Genres: experimental

  • Rules of the Road

    “Rules of the Road” tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the primary objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling along the sides. A typical American family car for an atypical American family, it provides them at first with all the familiar comforts. But when their relationship ends, the car becomes the property of one woman and the bane of the other’s existence. Even long after their separation, this tangible reminder of their life together – and thousands of its imitators- continues to prowl the streets of…

  • Barbara’s Blindness

    “There is no one named Barbara to be found; a pair of mysterious blind-person’s hands (looking suspiciously like Wieland’s) make only one cameo appearance to ‘read’ us the title; yet these seemingly incongruous elements provide the perfect introduction to the ironic humour of the film itself. The main source of the film seems to be an old grade-school morality-movie on the appreciation of eyesight, starring golden-haired Mary, who finds herself temporarily blind, and a leaden-voiced narrator, who finds himself our unwitting straight-man. The filmmakers re-edited this curiosity and intercut it with other stock footage of disasters, agricultural techniques, and monster…

  • Runaway

    A cartoon image of dogs rushing across the screen, then reversing their direction, is looped over and over, to the accompaniment of a sprightly tune played on an organ. The footage is seen on television, then as film, then back on TV, deteriorating and recovering clarity as the repetitions roll on. “Lawder achieves the perfection of all his techniques… in which he uses a few seconds of cartoon dogs chasing a fox. By stop-motion reverse printing and video scanning and other techniques, he creates a totally new and different visual reality that is no longer a silly funny cartoon.” –…

  • Ryland’s True Story

    Through the art of realism and East Coast story telling, this short experimental documentary reconsiders the fine line between documented truth and the everyday interaction of relating personal experiences.

  • S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED

    A conceptual lap dissolve from “water currents” to “film strip current.” Dedicated to my son, Christopher. (PS) “In his earlier flicker films, Sharits explored the mechanisms of perception and projection, and now he takes his investigations to their logical extreme – to the nature of the film-strip itself. His analysis is constructed on close-up footage of water currents in a streambed. In each of the three, fourteen-minute loops, he progressively decreases the number of superimposed current directions from six to one. On this film he adds continuous straight scratch lines in multiples of three, so that by the end of…

  • Sailboat

    “‘Sailboat’ has the simplicity of a child’s drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seems to underline the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way a child might draw a picture of water and write word sounds on it to make it as emphatic as possible. The little image is interrupted at one point by a huge shoulder appearing briefly in the left-hand corner.” – Robert Cowan, Take One “This little Sailboat film will sail right through your gate and into your heart.” –…

  • Sally’s Beauty Spot

    In this lively, intimate film, a large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and sexual difference. Off-screen women’s voices and scenes form the 1960 Hollywood miscegenation melodrama “The World of Suzie Wong” counterpoint Sally’s own interracial encounters and emerging self-awareness. A stylish and playfully impressionistic account of racial expectations and role-playing which critiques Western stereotypes of Asian femininity. “…challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, wittily tracing a character’s move from stereotypical object to sexual subject.” – Laura U. Marks, Afterimage “Framed as a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty, this…

  • Sammy

    Sammy was a dog I had when growing up in Dundas, Ontario. I found old Super 8 footage of Sammy long after he had passed away, and I decided to work with these images on both a rotoscope and optical printer, to playfully and rhythmically evoke my emotions, memories, and image of little Sammy.

  • Sanctus

    “Sanctus” is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as its protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate. “In ‘Sanctus,’ Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she cretes images. She has transformed ‘found footage’ – scientific x-ray films from the 1950s – into a lyrical journey, into…

  • Sang Song

    From atop a Jakartan ferris wheel, a song in light.