Film Format: 16mm

  • Rumours of War

    “Rumours of War” is a playful look, through a jaundiced eye, of the street preachers, Christians and charismatics that populate the streets of downtown Toronto. Through interviews, live action, text and montage, the filmmaker reveals the individuals behind the sermons, allowing their voices to be heard beyond the confines of their sidewalk pulpits. Ignoring foul weather, hecklers and occasional violence, the evangelists tirelessly exhort the faithless to repent before it’s too late.

  • Runaway

    A cartoon image of dogs rushing across the screen, then reversing their direction, is looped over and over, to the accompaniment of a sprightly tune played on an organ. The footage is seen on television, then as film, then back on TV, deteriorating and recovering clarity as the repetitions roll on. “Lawder achieves the perfection of all his techniques… in which he uses a few seconds of cartoon dogs chasing a fox. By stop-motion reverse printing and video scanning and other techniques, he creates a totally new and different visual reality that is no longer a silly funny cartoon.” –…

  • Running Fence

    “Running Fence” depicts the four-year struggle faced by the artist Christo to see his vision realized: a 24-mile fence of white fabric over the hills of California disappearing into the Pacific. After an extensive battle with the state bureaucracy, the fence is finally unfurled, bringing the community together in celebration of its beauty. The three-million-dollar fence was taken down as planned at the end of two weeks, and now exists solely on film.

  • Ryland’s True Story

    Through the art of realism and East Coast story telling, this short experimental documentary reconsiders the fine line between documented truth and the everyday interaction of relating personal experiences.

  • S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED

    A conceptual lap dissolve from “water currents” to “film strip current.” Dedicated to my son, Christopher. (PS) “In his earlier flicker films, Sharits explored the mechanisms of perception and projection, and now he takes his investigations to their logical extreme – to the nature of the film-strip itself. His analysis is constructed on close-up footage of water currents in a streambed. In each of the three, fourteen-minute loops, he progressively decreases the number of superimposed current directions from six to one. On this film he adds continuous straight scratch lines in multiples of three, so that by the end of…

  • Sailboat

    “‘Sailboat’ has the simplicity of a child’s drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seems to underline the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way a child might draw a picture of water and write word sounds on it to make it as emphatic as possible. The little image is interrupted at one point by a huge shoulder appearing briefly in the left-hand corner.” – Robert Cowan, Take One “This little Sailboat film will sail right through your gate and into your heart.” –…

  • Salesman

    It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verité or direct cinema.

  • Sally’s Beauty Spot

    In this lively, intimate film, a large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and sexual difference. Off-screen women’s voices and scenes form the 1960 Hollywood miscegenation melodrama “The World of Suzie Wong” counterpoint Sally’s own interracial encounters and emerging self-awareness. A stylish and playfully impressionistic account of racial expectations and role-playing which critiques Western stereotypes of Asian femininity. “…challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, wittily tracing a character’s move from stereotypical object to sexual subject.” – Laura U. Marks, Afterimage “Framed as a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty, this…

  • Sammy

    Sammy was a dog I had when growing up in Dundas, Ontario. I found old Super 8 footage of Sammy long after he had passed away, and I decided to work with these images on both a rotoscope and optical printer, to playfully and rhythmically evoke my emotions, memories, and image of little Sammy.

  • Sanctus

    “Sanctus” is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as its protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate. “In ‘Sanctus,’ Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she cretes images. She has transformed ‘found footage’ – scientific x-ray films from the 1950s – into a lyrical journey, into…