Film Categories: history

  • Panama, The

    “The Panama” chronicles the Chan family of Victoria, B.C. as it evolved from its first days in Canada when the patriarch Chan Dun, at the age of twelve, landed in Victoria in 1890. From this auspicious occasion, a family of eight sons and four daughters would eventually center around the Panama café, a western-style eatery specializing in liver and onions and apple pie to the working class of the city. Located on Government Street by 1930, The Panama café is a story of one of the oldest Chinese Canadian families. It describes its experience during the depression, the war years…

  • Paper Age and Ancient Flight, The

    It was in Egypt 4000 years ago when mankind first developed the aircraft. Using the pyramids as launch pads, ancient civilizations had mastered the air before the invention of the wheel. For over a thousand years cultures around the world used papyrus, or paper, to construct simple yet effective means to travel through air. Is it possible that this age of paper thrived for so long, but has remained virtually unnoticed? In in-depth interviews, William Deiches describes how he rediscovered this ancient technology. While researching pyramid contruction, he stumbled unexpectedly onto secret plans for hot air balloons, gliders and hang…

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Patriotism 1

    Wieland’s kinetic romp casts David Shackman as an overexposed sleeper dogged by a patriotic march of tube steaks that finally refigures him as our most familiar icon of freedom. This pixillated short about hot dogs is the latest of Wieland’s early film works to be restored to circulation.

  • Patriotism 2

    In a way a portrait of Dave Shackman with the American flag. The ending is a stop-motion animation of a set table with food moving and swirling and finally gathering together in a ball. Looking back at the film, the animation sequence seems to foreshadow Dave Shackman’s early death. He died shortly after the film was made.

  • Perfumed Nightmare

    “One of the year’s ten best films.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice “There’s nothing even remotely nightmarish about ‘Perfumed Nightmare.’ It’s an enchanting and poignant experience, a totally original seriocomic creation with an infectious and exuberant energy. The film is a semi-autobiographical fable by a young Philippino named Kidlat Tahimik, about his awakening to, and reaction against, American cultural colonialism. Born in 1942 during the Occupation, Kidlat spent ‘the next 33 typhoon seasons in a cocoon of American dreams.’ This, then, is his perfumed nightmare: the lotus land of American technological promise. “In his primitive village he worships the heroism…

  • Pierre Vallières

    He delivered three essays, without stopping, except for reel change and camera breakdown: 1) Mont Laurier; 2) Quebec history and race; 3) women’s liberation. Everything which happened is recorded on film. It was a one-shot affair, I either got him on film or I missed. What we see on film is the mouth of a revolutionary, extremely close, his lips, his teeth, his spittle, his tongue which rolls so beautifully through his French, and finally the reflections in his teeth of the window behind me. (JW)

  • Pioneers of X-Ray Technology

    “In Ann Marie Fleming’s ‘Pioneers of X-Ray Technology’ (a film about Grandpa), super-8 home movies are only one part of the film’s cooly complex structure. The first time I saw ‘Pioneers’ it looked like an uncomplicated portrait of Fleming’s grandfather, Dr. Ernest To, who was a photographer, amateur filmmaker and Hong Kong radiologist. On second viewing, the film’s ambivalence towards its subject becomes clear. “Fleming (‘You Take Care Now,’ ‘New Shoes’) is known for the ‘quirkiness’ of her films, but she’s above all a brilliant editor, both cinematographically and conceptually. Like nearly all her films, ‘Pioneers’ benefits from remarkable compression.…

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…