Genres: experimental

  • Nursing History

    “Nursing History” began as an inquiry into the nature of woman’s work, specifically the relationship between woman’s work as wives and mothers, and woman’s work as nurses. Having worked as a nurse for ten years, I decided to locate this inquiry historically, within my own past as represented in the home movies that, for the most part, my father had made and that stand as a record of our family’s collective history. From 1968-1984, 60 minutes worth of history, on Super 8 film, were recorded. Out of this footage there were forty minutes of weddings and in each case it…

  • O Panama

    O Panama’s elegant montage denotes a subject that is always on the verge of collapse. This episodic narrative opens spaces in the film where the audience can enter into the story with its own experiences.

  • ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)

    Music by Tucker Zimmerman. “Philip Hoffman’s ‘?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)’ uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else’s filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed & Two Noughts’), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. ‘Pure’ is both the right and the wrong word: Hoffman is a man addicted to the hermetic thisness of filmed images, and plagued by the suspicion that these images, far from being pure, are really scabs torn away from the sores of the world. Found footage shot by his grandfather (a newsreel cameraman) is the starting point…

  • Oblivion

    “‘Oblivion’ successfully blends elements from both the poetic and diary modes. In the process, Tom Chomont has created one of the few truly erotic works of cinema.” – J.J. Murphy, “Reaching Toward Oblivion,” Millennium Film Journal No. 3 “Lost in the heat of a masturbatory revel, light pours off the skin of the filmmaker, finally coalescing in an associative montage that relates the body of his hustler/lover with the world outside. ‘Oblivion’ is very much a ‘home movie,’ enclosed between the four walls of a New York tenement, it describes a lover ‘s encounter.” – Mike Hoolboom

  • October 25th + 26th, 1996

    During the Metro Days of Action, a 150’ long building was inflated using the air vents in front of Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. The October Group action references both public institution and temporary home to protest the erosion of our city. Music by Dirty Three.

  • Aura-Gone

    The film centres around one still shot that documents the movements of a city, which is seen in a multi-layered reflection of passing street action. ‘Aura-Gone’ is a serious, mature experimental film. The front of the hospital has the appearance of a giant mirror with double doors set into it. The effect of watching this extended single shot is to gradually discover the layers of real and reflected space occupied by moving people. It has a particularly fascinating complexity.” – John Locke, Cinema Canada  

  • On Land Over Water (Six Stories)

    “In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought” (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of “On Land Over Water.” “On Land Over Water…” was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, “On Land Over Water…”…

  • On Land Over Water – At Her Cottage

    “In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought” (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of “On Land Over Water.” “On Land Over Water…” was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, “On Land Over Water…”…

  • On Land Over Water – His Romantic Movement

    “In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought” (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of “On Land Over Water.” “On Land Over Water…” was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, “On Land Over Water…”…

  • On the Marriage Broker Joke

    “‘On the Marriage Broker Joke’… turns upon an opposition of Freudian analysis and Christian hermeneutics… Two pandas, who exist only because of a textual error, run a shell game for the viewer in an environment with false perspectives. They posit the existence of various films and characters, one of which is interpreted by an academic as containing religious symbolism. Sigmund Freud’s own explanation is given by a sleeper awakened by an alarm clock.” – P. Adams Sitney