Genres: experimental

  • <---> (Back and Forth)

    “… his sternest film, titled with a sign for back and forth motion. A specially rigged camera swings right-left, left-right, before a homely, sterile classroom wall, then accelerates into an unbearable blur (the same frenzied scramble, as though the whole creative process was going berserk, that occurs three quarters of the way through ‘Abbey Road’)… In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention and, as much as any single element, created the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.”…

  • private patch of blue, a

    “I have breathed you in and there are no words to exorcise you from my soul.” – Eleanor Crow “An auto-portrait of maternity, ‘private patch’ shows Toronto filmer Tracy German quietly expectant, keening through winterludes of surprise before the birth of her first child. Episodically structured and materially assured, German’s exacting observational sense re-creates her domestic surround from the point of view of her boy-to-be, lurking over woodpiles and rock with eyes wide in wonder, turning the surrounding bush into a softly focused pastel glaze. “Deftly intercutting interiors and exteriors, ‘private’ opens on a wintry porch, a liminal architectural space…

  • Private Property / Public History

    “Having acquired a set of family snapshots at an auction sale, Doyle traced their origins to an Ontario family. She talked with the now-elderly women and reconstructed the photographs and the dialogue in this film which confronts issues of photographic representation and its uses in family history.” – “Toronto: A Play of History,” The Power Plant, 1987

  • Privilege

    The most remarkable thing was the silence that emanated from friends and family regarding the details of my single middle age. When I was younger, my sex life had been the object of all kinds of questioning, from prurient curiosity to solicitous concern. (YR)

  • Process, The

    LIGHT was primary in my consideration. All senses of “process” are (to me) based primarily on “thought-process”; and “thought-process” is based primarily on “memory re-call”; and that, as any memory process (all process finally) is electrical (firing of nerve connection) and expresses itself most clearly as a “back-firing” of nerve endings in the eye which DO become visible to us (usually eyes closed) as “brain movies” – as Michael McClure calls them. When we are not re-constructing “ a scene” (recalling something once seen), then we are watching (on the “screen” of closed eye-lids) the very PROCESS itself. (SB)

  • Prologue: Infinite Obscure

    The film began with the idea of doing a “remake” of “Moby Dick” using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted from his version. A number of other issues began to take precedence however: the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic writing; the possible intersections of (auto) biography and fiction; the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo) sexuality. (MC)

  • Psychosynthesis

    The sub-personalities of me, my baby, athlete, witch, and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and colour layers coming quietly together through the healing powers of natural touchstone. (BH) “…I would gladly go out of my way to see it again and would travel some distance to a retrospective of its author’s work.” – Tom Dowling, Washington Star “Ms. Hammer, a feminist artist in a male-dominated industry, is clearly someone who has ideas which go beyond male-female roles into the very nature of the film experience. Her awards and prizes include the Louise Riskin Prize and her…

  • Puits de Lumiere, Le / Light Shaft

    “Light Shaft” diagonally crosses the screen with a wedged light formation, usually on the diagonal. Its variations are rendered through arrangements of the tripod while panning the camera. Limiting the viewer’s attention to a smaller screen, a point in space, allows for a certain confusion as to whether the rest of the (dark) screen blends itself into the surrounding blackness or is just a window ino it. This is more apparent when the “wedged light” goes out of the frame. It can be felt as if crossing the room; and it reappears at the opposite end of the frame. Sometimes…

  • Quiproquo

    Situated in an environment where nature and social-industrial technology meet, the film attempts a visual dialogue with (and critique of) mainstream society’s concerns. To the extent that it refers to the economy of means involved in relation to what is stated, the work is both a reflection on the possibilities of the medium and an inquiry concerning the implications of the reality filmed.

  • R34

    “Begun with a softly focused series of close-ups, London artist Greg Curnoe is unfurled in an impressionistic hue that gives way to a cataloguing of his Schwitters-like collages. Chambers proceeds with a strict attention to rhythm, chaining together recycled fragments in a round dance that swings in and out of closing doors, image winking out of darkness, the products of Curnoe’s labour intertwined with his own cooking, combing, taking out the garbage. His montage is not merely content to show an artist at work, but actively mimes the very work it is witness to. “A fragmentary confessional ensues, broken lines…