Genres: experimental

  • Stately Mansions Did Decree

    This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which emerges a series of landscapes, gardens, exteriors of mansions, castles and the like, then (as yellow predominates ever vegetable greens, sherwood greens and deep floral reds, blood reds) interior corridors and room, as if lit by chandeliers and candelabras – all of which eventually bursts into flames, explosions, which somewhat “echo” visually the beginning of film. (SB)

  • Coupling

    This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work (involving Positives and Negatives of original painted source material in combination, as well as superimpositions filmed at 24fps and at 48 fps) is a very organic be-seeming darkly coloured work (blood and rust reds mixed with off-greens) as if microscopic images of connective and (other) cells and/or threads of internal muscles were caught in a “dance” (i.e. contrapuntal varieties-of-rhythm increasingly coordinated) ultimately suggestive of sex). The forms of the work also vaguely metaphor male and female exterior nudity coupling. The evolution of the work is almost purely rhythmic as increased tempos, in ever more…

  • Like a Dream That Vanishes

    “Like a Dream That Vanishes” continues my work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses. (Your life is like a candle burning.) Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles. The movement between form and…

  • Off the 401

    Thinking of Jack Chambers, but going farther afield; fields of colour, colour fields.

  • Hoolboom

    “Hoolboom” is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. With some collaboration from Mike, Wrik has produced a film about the body, self-awareness, and the art of film.

  • Beluga Crash Blues

    Usually studies of faces, objects, machines or abstractions carry a sense of heightening montage. In this case the filmmaker, preferring dramatic effects to anecdotes, is preoccupied less with situating the action in time and space than producing malleable visual material and the aesthetics of montage. The space created in the film presents a neutral architecture, utilitarian and mechanistic, where the protagonists ponder the torrid universe which has been created in their image.

  • Cloud Chamber

    This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually give way to pale suggestions of pastel colours. These take shape occasionally and flicker the forthcoming bits of solid coloured and multiply formed abstract images, a few brief sequences-of-such interspersed with the cloud-suggestive passages as at beginning, which eventually end the film (Stan Brakhage).

  • Persian Series #7

    In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. (Stan Brakhage)

  • Persian Series #8

    In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. (Stan Brakhage)

  • Dark Tower, The

    This hand-painted step-printed film begins with streaks of glare light and vibrantly colored forms apparently in the sky for in as much as there appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a tower, a silhouette as it were against the backdrop of the flaring sky. As this shape of tower disappears, the conflagration of scratches and paints seems grounded and takes on the semblance of a battle of knights, their lances, horses, et al, often against a scattering of star-like flecks until finally the silhouette of the tower reappears as if much closer, certainly thicker and straight-sided. The film finishes…