Film Categories: media studies

  • Pictures of Things That Aren’t There

    “Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic…

  • Role I Was Born To Play, The

    Using borrowed clips from three films about gender bending – two comedies and a tragedy – a personal gender landscape is created. This piece touches on the assumptions, strategies for survival and a the commitment to discussion that alternate gender expressions evoke.

  • Dear Guy

    “Dear Guy” dramatizes an inward and sometime romantically sentimental meditation on the relevance, remembrance and acculturation of Guy Debord’s life and works. The layered histrionics of the film engender reconsiderations of identification, moral responsibility, nostalgia and the potential of art in contemporary society. Excerpts from Debord’s memoir and fictional epistolary monologues are combined with an eclectic assortment of appropriated materials, invented leitmotifs, lecture performances, hybrid forms of the essay film, documentary and edutainment formats. “Dear Guy” drifts through a labyrinth-like montage structure that frustrates passive viewing while inviting contemplation. “DEAR GUY is an energetic response and thoughtful companion piece to…

  • Fountain of Youth

    The last home movie. Shot on now discontinued Kodachrome 40 super 8 film stock, a cine-poem to time, childhood and the colour of memory.

  • Moving Images – The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Relocates

    The day the Film-Makers’ Cooperative was forced by loss of lease to move from their offices at Lexington Ave. and 31st Street in New York City, filmmaker and Coop member Joel Schlemowitz showed up with a camera to document the historic moment. On the soundtrack Jonas Mekas, one of the Coop’s founders, and MM Serra, the current executive director, describe the Coop’s beginnings, the organization’s recent struggles, and the difficulties of finding space for the arts.

  • Dangling Participle

    Made entirely from old classroom instructional films, “Dangling Participle” offers a wealth of practical advice on contemporary sexual hangups and where they come from. A collage of dating, anti-smoking, sex education, and family life films from the late 50s and early 60s, intent on convincing us that the surreal is “perfectly normal.”

  • NYC Dilemma

    In 2002-2003, San Francisco composer Jack Curtis Dubowsky moved to a fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This semi-verité musical video by Todd Wilson (Under One Roof), shot entirely in one day, documents the great dilemmas of NYC life. Go to the survival job, or attend a business meeting with a potential client (portrayed by real-life client and director Elizabeth Elson [Born in a Barn])? Eat lunch or scavange? How hot is it outside? How to afford a gym? And, the greatest mystery of all, if this is an “E train running on the F line,” is it an…

  • Searching For Wallenberg

    Drawings and text bring to life a poem by Isa Milman. …..Someone named Vera is looking for Raoul Wallenberg; he was last seen in a Soviet prison, scratching into the stone wall. Isa was born in a DP camp in Europe; she now lives in Victoria and has published a second volume of poems.

  • FACE IT! (Cast Your Self™)

    Images from the private sphere of the world wide web. “The video has been removed due to its inappropriate nature”. (Sat, 03. Mar 2007, YouTube | Broadcast Yourself™)

  • Shit Storm

    Based on a notorious ‘art scandal’ from 2007, writer/artist RM Vaughan recounts how rich and powerful members of the art world turned on him when he wrote his true thoughts about the mundane work proffered by the so-called Vancouver School. Art doesn’t have to be pretty, but does the art world have to be so ugly?