Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Patriotism 2

    In a way a portrait of Dave Shackman with the American flag. The ending is a stop-motion animation of a set table with food moving and swirling and finally gathering together in a ball. Looking back at the film, the animation sequence seems to foreshadow Dave Shackman’s early death. He died shortly after the film was made.

  • Pearl Mad

    Fantasy is her only refuge as Mae spends the last day of her life at the Gothic Insemination Laboratory, where she works and struggles with her role as a “passive collaborator.” An exoticised portrait of a WASP hunted by Bees. In a private allegory for despair, the protagonist, Mae, unfolds a personal mythology of sex and honey in Pearl and Glitter. Vowing never to return, Mae embarks on an absurd Suicide-Quest with the “good seeds” of man!

  • Pearl’s Diner

    A beautifully rendered all-night roadside diner – complete with shiny chrome surfaces, jukebox, and local regulars – is the setting for this quietly moving story, seen through the eyes of the waitress, Pearl. Though trying to remain uninvolved, Pearl cannot help secretly imagining and speculating about the private lives of two of her customers. The question becomes: Should she act on those speculations? The animated images are composed of cutouts, collage and drawings.

  • Peggy’s Blue Skylight

    Filmed in Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow’s loft in New York, the film covers a day of friends visiting, writing and drawing from noon of one day to dawn the next day. The soundtrack was done by Paul Bley. The 16mm film is a blow-up of grainy 8mm stock.

  • People in Black, The

    A lyrical and gentle protrait of a traditional Saskatchewan Hutterite community. Luminous slow motion images of this dignified people performing their daily chores are accompanied by a soundtrack of Hutterite songs and prayers. They can be found in scattered retreats across the grasslands of our three prairie provinces and five American states. Study guide available.

  • Performance by Jack Smith, A

    In October of 1984, the highly acclaimed New York artist, Jack Smith, came to Toronto for a week long performance/Halloween ritual at the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre. This performance, true to Smithesque form, went by three different titles: “Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application,” “Brassieres of Uranus,” and “Impacted Croissants From Outer Space.” Accompanied by the music of Yma Sumac, this short piece remains the last film documentation of this historic event.

  • Perils

    An homage to silent films: the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy; seduction, revenge, jealousy, combat. The isolation and dramatization of emotions through the isolation (camera) and dramatization (editing) of gesture. I had long conceived of a film composed only of reaction shots in which all causality was erased. What would be left would be the resonant voluptuous suggestions of history and the human face. “Perils” is a first translation of these ideas. (AC) “Even more emphatic in its expose of movie methods is ‘Perils,’ which stages stylized fight scenes, with an occasional appearance by a camera on a…

  • Personal Effects

    “Personal Effects” is a film about Alison, a sixteen-year-old, who moves into an all-male rooming house. When she realizes that her recurring dream of someone appearing in her room at night is not, in fact, a dream, and that her underwear has been gradually disappearing, she undertakes to find out what’s going on. The unexpected results of her investigation reverberate and come full circle years later, challenging a simple explanation of the events in the house along gender lines and showing, in retrospect, the consequences of Alison’s impulse to forgive.

  • philter

    A visual essay based on the sound piece “Toxic Philter.”

  • Pierre Vallières

    He delivered three essays, without stopping, except for reel change and camera breakdown: 1) Mont Laurier; 2) Quebec history and race; 3) women’s liberation. Everything which happened is recorded on film. It was a one-shot affair, I either got him on film or I missed. What we see on film is the mouth of a revolutionary, extremely close, his lips, his teeth, his spittle, his tongue which rolls so beautifully through his French, and finally the reflections in his teeth of the window behind me. (JW)