Genres: experimental

  • Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, The

    “The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough” uses literary, structural, autobiographical and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it “stunning” and “hallucinatory.” The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. “…miraculous… charged with…

  • Man Who Envied Women, The

    Jack Deller, a professor of Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, is left by his artist-wife after four years of marriage. Deller is played by two actors; the wife is never seen. Her voice is heard throughout – it governs the film. The camera pursues him on the image track, while her voice pursues her train of thought. The structure of the film is elaborated in a constant interweaving of fiction and documentary, narrative and theory, amidst issues of sexuality, aging, power relations, and political activism.

  • Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy, A

    “Having recently completed his monumental film cycle, ‘The Book of All the Dead,’ Elder begins a new cycle – ‘The Book Of Praise’ – with ‘A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy.’ Elder believes that, by using speed and by creating constructions which incorporate a number of attractions that contend with each other for attention, a filmmaker can produce a form of experience that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the body and the senses. Accordingly, he creates dense, elaborate films that make use of intricate montage construction, complex collage (combining simultaneous multiple…

  • Marilyn’s Window

    This stream-of-consciousness could be nothing less than pathway of the soul, as images of Marilyn’s window are remembered from inside-out, its “view” interwoven with all of other windowing and the Elements of the known world.

  • Architectures Landscapes

    Although made in 1993, this film languished for several years as the filmmaker attempted various remakes during 1994-95. Eventually he decided to preserve the original version and to allow the new experiments a place in the subsequent films, “You Take The High Road” and “We Are Experiencing ….” Luckily the filmmaker’s parents had kept a VHS video version of the original film, otherwise it would have been impossible to cobble together the various film elements from memory alone. The film marks the filmmaker’s first use of the optical printer as a tool for image manipulation and layering. The film is…

  • Mary Mary

    Presented as an autobiography, “Mary Mary” interweaves the political with the mythical; visual and textual “quotes” from other films with fragments of children’s stories; and dreams and memories with history. “M” is an ambiguous figure: an English-Canadian woman filmmaker struggling with the representational structures that form and are formed by her as she tries to make a film. At first her script eludes her. Locked in her room, she becomes tangled in a web of memories, images and stories, quotations and histories. Yet even within these confines (narrative and psychic, as well as architectural) the possibility of new readings is…

  • Matilda

    “Matilda” is an impressionistic portrait of a woman confined to a wheelchair. Through a series of five vignettes, the history of her life unfolds enhanced by a blend of experimental and documentary elements. In the last vignette, entitled ” Matilda’s Interview,” we leave the film with an understanding of her personal survival. Produced with assistance from the Ontario Arts Council.

  • Mayhem

    “Mayhem” gives homage to Film Noir, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books, which generate the action. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade’s “Justine” and Vertov’s sentences about the satiric detective advertisement, “Mayhem” looks at sexuality and violence in the movies. “Mayhem” links the screen, the bedroom, and the streets to generate a mosaic of the way modern culture sends mixed signals about sexuality to men and women. “‘Mayhem’ is more than a detective story; it’s a hypermodern melding of forms, an erotic send-up of slapstick with a heady dose of cultural nay-saying.” – Elizabeth Pincus, Gay Community News…

  • McLuhan

    In “McLuhan”, Kerr recontextualizes a “question and answer period” for design students delivered by media theorist Marshall McLuhan at Sherdian College in 1975. Operating from McLuhan’s own aphorism “the medium is the message,” Kerr combines footage of the address with two scrolling texts in the borders, in one showing an asynchronous transcript that weaves around McLuhan’s dialogue, and in another, reinforcing McLuhan’s talking points like a ticker on cable news. It has the effect of sharply reconceptualizing the semantic and rhetorical values of the lecture in particular, yet also provides a fascinating perspective on McLuhan’s own ideas and intellectual form…

  • Mead, Wrik – Super 8 Films

    Video compilation includes: Deviate Gravity It Helped My Mind Relax What Isabelle Wants Jesus Saves Haven