Film Categories: art & artists

  • Importance of Hortense, The

    Hortense Gordon was a teacher as well as an artist, and studied abstract painting under one of the great teachers of that movement, Hans Hoffman. As an artist who makes figurative images, even in what is known as “experimental” animation, I had to do some research not only on Hortense, but on abstract painting. Also, researching Hortense turned up as much about her teachings (and, by extension, Hoffman’s) and philosophies as her work, so in the end I felt I was working through the film as a pupil. These are my exercises. Part of the TAIS Eleven in Motion program.

  • STROKE

    Action painter, Olympic paddler, bon vivant of the highest order: these are words that exemplify Tom Hodgson, a man of many seemingly contradictory parts. This film explores the connective tissue that held his life together. Vivid, rhythmic imagery pulls the viewer into a world where the mighty sweep of a paddler’s arm becomes the abstracted sweep of paint across a page becomes the primordial, sexual stroke of a life fully lived. Part of the TAIS Eleven in Motion program.

  • End is the Beginning, The

    “My opinion is … the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance … the modern artist is living in a mechanical age … working and expressing an inner world-in other words, expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.” – Jackson Pollock Working from Pollock’s notion that the modern world of atom bombs and destruction obliterated the need for representational art and called forth a new, introspective form of art creation, Craig Marshall takes a Ray Mead painting as his starting point and moves backwards. Part…

  • Complete Works of Joyce Wieland, The: 1963-1986

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. This 5-disc set brings together for the first time the film works of Joyce Wieland (1931-1998), largely regarded as one of Canada’s most influential and important artists. Spanning a period from 1963 to 1985, the collection includes sixteen shorts and two feature films made from new high-definition digital transfers. A multi-disciplinary artist who produced work in a wide variety of media, Wieland’s intelligent and irreverent explorations of female sexuality, domestic life, ecology and Canadian nationalism put her at the forefront of feminist practice. Wieland made her mark in the film underground in…

  • A Dream

    The story of meeting your soul mate in a dream and waking up to find your soul mate in reality.

  • El cuento (The Story)

    A haunting and poetic vision of war and its effects on everyday life, created without images of war. The film’s structure is drawn from road signs found as fragments of a trip, with the quotidian images – of landscapes, city life, children playing, a wedding – collected like a diary in a combination of richly saturated colour and high-contrast black-and-white footage. In contrast to the emotive quality of the imagery and music, the voice-over/text provides a dispassionate and chilling guide on what to expect and how to behave in times of war: “Before proceeding with the burial, it is important…

  • Dripping Water

    “You see nothing but a white, crystal white plate, and water dripping into the plate, from the ceiling, from high, and you hear the sound of the water dripping. The film is ten minutes long. I can imagine only St. Francis looking at a water plate and water dripping so lovingly, so respectfully, so serenely. The usual reaction is: ‘Oh, what is it anyhow? Just a plate of water dripping.’ But that is a snob remark. That remark has no love for the world, for anything. Snow and Wieland’s film uplifts the object, and leaves the viewer with a finer…

  • Generations

    “Generations” is a film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Seventy-year-old acclaimed director Barbara Hammer hands her camera to Gina Carducci, an aspiring queer filmmaker. The women, each shooting her own footage during the last days of Astroland at Coney Island, find that the inevitable fact of ageing echoes in the architecture of the amusement park. Separately editing their respective footage, the filmmakers ultimately blend their work, thereby creating a true generational, experimental document. World premiere at MoMA; winner of the Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the Berlin Film Festival; and winner of…

  • Color Study

    A humorous, digitally induced meditation on colors, motion and space from a few frames of road side fall panorama in upstate NY.

  • Wildblood

    “Wildblood” is the third piece in a trilogy of animated shorts by Los Angeles artist David Jones. The film takes its inspiration from queer zines and the San Francisco homocore music scene of the early 90s. The artist was a member of the seminal band Fagbash and considers the piece reminiscent of the type of making indicative of this period. It is constructed entirely of xerox collages re-photographed and animated digitally.