Film Categories: Landscape

  • river

    The Saugeen River was named Sauking, “where it all flows out,” by the Ojibwa in the early 1800s. It runs into Lake Huron, in central Ontario. The place where I know it is twenty miles south of Owen Sound, near Williamsford, where I spent lots of time in my youth exploring. Over the past twelve years I’ve returned there to film, and collected these moments in a fifteen-minute meditation called simply, “river.” In 1997, I arrived with a wind-up 16mm Bolex and one roll of 16mm colour film; in 1981 with a half inch, reel-to-reel black-and-white video portapak; in 1984,…

  • Road Ended at the Beach, The

    In making this film I collected images and sound over six years of travel (not continuous) through Canada. Keeping daily both filmic and written records, I focused on people and places, my relationships to them, and the changes that occurred between each visit. I would collect these images freely: later to examine and make meaning of during the editing process. In this film I started to consciously pursue the relationship between a formal chronicle of events and my memory of those events. (PH) “The film is a series of ‘telling’ incidents in which events, which fall short of expectations, are…

  • Rooftops

    Continuous camera movement over stationary structures on New York rooftops, edited closely to a piece by Benjamin Britten. “Rooftops” reveals an urban landscape devoid of regular city life. “A meditative perusal of rooftops…interesting linear composition with the use of black leader between shots, and great after-images.” – Canyon Cinema

  • Rote Movie

    On the voice over, de Bruyn places himself behind the wheel of a car, an appropriate metaphor for his expatriate driven-reflections on his feelings of exile, distance and loneliness. Necessarily unintelligent memories highlight habitual subjectivity of “walking through a landscape alone,” “gypsy,” “victim.” Images of road signs, cars, billboards, the passing landscape; elegantly simple rotoscope (by rote?) drawings, recopied and texturally manipulated filmic images; the inevitability of the repetition of leader. A tired, yearning, moving film.

  • Rue des Teinturiers

    Filmed frame-by-frame in the camera, the focus of each frame is adjusted so that certain graphic features of items in the street are extracted and inscribed onto the film strip in a way which allows their characteristics to be seen, when projected in succession on the screen, as parts of a spatiotemporal image stretching from a position on a balcony over a canalized river to the road. The film is composed of twelve 2 3/4 minute reels, each of which was filmed on a different day throughout a six-month period. No editing was undertaken other than joining the reels together.…

  • Running Fence

    “Running Fence” depicts the four-year struggle faced by the artist Christo to see his vision realized: a 24-mile fence of white fabric over the hills of California disappearing into the Pacific. After an extensive battle with the state bureaucracy, the fence is finally unfurled, bringing the community together in celebration of its beauty. The three-million-dollar fence was taken down as planned at the end of two weeks, and now exists solely on film.

  • Sailboat

    “‘Sailboat’ has the simplicity of a child’s drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seems to underline the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way a child might draw a picture of water and write word sounds on it to make it as emphatic as possible. The little image is interrupted at one point by a huge shoulder appearing briefly in the left-hand corner.” – Robert Cowan, Take One “This little Sailboat film will sail right through your gate and into your heart.” –…

  • Sang Song

    From atop a Jakartan ferris wheel, a song in light.

  • Bark Rind

    “Bark Rind” is a single-concept film that creates a unique audio-visual cinematic experience. Presented over the course of the work are gyrating, close-up images of flowers, bark, grass and leaves, accompanied by the shrill of insects on the soundtrack. The entire film was shot in single frame, each frame involving multiple exposures of the same object in complex combinations of close-up, medium shot and long shot, all realized in-camera.

  • Scenes de la Vie Francaise: Avignon

    Four scenes of Avignon: a park, a bus terminus, Rue des Teinturiers, and a town square are filmed at different times from an identical viewpoint. The material taken at diverse periods appears interwoven in the final print.