Genres: experimental

  • Past History

    Adventure, romance, politics and exile are themes in this unique combination of live action, archival photographs, and animation. Stories of people long ago and far away are brought to life, tracing a history of the effects of progress and development in Latin America on past and present generations.

  • Pat’s Birthday

    A day in the country with Claes Oldenburg and the Ray Gun Theatre Players, including such classic items as the haunted house, a gas station, an ice cream stand, miniature golf, airplane noises, and balloons. Things happen after each other in this film only because there isn’t room for everything at once. After all, time is not supposed to move in one direction any more than it does in another.

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Patriotism 1

    Wieland’s kinetic romp casts David Shackman as an overexposed sleeper dogged by a patriotic march of tube steaks that finally refigures him as our most familiar icon of freedom. This pixillated short about hot dogs is the latest of Wieland’s early film works to be restored to circulation.

  • Ay Que Pelos!

    “Ay Que Pelos!” is a hand-processed experimental film about anxiety disorders and panic attack syndrome. This bilingual film (interweaving English and Spanish) incorporates personal experiences, family history, case studies and medical texts, and uses these to examine the perception and (mis)understanding of the disease. The film is visually structured to reflect and invoke the experience of panic attack.

  • Patriotism 2

    In a way a portrait of Dave Shackman with the American flag. The ending is a stop-motion animation of a set table with food moving and swirling and finally gathering together in a ball. Looking back at the film, the animation sequence seems to foreshadow Dave Shackman’s early death. He died shortly after the film was made.

  • Pearl Mad

    Fantasy is her only refuge as Mae spends the last day of her life at the Gothic Insemination Laboratory, where she works and struggles with her role as a “passive collaborator.” An exoticised portrait of a WASP hunted by Bees. In a private allegory for despair, the protagonist, Mae, unfolds a personal mythology of sex and honey in Pearl and Glitter. Vowing never to return, Mae embarks on an absurd Suicide-Quest with the “good seeds” of man!

  • Peggy’s Blue Skylight

    Filmed in Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow’s loft in New York, the film covers a day of friends visiting, writing and drawing from noon of one day to dawn the next day. The soundtrack was done by Paul Bley. The 16mm film is a blow-up of grainy 8mm stock.

  • People Have Their Strife Now and Then

    Less is more, and it’s humorously proven as people are told to “Stand on the X” while the camera records them. Although they’re asked to do nothing, of course they do everything but. Personalities are revealed through a minimalist format.

  • Perestroyka

    Shot in the spring of 1992 in St. Petersberg and Moscow, “Perestroyka” is a collage of conversations with Russian people, mostly artists, about life in Russia and about their hopes and fears for the future of their country. The position of artists and filmmakers in contemporary Russian society, the position of women in the new Russia, problems of unemployment, the politics of sexuality, and the erosion of traditional values are debated and discussed. Appearing in the tape are (in order of appearance): Sergey Letou Jazz Band, Vladik Mamyshev Monroe (performance artist), Bella Matveeva (painter), Alexandr Sakurov (film director), Liubov Polga…