Film Categories: media studies

  • Walnut Grove, mon amour

    After the death of his mentally ill father, artist RM Vaughan attempts to come to terms with the event by reconstructing his father’s emotional responses to the maudlin 70’s television program “Little House on the Prairie.” A blackly humourous meditation on death and grief, punctuated by crying scenes from the famously teary, famously cheesy television classic.

  • Hate

    Using his own lumpy body as a template, artist RM Vaughan explores differing reactions by various audiences to the blunt reality of having a non-commodifiable body in the age of supermodels. Alternately scathing and self-deprecating, “Hate” dishes out (and takes) some unhappy truths about “beauty” and art.

  • Dominion

    A reworking of images of Princess Diana drawn from a CNN tribute called “The People’s Princess.” The isolated and manipulated images point to England’s colonial past and to the elusiveness of a media image.

  • Popcorn with Maple Syrup: Film in Canada from Eh to Zed

    The first movie star in the world, the first three actresses to win Academy Awards, the first performer in a nude scene, the first actress to kiss on-screen, the first nickelodeon – all were Canadian. From drive-ins to IMAX to Mike Myers to “The Barbarian Invasions,” a rambunctious history of the Canadian movie industry, including some key triumphs and disappointments, unfolds in “Popcorn with Maple Syrup: Film in Canada from Eh to Zed”. “‘Popcorn with Maple Syrup’ might be the most exhaustive and entertaining overview of this country’s film biz ever undertaken.” – Bill Brownstein, Montreal Gazette “A jaunty, packed…

  • nostalgia (april 2001 to present)

    “The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality…” – Noam Chomsky “In a colour fest of broken emulsions, the artist reconvenes a suite of feel good 50s adverts for a better life. A young boy on a bicycle, a blonde smiler on a tricycle, two men at a clothesline, the crisp border of neighborhood lawns appearing as if no one had ever set foot on them. The world is blank and the first line I lay across it is perfect, and then the second marks an intersection and the town is…

  • Bombardement le port des perles, le

    A reworking of the trailer for the movie “Pearl Harbor,” using both handmade and digital techniques. Formally, “Le bombardement le port des perles” explores collage and found sound as voice-over.

  • INDUSTRY: Recent Works by Richard Kerr – Limited Edition

    INDUSTRIE / INDUSTRY Oeuvres récentes / Recent Works by Richard Kerr Edited by Brett Kashmere Part high-tech, part handmade, this unique DVD-format exhibition catalog contains two hours of audio-visual material, including three new collage films and a spellbinding slide show by the Montreal filmmaker and visual artist Richard Kerr, as well as a bonus 60-minute audio collage/radio drama by Gerstyn Hayward. Packaged in original handcrafted and painted covers, the disc is accompanied by 70 pages of critical writing, notebook drawings, production notes, photographs, exhibition documentation and related artworks, plus a pullout gallery floor plan. With essays, conversations, program notes and…

  • INDUSTRY: Recent Works by Richard Kerr – Educational Edition

    INDUSTRIE / INDUSTRY Oeuvres récentes / Recent Works by Richard Kerr Edited by Brett Kashmere This unique DVD-format exhibition catalog contains two hours of audio-visual material, including three new collage films and a spellbinding slide show by the Montreal filmmaker and visual artist Richard Kerr, as well as a bonus 60-minute audio collage/radio drama by Gerstyn Hayward. The disc is accompanied by 70 pages of critical writing, notebook drawings, production notes, photographs, exhibition documentation and related artworks, in printable PDF format. With essays, conversations, program notes and other texts by Gerda Johanna Cammaer, Randolph Jordan, Brett Kashmere, Michael Rollo, Astria…

  • Love in the White City

    “Made with a camera the size of a deck of cards carried in my pants pocket for one year, the ‘White City’ beckons, repulses and quakes with portent. The original poem was commissioned by CBC Radio in 2002 on the theme, ‘Love in Winnipeg’ – it began at 3 am in mid-February at 30 below, on a drive home through an empty, wind-swept, snowbound city. An audience member in my home town asked me why this film in particular was so dark, so sad. I said I didn’t find it to be so, but I wish I’d said something to…

  • Trains of Winnipeg (the short)

    “An epic audiovisual poem. Trains as kinetic sculpture and kitsch, found sound art, a film-maker’s fetish or a Romantic’s wet dream: O take me to far away places, the rhythm in our plastic hearts, as we are also machines. Tortured cello, the scraping wheel, old cameras, film and rail as parallel tracks through the remnants of the industrial age. ‘Trains of Winnipeg’ uses multiple film gauges and digital formats in a collage of colliding and looping vantage points on this brief, ever-moving, moment in history.” Music by Emily Goodden.