Film Categories: Landscape
-
Metro Reels/Double A Side, The
While an old, battered 45 RPM record playing garage rock spins, a film projector shows two old Super 8 film reels. One in black and white, one in colour, the reels show the metropolitan downtown in all of its new, old, ugly, and beautiful forms to the sounds of the accompanying record.
-
Tourist
“Tourist” investigates the nature of spectator perception in an unfamiliar environment.
-
Butte
Poetic and sensual, “Butte” unfolds over the course of a day, marking the progression of time at four key points – sunrise, mid-day, late afternoon, and sundown. Filmed on the Blood Reserve in the plains and ancestral grounds of Southern Alberta, the camera instinctively accentuates dancer-choreographer Byron Chief-Moon’s deep connection to the land. The film captures images of nature and the connectiveness with the land – undulating waves of wild grass, the slow passage of clouds, pastoral, woodland thicket, and streams. The body as landscape is the central image; where the flesh, bone and muscle become synonymous with the land.
-
Dandelions
“Lyrical and full of mirth, this filmmaker wonders out loud in her first film: ‘How do I make myself at home in a landscape made foreign to me?’ Wilkinson looks at her self – black – and ponders in the white landscape called Canada how can she ‘enjoy the flowers’ as she cartwheels with great panache through fields of them. What kind of relationship to the land can she have in a place where she sees herself but where others constantly ask: Where are you from? Wilkinson’s existence vis a vis the land seems to lie somewhere in between the…
-
Shelter, The
After a tragic event that destroyed human civilization, two survivors wander around a destroyed building. The younger one, full of hope, thinks he can arrange the situation by finding other possible survivors, while the elder waits for his hour to come by making art with the debris of the late Civilization.
-
Brown Christmas with Colour
Without Snow, we lit up the season like never before. Part of “Twenty Five Short Films in and about Saskatchewan.”
-
Echo
“Echo” recalls childhood and the native home of the filmmaker through image, song and text. This self-portrait hints at the fragments, the pieces, the painful and repressed shards that the self contains, and through which it strives to piece together and illuminate its mysterious gaps. “‘Echo’ by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof boldly explores homesickness and cultural yearning through visual imagery, song and text. In this atypical self-portrait, the artist has created a photogram of her body that acts as a travelling matte through the countryside of her native land as she mouths an old Polish immigrant’s song; the original recording pierces like…
-
3 X 16
These three short films consist of perceptive depictions of a public square in Lima, the view from his mother’s rooftop, and work at the Toronto Film Festival revision department. The filmmaker used 16 mm as documentary format. Each film in this series is almost three-minutes long, which is the length of one roll of 16 mm film. The entire film uses in-camera editing, therefore all the editing decisions were made on location.
-
Four Toronto Films
The suite of four short films explores ideas about framing, centred round the attempt to find a necessary correspondence between the facts of the camera apparatus; fixed, rectangular frame and aspect ratio, and the work’s subject matter. A related idea concerns the figuration within the films of the manner in which the camera creates its own pro-filmic. To this end, there is a more or less recurring theme of frames within frames. Three of the four sections were filmed in, or within a stone’s throw of, the house in Toronto where I stayed while completing the work as an artist…
-
Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past (DVD Release)
Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. “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…
