Film Format: 16mm

  • Beating

    “Beating” – to get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts… “Beating” exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed – in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. (BS) “Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless…

  • Skein

    A loosely coiled length of yarn (story)… wound on a reel – my parenthesis! This is a painted film (inspired by Nolde’s “unpainted pictures”): “skins” of paint hung in a weave of light. (SB)

  • Sketches

    Brief songs of light and line.

  • Skin Flick

    As a textual surface, skin becomes the privileged vehicle for the representation of history. A site from which culture defines spatial concepts of containment and exclusion, the marked skin is the point of entry for an analysis of institutions, economic processes and ethical systems. A metaphor for external boundaries, the tattoo traces an architectural system of social discipline applicable to prisons, factories, schools, warehouses: all the places that operate on principles of isolation and surveillance.

  • Slap Happy Jim

    James Anderson’s exuberant paper cell animation “Slap Happy Jim” features a skinny man in a canoe (with a bicycle on his head) who faces all manners of unexpected travails.

  • Slow Dance World

    In Hindu mythology, dance represents the rhythm of life and Shiva – god of creative and destructive forces- is master of the dance. As Shiva imagines the creation of the world in his mind’s eye, the forms, the textures and movements found in air, earth and water are revealed. Satisfied with his plan, Shiva brings the world into being and in the end is united with his creation. This film was created by animating three-dimensional objects on a colour photocopier.

  • Sluice

    It is a wooden silver-retrieving sluice – thus light-catch awash with something like “cheek and jowl clippings of Argentine bulls” (as Hollis Frampton reminds us) and many chemical residues of earth. My mind has grown TREE out of the forest of it all. (SB)

  • Small Pleasures

    “Small Pleasures” is the first Chinese-Canadian feature film made by a Chinese-Canadian. It is about two young women from Beijing studying in Toronto, who experience life in the West during the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989.

  • Smell of Burning Ants, The

    “The Smell of Burning Ants” is a haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. Through formative events of a boy’s life, we come to understand the ways in which men can become emotionally disconnected and alienated from their feminine side. The common dismissal that “boys will be boys” evolves into the chilling realization that boys frequently become angry, destructive, and emotionally disabled men. “The Smell of Burning Ants” illustrates how boys are socialized by fear, power and shame. The burning of ants is one of the…

  • Snorkel

    When a film camera is introduced into an unexpected setting it acts as a catalyst for spontaneous performance. “Snorkel,” which was shot in Super 8 and transferred to 16mm film, shows a group of friends gathered for a social evening. They put on various acts, including the garbled telling of some sci-fi movie’s plot, and snorkelling in a pail of water. McLaren’s camera is by no means an innocent bystander – it intrudes upon the scene, picks out particular activities, withdraws, and generally impels the action as mediator between event and document.