Film Categories: Literature

  • Duration of Life and Other Tales from the Grimms, The

    Seven of the Grimms’ most mysterious and obscure fairytales are told over a dazzling display of Ontario landscape. Under the guidance of Katherine Grier’s careful telling, Canadian filmmaker Amy Bodman uses the film to create a dialogue between the inner and outer worlds, attempting to show how one’s imaginings are essential in giving meaning in our day-to-day living.

  • Come Around

    Poem by Louise Bak. Music by Peter Scherer.

  • Nose, The

    An ambitious civil servant wakes one morning to find his nose is missing. Surrealism and fantasy collide with mundane bureaucratic reality as he attempts to recover it. Based on the story by Nikolai Gogol.

  • Be Careful With Hope

    A poetry film based on Carol Barbour’s poem “Be Careful with Hope”, which was inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers.” The camera follows a woman moving through an urban nature site. She is mourning a loss and seeking to find hope again. She settles on a bench with a wide view of the surrounding landscape and opens a book that reveals a magical outcome.

  • Pierre Vallières

    He delivered three essays, without stopping, except for reel change and camera breakdown: 1) Mont Laurier; 2) Quebec history and race; 3) women’s liberation. Everything which happened is recorded on film. It was a one-shot affair, I either got him on film or I missed. What we see on film is the mouth of a revolutionary, extremely close, his lips, his teeth, his spittle, his tongue which rolls so beautifully through his French, and finally the reflections in his teeth of the window behind me. (JW)

  • Pat’s Birthday

    A day in the country with Claes Oldenburg and the Ray Gun Theatre Players, including such classic items as the haunted house, a gas station, an ice cream stand, miniature golf, airplane noises, and balloons. Things happen after each other in this film only because there isn’t room for everything at once. After all, time is not supposed to move in one direction any more than it does in another.

  • Passion Crucified

    “Passion Crucified” is an episodic rite of passage rendered in tableau style. Part creation myth, part medieval science fiction, it enacts a typology of the body – offering us glimpses of Adam, Eve, Christ and Joan of Arc. Together they are figured as subterranean ideals, which continue to haunt us, even as they provide the means by which we might come to understand our own bodies. Begun as a dance performance, Torossian recasts her naked charge into a series of phantasmagoric settings – trees whose fruit show the faces of Medici children, drunken underground rooms filled with a rotting, natural…

  • Ophelia and The Cat Lady

    Two films on one reel. With Liz Reiner (OPHELIA) and Carla Liss (THE CAT LADY). On one level the films are portraits; on another level the first is inspired by reading about the painting of John Millais’ “Ophelia,” and “The Cat Lady” is an homage to the horror films of the filmmaker’s childhood movie going.

  • One Woman Waiting

    “One Woman Waiting” evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film. “Massarella uses the fixed camera shot in her enigmatic film of a symbolic encounter between two women in a beautifully shot desert location. Its cryptic form is a good example of how an idea can be treated most effectively by simple means, for instance in the use of the frame as a point of entry and exit for characters…

  • On the Marriage Broker Joke

    “‘On the Marriage Broker Joke’… turns upon an opposition of Freudian analysis and Christian hermeneutics… Two pandas, who exist only because of a textual error, run a shell game for the viewer in an environment with false perspectives. They posit the existence of various films and characters, one of which is interpreted by an academic as containing religious symbolism. Sigmund Freud’s own explanation is given by a sleeper awakened by an alarm clock.” – P. Adams Sitney