Film Categories: Landscape

  • Making Pictures

    “Making Pictures” is an experimental film that follows a fine art photographer being photographed by a documentary crew as he travels through China “making pictures” of massive industrial projects. The film contrasts the photographer and the laborers ‘at work’ and brings up complex questions about making art in that context. The film was photographed as a home movie on black and white super-8, hand-processed and blown up to 35mm for release. All of the lab work was done by the filmmaker including the optical printing and print processing. The texture of the film is as impressionist as the photographers’ work…

  • 1000 Feet

    A walk through the city of Maputo becomes a poetic visual essay. Inspired by two Mozambican poems, its central themes are: shoes, time, space, history, humanity, reading the asphalt and the intrusive effect of a camera. Scenes from everyday life and a series of portraits link with radio loops and local ambiance sound. The curious gaze of a foreigner gradulally evolves to the fascinated look of a gues enchanted by the city and its people. Strangeness, obstruction and mutual unease are step by step replaced by contact and communication. Distance and closeness measured in feet: the theme for a possible…

  • Going Back Home

    Turmoil of unsheltered childhood; the dwelling as self. “Louise Bourque’s ‘Going Back Home’ conveys a sense of loss and upheaval with just a few images.” – Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz, program notes, San Francisco International FIlm Festival, 2002 “The disasters of life can make it hard to go home. Bourque’s brief, beautiful, and affecting film goes by so quickly it’s printed twice on the reel, so you can get a second look.” – Program notes, Images Festival, 2001 “To the scratchy sounds of an old music box… ‘Going Back Home’ weaves snippets of old reels of houses collapsing, fires…

  • Along the Road to Altamira

    “The lateral movement of the title “Along the Road to Altamira” signals that we are about to embark on a journey through Spain. Our final destination is Altamira, where the first forms of representation by Paleolithic man still remain. These images, a narrator tells us in German, would have remained undiscovered if not for the childish curiosity and unconditioned vision of the young girl who noticed the ancient paintings of bison on the cave ceiling. “In keeping with this idea, the film takes us on a journey toward a final destination of symbolic import. However, what one sees along the…

  • Jolicoeur Touriste

    An enclosed space, a struggle against the constraints of personal isolation explored through a fractured narrative. A man living in a broken-down rented room in a Tourist Inn travels through his inebriation, his memories and his fantasies, transcending the limits of time and space, which suddenly intertwine. A film about loss and absence. Selected screenings & awards: Best Experimental Short, Melbourne International Film Festival, Australia, 1990; Outstanding Achievement Award, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, 1989; Honorable Mention, The Canadian International Annual Film Festival, Ottawa, ON, 1990; Opening film, 39th International Mannheim Film Week, Germany, 1990

  • People in the House, The

    “‘The People in the House’ examines the dynamics of a family in crisis and questions the role of religious devotion in the perpetuation of dysfunction. The exterior of the house is never seen, and the family’s anxiety, as is often the case, plays out within the confines of four walls. Filmed with a dreamy, surreal quality, ‘The People in the House’ dwells within the tension between harmony and chaos.” – Liz Czach, Toronto Film Festival Catalogue, Canada, 1995 Selected screenings & awards: Best Experimental Film, The 14th Uppsala Short Film Festival, Sweden, 1995; Special Jury Award, The 31st Yorkton Short…

  • Toraanisqatsi

    Leif Harmsen’s remake of Godrey Reggio’s classic independent film “Koyaanisqatsi” was shot on Super 8 film entirely on location in Toronto by invitation to the Splice This! 2005 Super 8 Film Festival. Bob Wiseman wrote and performed the evocative instrumental soundtrack. “Toraanisqatsi” is an environmental thriller set in the Toronto of the 21st century, a city taken over by cars, fast food, electronic billboards, jetliners, industry and pollution. It is seen through the terrified eyes of a living breathing human. All transportation for this film was done by bicycle or foot.

  • fall storm (california 2003)

    Sitting in a quiet room; listening to a storm out the window.

  • (panacea)

    Two lovers – a sailor and an artist – made of different fabrics (one skin, one pleather) spend their last afternoon together.

  • Connecting Lines

    Four passengers trace a circular journey connecting Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and back to Seattle again. The action in Connecting Lines takes place in the bar cars of these moving trains, where changing landscapes fill a single moving-picture window, as an eclectic mix of passengers come and go in the foreground. These passengers do the things people on trains usually do: smoke, drink, and tell stories. As characters appear, wander off, and reappear at random, their tales are reinvented and adapted to suit new audiences. All the while, the passing landscape is being shaped into patterns by the…