Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • King County

    “King County” follows Camile Schwartzbaum as she leads her community theatre company in a frantic search for a bad 80s movie to turn into the next Broadway Smash ala XANADU.

  • Mean

    “Mean” is a diptych made from Super 8 film and old video footage. The pun of the title comes from the extra levels of “meaning” we attach to nation, religion, sports teams, and even to art genres like film and video. The hockey players were shot in Super 8 off a TV set and then subjected to cheap and crude “toy-like” effects – the result seems to capture the tragicomic nature of hockey fights (and of artists arguing). With the fans, the favourite kind of hockey fight results in 100% domination, with the complete humiliation and psychological disintegration of the…

  • Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis

    “Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis” is Saïto’s second collaboration with musician Malcolm Goldstein, who composed and performed the original structured improvisation score for the film. The film explores familiar landscape imagery Saïto and Goldstein share in their neighbourhood at the foot of Mount-Royal Park in Montréal. Using images of maple trees in the park as the main visual motif, Saïto creates a film in which the formations of the trees and their subtle interrelation with the space around them act as an agent to transform viewer’s sensorial perception. Richly colored and entirely hand-processed, “Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis”…

  • Sniffing Glue?

  • Strap Teasing Terror 2

  • End, The

  • Michael Snow Up Close

    “MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE” was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow’s creative genius, including glimpses of his work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works, performance, installations, and holography. Discussions with Snow, original documentation of his music and performance work, and excerpts from his avant-garde films, are complemented by interviews with filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Bruce Elder, Snow’s dealer Av Isaacs, the architect Eb Zeidler, museum director Pierre Théberge, curator Louise Dompierre, and others. A deliberately conventional documentary about a deliberately unconventional artist.

  • Puccini Conservato

    “Puccini Conservato” (Canada/Italy) was commissioned by the Lucca Film Festival for the 150th anniversary of the famous Italian composer’s birth. In this delightful video, the Canadian master offers a witty visual and sonic commentary to Puccini’s La Bohème.

  • Limits of What We Know, The

    In 1993, Amy Bodman took a small crew to Zimbabwe to make a film about land as a living entity. Quietly told through the voice of Zimbabweans, THE LIMITS OF WHAT WE KNOW documents the changing landscape of Zimbabwe and its people’s relationship to it. Part travel log, part environmental study and part meditation on life itself, the film reveals nature’s mysterious tenacity in the face of great change. Although the film initially appears to be a portrait of Zimbabwe, THE LIMITS OF WHAT WE KNOW culminates as a heart-felt picture of our changing world as it struggles to compensate…

  • Still On About Keith Cole

    Inspired by The Cockettes, musical art star darlings KIDS ON TV have never looked and sounded so good. A music video where the KIDS are the kids, the mother a gift-bearing fairy wood nymph and the father a high-heeled, nosey prude. Modern-day family values brought to life by director and subject Keith Cole, “Still On About Keith Cole” is a hippy, trippy homage to our queer past.