Film Categories: media studies

  • Stardust

    While others are quick to declare that film is dead, this film celebrates its dust and scratches, and its magic powers for time and space travel. It is an imaginary plea to preserve our dying celluloid past and to fight the takeover by digital technologies.

  • Tamalpais

    Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing – to transfer vision to a sheet of paper – is used for an opposite effect – to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time.

  • Michael Snow Up Close

    “MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE” was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow’s creative genius, including glimpses of his work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works, performance, installations, and holography. Discussions with Snow, original documentation of his music and performance work, and excerpts from his avant-garde films, are complemented by interviews with filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Bruce Elder, Snow’s dealer Av Isaacs, the architect Eb Zeidler, museum director Pierre Théberge, curator Louise Dompierre, and others. A deliberately conventional documentary about a deliberately unconventional artist.

  • I’d Rather Be Looking At Porn

    An anthem for the disenchanted. When the respectable and desirable activities of modern society have turned to rot and stupidity, one voice calls out for a retreat to that which is supposed to be so disreputable.

  • Some Day My Prince Will Come

    There is a world where no one wants what they can’t have – they get exactly what they want. Shaped by years of media persuasion with problematic seduction narratives, “Some Day My Prince Will Come” is the creation of fantasies that viewers are encouraged to believe in. Through a reconstruction of these narratives, an exploration of how reality is co-opted by desperation guides us in to the mind of the viewer.

  • Cropping of the Spectacle, The

    “The Cropping of the Spectacle” began as a live cinema performance investigating the birth of the Television Spectacle in 1954 McCarthy’s America. Based loosely on the classic anarchist documentary “Point of Order” (Emile de Antonio/Dan Talbot, 1964); a film which at once deconstructed the hearings and re-invented documentary strategies – “The Cropping of the Spectacle” integrates archival movie and audio clips in chronicling the strange temporal evolution of our understandings of recent history. The original film and its many revisions ultimately reveal an odd continuation of a hegemonic framing process begun with the original Army-McCarthy hearings, which continues to the…

  • Off Route 2

    The scene of a car accident serves as a backdrop to an exploration of trauma and the often-anticlimactic aftermath of personal tragedy. A woman hangs inverted in silence, inhabiting the space of wildlife in the forest. This is as much a performance of endurance as it is a fictional construct; the execution of the film demanded that the artist hang upside-down from a seatbelt for extended periods of time in sub-zero weather.

  • A+

    Cinema finds its accounts in an uncommon ledger, whose lines and tabulations conceal the greatest love of all.

  • Burning Star

    Dedicated to my father, who asked that I make a more colourful work. Made during my residency at the now defunct Experimental Television Center, “Burning Star” is a colourful implo/explosion of the twelve sided star. The title refers to Kenji Onishi’s “A Burning Star.” – Joshua Gen Solondz Winner Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival, MIchigan, U.S.A. (2013)

  • Dr. Bish Remedies

    From Ross Lipman’s “personal ethnographies” series, an informal visit with legendary filmmaker Bruce Baillie at his home on Camano Island in Washington State. “From the lone transcendent biker riding the two-lane highway of nightmares in 1964’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux to 1970’s Quick Billy, Baillie blazed a path through nothing less than the American consciousness itself, closing the cycle with the Quixotic epigram “Ever Westward Eternal Rider!” As the admonishment warns, the journey continues, and endpoints are illusionary – only movement is of essence. –“Whither Bruce Baillie?”, Ross Lipman, 2010