Film Categories: history

  • Politics of Perception, The

    Selected for the 11th Paris Biennale of Modern Art and included in the collection of numerous museums and universities, “The Politics of Perception” is a film essay concerned with the language of the film medium. At its point of departure, it is a meditation on the images, sounds, rhythm and sub-text of the “entertainment” film. A Hollywood discourse is stripped of its fleshly covering to reveal the mechanics of its manipulations, at the same time liberating the kinematic and photochemical energies “trapped” in its representational content/form. At its apogee it is an invocation of the forms and textures of film…

  • Portrait of Small Hydro, A

    A sister film to “Water Power,” “A Portrait of Small Hydro” concentrates on three hydro entrepreneurs who bought up old dam sites in New England and rebuilt them for production of power. In 1978, the US Congress passed the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) which requires utilities to buy power at fair rates from private producers. With a guaranteed return, investors scurried all over the country looking for suitable sites. Charles MacArthur found his “bottomless oil well” in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. In1977, his 600 kw output was worth $12,000 a year. In the early 1980s, it was worth $120,000. But,…

  • Potters at Work

    In Japan, a man works with his sons and apprentices fashioning pots. A woman scoops off water from a clay settling tank while another lifts out heavy, wet handfuls of clay. An ancient brick kiln is walled up at night. Working with understanding and affection, refusing such aids as commentary and music, th filmmaker, creating from the pattern of the potter’s work, shows precisely how pots are crafted and has captured a vision of creativity radically different from western concepts of art-making.

  • Pretending We Were Indians

    “This short animated film represents the recollections of a woman whose native ancestry was obscured by the social mores of the recent past. Tracing fragments of information as she walks, the woman speculates on what really happened to her ancestors and herself.” – Frances Leeming

  • Private Property / Public History

    “Having acquired a set of family snapshots at an auction sale, Doyle traced their origins to an Ontario family. She talked with the now-elderly women and reconstructed the photographs and the dialogue in this film which confronts issues of photographic representation and its uses in family history.” – “Toronto: A Play of History,” The Power Plant, 1987

  • Rattle

    The film is, at once, a document of a great Canadian multinational facing perilous agricultural “sophistication,” and a lament – a witness to the element of ruin that plagues industry. The Massey Harris King Street Factory (Toronto) was built in 1879 to a chorus of consternation. The size and scope were unprecedented in Canada at that time, and it established this company (later to be Massey Ferguson) as a major manufacturing firm in the agricultural industry. The film is a journey through the remnants of the factory which, for years, served as the pillar of the corporation. Seen from afar,…

  • Red Rocket

    In 1929, there were speakeasies, Charleston dancers, gangsters and jazz. It was the year the stock market crashed and a group of men sat down to design the streetcar of the future. They were ten feet high, forty-six feet long and weighed twenty tons. The manufacturer called them streamliners, the public called them “Red Rockets.” The film captures the spirit and grace of the now-famous streetcars which have fired the imagination of rail buffs and the public alike for three generations.

  • Reunion in Dunnville

    This film started out as a community project involving my students at Sheridan College. On one level, it documents a remarkable reunion of people from as far away as Australia and New Zealand who converge on a small town in rural Ontario, where 2,436 Allied pilots received their training during World War II. A subtext emerges in the dialectic between our own newsreel footage of the event in 1979, and home movies shot by the veterans, including reunions at the base before it became a giant turkey farm. This allows for some revealing interruptions of conventional documentary codification, and serves…

  • Rochdale College 1970

    Rochdale College was an experiment with new ideas and ways of living while being conventionally forced to live within the old, dead civilization and its structures. The results inevitably show confusion and angered disillusionment. The new ideas and ways, never allowed time to evolve and produce positive results, were smothered for the sake of convenience and convention. The film is ultimately a nostalgic reminiscence of the Sixties.

  • Scientific Girl, The

    “The Scientific Girl” explores the “outbreak” of 1940’s Hollywood films featuring mentally ill heroines – Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit,” for example. By tracing the treatment of hysterical women in the 1890s, our heroine, the Scientific Girl, reveals how women’s problems have been stereotyped and how the “evil-seductress effect” works. “An intelligent attempt to span generations and cinematically tie together the treatment of hysteria in women as a form of entertainment…an intriguing subject.” – Cinema Canada