Film Categories: film studies

  • This Unnamable Little Dream: or a Traced Sketch of Two Brothers

    a personal narrative inserted into an homage to the Brother’s Quay commissioned for the Splice This Remake This program.

  • Maternal Record Not Fully Recorded, A

    super 8 home movie footage captures memories not otherwise remembered while other memories never materialize in the tangible home photo archives

  • Girl’s Nervy, The

    Exuberant rhythms are created for the eyes in this nostalgic study of the single film frame, through cutting, pasting, and painting clear and photographed film images. Fleeting shapes in lush, spattered color flicker and dance to big band beats.

  • White Palace

    My early performances in thriller genres are reconsidered in a rehabilitation of images in this film. Though once renounced by me as complicit and misogynist, my filmed body is treated as recoverable for liberation of my memory.

  • Accidental, The

    This film is about inappropriate attention to sensory experiences other than the visual while driving and in response to an accident. Sound, touch and taste may disrupt safety to others and might threaten public order when not kept in check by the dominion of the visual. Dogs know all about this.

  • Ever Present Going Past

    Filmmaker Philip Hoffman and poet Gerry Shikatani combine to make a cine-poem about the making of gardens, films and poems. Excerpts from Shikatani’s `First Book, Three Gardens of Andalucia’.

  • All Fall Down

    “All Fall Down” is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question “what has been here before?” The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step-daughter) across two hundred years. “All Fall Down” explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that…

  • I’m Sorry, Sterling

    Poet RM Vaughan muses on his relationship to 50s film noir tough guy hunk Sterling Hayden, and why he cannot make his life more like a 50s film noir masterpiece. Created by video/internet artist Jared Mitchell, the film inserts Vaughan into the rain-dappled, shadowed and dreamy world of film noir – turning the poet into Hayden’s moll, lover, and dumb broad. A film about living your life “in the right movie,” queer projection onto mainstream cinema, and the collision of fantasy and reality.

  • irma Vep

    Mad pursuit for the wild life leads to an outrageously messy story about a cover girl who encounters dangerous magazine cut-outs. irmaVep / Stars the bride of quietness / In a flowery tale, / Who will transform thy shape, / Leaving behind unanswered questions: / What maidens loath? / What mad pursuit? / What struggle to escape? / What wild ecstasy? Selected Screenings: Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, 2009 (Toronto, Canada); Cucalorus Festival, 2009 (Wilmington, NC)

  • Coronation Park

    CORONATION PARK is constructed from haunting, sometimes abstract, cool blue shots of bare maple and oak trees in winter. The images are paired with the single word breathe. Inspired by the many languages spoken in the city of Toronto where the film was shot, the words rhythmically appear then disappears, each time in a different language. This pairing of text and image suggests a plea for the trees to “breathe”, to come back to life, to transform themselves from bare branches to the green leaves of spring. The winter leafless trees also resemble human body parts, limbs and veins, thus…