Film Categories: media studies

  • Mayhem

    “Mayhem” gives homage to Film Noir, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books, which generate the action. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade’s “Justine” and Vertov’s sentences about the satiric detective advertisement, “Mayhem” looks at sexuality and violence in the movies. “Mayhem” links the screen, the bedroom, and the streets to generate a mosaic of the way modern culture sends mixed signals about sexuality to men and women. “‘Mayhem’ is more than a detective story; it’s a hypermodern melding of forms, an erotic send-up of slapstick with a heady dose of cultural nay-saying.” – Elizabeth Pincus, Gay Community News…

  • McLuhan

    In “McLuhan”, Kerr recontextualizes a “question and answer period” for design students delivered by media theorist Marshall McLuhan at Sherdian College in 1975. Operating from McLuhan’s own aphorism “the medium is the message,” Kerr combines footage of the address with two scrolling texts in the borders, in one showing an asynchronous transcript that weaves around McLuhan’s dialogue, and in another, reinforcing McLuhan’s talking points like a ticker on cable news. It has the effect of sharply reconceptualizing the semantic and rhetorical values of the lecture in particular, yet also provides a fascinating perspective on McLuhan’s own ideas and intellectual form…

  • Mercy

    “Voyeurism, eroticism, violence and pornography are challengingly jumbled together: the result is a mixture of fluttery pictures which cloud what is real and what is not, making the questions that these films provoke all the more disturbing.” – Jane Headon, City Limits “‘Mercy’ shows no mercy as it dissects the games mass media play with our perceptions. It blends found footage, images and sounds into a flow that’s as revealing as it is overwhelming.” – New York Festival Catalogue

  • ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)

    Music by Tucker Zimmerman. “Philip Hoffman’s ‘?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)’ uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else’s filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed & Two Noughts’), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. ‘Pure’ is both the right and the wrong word: Hoffman is a man addicted to the hermetic thisness of filmed images, and plagued by the suspicion that these images, far from being pure, are really scabs torn away from the sores of the world. Found footage shot by his grandfather (a newsreel cameraman) is the starting point…

  • Orientation Express, The

    By animating three decades of LIFE Magazine, “The Orientation Express” humorously guides us through the sexism of North American media. Hosts such as The Quaker Oats Man, Colonel Sanders, and The Kool Aid Jug explore “the feminine mystique.” This film highlights how attitudes towards women have changed and works to eliminate stereotypes which still persist today. “A technically polished animated film…devoted to an amusingly didactic re-expose of the horrors of sexual stereotyping, circa 1950.” – The Globe and Mail

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear

    What does our culture dream? How can we locate that dream within the logics which govern our lives? Half collage, half essay, half serious, “A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear” is a busy, referential riff on the political moment.