Genres: experimental

  • Next to Me

    Using fragmented personal imagery, “Next to Me” renders Cartier-Bresson’s theory of the “decisive moment” fully in cinematic terms. The film is an expressionistic exercise in editing, which explores the nature of time and memory, film and still photography, against the urban landscape of New York. “Renais-like, Hancox discovers the plastic qualities of time, the involving power of fragmentation… The work is inventive and fresh with a spontaneous approach made meaningful by some remarkably fine-edged cutting. He uses visual images like words and sounds in poetry.” – Cinema Canada, May 1974

  • At Present

    “What’s involved in love?-power, control-is that what we’re talking about?” This film is about love-relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular. Another voice-over reads parables, which present a context for the possibility of love or spirit in the world at large. The film ends optimistically: a smile slowly spreads on a man’s face; women addressing men in their own voices. “He stored the Divine Light in a vessel, but the vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst, and its shards, permeated with…

  • Night Music

    This little film (originally painted on IMAX) attempts to capture the beauty of sadness, as the eyes have it when closed in meditation on sorrow. (SB)

  • Night Stream

    “Night Stream”, a short experimental film about rebirth and fertility, succinctly evokes the flow of tension and trance within the dream state. Selected screenings: New York International Independent Film Festival, New York,1999; Bangladesh International Film Festival, 1999; Madrid Experimental Film Festival, Madrid, Spain,1997; Ann Arbor Festival of Independent and Experimental Film, Ann Arbor, MI,1996.

  • Nightmare Series

    A decade and a half ago, poet Robert Kelly told me that the “crucial work” of our time might be what he calls “the dream work”: I hope, with this Series, to have entertained his challenge more thoughtfully than with any previous “dream” filmmaking. In homage to Sigmund Freud & Surrealism, this film proposes clear visual alternatives to the consideration of both “The Interpretation of…” and all previous representations of… dreaming. (SB) “These four short films…have each individually a haunting quality but do importantly work together to form a gradually swelling curve of increasingly intense unease.” -Marie Nesthus

  • Atmosphere

    “In ‘Atmosphere’ the camera pans back and forth over a body of water at a varying tempo and most people assume that a camera operator is in charge. The final image of the film carries a great deal of significance. It opens up a gap between the film’s appearance and its reality; what it appears to be – what it imitates – is not an object or scene from everyday life, but a film. ‘Atmosphere’ is not just an imitation, but an imitation of an imitation, a metafilm that plays with the viewers’ expectations about cinematic form.” – R. Bruce…

  • Nine O’Clock Gun, The

    Real time is an oxymoron. The film presents one firing of Vancouver’s famous gun; an event that attracts an audience visible on screen unlike the audience watching the film; ourselves. Our experience of time in our innermost self is unlike our experience of space or mass yet nothing in physics corresponds to the passage of time. How can something we experience as so real be based on an illusion. Norfolk, Virginia also has a Nine O’clock Gun.

  • 1933

    “1933. The year? the number? the title? Was it (the film) made then? It’s a memory! (i.e. a Film.) No, it’s many memories. It’s so sad and funny: the departed, departing people, cars, streets! It hurries, it’s gone, it’s back! the film (of 1933?) was made in 1967. You find out, if you don’t already know, how naming tints pure vision.” – Michael Snow “The repeated images are such that they appear to be different each time; to be expanding. ‘1933’ has a machine-mechanical doll rhythmic-like structure.” – Robert Cowan, Take One

  • Nocturne

    A train passes by, a boy with a sparkler in his hand leads us into the world of night. A dark, haunting portrait of the urban landscape in a nocturnal fog. “An impressionistic portrait of Montreal in a nocturnal fog that is simultaneously beautiful and foreboding.” – John Dippong, Vancouver International Film Festival “A painterly vision of what happens in the city at night – beautiful and poetic.” – Stuart Poyntz, Street-Level Film Festival

  • Non-Zymase Pentathlon

    “Non-Zymase Pentathlon” makes use of the commercial imagery of post-war North America, culled from the pages of Life, Maclean’s, National Geographic, and their ilk, animating these pictures in absurd and arbitrary juxtapositions. Animals, people, consumer goods, military equipment, and other detritus float across different planes in an ambiguous film-space. The film is structured into five “events,” preceded by a brief introduction.