Film Categories: Literary/theatre

  • Adagio

    Music as sensuous and longing as a fragrance. Phrases that rise and fall slowly at first, then more and more passionately. A love poem. And also a study of the relation between film phrases and musical phrases. As in the music, the film uses only fades and dissolves between statements. Based on Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”

  • Pressures of the Text, The

    “The Pressures of the Text” integrates direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language, and simultaneous translation to investigate the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness. A parody of art/critspeak, educational instruction, gothic narrative, and pornography, it has been performed as a live work at major media centres and new music festivals nationwide. The piece was written, directed and delivered by Peter Rose; co-directed by Jessie Lewis; with sign language and ideographic symbols by Jessie Lewis; and with English simultran by Fred Curchack.

  • Prologue: Infinite Obscure

    The film began with the idea of doing a “remake” of “Moby Dick” using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted from his version. A number of other issues began to take precedence however: the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic writing; the possible intersections of (auto) biography and fiction; the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo) sexuality. (MC)

  • Remedial Reading Comprehension

    “The whole of ‘Remedial Reading Comprehension’ is a film of short phrases in an ambiguously didactic sequence. Dream inspiration and academic education are conflated and the viewer is constantly reminded of his status as a reader.” – P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film

  • Sappho

    Using the sixth century B.C. lyricist’s poetry, a group of women unwrap the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara and six students, together at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.

  • Scenes from Macbeth

    “Scenes from Macbeth” is a pared-down version of Shakespeare’s tragedy of ambition, set in the world of contemporary Toronto’s business elite. Macbeth’s rise is spurred by the prophecy of three bag ladies; his fall is planned over a power lunch. The story is filmed in a hyperbolic style with no respect for tradition.

  • Seadrift

    “Seadrift” is based on a story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft, and was shot partially in Marblehead Mass. Each section represents a synthesis of the various aspects and moods of the story. The sum total of the fragments expresses the atmosphere of the whole. With Mike Kuchar, Robert Cowan, Donna Kerness, Walter Gutman and others.

  • Beach Events

    This film completes a trilogy of landscape/poetry films, which include “Waterworx” (1982) and “Landfall” (1983), and was shot near the family home on the Northumberland Strait in Prince Edward Island. In writing the text for “Beach Events”, I wanted to challenge the cinema’s dominant present tense by imitating primitive “event” poetry, referring superficially to action present on the screen, but gradually slipping out of synchronization with its referent. This practice, together with reading a kind of sub-conscious, internal monologue (also based on the film’s events, but only those past and future), helps the viewer transcend the spectacle of the present,…

  • Sons of Captain Poetry

    This “fantasy documentary” tries to blend Canadian poet bp Nichol’s everyday world with the images of characters in his poetry. Sequences include a section on Plunkett, Saskatchewan, where the poet grew up, and scenes of him discussing “concrete poetry.” In the film bp Nichol performs several sound poems. There are also scenes showing his involvement with Coach House Press and Therafields.

  • Villanelle

    Elizabeth Lewis’s “Villanelle” is based on a poem of the same name by Earle Birney, one of Canada’s best-known poets. In a live action segment preceding the animation, Birney introduces the poem, describing the circumstances that led him to write it. He tells of how he spent one summer of the 1960s at Bowen island, north of Vancouver. During the week he was alone. But on the week-ends, friends and students would join him. Only one of those friends, a promising young student named Betty Lamert, was able to join him on his two-mile swims in the icy bay water.…