Film Categories: found footage

  • Airplane Film

    “Airplane show take-offs, landings, mid-air stalls, planes lurching through storms and countless characters yelling over propeller noise. These bits call up every emotion connected with flight: anxiety, longing, escape, destruction, power…It all amounts to fear of flying – just another manipulated sentiment in the context of a regular film, used to set the unconscious on edge without anybody noticing. Here it’s a breathless, liberating free-association.” – Renee Shafransky Spanning 40 years of aviation through feature clips wrenched from their cozy narrative settings, the film switches perspectives relentlessly. Pilots gaze out of windows to static shots of the earth. Air Force…

  • Shelter

    “Shelter” is a multi-layered experimental film that cleverly weaves archival social commentary and recent political activism in a playful analysis of our culture’s misplaced priorities. The film blends a variety of appropriated material – including a homeless demonstration during the gala premiere of an Atom Egoyan film at the Toronto Film Festival – with archival footage of circuses, westerns, and Pierre Burton discussing the pros and cons of building a bomb shelter. “Shelter” also celebrates the inherent qualities of the film medium, qualities that have quickly become marginalized through the current obsession with digital technology.

  • 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…

  • Strange News from Another Star

    “Strange News from Another Star” is an experimental space odessy that contrasts everyday images with archival space photography in order to reflect on the paradoxical nature of desire, and to present the simple truth that each of us possess the means by which to satisfy our own longing.

  • Tourbillon, Le

    Over and over I am mesmerized by Jeanne Moreau’s presence in cinema. Enigmatic, gutsy, provocative, she defines the true female avant-garde artist. (LB) English and French with subtitles.

  • Cinema and Visual Pleasure

    The film is constructed upon a short loop, extracted from an old 8mm burlesque film depicting a belly dancer moving against a black background. Her dance consists of little more than a series of languid, circular gestures. Her hips, elbows, wrists and stomach perpetuate endless circles each within their own orbits of motion. The image is black and white, scratched and grainy, and further complicated by the orange bubbles of nitrate decay that speckle the emulsion’s surface. The loop is expanded across the film’s duration through repetition and multiple superimpositions. The film is an exercise in the plastic properties of…

  • Saskatchewan

    Using home movies, vintage memorabilia, and the straight facts about Saskatchewan, the filmmaker creates an eccentric portrait of the first year of his life, and the province that shaped his identity. “Brian Stockton’s bittersweet tribute to the province he was born in perfectly captures the essence of life in the vast and lonely prairies.” – Nicole Cohen, EYE Weekly “Miss at your peril… Stockton’s grounded, deadpan voice-over, combined with the homely seduction of the images, keeps the tether strong between private myth and real life.” – Cameron Bailey, Now Magazine

  • Shadowy Encounters

    “An extraordinarily provocative film which draws the viewer in with its strange mesmerizing beauty.” – Brothers Quay The film “Shadowy Encounters” is an homage to the work of the Quay Brothers. The film is a synthesis of collaged moving and still images taken directly from the Quay Brothers’ 35mm films and recontextualized in order to metaphorically and responsively capture and reframe the Quay’s films’ qualities. The resultant richly textured and layered imagery delves the labyrinthine and secret realms of the Quay Brothers’ world. In itself, “Shadowy Encounters” is a complete, compelling, mythic and painstaking transcription of an inner journey. It…

  • Cooper/Bridges Fight

    The anxieties and frustrations of McCarthy-era Hollywood are integrated into this reconstruction of an infamous scene from “High Noon.” The struggle between a sheriff and his deputy become one with the film’s emulsion. Considered “un-American” by the House of Un-American Activities Committee, High Noon’s writer and director was blacklisted in the 1950s for alleged Communist sympathies. “They punish each other mercilessly, nothing barred. The horses, becoming nervous, rear and whine in their stalls…”- from “High Noon,” original script by Carl Foreman.

  • Marilyn and Media

    Marilyn Monroe, roboticized by copy-protection, is captured and trapped forever by the media and the medium of celluloid.