Film Categories: Abstraction

  • Phase Transition

    A disk of butter melting in a pan creates a mini-spectacle.

  • HookLineSinker

    Lead, rope, single-channel video projection, sound (5:00 loop), 2005-2014 An installation that challenges the viewer to negotiate between two and three-dimensional space. A rope from above penetrates a simulated “hole” in the projected image of water. An additional simulation of refraction leads the rope below the “surface” of the water to an oversized lead sinker toward the viewer’s space.

  • Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    There were two initial impulses for the film: Turner’s almost-not-there paintings of light (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) and the swirling, spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr. Sun-light-film- Untitled #1 is a film of liminal thresholds, borders, amorphous states – sky, clouds, fog, lake, snow. A film in motion – camera gestures and emulsion activity. People and seasons pass in the daily repetitive cycles- repetitions and reprises and beginnings again – sameness amidst the fleeting. Blurring, merging, dissolving boundaries,- the world as it is forming and disappearing…Not nothing, everything. “Everlasting and powerful is the theatre of life, without substance, but…

  • May Waves Rise From Its Floor

    “May Waves Rise From Its Floor” follows in Hallé’s career-long practice of researching and building custom-made projection devices to be used in collaborative shows. For this project, Hallé continues his method of using live manipulation of candle light with broken pieces of glass and breathing to illuminate 16mm film. The ability to spontaneously create and adapt the visuals has led Hallé to perform this show with a diverse range of renowned improvising musicians. The 16mm film that plays on the projector was made by Hallé specifically to be projected using this custom-device. The subtle, slow-moving, and often abstract imagery of…

  • May 35

    A haunting commemoration of the Tiananmen Square uprisings made from fragments of censored archival imagery transferred onto film using razor blades and scotch tape. “May 35” speaks to the difficulty of remembering in the absence of memory, especially when June 4 histories have been censored and obscured. It is a tribute to the thousands of lives devastated by this upheaval. Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne

  • Island Story

    “I know nothing about the filmmaker, but with a short film as odd and strangely poignant as this one, the mystery makes it all the better. The blindingly and like a Martian horizon, the sun plays with the viewer’s stability. A narrator gives the account of a strange tale of a couple on a transformative journey into a world of paradise with no language. Animalistic gesticulations and instinctive expression emanate from the body until both of them grow apart and then into other versions of themselves, never to be the same again. A grainy vintage-like feel permeates the alien world…

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • (tourism studies)

    Sometimes it’s not until the project is finished that I begin to know what the project is about. I’d been sifting through this footage: travel movies, home movies, fragments from projects that never became more than that. It was the summer of 2018 that I began assembling these parts, working intuitively, letting the process guide me and I began to realize that I’d made a Rorschach test for myself, a formalist self-portrait of my Belgian-Japanese-American-Jew heritage and a personal emotional journey following my mother’s passing, my father’s remarriage, and Emma having my child. January 2019 while shooting in Hong Kong,…

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • the framing of perception

    “I saw the light…” Sun, light, darkness, shadow — from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its heat, its colour, its radiation, its nature – is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for…