Film Format: 16mm

  • Championship

    At a wrestling tournament, a young competitor faces match upon match. Referees converge on the scene. The crowd’s attention wanes and focuses with the intensity of the bout. Sounds drift in: a psychic piano enters over fast and short breaths. This is a contest of past and future. It will be decided in the ring.

  • Spirits In Season

    Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. This film explores the town’s Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump, and Fairy Trail. Music by Nate Wooley.

  • Brébeuf

    A study of St. Ignace, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649.

  • 11×14

    “One of the most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning’s 1976 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of image/sound pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and a fractured, painterly study of the American midwestern landscape, ‘11×14’ points toward the creation of a new, non-literary but populist cinema.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice Included in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Alternative 100 Top Films,” The Chicago Reader, 1998.

  • Axis

    Axis is an experimental film made through entirely photomechanical and photochemical means. The film fits into the experimental sub-genre of “optical printer film.” Some practitioners who have inspired me include Jordan Belson, John Whitney, David Rimmer, Pat O’Neill, Al Razutis, Gary Popovich, Bruce Elder and Norman McLaren. Axis takes as its subject matter the mundane, faceless urban landscape with its gleaming towers and factories. The workaday humdrum… drones to the hive. So I take to the streets, with my homemade Bolex robot, affectionately known as “BOLBOT.” It is a time-lapse motion control machine capable of smoothly spinning through X-Y-Z axes…

  • Semper Porro (Ever Forward)

    Semper Porro is a rhythmic composition of abstracted images derived from nature and droning -generative sound derived from the film-material itself. Shot on location in Wellington North County, Ontario, at the Film Farm – the film’s title is also the motto for the county, a Latin term meaning always forward or ever forward. While implicating the linear and temporal nature of film as a medium the title simultaneously makes reference to the geographic origin of the films content. The film is a process-based work, created using high-contrast 16mm black and white film that has been heavily manipulated by optical duplication,…

  • Brimstone Line

    Three grids are placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario. They become devices through which the stationary camera, pointing upstream, delineates the landscape. They motivate the movement of the zoom, which intensifies our sense of the field of view, narrowing vision and flattening space. The river, framed momentarily, flows past. Financial assistance provided by the Toronto Arts Council.

  • Schuh Schnell Service

    A simple intersection in Wuppertal, Germany becomes a microcosm of the patterns of everyday life. Cars trace the angles of the streets, pedestrians forge new paths and Wuppertal’s famed Schwebebahn turns our expectations upside-down. Shot on Super 8 in Wuppertal April 28, 2009, while making Phantoms.

  • Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels

    This compelling film profile of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart uses archival material, interviews with family and friends, readings and dramatic re-creations to portray a writer who was mythologized in her own lifetime. Elizabeth Smart died in England in 1986, at the age of 72. She is best known for her novel “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” published in 1945, a story of passion and obsession inspired by her love affair with the English poet George Barker. The years subsequent to that dramatic period – the complex relationship she developed with Baker, the period of literary exile…

  • This Film Has No Commercial Value

    Film made by John Kneller with a sound design by John Shipman. It focuses on the environment using time-lapse cinematography as a means to capture phenomena that is impossible to see with the naked eye. Automated pan, tilt and zoom mechanics were custom-built by the filmmaker to augment the time-lapse techniques. The resulting imagery is a hyper-reality of landscapes transformed by means of the camera’s mechanical mediation. The sound design was created from naturally recorded sound phenomena and musical performances. The Romantic musical elements are reminiscent of lyrical depictions of nature and environment. The deliberate mediation of the sound and…