Film Categories: body

  • (ab) NORMAL

    “In ‘(ab)NORMAL’ the relationship spectrum, from paranoid avoidance to smothering and overwhelming attention, is traced through four pixilated sketches.” – Toronto International Film Festival

  • Portrait of Lydia

    The emotional life of a young art student is expressed in Freudian terms through a succession of images and symbols, constantly combining themselves into famous paintings and sculptures. A barrage of images that tell different stories to different viewers.

  • private patch of blue, a

    “I have breathed you in and there are no words to exorcise you from my soul.” – Eleanor Crow “An auto-portrait of maternity, ‘private patch’ shows Toronto filmer Tracy German quietly expectant, keening through winterludes of surprise before the birth of her first child. Episodically structured and materially assured, German’s exacting observational sense re-creates her domestic surround from the point of view of her boy-to-be, lurking over woodpiles and rock with eyes wide in wonder, turning the surrounding bush into a softly focused pastel glaze. “Deftly intercutting interiors and exteriors, ‘private’ opens on a wintry porch, a liminal architectural space…

  • Psychosynthesis

    The sub-personalities of me, my baby, athlete, witch, and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and colour layers coming quietly together through the healing powers of natural touchstone. (BH) “…I would gladly go out of my way to see it again and would travel some distance to a retrospective of its author’s work.” – Tom Dowling, Washington Star “Ms. Hammer, a feminist artist in a male-dominated industry, is clearly someone who has ideas which go beyond male-female roles into the very nature of the film experience. Her awards and prizes include the Louise Riskin Prize and her…

  • Razorhead

    “Experimental ‘Razorhead’ …is a jolt and a half that has little to do with any sort of haircut you can get on Astor Place.”- Eliot Stein, Village Voice, 1987 The film was made on the request of the participants as a record of a two-day erotic ritual. 400 feet of film were shot and later permission was obtained to treat the material as an aesthetic composition, approximately 250 feet long. Originally the film was intended as part of a series dealing with non-genital sex and symbolic eroticism.

  • Ball in California, A

    I took along a beach ball on my trip to California; it is bounced, rolled, tossed, kicked and carried by a motley collection of complete strangers who express a great range of attitudes towards the camera, the ball and me. This film incorporates an unusual improvised soundtrack for solo bassoon.

  • Reasonably Barbie

    “Reasonably Barbie” was developed out of frustration with the North American “Beauty Guidelines,” outlined by mass media and advertising. Divided into two parts, the film allows many women (and men too) to take an objective look at the North American “Beauty Myth” starting with a splash of humour and then moving to a more serious approach. The filmmaker hopes that the film will encourage young women to stop hurting themselves for fashion and inspire them to come to realize their own self worth.

  • Sally’s Beauty Spot

    In this lively, intimate film, a large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and sexual difference. Off-screen women’s voices and scenes form the 1960 Hollywood miscegenation melodrama “The World of Suzie Wong” counterpoint Sally’s own interracial encounters and emerging self-awareness. A stylish and playfully impressionistic account of racial expectations and role-playing which critiques Western stereotypes of Asian femininity. “…challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, wittily tracing a character’s move from stereotypical object to sexual subject.” – Laura U. Marks, Afterimage “Framed as a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty, this…

  • Sanctus

    “Sanctus” is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as its protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate. “In ‘Sanctus,’ Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she cretes images. She has transformed ‘found footage’ – scientific x-ray films from the 1950s – into a lyrical journey, into…

  • Shiteater

    “A five star gross-out, ‘Shiteater’ features a body in revolt… Andrew Wilson gives a tour de farce performance as the shiteater and Hoolboom’s camera work is never less than sublime.” – Gina Hampton, Herald