Film Categories: art & artists

  • Entonces Bueno

    Havana, Cuba. A man and a pig lead the way through this series of nine brief portraits of Cuban artists. A mixed-media short film composed of 16 mm, animated 35 mm stills, Super 8, interviews and sounds recorded in Havana. An image maker spends a month in Havana. There he meets a few visual artists with whom he talks about the kinds of ideas that motivate their art. Through this, the filmmaker creates metaphors of the exterior world these eight artists’ experience.

  • Breakfast (Table Top Dolly)

    “Snow’s use of the dolly shot in ‘Breakfast (Table Top Dolly)’ vividly – and comically – emphasizes the physical effects of the camera’s forward movement, in contrast to the purely optical effects of the zoom in ‘Wavelength.’ In ‘Breakfast,’ the camera dollies toward an untidy still life of breakfast items and slowly pushes the objects along the table until the tip over, tumble off, or are smashed against the wall at the far end of the table.” – William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time

  • Vision from the Edge: Breyten Breytenbach Painting the Lines

    “Listen: this is the sum of my life: I travelled all the regions where peaks are looking glasses for the absent face of God and shadows are unknown there except when whispering under the sods.” Quite the contrary of a “social documentary,” this film offers glimpses of a man who has spent his life away from the “mainstream,” with his specific, his very own Vision from the Edge. September, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands: Breyten Breytebach, poet, painter and anti-Apartheid activist, creates six panels/scrolls which will hang from the ceiling of the exhibition. These are part of…

  • Lost Heroes

    Francisco, the lead character, is a Portuguese-Canadian artist who has just been commissioned to work on a painting celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution, which took place on April 25, 1974. His agent, upon realizing how distanced Francisco feels from his home, sends him to Portugal to rediscover it. Once there, he goes to meet Catarina, a childhood friend who lives with her family in a small village. Conflict arises when Catarina’s father discovers that Francisco has returned. An ex-captain of the notorious PIDE, the Portuguese equivalent to the KGB, he had Francisco’s father imprisoned, tortured, and killed…

  • Living Room, The

    In “The Living Room,” objects on the wall one by one explode or burn and disappear one after the other while various acting events takes place nearby. “The Living Room” opens with a wall completely bare, then all these objects return from the dead with the clothes of the standing pregnant woman who then does a striptease.

  • Prelude

    “A carefully prepared ‘rush job’ and come-on … Every second counts in ‘Prelude,’ an unblinking wild three-way where most every action (teaser ingredients of sex, violence, music and food) occurs thrice as sound, verbal description and visual event. Though the constituent parts of any event are out of joint and rarely meet in the same incremental ‘time zone,’ perfect synch seems to only occur dead centre within the room. The action occurs within the same camera pan and single take. “Like some of Snow’s greatest work, the seemingly offhand ‘Prelude’ is conceptually meticulous. The film constructs a momentary physical world…

  • Death to Everyone

    “Using the drawings of Bruno Schulz, who must be numbered among the great writers of the 20th century for his two slim books of short stories, Torossian builds up a disturbing imagescape of sexual malice and voyeurism. Torossian’s films are characterized as much by her reuse of other artists’ work as they are by her trademark collage techniques.” – Chris Gehman, Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, 2001

  • BROWNSNOW

    “‘Brownsnow’ presents a fascinating combination of two artistic visions: Carl Brown’s and Michael Snow’s. The form of this expressionistic documentary on Michael Snow’s artwork is a complete melding of Carl Brown’s rich manipulation of the photographic image with the fundamental concepts of Michael Snow’s aesthetic vision. “Brown’s strengths as a portrait photographer are also well-translated to the filmic medium as he situates key commentators on Snow’s artwork (Dennis Reid, R. Bruce Elder, Jonas Mekas, Peggy Gale and Regina Cornwell) in various dramatic Canadian landscapes. Like an abstract expressionist painting in motion, Brown’s brilliant work as a colourist deftly employs photographic…

  • Still Here

    Made for the filmmaker’s uncle, a painter and a gay man who died violently in 2001, this silent, hand-processed film marks an enduring presence with bold brush strokes. When the body is absent the shadows remain. “Still Here” consists of a series of spontaneous, single-take performances that have been edited in-camera. It is at once a eulogy and an act of defiance against the crime that ended Davis Buller’s life.

  • Tom

    “A dazzling experimental documentary about notorious cineaste Tom Chomont. Tom narrates his recollections and transgressions against a dizzying array of found footage, video, super-8 and photographs. At moments, he appears in front of the camera, alternately flamboyant or fragile. His revelations cover a broad scope from sadomasochistic desire through existential vulnerability to an incestuous relationship. With this extraordinary portrait, Hoolboom creates a different kind of biography film, one that eschews traditional mimetic realism in order to depict the reminiscences of a fading life lived in the throes of image culture.” – Diane Burgess, Vancouver International Film Festival “An uncommon biography…