Language: No dialogue

  • Head Cleaner

    Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images issuing from an apparently malfunctioning machine. Materials and objects, in varying physical or mediated transfigurations, pervade each scene, as relics from one moment in a transformation from girlhood to womanhood. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on entertainment technology’s fraught relationship to individual agency and identity, and its role in the standardization of expression and behaviour, underlies a loosely suggested coming-of-age narrative.

  • Le Phare

    Unlike the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building, Montreal’s iconic urban landmark is horizontal and spectral, not vertical and solid. Le Phare is a filmic portrait of the Montreal’s nocturnal marker, a spinning beacon that has been raking four long beams of light across the city’s environs since 1972. The nightly presence of these intense, rotating rays is reassuring for many, and yet also oddly perplexing: the illuminating machine does not provide reconnoitering for aviation; it is not synched to act as a time-keeping device; nor does it commemorate a specific historic moment or personage. Indeed, the lights serve…

  • Trailer

    The same duration as a standard promotional film trailer (two and a half minutes), Trailer documents the mechanical and support systems that are present at most large film productions.

  • The European Rooms

    An unhurried camera glides by bedrooms, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and entrance halls filled with finely crafted furniture and carefully selected objets. While displaying a familiar world of privilege, class, and prestige, these well-appointed rooms appear in the film as inescapably uncanny and oneiric. A slow unraveling of cinematic, sonic and architectural space played out in real time, The European Rooms is as confounding as it is elucidatory.

  • Intersection

    On the corner of Brooktondale Rd and route 79 near Ithaca is an amazing planting of Forget-Me-Nots and Dandelions. An improbable dance between different layers of reality, one organic, the other mechanical, an other the numbing every day. Timeless fragility joust with fleeting enamels and the upstanding violence.

  • Overview

    An investigation of time and memory seen from the perspective of a mysterious space. Shadowy images through opaque glass-brick obscure familiarity as distant sounds complete a haunting remembrance of a city. As the mystery unfolds, a solitary exploration is revealed.

  • House Dress #1-5

    Five short dance works by a senior dance artist. An exploration of the body in mid-life and confined spaces.

  • Die Haut der Musik (Music’s Skin)

    It is a very thin skin that covers the difference between sound and music. Between external noise and interpretation. It is this skin that separates the objective from the subjective, the natural from the artificial, the real from its representation.

  • Roundtrip

    A diptych filmed on a journey between Montreal and New York City. My last roll of Ektachrome to commemorate an important day when two became unified in the act of giving. 

  • [T]

    “[T] is a film at the limit of cinema, an experiment in the moving image where stillness and movement converge on each other to produce an experience of time as space. Philippe Leonard shot the footage for this remarkable work at Times Square, in New York City, during the hours of artificial illumination. Partly for this reason, it is an oneiric diary, tempted by myth and, at the same time, suffused by a melancholy sense that myth has lost its magical power. Faces appear and disappear in spasmodic waves of light, which emanate from billboards and mobile telephone screens and…