Film Format: 16mm

  • Paul Horn in China

    The famous Canadian jazz flautist visits China with a tour group and finds himself on stage before an audience of five thousand. This remarkable trip, full of both Chinese music and the unmistakable melodies of Paul Horn, is captured on film by the filmmakers who travelled with him.

  • Pearl Mad

    Fantasy is her only refuge as Mae spends the last day of her life at the Gothic Insemination Laboratory, where she works and struggles with her role as a “passive collaborator.” An exoticised portrait of a WASP hunted by Bees. In a private allegory for despair, the protagonist, Mae, unfolds a personal mythology of sex and honey in Pearl and Glitter. Vowing never to return, Mae embarks on an absurd Suicide-Quest with the “good seeds” of man!

  • Pearl’s Diner

    A beautifully rendered all-night roadside diner – complete with shiny chrome surfaces, jukebox, and local regulars – is the setting for this quietly moving story, seen through the eyes of the waitress, Pearl. Though trying to remain uninvolved, Pearl cannot help secretly imagining and speculating about the private lives of two of her customers. The question becomes: Should she act on those speculations? The animated images are composed of cutouts, collage and drawings.

  • Peggy’s Blue Skylight

    Filmed in Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow’s loft in New York, the film covers a day of friends visiting, writing and drawing from noon of one day to dawn the next day. The soundtrack was done by Paul Bley. The 16mm film is a blow-up of grainy 8mm stock.

  • People Have Their Strife Now and Then

    Less is more, and it’s humorously proven as people are told to “Stand on the X” while the camera records them. Although they’re asked to do nothing, of course they do everything but. Personalities are revealed through a minimalist format.

  • Performance by Jack Smith, A

    In October of 1984, the highly acclaimed New York artist, Jack Smith, came to Toronto for a week long performance/Halloween ritual at the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre. This performance, true to Smithesque form, went by three different titles: “Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application,” “Brassieres of Uranus,” and “Impacted Croissants From Outer Space.” Accompanied by the music of Yma Sumac, this short piece remains the last film documentation of this historic event.

  • Perfumed Nightmare

    “One of the year’s ten best films.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice “There’s nothing even remotely nightmarish about ‘Perfumed Nightmare.’ It’s an enchanting and poignant experience, a totally original seriocomic creation with an infectious and exuberant energy. The film is a semi-autobiographical fable by a young Philippino named Kidlat Tahimik, about his awakening to, and reaction against, American cultural colonialism. Born in 1942 during the Occupation, Kidlat spent ‘the next 33 typhoon seasons in a cocoon of American dreams.’ This, then, is his perfumed nightmare: the lotus land of American technological promise. “In his primitive village he worships the heroism…

  • Azure Serene

    “Inspired by the poets of Rainer Maria Rilke, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound…Elder’s latest film…is a visually lush collage,” and “an ironic attempt to construct a ‘Divine Comedy’ for modern times.” – Jim Shedden

  • Perils

    An homage to silent films: the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy; seduction, revenge, jealousy, combat. The isolation and dramatization of emotions through the isolation (camera) and dramatization (editing) of gesture. I had long conceived of a film composed only of reaction shots in which all causality was erased. What would be left would be the resonant voluptuous suggestions of history and the human face. “Perils” is a first translation of these ideas. (AC) “Even more emphatic in its expose of movie methods is ‘Perils,’ which stages stylized fight scenes, with an occasional appearance by a camera on a…

  • Permutations and Combinations

    Aleatory procedures are used to create movement at the points of fusion of the still images of which the film is constituted. For this reason, all movements within the film are completely reversible. This reversibility is extended into the film’s overall structure, as the film is formed into a loop – a closed container for the film’s chance elements. Such a structure, I believe, results in the complete elimination of all vestiges of drama from the film. Hence this film is a companion piece to “She Is Away.” The sounds of the film though determined in their occurrence by specific…