Film Categories: art & artists

  • Burning Down the Suburbs

    “On the side of a country highway, a nuclear family watches its four-wheel drive burn to the ground. What were we thinking? they seem to ask themselves. This film is an attempted update of a Dylan Thomas masterpiece, but read at a Jack in the Box picketed by P.E.T.A. “While making this one I wanted to create a ‘mini film set’, so I asked film-maker Caelum Vatnsdal to act as camera operator. As it turned out, he’d burned and filmed many toys as a child, and so became a key part in the making of this work.” Figures (modeling compound,…

  • Active Pass

    “The footage and audio for ‘Active Pass’ were filmed and recorded while I worked on the B.C. Ferries over several years. Active Pass is a narrow space between two islands in Georgia Strait, the halfway point of a good ride, a tourist’s blurred iconic dreamscape – and the simple question, What is on the other side?” Music by Jason Tait.

  • Nanaimo Station

    “A collage of family archive narrow gauge footage embracing/refuting the ideas of nostalgia and lost innocence, the contemporary commingling in our minds of the romantic past and easy irony. We can’t go back. The home we search for is gone. The kinder, gentler, magazine we wish we could live in never existed at all. We are lost. Hurrah. “This footage, including my first steps, was filmed by my namesake, Clive Brown, a friend of the family, our adopted ‘Uncle Clive’, and a west coast fisherman. Nanaimo, British Columbia, is where my family first attempted to set up a home in…

  • Jew and the Irishman, The

    “‘Can’t you take a joke?’ They asked us that for years. The young artist’s role as witness, cataloguing the abject misery of his betters – then later, communing with mother moon and father darkness. Suburban car wrecks and the long walk home. ‘A friend recently suggested that the key biographical moment captured in this piece (witnessing my father’s temporary sense of freedom after transgressing the social contract of white, middle class, 1970’s, British Columbia) may have been when I decided to become an artist.” Music by Christine Fellows.

  • Saigon Apartments

    “The artist watching the weak doing the poor. The film-maker’s eye as voyeur’s lens. The camera as gun. If violence is the new sex, then TV news is the new pornography. Romance language yoked to the class struggle. Bulls eye. “This one’s about one-way interfaces in reference to class and power dynamics. It’s common in our culture for artists to live in low rent neighbourhoods, and therefore to witness the daily misery of the poor, which often informs their art. But this witnessing is generally done from an outsider’s perspective. At times this complex of watching, hearing, and recording can…

  • Bus North to Thompson With Les at the Wheel

    “Les Brandt drives for Grey Goose Coach Lines due north from Winnipeg to Thompson, Manitoba, as well as on long distance charters all over North America. He was recently awarded the ‘Million Safe Miles Award’, as well as ‘Driver of the Year’. “I drove highway bus myself for many years – it was an exceptionally good seasonal artist’s job, that I still miss. When speaking with Les, I’m reminded in particular of the summer of ’87, when I drove a route from northern British Columbia to the Yukon. Over the years I’ve come to admire people, like Les, who do…

  • Condo

    “Buildings modeled on mausoleums, filled with retirees. What can we make of this? The word ‘condo’ has become charged with meaning in our culture. “The question of where to live has recently reached a fever pitch for many people in the richer Western industrialized nations. People are moving with greater and greater frequency, as if desperate to find the perfect ‘resting place’. At the end of the road is a gilded question mark. Is this what we worked so hard for?” Music by Jason Tait.

  • Neighbours Walk Softly

    “‘Neighbours Walk Softly’ is an anti-war protest poem, a test of the idea of neighbourhood, and a highlighting of the dividing lines we’re only too willing to fight to defend in the inevitable times of crisis. “This Super 8 and video footage was collected in an upscale Vancouver neighbourhood over the period of one year. The act of looking through a lens caused me to realize what wasn’t there to be seen – even though there weren’t any physical walls to keep out the poor and the less beautiful, somehow they were missing from the footage I collected. “The familiar…

  • Unbreakable Bones

    A celebration of my love for my parents and of their bravery in the face of death. Footage shot from the windows of planes high above the Rocky Mountains, on trips between Winnipeg and the West Coast to visit my parents: broad metal wings equaling the heights of material invention, the dream-like hush of air travel, human endeavour sailing through blue ether. Music by Jason Tait.

  • Lapse Lose All

    “Lapse Lose All” both documents and obscures the collage painting process of Toronto artist Kathryn MacKay. Time-lapse photography seems to speed up the activity of painting by concentrating the work of several weeks into a few minutes, concealing more than it reveals. The title of the documented work is “Hammett’s Eclipse,” and it is indeed eclipsed in this film – first by the body of the painter at work and finally by the reversal of time itself. Layered sounds, recorded live in MacKay’s studio, offer an ambient audio echo of the visual complexity of the painted work. This work can…