Film Categories: history

  • Interim Sketches of a Year of Austerity

    “The children of the post-war baby boom are now in their early to late twenties. As is now apparent on a global scale, the economic system is poorly equipped to cope with their demographic tidal wave. They subsist in an age of specific depression with values maladaptive to most of the job market. As one woman said: ‘A few years ago we talked about being green and now we talk about being poor.’” – Jeff Solway, Secretary of State, Canadian Alternatives, 1075 This documentary follows the people who live in these conditions in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Through stories, still photographs…

  • Iraq Campaign, The

    “Good evening, the United States of America is at war.” “The Iraq Campaign” by San Francisco videographer Phil Patiris presents a compelling artistic documentary of the immediate American national spirit as promoted and reflected by television during the weeks of Desert Storm (plus its short-lived afterglow). This “television history” is intended as well to be a representation of corporate television’s high-tech style in presenting extraordinary news events, illustrating the ultimate convergence of American news and entertainment; and of how the magic and power of television can be used as a not-so-subtle device for mass influence by corporate media in co-operation…

  • Mashiko Village Pottery, Japan 1937

    Produced by a pre-war cultural organization in Japan, the film is a work of great clarity and beauty which follows an entire pottery-making cycle as performed in Japan for centuries. Mashiko ceramic manufacture is said to date back to 1853. Also shown at work is the great painter of teapots, Masu Minagawa, an itinerant, illiterate painter of patterns who travelled amongst the kilns in villages. It is said that she decorated up to one thousand teapots per day. Some of her very rare drawings on paper are now held at the Fogg Art Museum in Massachusetts. The film was restored…

  • MM Myth Myth-A Collage

    An animated film exploring the myth of Marilyn Monroe. Amusing and sad. “One of the most remarkable and dedicated amateur filmmakers in the world…” – Movie Maker 10 Best, 1986

  • Moffie Called Simon, A

    “A Moffie Called Simon” is a collage of photographs, letters, TV footage and dramatic sequences presenting the case of Simon Nkodi, a black gay activist and student leader in South Africa, who has been in jail for nearly two years. Based on letters from Nkodi and his lover, Ray, a Canadian gay journalist, “A Moffie Called Simon” also explores connections between anti-apartheid struggles and gay liberation.

  • Mondo Punk

    In the beginning were the Sex Pistols. All the ikons of the Punk Movement and more. Anarchistic anti-art calculated to offend. “It’s violent… it scared the shit out of me a couple of times.” – Freddy Pompeii, The Viletones

  • Monuments

    Utilizing the poetic voice to give language and meaning to the downtown monuments of Halifax, Nova Scotia, we discover that, if they could, our monuments would destroy the human race rather than face the onward thrust of history.

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past

    “Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, “Moose Jaw” is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along with a giant moose), and schemes to restore…

  • Mother Marilyn

    This film is animated in the rough collage style that James MacSwain has made his own. Utilizing a series of vignettes, the film traces the story of the child born to Marilyn Monroe and President Kennedy. As the satire unfolds, the story becomes a metaphor for the collapse of the American Empirre due to mysticism and drugs. Also available on DVD on the compilation “James MacSwain Retrospective.”

  • Myth of Sisyphus, The

    In the language of collage, this experimental animation film is a visual interpretation of a story by Albert Camus. It concentrates on that moment when Sisyphus watches his rock fall. “At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning to his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that the series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under the memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has…