Genres: experimental

  • On the Pond

    Essential to the making of the film was an examination of still photographs. Stills were used as clues to the past. Clues that would bring order and meaning to significant memories. (PH) “Hoffman’s film is in the experimental film tradition of the personal diary, although in this case a beautifully paced mixture of family photographs and dramatic reconstruction interwoven into a narrative creates an objective distance. ‘On the Pond’ reveals skills of editing, sound and story telling which evoke in ten minutes a complex and emotional study of a family, its past and present, its young dreams and its affections.…

  • One Second in Montreal

    “In Snow’s… ‘One Second in Montreal’ and ‘Dripping Water’ (made with Joyce Wieland) we are brought to consider the force of time stripped of spatial interest. A collection of snow scenes, all still photographs of potential sites for a monument in Montreal (thus distinctly not ‘artistic’ photographs) follow one another for 22 minutes. The film is aggressive, yet haunting. It is too at the edge, at the point where an image of an actuality provides a firmer ground for meditation than an abstract image or no image at all. “This particular film provides the subtlety of Snow’s genius, in his…

  • One Side, Left Corner

    “The one I liked best was ‘One Side, Left Corner’, which could be described equally well as a drama, documentary, or experimental film. If it can be said to have a plot it’s about a couple who drive out to a cottage in the country, then back to the city – but that really doesn’t matter. It’s about people failing to communicate! What counts is the experiments in filmmaking that were an integral part of what the film was saying. I liked Neal Livingston’s innovations. They worked. Experimental success.” – Catriona Talbot, The 4th Estate, Halifax, Nova Scotia

  • One Way Boogie Woogie

    “…sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual contrast but is also felt as a dialectic between permanence and impermanence…” – Noel Carroll, Soho Weekly News

  • One Woman Waiting

    “One Woman Waiting” evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film. “Massarella uses the fixed camera shot in her enigmatic film of a symbolic encounter between two women in a beautifully shot desert location. Its cryptic form is a good example of how an idea can be treated most effectively by simple means, for instance in the use of the frame as a point of entry and exit for characters…

  • Ophelia and The Cat Lady

    Two films on one reel. With Liz Reiner (OPHELIA) and Carla Liss (THE CAT LADY). On one level the films are portraits; on another level the first is inspired by reading about the painting of John Millais’ “Ophelia,” and “The Cat Lady” is an homage to the horror films of the filmmaker’s childhood movie going.

  • Optic Nerve

    Of this film Hammer says, “It is about the fragility of both film and life as the sterility of a nursing home is memorized with veils and faded patterns of the past by the filmmaker imagining what her grandmother is seeing.” The film won first prize in several film festivals, was chosen for the 1987 Whitney Museum of Art Biennial and was premiered at the London International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1988.

  • Autumnal

    This is a film composed of two elements: (1) simple hand-painted frames and brief strips of hand-painting, and (2) strips of blank colours, which appear as overall hues or colour tones filtering light itself rather than any pictured scenes. These two elements are interposed in editing so as to suggest the seasonal changes of tree-leaf (from greens to golds, reds and browns) and the sky (from varieties of warm-to-cold blues).

  • Opus 40

    “Opus 40” is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to form pattern and rhythm, repetition in order and in revealing. “Opus 40” was filmed in the Enterprise Foundry, Sackville, New Brunswick, and has excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s writings.

  • Our Lady of the Sphere

    The mystical Lady with the orbital head moves through the carnival of life in a Surreal Adventure. A classic. Show it to anyone who likes movies. “A beauty … a genuinely mystical excercise.” – Howard Thompson, N.Y. Times “‘Our Lady of the Sphere’ – perhaps Jordan’s most exquisitely perfect creation – is a color collage of roccoco imagery juxtaposed with symbols of the space age. The images metamorphose, transmute, interpenetrate and otherwise change with the fluid effervescence of bubbles rising out of water, punctuated by sudden flashes of light, alarm buzzers and abrupt visual surprises. It is a mystical, jewel-like…