Film Format: 16mm

  • Scissors

    An animated film using single-frame manipulation techniques to describe the imaginary life cycle of a pair of scissors, in a vaguely submarine backdrop of strange plants and ball-like creatures bounding around the landscape. Scissors like to eat these balls, but occasionally they form an aggregate monster that likes to eat scissors.

  • Scrambles

    Impressions of a day of motorcycle races. Action and fatigue.

  • Scream of the Butterfly

    In vivid colour, the metamorphosis from larva to butterfly to collector’s jar. The beauty of the butterfly bursts from the cocoon as an atom bomb, only to be netted and bottled. The living beauty can only become illusory when bottled.

  • Seadrift

    “Seadrift” is based on a story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft, and was shot partially in Marblehead Mass. Each section represents a synthesis of the various aspects and moods of the story. The sum total of the fragments expresses the atmosphere of the whole. With Mike Kuchar, Robert Cowan, Donna Kerness, Walter Gutman and others.

  • Batteries

    As the only winter port on Canada’s Atlantic coast during WW II, Halifax was an active part of the Allies’ war effort. At the start of the war, thousands of dollars were poured into the construction of concrete embattlements to defend Halifax Harbour against attack, and ultimately, to guard against possible land invasion. The attack never came. The filmmaker presents a striking, ironic contrast between the footage of the batteries as they stand today, crumbling and abandoned with narratives that recall the anxious, sometimes frantic fear of an enemy attack.

  • Searching for My Mother’s Garden

    Partially shot in rural Czecho-Slovakia, this film investigates the phenomenon of no longer being rooted to a motherland, yet being tied to one’s origins.

  • Seashore

    “The basic image derives from a shot of women in (Edwardian era ) dresses standing along the edge of the ocean. Within this eight-second loop, [Rimmer] cuts shorter ones. For example, the activity of a central group of three women is cut so that the figures repeat certain motions over and over and over again… “Rimmer also chose to use the forms of surface imperfections, the scratches and dirt patterns, as bases for his loops… Although working in a disciplined style of re-structuring cinematic forms, his highly orchestrated creations have inspired great admiration both from cineastes and the more general…

  • Seated Figures

    “Seated Figures” is built with images which are all variations of eight movements on the screen: moving up, down, to the left or to the right, and the four possible diagonal movements. These movements are occasionally interrupted by holds (freeze frames). All the images move parallel to the ‘picture plane’ (the screen). The film could be considered a history of roads. Starting on asphalt the film moves to gravel, then sand, and gradually onto more and more rocky surfaces, occasionally passing through streams. Vegetation appears, roads become paths until finally the images are fields with flowers. The images were all…

  • Second Impressions

    In “Second Impressions” I made a decision to impose on myself, and the film, severe formal limitations in order that I might concentrate on the creation of visual imagery possessing the inherent qualities and natural restrictions of the filmmaking process. The camera was to be fixed for the duration of the film; there was to be no suggestion of direct or implied narrative connections or development. The viewer is locked in the room depicted in the film for a period of nine minutes. The two opening sequences provide autobiographical references to my previous film work. This is followed by the…

  • Secondary Currents

    A film about the relationships between the mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an “imageless” film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and sub-titled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language. “Secondary Currents” is the subject of a number of articles on the use of language in the arts.