspirations of self and society are expressed in, and confined by, the language of architecture. “Beginning with a glimpse of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, this wild and opinionated essay peruses some of the world’s most resonant architectural sites, among them the Pantheon of Rome, Palladio’s Rotunda, Renzo Piano’s New Metropolis, Barcelona for Gaudi, then Mies van der Rohe, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar, India. Director…

  • My Canada Train Journey

    50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • The Perfect Human

    Inspired by Jørgen Leth’s Black and White cult classic The Perfect Human (1968) which raises many simple yet philosophical questions about who the perfect human is, what it means to be human, or perfect, this work applies unsupervised machine learning and experimental filmmaking techniques to reexamine and question the contested notion of perfection in the eyes of artificial intelligence. Later the remake of the computer-generated moving images are transformed from digital recreation to an analog artifact of transparencies which completed the cycles from analog film to digital video and back to 16mm format, from motion pictures to still images, and…

  • A Canadian Ghost Story: The Quilt for Joyce Wieland

    A Canadian Ghost Story: The Quilt for Joyce Wieland is a tribute to the films and other artwork of the late Joyce Wieland. It comprises a series of vignettes, each referencing the title of one of her films and picking up themes and motifs from her work. Two characters, A and B, are engaged in a somewhat mysterious and arduous endeavour surrounding Wieland’s films. Their memories of Wieland are stitched into a tale that is being told in a time of uncertainty and looming danger. The piece explores artistic legacy, particularly in a feminist and Canadian context, with some of…

  • The Wind Probably

    A human is observing the deserted streets of his hometown on the edge of the Apocalypse. The world is on the verge of being absorbed by the Black Hole. Familiar places in the ruins are difficult to recognize and it’s hard to find the clues to understand is it a reality or dream. The sensation of “not quite real” is the sensation experienced during a catastrophe. In a person’s attempts to orientate the disintegrating reality, the only one with whom he can discuss what is happening is artificial intelligence.

  • Iraq Campaign, The

    “Good evening, the United States of America is at war.” “The Iraq Campaign” by San Francisco videographer Phil Patiris presents a compelling artistic documentary of the immediate American national spirit as promoted and reflected by television during the weeks of Desert Storm (plus its short-lived afterglow). This “television history” is intended as well to be a representation of corporate television’s high-tech style in presenting extraordinary news events, illustrating the ultimate convergence of American news and entertainment; and of how the magic and power of television can be used as a not-so-subtle device for mass influence by corporate media in co-operation…