Film Format: 16mm

  • At Present

    “What’s involved in love?-power, control-is that what we’re talking about?” This film is about love-relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular. Another voice-over reads parables, which present a context for the possibility of love or spirit in the world at large. The film ends optimistically: a smile slowly spreads on a man’s face; women addressing men in their own voices. “He stored the Divine Light in a vessel, but the vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst, and its shards, permeated with…

  • Niagara

    Drawing on both the substance and spirit of hardcore music, “Niagara” sets in motion a number of male-female scenarios designed to challenge male aggression. A couple’s argument in the back seat of a car erupts into violence when the man suspects his lover of having an affair in Niagara Falls. Another couple arrives home from a dinner party and encounter an intruder in their home. As a gang runs around and commits random acts of violence, they sing the film’s chorus: Do you think he did it?/Wouldn’t be right. Would it?/he’s not the type anyway. Is he?/Hit!Hit!Hit!/He’s all rage and…

  • Nice Girls Don’t Do It

    “Nice Girls Don’t Do It” is a not-quite-conventional documentary about female ejaculation. While referencing some of the codes of pornography (i.e. out-of-focus, leather, explicit close-ups), the film clearly works against conventional pornography in its use of black and white film, text, and in its positioning of the spectator. The film serves less as a treatise than as an invitation to its spectators to fill in the gaps created by the film – to query, challenge, investigate, object, corroborate, perhaps inveigh against, but ultimately to create a space for others to speak about a part of female experience long-shrouded in silence.

  • Nice Step to Take, A

    The radical change from an institutional residence to an apartment complex promoting independence sets the stage for this film about the people at Bellwoods Park House in Toronto. Founded in 1967 by the Adult Cerebral Palsy Institute, Bellwoods is one of the first residences for the disabled in North America. This film puts a face on people too often masked by our perception of disability. Produced for The Adult Cerebral Palsy Institute of Metro Toronto.

  • Night Music

    This little film (originally painted on IMAX) attempts to capture the beauty of sadness, as the eyes have it when closed in meditation on sorrow. (SB)

  • Night Stream

    “Night Stream”, a short experimental film about rebirth and fertility, succinctly evokes the flow of tension and trance within the dream state. Selected screenings: New York International Independent Film Festival, New York,1999; Bangladesh International Film Festival, 1999; Madrid Experimental Film Festival, Madrid, Spain,1997; Ann Arbor Festival of Independent and Experimental Film, Ann Arbor, MI,1996.

  • Nightmare Series

    A decade and a half ago, poet Robert Kelly told me that the “crucial work” of our time might be what he calls “the dream work”: I hope, with this Series, to have entertained his challenge more thoughtfully than with any previous “dream” filmmaking. In homage to Sigmund Freud & Surrealism, this film proposes clear visual alternatives to the consideration of both “The Interpretation of…” and all previous representations of… dreaming. (SB) “These four short films…have each individually a haunting quality but do importantly work together to form a gradually swelling curve of increasingly intense unease.” -Marie Nesthus

  • Atmosphere

    “In ‘Atmosphere’ the camera pans back and forth over a body of water at a varying tempo and most people assume that a camera operator is in charge. The final image of the film carries a great deal of significance. It opens up a gap between the film’s appearance and its reality; what it appears to be – what it imitates – is not an object or scene from everyday life, but a film. ‘Atmosphere’ is not just an imitation, but an imitation of an imitation, a metafilm that plays with the viewers’ expectations about cinematic form.” – R. Bruce…

  • Nine O’Clock Gun, The

    Real time is an oxymoron. The film presents one firing of Vancouver’s famous gun; an event that attracts an audience visible on screen unlike the audience watching the film; ourselves. Our experience of time in our innermost self is unlike our experience of space or mass yet nothing in physics corresponds to the passage of time. How can something we experience as so real be based on an illusion. Norfolk, Virginia also has a Nine O’clock Gun.

  • 1933

    “1933. The year? the number? the title? Was it (the film) made then? It’s a memory! (i.e. a Film.) No, it’s many memories. It’s so sad and funny: the departed, departing people, cars, streets! It hurries, it’s gone, it’s back! the film (of 1933?) was made in 1967. You find out, if you don’t already know, how naming tints pure vision.” – Michael Snow “The repeated images are such that they appear to be different each time; to be expanding. ‘1933’ has a machine-mechanical doll rhythmic-like structure.” – Robert Cowan, Take One