Film Categories: science/medicine

  • Bakersfield,Earth

    Guy tries to join an anti-evolution protest group because he thinks his alien race created humans.

  • Head Cleaner

    Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images issuing from an apparently malfunctioning machine. Materials and objects, in varying physical or mediated transfigurations, pervade each scene, as relics from one moment in a transformation from girlhood to womanhood. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on entertainment technology’s fraught relationship to individual agency and identity, and its role in the standardization of expression and behaviour, underlies a loosely suggested coming-of-age narrative.

  • Théodolitique

    Théodolitique is a moving image project that merges the geodetic and the filmic, linking the very long history of land surveying with the comparatively new technologies of film-making. Connecting these two methods of visual observation and recording, Théodolitique documents student surveyors from the École des Métiers du Sud-Ouest-de-Montréal as they take an outdoor exam over the course of a single day. The project utilizes a wide range of filmic and acoustic techniques — including a parabolic microphone to capture distant audio, and a custom built ‘theodocam’ to provide a surveyor’s eye view — to reflect and mimic how the students…

  • Spermwhore

    This short film is a queer, feminist and experimental work that began in 2009 and came to fruition in the spring of 2013. Spermwhore is a queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.

  • Quanta

    Particles in space recorded during an afternoon on familiar waters. Quanta is an investigative record of patterns found in the observable Universe, as contained within the perceptions of a Bolex taken for an excursion in a rowboat. Special thanks to Ajla Odobasic.

  • Waterfilm

    Two film strips illuminated by passages of water: one aboard a ferry crossing the English Channel at day, the other on the banks of the Seine river at night. The soundtrack is generated directly by the projector ‘reading’ the images shot in Super-16mm.

  • memento mori

    A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime’s compendium of images, memento mori is a layered time-lapse exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of the filmmaker’s life – over 120,000 in total. This all-seeing archive is blended into permutations and combinations of subjects, objects, percepts, dreams, and experiences, to form an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight. “A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies,…

  • Wild Currents

    A tragic mistake jolts Teddy and Joanne into limbo. Their spirits bear witness to their past usage of household appliances, as if by electric charge they might uncoil their spectral presences from home and garden.

  • Doorway for Natalie Kalmus

    ‘Doorway for Natalie Kalmus’ is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many…

  • Oramics: Atlantis Anew

    ‘Oramics: Atlantis Anew’ is conceived of as an artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London.
Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The…