Film Categories: Landscape

  • Mondrian Voor Rebecca

    I’m very certain it’s about the 30 km dyke in the north of Holland, the “Afsluitdijk.” I’m sure that the lines, the colours and the horizon figure heavy into grids, squares and rectangles. I’m positive it’s about being on an exquisite land/water edge and I’m assured it involves Rebecca, whom I barely know, and Mondrian, whom I barely know, and windmills. So I’m decided that much that is beautiful of Holland, apart from Rebecca, lies in the instinct that has refined the elements, and has become Science – not the other way around. (JG)

  • Monitoring the Unstable Earth

    A (re)collection, a (re)ordering of the elements of our external world, filmed during travels in California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. A sort of “topological revue.” Salt flats, deserts, mountains, forests, cityscapes, plus meditation on Christo’s “Running Fence” and Duane Hanson’s figurative sculptures. Fantastic landscapes transmuted/reduced to their distinctive aesthetic qualities. Patterns of symmetry, of pure form emerge. Here shape and texture, colour and light overcome meaning to affect perception on a primary, visceral level. Sensations evoked by certain (sometimes archetypal) images: a profound feeling of peace, a disturbing sense of unease, a tug of nostalgia … “Michael Wallin’s ‘Monitoring the…

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past

    “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 with a giant moose), and schemes to restore…

  • Moving Bicycle Picture

    Duchamp once said about his bicycle wheel piece, “One day I had the happy idea to mount a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool and watch it spin.” One summer I had the happy idea of taking a bicycle trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay. The bicycle trip was recorded with a tiny “Keystone” camera. I leave out important events like eating and camping and concentrate mainly on what is seen from the moving bicycle. After a time the camera, bicycle and myself become entangled, involved, friends and enemies. A film on moving. As a film I often mount it…

  • Narrows Inlet

    Starting with a boat swaying on its anchor at the head of an inlet, a landscape of pilings, shore, and forest is slowly revealed by time-lapse photography as the morning fog lifts. While the deep space of the landscape evolves out of the fog-enshrouded flatness of early morning, the camera skips from fixed point to fixed point – suggesting the motion of the human eye while reading.

  • Nine O’Clock Gun, The

    Real time is an oxymoron. The film presents one firing of Vancouver’s famous gun; an event that attracts an audience visible on screen unlike the audience watching the film; ourselves. Our experience of time in our innermost self is unlike our experience of space or mass yet nothing in physics corresponds to the passage of time. How can something we experience as so real be based on an illusion. Norfolk, Virginia also has a Nine O’clock Gun.

  • Nocturne

    A train passes by, a boy with a sparkler in his hand leads us into the world of night. A dark, haunting portrait of the urban landscape in a nocturnal fog. “An impressionistic portrait of Montreal in a nocturnal fog that is simultaneously beautiful and foreboding.” – John Dippong, Vancouver International Film Festival “A painterly vision of what happens in the city at night – beautiful and poetic.” – Stuart Poyntz, Street-Level Film Festival

  • North on Evers

    “Practically all of this fascinating road movie by a master framer of landscapes, stretching from the west to the east coast and back again, is not only subtitled but subtitled in handwritten text that moves constantly across the bottom of the frame. Though the procession of shots and the procession of text offer different versions of the same narrative – Benning’s cross-country trip by motorcycle, with many personal stops and one-night stands along the way – they’re rarely in sync or mutually enhancing; sometimes the text precedes the illustration by several minutes, and sometimes the picture comes well before the…

  • notes in origin

    “Shot in northern Alberta, where the artist grew up, the film consists of ten long-take shots of various lengths divided by black leader bearing a number for each successive shot… ‘notes in origin’ realizes the subtle lyricism that appears in the last image of its predecessor. Here Epp intimates a mysteriously shared and personal complicity of artist and viewer without, however, abandoning that purity and extraordinary elegance that mark Epp as one of the most accomplished of film artist.” – Bart Testa, Art Gallery of Ontario catalogue What I like in film is precision, slightness, economy of means, delight, inference…

  • October 25th + 26th, 1996

    During the Metro Days of Action, a 150’ long building was inflated using the air vents in front of Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. The October Group action references both public institution and temporary home to protest the erosion of our city. Music by Dirty Three.