Genres: experimental

  • Sex Without Glasses

    “The quintessential boy meets girl story, ‘Sex Without Glasses’ is a tale about relationships – of various kinds. This film has everything from alphabets (manual) to zithers, and features some of Toronto’s most celestial bodies.” – Anna Gronau

  • Sexual Meditation: Room with a View

    Directly in the tradition of “Sexual Meditation No. 1: Motel…” this “sequel” does explore further the possibilities of nudes in a room… (SB)

  • Shadows

    “Shadows” is a marriage of dance, music, and digital visual effects. The choreography and the visual effects work integrally together to create a piece that could only exist in this medium. Images of a dancer and of a solo harpist are manipulated and combined electronically, so that they pass through each other, transform one into the other, and bend and ripple to the music, as the harpist plays one of John Weinzweig’s haunting “Fifteen Pieces for Solo Harp.”

  • 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,…

  • She Is Away

    The film’s projected time is the basic material of this film and is wrought into a simple form which, by its radically reductionist structure, transforms the material of the dramatic form into a tone poem of waiting and anticipation. (RBE)

  • Sheep

    A man counting sheep as he sleeps. I have never seen sheep as I sleep. The sheep relax the man, he falls into a deep sleep. You are wide awake, moving through the man, maybe sleeping counting sheep. The alchemy, the dream, the scene. (CB)

  • Shimmer

    This early short already shows Kneller’s characteristic image manipulations, lyric sensibilities, and insistence on a simultaneous presentation. The central figure of this film poem is a distorting mirror, reflecting from a distance the stern grid of an apartment block, rendered now in wavy lines of loopy abstractions. This conversion of material into immaterial closes with an image of a window plant, as if these cycles of transformation had emerged from a plant’s vision after all, its conversion of sunlight into oxygen (photosynthesis) an emblem for the transformative power of seeing.

  • Shiteater

    “A five star gross-out, ‘Shiteater’ features a body in revolt… Andrew Wilson gives a tour de farce performance as the shiteater and Hoolboom’s camera work is never less than sublime.” – Gina Hampton, Herald

  • Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film

    In 1970 I had a large retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. For this exhibition I composed/designed a largely photographic book called “A Survey.” This was the first of several works, which attempted to use previous work or the records of previous work as the material for new work. Starting with “raw” material that has already been formed by oneself on some other occasions for some other purposes is a very interesting thing. “Side Seat…” is a 20-minute sound film made in 1970 of the projecting and verbal (my voice) identification of slides (made at various…

  • Sifted Evidence

    A woman is telling the story of how she went to Mexico looking for an obscure archaeological site; how she met a man who promised to take her there; how they stayed together locked in cross-purposes and misunderstandings – how, but never why. The central event has been reconstructed through stills, narration, and enactment by two performers in a tableau limited by the boundaries of a front projection screen. “Patricia Gruben’s striking featurette starts like a parody of anthropological film and turns into an hallucinatory subjective account of one woman’s Mexican misadventure. Among the most assured experimental narratives of the…