Film Categories: film studies

  • 3 X 16

    These three short films consist of perceptive depictions of a public square in Lima, the view from his mother’s rooftop, and work at the Toronto Film Festival revision department. The filmmaker used 16 mm as documentary format. Each film in this series is almost three-minutes long, which is the length of one roll of 16 mm film. The entire film uses in-camera editing, therefore all the editing decisions were made on location.

  • Quartet

    “Leading British avant-garde filmmaker Nicky Hamlyn is known for evoking the beauty in the everyday. His ‘Quartet’ comprises four variations on the same twenty shots of a flat, all beautiful ‘still lives.’ In the first two sections of the film, each shot contains an element of the subsequent shot, forming a necklace of images. These are strung together through a studied and sensual accumulation of time and space, both on the screen and in the imaginary. Thereafter, a release from structure compels us from contemplation toward memory and re-creation.” – Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival

  • Gendercator, The

    “The Gendercator” is a satirical take on surgical body modification and gender. The story uses the “Rip van Winkle” model to extrapolate from the feminist 1970s to a frightening 2048, where politics and technology have conspired to mandate two gender “choices”: macho male or Barbie babe. In this dystopian future, those whose gender presentation does not comply will be GENDERCATED.

  • Talking Portraits

    TALKING PORTRAITS is a 2-disk compilation of the following films: YOU 16mm, 1990, 15 min., sound YOU is an imaginary fictionalized you in a whimsical space. It is the still live residue of the broken relationship Lisa is here confronting. A parallel actor, the film is in the business of reinterpreting. Director’s Choice, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1990 OUT IN THE GARDEN 16mm, 1991, 15 min., sound Set in and around the house and garden of a middle-aged upstate New York academic, Grenier’s intimate experimental documentary portrait explores, in an innovative form, the thoughts and feelings of one…

  • Mr. Edison’s Ear

    “An inventive exploration of the visceral nature of sound and how we learned to capture and reproduce it over time. Anchored by the discovery of the phonograph by the brilliant-and deaf-inventor Thomas Edison, this visual and conceptual collage of rich archival footage and animation playfully traces the birth of technological reproduction and the beginnings of our modern, audio-drenched world.” – Gisèle Gordon (Hot Docs Canadian Spectrum programmer) Selected Screenings: Canadian Spectrum, HotDocs, 2008; DOK Leipzig Festival, 2008

  • Young Prince, The

    The fifth film in THE BOOK OF ALL THE PRAISE cycle. “‘The Young Prince’ film is my current project, and is based on alchemical themes. The film is about transformations – about transformations of imagery, about history as transformation, about eros as a transformative power, about that old Eisensteinian idea of collage and montage as transformation, but most of all, about transformations of the self. “The film combines two sorts of transformations: electrical transformations, produced by digital image processing, and chemical transformations, produced by processing the film by hand, in small batches. Thus, it is a dialogue between two technologies,…

  • Rostrum Press: Materials Testing

    In “Rostrum Press: Materials Testing”, I use the Oxberry 16mm animation stand as a mechanism to test the response of a variety of objects and materials to the downward pressure of the camera. A professional animation stand is a large, heavy machine, with a powerful motor attached to move the camera up and down. Each shot in “Rostrum Press” is essentially a self-contained little film in which the camera moves inexorably closer to its object, one-eighth of an inch closer between each frame and the next, until contact is made and the object is pressed down towards the rostrum table…

  • Armoire

    It was all started by a Red Robin who one day in the spring, obsessively went after his double in the large mirror at the end of our garden. Just having fun with the surrounding consequences regarding storage, openings, motion and nature, among others.

  • Films of Su Friedrich, The: Volumes 1-5

    Digitally re-mastered from the original 16mm negatives, this collection of 13 films is essential for every library or media centre, as well as women’s and cinema studies programs. Since the 1970s, Friedrich’s skillful mix of experimental narrative and documentary forms, filled with provocative feminist and lesbian themes, has made her a groundbreaking member of the avant-garde film community and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema. This collection of DVDs includes the filmmaker’s classic works such as SINK OR SWIM, HIDE AND SEEK, THE TIES THAT BIND, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T, and THE ODDS OF RECOVERY, as well…

  • Films of Su Friedrich, The: Volume 1 – The Ties That Bind

    “The Ties That Bind” is a powerful meditation on political responsibility and personal loss as seen through the story of the filmmaker’s mother, who grew up in Nazi Germany. Using rare archival footage, extensive interviews and critical commentary, Friedrich constructs a fearless dialogue between past and present, between mother and daughter. “The Ties That Bind” engages in a profound search for an understanding of history, and challenges us in our responsibility for the present. Languages: English, German * New Directors/New Films, MoMA * “Le Mois du Film Documentaire,” France * “In and Out of the Cold, 1945 to 1995,” International…