Film Format: 16mm

  • Lady in a Chair

    This film documents the tragedy of senility as it affects the life of an elderly woman. Whereas she was once in command of language (and culture), she is now victimized by her inability to interact with it. The objects in her home offer no comfort; rather they combine to illustrate the imprisoning nature of her state. She questions the meaning of her continued existence and pleads for help that can never come. The voice used is that of the woman whose plight the film describes; the words are hers and, with two exceptions, the voice was recorded “straight.” Originally shot…

  • Lake Odyssey

    The problem of overgrown lakes detracts from the great tourism industry of Northern Canada, so researchers discovered weed harvesting as a means of restoring the delicate plant balance. This film looks at the process of harvesting lake weeds and recycling the material for animal fodder and compost. Excellent nature photography presents this case of creative environmental management.

  • Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 4

    This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems…

  • Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World

    “How doth the city sit solitary, That was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations. Behold, Oh Lord; for I am in distress: My bowels are troubled; Mine heart is turned within me; For I have grievously revelled; Abroad the sword bereaveth, At home, there is as death.” “Lamentations,” which has a total running time of 435 minutes, comprises two parts: “The Dream of the Last Historian” and “The Sublime Calculation.” Each part can be rented separately. “Elder occupies a unique place in Canada. Both philosopher and filmmaker, Elder’s films,…

  • Landfall

    “Landfall” was shot in Prince Edward Island, near the family home on the Northumberland Strait. The original footage, shot in 1974, was a kind of interactive, camera “dance” with the environment. Poetry became important when the footage was later superimposed onto its own mirror-image, to help direct the viewer away from the luring yet limited world of image-identification. “I Thought There Were Limits,” by Quebec poet D.G. Jones, w as used to encourage the viewer to reject Newtonian notions of space and time, and to conceptualize the film’s interplay between absence, desire, and presence. Eventually, the limitation of text as…

  • Landscape

    Using fixed frame timelapse, 15 hours of a day in the mountains, showing the changes in the sea and sky, is compressed into eight minutes. Designed originally to be rear-projected onto a plexiglass screen framed in a false wall by a traditional wooden picture frame.

  • Landscape Suicide

    “In ‘Landscape Suicide’ Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. “Benning has created a script which…

  • Last Days of Contrition, The

    Shot in the late 1980s in deserts of the American southwest, LAST DAYS is a poetic, harrowing vision of the apocalyptic consequences of militarism and the bankruptcy of the American ideal. Set after the fall, disembodied voices prophesize and attest over a swirling ménage of unsettling desert landscape, weaponry, and dystopian nationalist symbolism.

  • Last Night of Charles Bukowski, The

    Sometimes words and phrases have higher meaning at specific moments. Sometimes words spoken take on significance much later. There’s just massive “stuff” to absorb each day, and some days are sponges. “The Last Night of Charles Bukowski” is about such moments.

  • Accident/Interruption

    An examination of the factors which hinder people, especially women, from finding a voice. “Interruption is a mechanism by which: A) men can prevent women from talking, and B) they can gain the floor for themselves…” – Dale Spender . “After all, the whole point of a sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place.” – John Osborne The roughness of the film is a testament to the determination to work through all the technical problems of the production.Throughout, the questions – how are images (of self, of others, on film) constructed? and…