Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Fallen Flags

    A layered tapestry of trains and underwater footage exploring the realms of fear death and transience, this film places the traces of human voices amidst the flickering light and shadows of empty passenger cars.

  • Desert Veils

    “Desert Veils” is a personal exploration of images of women filmed in the Chihuahua Desert of north-east Mexico. I was part of a film crew documenting the daily activities of an archeological dinosaur dig; when I wasn’t working with the film crew I was shooting my own images, looking beyond the disarticulated fossils and apparent structures, searching for what seemed elusive, hidden from me in my initial encounters with the women I met in Mexico. Given the cultural differences and structures that existed around me, my original images made me feel no closer to what I was seeing. It is…

  • Three Part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1

    This experimental dance film employs a bastardized version of the 1930s’ three-strip Technicolor process. Shot entirely on black-and-white film through colour filters, the images were recombined into full colour through optical printing techniques, one frame at a time. The gestures in this dance work explore the psychological fracturing and reunification in representations of the female body.

  • Mechanical Memory

    Created from super 8 footage that was shot in the 1970s of the family dogs and the trains that my father worked on, this film explores the decay of memory and image. The super 8 film grew fungus while stored in a basement. It was then optically printed up to 16mm and slowed down so that the snowflake shaped fungus could be studied. Narration presents fragmented stories of childhood memories. This film was created as a source film, which was later physically cut up and reprinted with a flashlight to destroy the image and sound for the subsequent film “Mechanical/Animal…

  • Knowledge of Good and Evil

    “Knowledge of Good and Evil” is an abstract exploration of the tension surrounding women and stereotypical representations of their knowledge. This film was created from footage shot at Phil Hoffman’s independent imaging retreat (aka “the film farm”) in Ontario as well as from footage shot in Vancouver (where I had given myself the challenge of shooting 100 feet of film every month). All of the footage was hand-processed, and some of it was contact printed by hand and treated in baths of potassium ferricyanide. The final film was created through various optical printing techniques.

  • 16mm Postcard

    A diaristic film in which the filmmaker comes to terms with her new life in Vancouver, “16mm Postcard” is a bittersweet letter back home to the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative in Halifax. Like in any letter, it becomes painfully obvious that one can never fully communicate, and the result is a series of random tidbits that point to a larger experience.

  • Playing Jacob

    Loosely exploring the historical weight of institutionalized religion in a postmillennial society, and its relationship to individual spirituality, the filmmaker places herself into the Jacob myth on the Pentateuch. She plays the role of Jacob in an attempt to come to terms with her religious upbringing, and her anxious ambivalence towards her own agnosticism. Inspired by the in-camera techniques of the early cinema of Meliese, the film and all of its special effects were shot and edited entirely in-camera in one take.

  • Forever Hold Your Peace

    Live actions with hand scratched sound, this film presents the frustration of feeling the need to speak with nothing to say. Filmed by the artist’s husband at the time, the film also relates to subtle complexities of communication within marriage.

  • If You Stand With Your Back To The Slowing Of The Speed Of Light In Water

    Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan are followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. Near the film’s end the tram lands in Manhattan, as if it had reversed direction; as in all of Murray’s films, the images and the editing can pull several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through.” – Fred Camper “The film aims to illuminate a vital sense innate to perception where inversion is counterbalance and focal…

  • Fore-and-Aft

    “Fore-and-Aft” was created by the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Canada – site of the highest tides in the world. Images of the tides are married with celluloid that was buried in the sea bed, and dragged through the ocean behind a boat. Physically exposing film to the motion and light of the sea recorded tactile evidence of the repetition and changes wrought by tide cycles.