Genres: experimental

  • Between You and Me

    “Between You and Me” (Tangled Garden, Act III, Scene I) looks at the internalization of homophobia and fatalism present in mainstream representations of the AIDS pandemic, as it reflects on the conflict between grief and desire in a gay man’s psyche. The film challenges the viewer to turn their red ribbons into real action both on the streets and in bed, and to resist the industry of AIDS. Also available on QUEERS ON THE VERGE.

  • Thigh Line Lyre Triangular

    Only at a crisis do I see both the sense as I’ve been trained to see it (that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic, colors as we’ve been trained to call a color a color, and so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves – spots before my eyes, so to speak – and it’s a very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I’ve seen that every time a child was born …. Now none of that was in “Window Water Baby Moving”; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed…

  • Thin Ice

    “Thin Ice” is an investigation into a number of dichotomies present within the prairie landscape. The prairies are highly three-dimensional in depth, yet at the same time two dimensional in horizontal flatness, empty and yet full of detail, static and yet always moving. The concerns within “Thin Ice” take on painterly attributes which are enhanced not only through compositional devices but through the use of a video camera, such that the technical aspects become a major tool for aesthetic consideration.

  • Third Degree

    The film is “about” the fragility of the film medium and human vulnerability; both the filmic and the human images resist threat/intimidation/mutilation: the victim is defiant and the film strip also struggles on, both “under fire.” It is a somewhat violent drama but it is also an ironically comic work and there is a formal beauty in the destructiveness of the burning film. While the film (from section to section or from screen to screen, in the installation format) develops, becomes more visually complex, successively regenerates (as the figurative images degenerate), it nevertheless implies no finality; rather, even in its…

  • This is the end of me

    On September 15th, 1830, during the opening ceremony of the first major railway line in Britain, the member of parliament for Liverpool, William Huskisson, attempted to cross the tracks but was struck by the train and died of the injuries he sustained. “This is the end of me” sets out on a true documentary mission – to delve into this historical event – but gets continually sidetracked …. It’s about history, technology, memory, chaos theory, Canada, eyesight, books, trains, speed, death, and Saskatchewan. The film is visually as eclectic as its narration, including documentation (photos, paintings, diagrams, maps); footage of…

  • 3:48

    “‘3:48’ is a film about living and dying in Ontario. I reassembled newsfilm and other footage to write an allusive and associative history that suggests the laws of memory and the processes of dream. The images date from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and depict the everyday: garbage collection, a picket line, children playing in the snow, a building on fire. Most lack the age or resonance that might inject them with nostalgia. However, they do trace the outlines of the small ways we try to make life in this sad place better.” – Blaine Allan

  • Three Homerics

    This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara Feldman) on a Homeric poem: 1) “Diana holds back the night …” is represented by dark shapes suppressing (almost angularly interfering with) orange-golden effusions of paint and the reflective paint-shapes of early morning greens (as if silhouettes or arm and bodily profile were shading the light), 2) Homer’s “… rolling sea …” represented by hand-painted step-printed dissolves of blues in wave shapes, bubbles, and the soft browns and tender greens of seaweed, flotsam-jetsam, and 3) “Ah, love again, the light” represented by painted explosions…

  • Through and Through

    The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger, and the pressure of history on one’s identity – how do I identify myself as “I”, how as part of a “We”? The film is visual, perceptual; it was made in awe of the world that goes on with and without us and of our personal, human struggles. It is a film about life and death; a film of discrete units of the eternal and a film of living here and now. It…

  • Through the Green Fuse

    “Through the Green Fuse” is a winterscape, a journey of rhythms: trees, ice floes, rushing water and a solitary figure. The film is based on a madrigal by Monteverdi that is itself based on a poem by Petrarch. Music and image intermix to speak of passions, beauty and solitude. It is a film in which voices celebrate, ice imprisons, water invites and the figure journeys. “…and so that my suffering may not reach the shore/A thousand times each day I die, a thousand I am born….”

  • Ties That Bind, The

    “The Ties That Bind” tells the story of a woman who lived in Germany during the Second World War, and like most Germans has had to pay the price ever since for letting Hitler’s actions continue unchallenged. This woman is the narrator of the film as well as the filmmaker’s mother. “The best of New Directors/New Film Festival…The film is an original: a moving and courageous tribute from a achild to a mother’s beleaguered memory.” – David Edelstein, The Village Voice, April 1985 “‘The Ties That Bind’ is a scrutiny both of a mother/daughter relationship and the demands of natural…