Film Categories: film studies

  • Barbara’s Blindness

    “There is no one named Barbara to be found; a pair of mysterious blind-person’s hands (looking suspiciously like Wieland’s) make only one cameo appearance to ‘read’ us the title; yet these seemingly incongruous elements provide the perfect introduction to the ironic humour of the film itself. The main source of the film seems to be an old grade-school morality-movie on the appreciation of eyesight, starring golden-haired Mary, who finds herself temporarily blind, and a leaden-voiced narrator, who finds himself our unwitting straight-man. The filmmakers re-edited this curiosity and intercut it with other stock footage of disasters, agricultural techniques, and monster…

  • Runaway

    A cartoon image of dogs rushing across the screen, then reversing their direction, is looped over and over, to the accompaniment of a sprightly tune played on an organ. The footage is seen on television, then as film, then back on TV, deteriorating and recovering clarity as the repetitions roll on. “Lawder achieves the perfection of all his techniques… in which he uses a few seconds of cartoon dogs chasing a fox. By stop-motion reverse printing and video scanning and other techniques, he creates a totally new and different visual reality that is no longer a silly funny cartoon.” –…

  • S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED

    A conceptual lap dissolve from “water currents” to “film strip current.” Dedicated to my son, Christopher. (PS) “In his earlier flicker films, Sharits explored the mechanisms of perception and projection, and now he takes his investigations to their logical extreme – to the nature of the film-strip itself. His analysis is constructed on close-up footage of water currents in a streambed. In each of the three, fourteen-minute loops, he progressively decreases the number of superimposed current directions from six to one. On this film he adds continuous straight scratch lines in multiples of three, so that by the end of…

  • Solidarity

    A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs, milling, marching and picketing with the word “solidarity” superimposed on the screen. The soundtrack is an organizer’s speech on the labour situation. Like her films “Rat Life and Diet in North America,” “Pierre Vallieres” and “Reason Over Passion,” “Solidarity” combines a political awareness, an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour unique in Wieland’s work. Image description: Plain black laced shoes and bare or white-stockinged ankles of a person standing on green grass, a metal-tipped umbrella at their side. White text superimposed over the middle…

  • Song for Mixed Choir

    “Song” is laid over two picture rolls, printed together. The first magnifies the grain of the film, filling the screen with the circling constituents of its material base. The second roll draws a succession of figures from a dimly lit nightlife. There is a dance, a house party and a subway turnstile moving toward the most domestic kind of horror, a horror of the commonplace and the mundane, the horrors of toothbrush and comb and electric lamp. “Song” is an image of cinema’s prehistory – before “in the beginning was the word” but also: before the domain of picture took…

  • Surfacing on the Thames

    “The loveliest Rimmer film (and the cleverest Rimmer title) shows a river boat slowly steaming past the Houses of Parliament – so slowly that it seems not to be moving, and surrounded by such luminous mistiness that one critic is supposed to have thought he was looking at a Turner painting rather than at film footage. Gradually the surface of the film begins to wrinkle slightly, to spot, to show minor blemishes – in a sense to assert itself above and before the rich density it contains. The gesture is tentative and discreet, but it is also unsettling and liberating…

  • Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax)

    “Parallax is the apparent change in position of an object resulting from the change in direction or position from which it is viewed.” Confusion, underlying meaning, and unspoken truths are often associated with the dialectic of sexual communication. Mingled with the intensity and unpredictability of a “one night stand,” they generate unique sensations – mixed emotion, risk, excitement. The film employs formal devices in a manner which is simple yet effective. Its subject matter – sexuality and communication – gains depth and poignancy through the artist’s decision to shoot the film’s three scenes for projection in a double-screen configuration, providing…

  • Third Degree

    The film is “about” the fragility of the film medium and human vulnerability; both the filmic and the human images resist threat/intimidation/mutilation: the victim is defiant and the film strip also struggles on, both “under fire.” It is a somewhat violent drama but it is also an ironically comic work and there is a formal beauty in the destructiveness of the burning film. While the film (from section to section or from screen to screen, in the installation format) develops, becomes more visually complex, successively regenerates (as the figurative images degenerate), it nevertheless implies no finality; rather, even in its…

  • Wavelength

    “The outstanding film of 1968… a very beautiful and important film.” – Jonas Mekas, Village Voice “‘Wavelength’ is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema.’” – Gene Youngblood, L.A. Free Press, 1968 “Michael Snow’s ‘Wavelength’, a pure, tough 45 minutes that may become ‘The Birth of a…

  • Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

    Yes, German film director Werner Herzog really does eat his shoe to fulfill a vow to fellow filmmaker Errol Morris – boldly exemplifying his belief that people must have the guts to attempt what they dream of. Inspiring.