Film Categories: media studies

  • HiFi Normal

    “Toward the insignificant” was the oblique strategy card that inspired this VHS collaboration. Beginning with representational images of a local landmark, the image gradually decays until it is replaced completely with abstraction. Two VHS decks were joined together and plugged into one side of a handmade DIY video mixer, while the other input of the mixer was connected to a VHS camera running a feedback loop. The starting image running on the loop was a static image of a telecommunications tower in the centre of Moncton which in recent years, has become almost useless, standing alone in the middle of…

  • Soak

    Soak is a short experimental student film shot and edited on digital formats, produced at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. This film explores the physical and emotional sensations of self-care. In this film a woman attempts to pull herself out of her sinking mood by taking a bath.

  • Kino Crvena zvijezda (The Red Star Cinema)

    “During the Homeland War I worked as a war reporter in Vinkovci, the town I grew up in. One of the air raids destroyed the Red Star Cinema, the cinema of my childhood. There, as a kid, I dreamt of a great film career. Among the debris I found pieces of damaged filmstrip with clips from different film titles produced in the former state. A Filmstrip’s function is cinema screening. Splicing the pieces together could not restore the strip’s initial purpose. Destruction and damage changed the strip’s content and gave it a new quality. Even the Old Bridge in Mostar,…

  • Head Cleaner

    Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images issuing from an apparently malfunctioning machine. Materials and objects, in varying physical or mediated transfigurations, pervade each scene, as relics from one moment in a transformation from girlhood to womanhood. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on entertainment technology’s fraught relationship to individual agency and identity, and its role in the standardization of expression and behaviour, underlies a loosely suggested coming-of-age narrative.

  • Scratch, Crackle & Pop!

    SCRATCH, CRACKLE & POP! by animator and filmmaker Steven Woloshen highlights 30 years of aesthetic discoveries made in the production of Super 8, 16mm and 35mm animated/experimental films. Written for aspiring animators and film lovers alike, SCRATCH, CRACKLE & POP! is a one-of-a-kind guidebook that explores the techniques, processes and tools of the trade through in-depth case studies of thirteen of Woloshen’s best-known films. A companion DVD and two 35mm filmstrips are included in the book. “A whole grains approach to making films without a camera.” – Steven Woloshen Foreword by Marco de Blois, animation curator and programmer at Montréal’s…

  • 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…

  • Trailer

    The same duration as a standard promotional film trailer (two and a half minutes), Trailer documents the mechanical and support systems that are present at most large film productions.

  • No End

    “No End” was inspired by a poem I wrote over the course of six months. During this process, abstract images surfaced, subsided, and settled: eventually forming the foundation of a film. The result is a lyrical journey that explores the intersection of interconnectivity and the lived experience. The film includes an original soundtrack by Graham Stewart of Viosac. Selected screenings & awards: Nevada International Film Festival, Platinum Award, Experimental Film (Las Vegas, USA, 2015); New York International Film Festival (New York, USA, 2016); Arte Non Stop Festival, Silver Palms Special Mention (Buenos Aires, 2016); Golden Gate International Film Festival, Nominated…

  • [T]

    “[T] is a film at the limit of cinema, an experiment in the moving image where stillness and movement converge on each other to produce an experience of time as space. Philippe Leonard shot the footage for this remarkable work at Times Square, in New York City, during the hours of artificial illumination. Partly for this reason, it is an oneiric diary, tempted by myth and, at the same time, suffused by a melancholy sense that myth has lost its magical power. Faces appear and disappear in spasmodic waves of light, which emanate from billboards and mobile telephone screens and…

  • Famous Diamonds

    A kaleidoscopic search for desire trapped inside a volcano. Famous Diamonds is a short film that studies lies, love, and desire by weaving together a diary narrative and an exploding icon. Composed of various image-making techniques, Famous Diamonds is a hand-painted, hand-processed tour of the dissolution of one’s internal image of desire.