Genres: experimental

  • Moving Bicycle Picture

    Duchamp once said about his bicycle wheel piece, “One day I had the happy idea to mount a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool and watch it spin.” One summer I had the happy idea of taking a bicycle trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay. The bicycle trip was recorded with a tiny “Keystone” camera. I leave out important events like eating and camping and concentrate mainly on what is seen from the moving bicycle. After a time the camera, bicycle and myself become entangled, involved, friends and enemies. A film on moving. As a film I often mount it…

  • As Seen on TV

    “Much of the imagery seen on TV is first captured on film; here the filmmaker has reversed the process. As the title suggests, this film foregrounds the aesthetic nature of the television/cinematic medium by manipulating its pictorial qualities – image grain, scan lines and its luminous colour qualities. “The structure of the film alternates between looped, processed stock TV imagery and a blank, static blue screen. This formal motif – a blank frame or screen onto which the artist projects imagery which expresses inner emotions and anxieties – is a motif which recurs throughout Rimmer’s filmic oeuvre. ‘As Seen on…

  • Murder Psalm

    “In my novel ‘The Devils’ I attempted to depict the complex and heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in an absolutely monstrous crime.” – Dostoyevsky’s “The Diary of a Writer” “‘Murder Psalm’ is a vision of blood on the tracks, a response to the daily diet of T.V. death, to death in the raw, to childhood terror … a dense texture of swiftly crossing viewpoints, image placed against image, in a film of impassioned intensity.” – A. L. Rees, British Film Institute

  • Museum

    We all make our own ghosts – we take the people and experiences and events that have affected us the most, and encourage them to haunt us. “Museum” is, on every level, replete with ghosts and hauntings. Penny, the narrator and filmmaker, is obsessed with the impossible task of capturing the ghosts that reside within her life on film (the most literal and unforgiving of mediums). Yet even as she struggles with this mission (one common to many image-takers), her own substance and “realness”are brought into question, as her disembodied voice carries us through the narrative. (CW)

  • My Own Obsession

    “My Own Obsession” is a film interested in the implications of identity and the archeology of those mental layers that represent our identities. It is a journey through the identity of an Armenian-Canadian woman during a specific period, which is documented through interviews with various individuals about their encounters and experiences with the protagonist. The line between documentary and fiction is blurred. The cinematic impact unfolds into poetic visual metaphors, which weave themselves throughout the film. It is a film which explores the relationship of the viewer to the film. An unknown archivist/filmmaker structures the cinematic experience through the guise…

  • My Withered Tomato Friend

    “My Withered Tomato Friend” is a haunting, experimental narrative that merges the roaming voice of a battered wife with popular images of women to question the conventional ideology of representation and the denial of domestic violence. Alternating between provocative poetry and submissive prose, the voice echoes terrifying thoughts of the abused woman while gradually deconstructing – and reconstructing- manipulated found footage. “Absolutely exhilarating to watch, this is the hard edge of feminist experimental cinema.” – Piers Handling, Director, Toronto International Film Festival One Star Award, Canadian International Amateur Film Festival, 1992

  • Name Your Poison It’s a Scream Channel No. 5

    A nasty little movie about violation and contamination – physical, geographical and ideological. The sound, built and mixed on a 4-track cassette recorder, was culled from shortwave radio, Italian B-movies, and a perfume advertisement. Chernobyl, AIDS, and sexual assault in a lament for our times.

  • At Her Cottage

    “At Her Cottage” depicts a woman who recounts, first non-synchronously, in voice-over, then synchronously, on camera, an episode of an acquaintance asking a young medical student friend to perform an abortion and his refusal. He claims that she is too young to make such a decision. In another episode, she tells of a man from a nearby town dying after his car plunged into icy waters, while another passenger escapes. “At first, the images in this section are typical cottage scenes. We are presented with vistas overlooking a lake, a young girl lying on a towel, a plastic wheelbarrow and…

  • Naosaki

    An aesthetic study of gymnastic movement, emphasizing its visual and lyrical elements, and creating the “feeling” of movement through the use of slow motion, repetition of movement, dissolves, etc. The movement proceeds sequentially through preparation, strength movements, airborne movements and so on to resolution.

  • Narrows Inlet

    Starting with a boat swaying on its anchor at the head of an inlet, a landscape of pilings, shore, and forest is slowly revealed by time-lapse photography as the morning fog lifts. While the deep space of the landscape evolves out of the fog-enshrouded flatness of early morning, the camera skips from fixed point to fixed point – suggesting the motion of the human eye while reading.