Film Categories: media studies

  • This Town of Toronto…

    This short film takes a rather unconventional approach to the city symphony genre, which often depicts the rhythms of the city from morning to night and relies on the symphonic composition of shots that, like in musical symphony, build through various movements until their final conclusion. This Town of Toronto… extends its temporal dimension past the span of one day to 108 years, by including some of the earliest motion picture documentations of Toronto: the Great Fire of 1904 and the traffic scene on Bay Street, including horse-drawn fire trucks and firemen rushing to extinguish the fire, all captured by…

  • Happy

    The quest for happiness dictates the shape of many lives in the world. Some find religion, some seek love, but all are searching to be happy. “Happy” moves through hand-processed 16mm film to explore the intersection of happiness, apostasy, and love. “Happy” considers the fiction of happiness and what it truly means, how it is proselytized in the church, media, and each other. Can simply smiling bring about an emotional change? Can being told to be happy make you happy? Has anyone told you that god loves you?

  • Selected Works by the Loop Collective: Volume 1

    A selection of films produced between 2005-2011 by members of The Loop Collective, a Toronto-based group of independent filmmakers, musicians, dancers and multimedia artists who strive to connect cinema to related interdisciplinary art forms. 1. fugitive l(i)ght 2. c: won eyed jail 3.Thaw 4. Parícutin 5.Quanta 6. Shapes Eat Shapes 7. Levitas 8. Spiders in Eden 9. The Changing Light 10. Christ Church – Saint James 11. Thought Form 12. Morning 13. Many Glimpses 14. Movement / Stasis (documentation)

  • Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds

    This solo performance for the camera pays homage to 1970s video art, exploring how the electronic manipulation of the video signal can create a choreocinema for body and machine. Choreographic patterns melding retro moves with a minimalist aesthetic participate in a jagged, pulsing duet with the danceable beats and noisy textures of the track “Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds” by Alterity Problem (Alexander Moskos and Joel Taylor). Effects were created in real-time with a raster-scan device built by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, accessed during a residency at the now-closed Experimental TV Center in upstate New York.

  • the body of Others

    the body of Others, is an experimental video that engages the tensions between sexuality, identity, visibility, representation and the body, as it relates to queer subjectivity. The video asserts a dynamic relationship between queer subjectivity and the representation of queer identities presented through ideological systems of representation, as performed by the queer body. The video questions the boundaries and distinctions between the visible/invisible, personal/political, private/public, body/technology, human/animal, interior/exterior and normal/other. the body of Others presents a body that is unstable and drifts over itself into space. The body fuses with the unknown and becomes an amalgam of skin, flesh, fur,…

  • Far From

    Constructed with repetitions and variations in reference to the musical form of a nocturne, Far From is an accumulation of the layers, density and noise of existence. The film evokes the ghosts of lives lived and the traces of lives being lived, rising. French Synopsis: À l’instar d’une nocturne, les variations et les répétitions du film « Loin de » agencent les couches, la densité et les bruissements de l’existence – les fantômes de vies passées et les traces de vies toujours présentes, en devenir.

  • Colour Theory

    Goethe’s colour theory dealt with the optics of colour relations while Rudolf Steiner’s and Kandinsky’s theories attribute emotional, musical, and spiritual affects to colour. North American Natives see personality traits, states of mind, seasons, races and the four directions in the four colours: red, yellow, white, black. What’s in a name, what’s in a word? A world of colour

  • Love Me

    Using only text-on-screen, Love Me distills the emotions of an earlier film, Beating: emotions conflict, confuse and are difficult to reconcile. The texts ‘speak’ unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. They are suppressed exclamations from past injustices and hurts; angers surface which are interrupting, erupting and demanding of attention.

  • Lily In The Grinder

    Kaleidoscopic, operatic, and layered, Lily in the Grinder explores meaning through sex, death, and time. We already are everything we will ever be.

  • Eyelash Wars

    Eyelash Wars is a melodramatic, expanded fiction about the rivalry between two female entrepreneurs who battle for supremacy in the false eyelash business. They compete by putting on elaborate, bizarro window displays that in time, escalate in scale and symbolism. Townspeople come and go, playing bit parts in this haunting and surreal world. In addition to screening as a single-channel film, Eyelash Wars can be presented in conjunction with installation and performance components that extend the story beyond the boundaries of the screen.