Film Categories: Landscape

  • Walking Away 2

    Scarborough Bluffs (1974): a woman walks away from us, through a field of grass. Approaching a treeline, she turns and crosses the frame. Instead of panning to accommodate her, the camera zooms wider – the woman continues to diminish as if still walking away and the landscape is fully revealed. The shot partially repeats: a wipe transition replaces the grass with water, and a ‘shipscape’ from Toronto’s Port Lands (2011) is revealed. Poetically, light reflected from downtown office towers catches the sail of a boat crossing the frame. Then amusingly, a split-screen sequence underlines the correspondence between woman and sailboat.

  • Fati et Aissatta (Fati and Aissatta)

    Fati, 23, and Aissatta, 16, live in the banlieue north of Paris, in a cité called “La Rose des Vents.” Their father emigrated from Mauritania to France 40 years ago to work on the assembly line at Citroën. Shot over a period of three years, the film follows the stories of the two sisters, their refusal of traditional ideas of French identity and their search for independence within a community where secularization, radicalization and patriarchal rule are continually in confrontation. Fati, 23 ans, et Aissatta, 16 ans, vivent dans la cité de La Rose des Vents, dans la banlieue nord…

  • Par vos yeux (through your eyes)

    tu touches ce qui t’entoure dans un lieu partagé avec la camera; à travers ce que tu touches, à travers une chambre, un escalier, un autre corps, comme ca tu commences à exister, à vivre, à désirer – à travers cette mort de toi-meme et cette naissance d’une troisième, cette naissance de l’invisible. you touch what surrounds you in a space shared with the camera; through what you touch, across a room, a staircase, another body – you begin to exist, to desire – through this death of yourself and this beginning of a third, this beginning of the invisible.

  • Selected Works by the Loop Collective: Volume 1

    A selection of films produced between 2005-2011 by members of The Loop Collective, a Toronto-based group of independent filmmakers, musicians, dancers and multimedia artists who strive to connect cinema to related interdisciplinary art forms. 1. fugitive l(i)ght 2. c: won eyed jail 3.Thaw 4. Parícutin 5.Quanta 6. Shapes Eat Shapes 7. Levitas 8. Spiders in Eden 9. The Changing Light 10. Christ Church – Saint James 11. Thought Form 12. Morning 13. Many Glimpses 14. Movement / Stasis (documentation)

  • Pepper’s Ghost

    How we may see in a Chamber things that are not! Here, mutations of light, through fabric, glass, and colored gel, make bodies and objects transparent. Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes but by the door or window. Let pictures be set over against this window. For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the spectator’s back, he will think to be in the middle of the room, as far from the glass inward as they stand from it outwardly. Clearly and certainly, he will think he sees nothing but truth.

  • Spirits In Season

    Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. This film explores the town’s Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump, and Fairy Trail. Music by Nate Wooley.

  • Brébeuf

    A study of St. Ignace, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649.

  • 11×14

    “One of the most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning’s 1976 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of image/sound pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and a fractured, painterly study of the American midwestern landscape, ‘11×14’ points toward the creation of a new, non-literary but populist cinema.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice Included in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Alternative 100 Top Films,” The Chicago Reader, 1998.

  • Axis

    Axis is an experimental film made through entirely photomechanical and photochemical means. The film fits into the experimental sub-genre of “optical printer film.” Some practitioners who have inspired me include Jordan Belson, John Whitney, David Rimmer, Pat O’Neill, Al Razutis, Gary Popovich, Bruce Elder and Norman McLaren. Axis takes as its subject matter the mundane, faceless urban landscape with its gleaming towers and factories. The workaday humdrum… drones to the hive. So I take to the streets, with my homemade Bolex robot, affectionately known as “BOLBOT.” It is a time-lapse motion control machine capable of smoothly spinning through X-Y-Z axes…

  • Watercolor (Fall Creek)

    Water flows under two bridges, or so it may appear. Since the advent of the industrial age, there has been a heated dialogue regarding the relationship between earth’s natural environment and manufactured human spaces. Watercolor (Fall Creek) exists between these necessary worlds, as time unfolds and remains difficult to comprehend.