Film Format: 16mm

  • Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion

    The bus stopped on the Mexican highway, placing us in full view of a young boy, motionless, on the hot pavement. In this film, the incident is revealed through a poetic text, derived from my written journals. The poetry mixes primarily with Mexican streetscapes which compliment the text in a tonal sense. Most images are 28 seconds long, the “breath” of the 16mm Bolex camera. A lone saxophone (Mike Callich) weaves its way through the narrative, blending to make stronger the tones and accentuations of the images. (PH)

  • Song for Mixed Choir

    “Song” is laid over two picture rolls, printed together. The first magnifies the grain of the film, filling the screen with the circling constituents of its material base. The second roll draws a succession of figures from a dimly lit nightlife. There is a dance, a house party and a subway turnstile moving toward the most domestic kind of horror, a horror of the commonplace and the mundane, the horrors of toothbrush and comb and electric lamp. “Song” is an image of cinema’s prehistory – before “in the beginning was the word” but also: before the domain of picture took…

  • Sons of Captain Poetry

    This “fantasy documentary” tries to blend Canadian poet bp Nichol’s everyday world with the images of characters in his poetry. Sequences include a section on Plunkett, Saskatchewan, where the poet grew up, and scenes of him discussing “concrete poetry.” In the film bp Nichol performs several sound poems. There are also scenes showing his involvement with Coach House Press and Therafields.

  • Sound of Space, The

    A film of an individual looking for himself, looking for inner peace in a world of continual conflict. Due to the fact that I wanted to be in the film, that the subject was me, it was my search, my wife did all the shooting when I was on-screen… The whole thing depends on focusing attention on something. The film is silent and should be run at 24 frames per second. After the film ends the projector bulb should be left on and the reel turning, film flapping against the projector for one minute. (CG) Available on DVD on “Charles…

  • Sowesto

    A collection of footage from my friends or by my friends and me. It is amazing the number of events recorded by various means around London. “Sowesto” contains the opening of Region Gallery, The First Canadian Happening, Barbara Ann Scott in St. Marys, Nihilist events, etc. (GC)

  • space

    “Something to be holdin, to you: something too beholden to you.” A concrete poem made as a very blue Super 8 film experiment about: “I need a little space.” It’s all the things she never said as she visits the haunts of their urban love and remembers what happened in the Fall.

  • Bedtime Story

    A timeless tale with a twist. Mother puts her child to bed, a witch and an artist make a deal and the moral of the story is … up to you. An exploration of stop-motion animation and composition combining human, wooden and feline actors.

  • Spare Parts

    Scenes from old educational and propaganda films, cut up and arranged (deranged) in numerical patterns. Chance collisions occur with techniques based on William Burroughs’ writing experiments and John Cage’s music composition. The final section consists of 24 variations of 24 frames in one second of film; to watch all 6.2 X 10 (to the power of 23) possible permutations would take approximately 76 thousand-trillion years.

  • Sparkill Ave

    Named after the street on which he lives in Tappan, New York, “Sparkhill Ave” continues the autobiographical line of inquiry through family, friends, neighbours, community, and Americana that began with “T.Z. “(1979) and passed through “Trial Balloons” (1982), “Bang!” (1986), and “A Frog on the Swing” (1988). In addition to his usual improvisations on form, colour, and motion, Breer collages and animates photographs of street scenes, parades and seasonal variations in the landscape. Combined with an unusual-for-him continuously running synthesizer soundtrack, “Sparkill Ave” paints a portrait of a small town, a seemingly closed system that’s never the less informed by…

  • Speakbody

    Using techniques from documentary, the avant-garde, and narrative films, a great deal of information about abortion is compressed into a short time. The film combines the interwoven multi-layered voices of women recounting their experiences with minimal images from one woman’s memory. Short but powerful.