Film Format: 16mm

  • Self Song / Death Song

    “‘Self Song’ documents a body besieged by cancer. The amber glow of narrowly focused, miniscule, layers of flesh and skin suggests both victory and submission to death. The warm colors of the flesh grooves and textures of the skin seemingly suggest a body, which is very much alive. Yet, there is always an impending darkness. Blackness surrounds the image and occasionally, takes it over altogether. Furthermore, the complex grooves and patterns of the flesh struggle to maintain their focus, suggesting the obscuring and dissolving effects of cancer. “In ‘Death Song’ the response to death is certainly more positive. The film…

  • Stately Mansions Did Decree

    This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which emerges a series of landscapes, gardens, exteriors of mansions, castles and the like, then (as yellow predominates ever vegetable greens, sherwood greens and deep floral reds, blood reds) interior corridors and room, as if lit by chandeliers and candelabras – all of which eventually bursts into flames, explosions, which somewhat “echo” visually the beginning of film. (SB)

  • Coupling

    This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work (involving Positives and Negatives of original painted source material in combination, as well as superimpositions filmed at 24fps and at 48 fps) is a very organic be-seeming darkly coloured work (blood and rust reds mixed with off-greens) as if microscopic images of connective and (other) cells and/or threads of internal muscles were caught in a “dance” (i.e. contrapuntal varieties-of-rhythm increasingly coordinated) ultimately suggestive of sex). The forms of the work also vaguely metaphor male and female exterior nudity coupling. The evolution of the work is almost purely rhythmic as increased tempos, in ever more…

  • Like a Dream That Vanishes

    “Like a Dream That Vanishes” continues my work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses. (Your life is like a candle burning.) Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles. The movement between form and…

  • Doc Mulsic

    An invalid’s fantasy? Desiring his own end and, as it were, discharging himself, Claremore takes revenge upon “the institution.”

  • Beluga Crash Blues

    Usually studies of faces, objects, machines or abstractions carry a sense of heightening montage. In this case the filmmaker, preferring dramatic effects to anecdotes, is preoccupied less with situating the action in time and space than producing malleable visual material and the aesthetics of montage. The space created in the film presents a neutral architecture, utilitarian and mechanistic, where the protagonists ponder the torrid universe which has been created in their image.

  • Cloud Chamber

    This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually give way to pale suggestions of pastel colours. These take shape occasionally and flicker the forthcoming bits of solid coloured and multiply formed abstract images, a few brief sequences-of-such interspersed with the cloud-suggestive passages as at beginning, which eventually end the film (Stan Brakhage).

  • Persian Series #7

    In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. (Stan Brakhage)

  • Persian Series #8

    In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. (Stan Brakhage)

  • Dizzy

    All of us have experienced times in our lives when the world seems to spin too fast and out of control. Shot in Toronto and Berlin, this film is a love story that tries to make sense of our fragile alignment in the modern world. At the airport on his way to Australia, Adam watches and worries about the check-in lady as she falls ill to some silent and mysterious nausea. Her dizziness triggers a string of memories connected to events in his life. Structured as a series of interwoven vignettes, this film traces the intercontinental wanderings of a modern…