Film Categories: Theatre

  • 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.

  • House Opera (it’s in the mix)

    This documentary is about the theatrical troup House of Pride, which consists of three main performers whose unique style combines both theatre and club cultures. House of Pride’s work transcends the usual boundaries of nightclub entertainment and performance art, bringing a new design of performance to theatrical spaces. The content of the performance smoothly blends together universal issues of gender and sexuality, individualism, spirituality, and the environment in a live theatrical show. House of Pride is a Montreal collective which combines outrageously athletic club-vogue-influenced choreography with searing confessional monologues.

  • nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

    ASL is not English: it has a syntax of its own. Remaining true to e.e. cummings’ vision, the poem was transliterated metaphorically into the original syntax of the ASL rather than the SEE (Signed Exact English) to express the poet’s linguistic play in words. The poetic hand movements of the ASL/Art-Sign is to emphasize the dexterous quality of cummings’ perspective, to innovate a different kind of visual interpretation, best suitable for an avant-garde poem. This film, based on e.e. cummings’ poem, presents a penetrating, political-linguistic expression of humanity in a twisting, intertwining multi-choreographed collaboration of the several artists in Art-Sign,…

  • UR Lucky

    I placed a medallion on the sidewalk and filmed whoever happened along to pick it up. The film is about not being able to have control over the event, and the acceptance of this fact. This is the first film in my Performance Trilogy, a series of films which also include “Snow Search” and “Making a Scene.” (MD)

  • 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,…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Film Concerto in Hanging Major

    As the heartbroken Papageno from The Magic Flute is on the brink of ending his life, we pause to examine his options. “Film Concerto in Hanging Major” is a highly informative, yet darkly humorous, guide into the most effective ways of committing suicide.

  • Fires of Transformation

    “Fires of Transformation” is a documentary about a unique women’s theatre troupe called VOICE (Violence Overcome in Creative Ensemble), who have collectively written and performed an original play based on their own experiences as survivors of wife assault and other forms of violence against women and children. The film chronicles VOICE’s 1990 National Tour, taking its viewers on an emotional and triumphant journey across Canada. Utilizing interviews, audience discussions, and scenes from VOICE’s powerful play the film celebrates the courage and strength of the women who created it and documents a process of empowerment and transformation.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.