Film Categories: Landscape

  • beth olem | house of the world

    two super 8 camera rolls capturing the beth olem cemetery in detroit on the site of GM’s “Poletown” plant, only open 4 hours per year.

  • By The Time We Got To Expo

    A meditative journey through Expo 67, re-visiting a significant moment in Canadian history using manipulated imagery taken from educational and documentary films. Footage has been re-worked using tints, toners and photochemical techniques to create a vibrant collision of colours, textures and forms.

  • Lunar Almanac

    “Lunar Almanac initiates a journey through magnetic spheres with its staccato layering of single-frame, long exposures of a multiplied moon. Shot in 16mm Ektachrome and hand processed, the film’s artisanal touches are imbued with nocturnal mystery”. —Andréa Picard, TIFF Wavelengths, 2014 Image description: A series of images of the full moon in a grid of four filmstrips taken from the film Lunar Almanac. The moon is white or pale yellow against a black background, in some instances obscured by tree branches or clouds. One section is coloured deep orange-red.

  • STILLE STADT

    STILLE STADT (trans. Silent City) depicts the state of contemporary urbanity through an Everyman on the verge of a mid-life crisis, who goes through his life of routine both stricken and sustained by opera arias, that stand in for his thoughts and emotions that only he (and the audience) can hear. STILLE STADT in an allegory of modern existence that blends the real with surreal to explore how urban dwellers lose their connection with the environment, people, and praxis; and the suppression and containment of those lost connections by consumerism, distraction, and interiorization. STILLE STADT is an update and inversion…

  • Le Phare

    Unlike the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building, Montreal’s iconic urban landmark is horizontal and spectral, not vertical and solid. Le Phare is a filmic portrait of the Montreal’s nocturnal marker, a spinning beacon that has been raking four long beams of light across the city’s environs since 1972. The nightly presence of these intense, rotating rays is reassuring for many, and yet also oddly perplexing: the illuminating machine does not provide reconnoitering for aviation; it is not synched to act as a time-keeping device; nor does it commemorate a specific historic moment or personage. Indeed, the lights serve…

  • Théodolitique

    Théodolitique is a moving image project that merges the geodetic and the filmic, linking the very long history of land surveying with the comparatively new technologies of film-making. Connecting these two methods of visual observation and recording, Théodolitique documents student surveyors from the École des Métiers du Sud-Ouest-de-Montréal as they take an outdoor exam over the course of a single day. The project utilizes a wide range of filmic and acoustic techniques — including a parabolic microphone to capture distant audio, and a custom built ‘theodocam’ to provide a surveyor’s eye view — to reflect and mimic how the students…

  • Against Landscape

    “Challenging the romanticization of west coast scenery, Josh Solondz creates a starling work of land art in Against Landscape. Whether political, performative, or both, the artist’s plucky gesture and the video’s precise framing limn the limits of control.” –Andrea Picard, TIFF Wavelengths 2014

  • House Dress #1-5

    Five short dance works by a senior dance artist. An exploration of the body in mid-life and confined spaces.

  • Marshlands (Marécage)

    A psychic’s prediction of impending disaster underlies this experimental meditation set on the marshes of Sackville, New Brunswick. Shot on Super 8, 16mm and video, Marshlands moves elliptically from a present steeped in memory to an uncertain future. Un médium prédit un désastre imminent: voilà le point de départ de cette méditation expérimentale se déroulant dans les marais de Sackville, au Nouveau-Brunswick. Tourné en Super 8, en 16mm et en vidéo, Marécage se déplace de façon elliptique, d’un présent enveloppé de souvenir vers un futur incertain.

  • Occidente

    A film-poem of an ecology of sings that speak of a colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geo-data. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table. “An ecology of signs lurking amid seductive 16mm travel footage echoes with post-colonial reverberations in Ana Vaz’s deceptively corrosive, award-winning Occidente. – ANDRÉA PICARD (TIFF, Wavelengths)