Film Categories: media studies

  • Between Two Cinemas Part 1

    For the past thirty years filmmaker/archivist Ross Lipman has cut a winding path between classic international cinema and the American avant-garde. In this riveting but completely unclassifiable work, he looks back at a life in the cinema and an indescribable divide at the heart of it. Part biography, part clip essay, part abstract painting, “Between Two Cinemas” integrates 4K restorations of his old films inside a new documentary/essay linking them. It uncovers previously unseen archival material on Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, and adds new collaborations with artists including visionary experimentalist Bruce Baillie, Jeanne Dielman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Bela Tarr…

  • Between Two Cinemas Part 2

    For the past thirty years filmmaker/archivist Ross Lipman has cut a winding path between classic international cinema and the American avant-garde. In this riveting but completely unclassifiable work, he looks back at a life in the cinema and an indescribable divide at the heart of it. Part biography, part clip essay, part abstract painting, “Between Two Cinemas” integrates 4K restorations of his old films inside a new documentary/essay linking them. It uncovers previously unseen archival material on Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, and adds new collaborations with artists including visionary experimentalist Bruce Baillie, Jeanne Dielman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Bela Tarr…

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…

  • Dear Grandpa

    Using my grandfather’s old eight-millimetre film camera, I explore the deteriorating relationship I had with my grandfather during his final days after being diagnosed with cancer.

  • 6 Permutations

    A trial-and-error attempt to reconcile presence and absence.

  • May 35

    A haunting commemoration of the Tiananmen Square uprisings made from fragments of censored archival imagery transferred onto film using razor blades and scotch tape. “May 35” speaks to the difficulty of remembering in the absence of memory, especially when June 4 histories have been censored and obscured. It is a tribute to the thousands of lives devastated by this upheaval. Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • the framing of perception

    “I saw the light…” Sun, light, darkness, shadow — from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its heat, its colour, its radiation, its nature – is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for…

  • Letters From Vancouver

    Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.