Genres: experimental

  • Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax)

    “Parallax is the apparent change in position of an object resulting from the change in direction or position from which it is viewed.” Confusion, underlying meaning, and unspoken truths are often associated with the dialectic of sexual communication. Mingled with the intensity and unpredictability of a “one night stand,” they generate unique sensations – mixed emotion, risk, excitement. The film employs formal devices in a manner which is simple yet effective. Its subject matter – sexuality and communication – gains depth and poignancy through the artist’s decision to shoot the film’s three scenes for projection in a double-screen configuration, providing…

  • Tending Towards the Horizontal

    The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind. The filmed images are predominantly houses: houses seen in passing, along the horizontal; houses reflecting sky and trees in their windows; houses partially hidden by trees or the shadows they cast; houses and office towers simultaneously pictured in stages of demolition and construction. The images dissolve in and…

  • Terminal City

    “The Devonshire Hotel in downtown Vancouver was destroyed by blasting: Gallagher recorded the event with a camera that shot 200 frames per second and manipulated the sounds recorded at the time so they play back at the same speed as the images. The ‘unnatural’ destruction of the structure is rendered mysterious as explosives accelerate. Camera retards natural rhythms of entropy, a man-made rock implodes into a static ‘heaven’ of smoke and dust: city becomes cloudscape; cheering and whistling, spirit calls heralding the void.” – Tony Rief

  • Agnus dei Kinder Synapse

    To the child mind, the transformative sacrificial power of “O, Lamb of God” is a daily manifestation – not as an adult shift-of-interest, but rather as ritual magic in which a toy train (“-of-thought,” an adult might say) becomes medium of shifts-of-scene, soforth, wherein an elephantine shape transforms to a more “real” (i.e. less metaphorical) train, in sacrifice of transformative elephant, so on-&-on. An earlier film, “The Machine of Eden,” is of some similar construct (as is a good deal of western painting) in its insistence upon contemporary mise-en-scene as grounds for Biblical lore.

  • Text of Light, The

    “All that is is light.” – Duns Scotus Erigena “To see a world in a grain of sand.” – William Blake These were the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the “first spark” of refracted film light. (SB)

  • Thanatopsis

    Time exposures of dancer Becky Arnold create a flickering vibrating image juxtaposed against the immobile face of Mac Emshwiller. An experimental film creating and portraying a state of anxiety. Heartbeats and ripsaws on the soundtrack contribute to the intense effect.

  • Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present

    “‘Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present’ posits, in ingeniously compact visual/aural form, a multitude of eternal dichotomies, among them darkness and light, and the psychic separation of spiritual/sexual (inward) vs. material/sexual (outward) striving. “Instead of a ying/yang antimony: God and the Devil in female guise. The fervently whispered prayers of the woman whose face is seen in close-up have transported her to a nearly sexual, religious ecstasy; and each reappearance of the worldly, sexually powerful ‘corporation’ woman is heralded by a sharp, synchronous thunderclap and camera flash. Yet it is she – the world woman, Venus in furs –…

  • b series

    This film is a series of five little hand-painted and elaborately step-printed sections which are individually titled but so inter-related I’ve decided they should always be shown in this order together, but each such a distinction of the essentially un-nameable subject matter they variously facet that they should retain the character of individual pieces within their shared context … a context I’ve attempted to represent by a small “b” for my name “Brakhage.” The film begins with Old Testament, a two-and-a-half minute historical section titled RETROSPECT: THE PASSOVER and its evolution of forms is meant to suggest the Biblical story…

  • There Is in Power… Seduction

    A short exploration of the symbolic ambiguity of corporate versus sensual power. Does a woman adopt the mannerisms of a man when she enters the “male” territory of corporate power? There is of course no correct answer, and perhaps there is really no question. The body is language. Power seduces and is seductive.

  • There, Try Alive…

    “There is a voice crying in the wilderness”, Catherine Clement and Hellen Cixous say, “the voice of the body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it?” It is they say, “the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage.” Introduction of “The Newly Born Woman” by Hellen Cixous and Catherine Clement. This film is an experimental psychodrama in which a woman goes through an incredible inner journey in which all fear, confusion, desire and attempts are bound and conquered towards a better understanding of herself. The doors represent the…