Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • Rochdale College 1970

    Rochdale College was an experiment with new ideas and ways of living while being conventionally forced to live within the old, dead civilization and its structures. The results inevitably show confusion and angered disillusionment. The new ideas and ways, never allowed time to evolve and produce positive results, were smothered for the sake of convenience and convention. The film is ultimately a nostalgic reminiscence of the Sixties.

  • Roses Are Blue

    “Roses Are Blue” is a short dramatic film exploring a woman’s sensual awakening to spiritual and feminist transformation. A blend of sci-fi, mysticism and modern relationship angst, “Roses Are Blue” was broadcast on WTN (Women’s Television Network) and won 2nd Prize at the 1998 Glebe Scenefest in Sydney, Australia. It features music by David Logan, Chip Yarwood and Edie Steiner.

  • Solidarity

    A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs, milling, marching and picketing with the word “solidarity” superimposed on the screen. The soundtrack is an organizer’s speech on the labour situation. Like her films “Rat Life and Diet in North America,” “Pierre Vallieres” and “Reason Over Passion,” “Solidarity” combines a political awareness, an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour unique in Wieland’s work. Image description: Plain black laced shoes and bare or white-stockinged ankles of a person standing on green grass, a metal-tipped umbrella at their side. White text superimposed over the middle…

  • Somebody’s Kids

    “Somebody’s Kids” is a social documentary that shows three contrasting adolescents, each with a learning disability, their feelings toward the disability and their perceptions of their behaviour. It makes reference to three essential criteria which help to determine the success or failure of the child: the importance of recognizing the disability in the young child; appreciating the fact that each child learns individually; and the significance of family supports. “Somebody’s Kids” is not a technical diagnostic tool. Its aim is to stimulate discussion and to help parents, teachers, and adolescents understand how adolescents with learning disabilities feel.

  • Sparkill Ave

    Named after the street on which he lives in Tappan, New York, “Sparkhill Ave” continues the autobiographical line of inquiry through family, friends, neighbours, community, and Americana that began with “T.Z. “(1979) and passed through “Trial Balloons” (1982), “Bang!” (1986), and “A Frog on the Swing” (1988). In addition to his usual improvisations on form, colour, and motion, Breer collages and animates photographs of street scenes, parades and seasonal variations in the landscape. Combined with an unusual-for-him continuously running synthesizer soundtrack, “Sparkill Ave” paints a portrait of a small town, a seemingly closed system that’s never the less informed by…

  • Speakbody

    Using techniques from documentary, the avant-garde, and narrative films, a great deal of information about abortion is compressed into a short time. The film combines the interwoven multi-layered voices of women recounting their experiences with minimal images from one woman’s memory. Short but powerful.

  • Still Point

    “‘Still Point’ serves as Barbara Hammer’s definitive reassessment of 70’s cultural feminism. She literally places side-by-side the romantic image of her companion walking and stretching under the sun in a landscape and the gritty realism of a methodical garbage picker on the street of New York city, pushing a shopping cart and moving on to the next waste container. Our world view must encompass both realities, the film indicates. Privilege can’t obscure vision.” – Chick Kleinhans, The Film/Video Showcase Presents the Films of Barbara Hammer

  • Stop Darlington

    Through the use of found footage of a TV image, the practical and moral imperatives of the title are momentarily suspended in a problematic of representation. In affirming the density of the material objecthood at the basis of its “message,” the film foregrounds the question: “What are some of the difficulties encountered in the appropriation of media – particularly those of the mainstream – by and for the pedagogical interest of the Left?”

  • Surviving Memory

    “Surviving Memory” is a film about the role of loss in the formation of identity. It is a narrative intercut with documentary fragments of political actions, which connect the various characters to event through collective memory. Through autobiographical spoken texts, the narrator relays fragments of a relationship between two Jewish women. The fragmented texts speak of the relation between these women as well as recounting various past and contemporary historical events of fascist and neo-Nazi activity (and resistance), Lesbian/Gay rights, Pro-Choice and AIDS demonstrations. While these instances tell a personal/political story about loss, they are also meant to elucidate the…

  • Between You and Me

    “Between You and Me” (Tangled Garden, Act III, Scene I) looks at the internalization of homophobia and fatalism present in mainstream representations of the AIDS pandemic, as it reflects on the conflict between grief and desire in a gay man’s psyche. The film challenges the viewer to turn their red ribbons into real action both on the streets and in bed, and to resist the industry of AIDS. Also available on QUEERS ON THE VERGE.