Film Format: 16mm

  • Vancouver Art Show

    The dictionary defines art as the product of a skill to create, a definition implying the importance of human skill over that of nature. To my thinking, art is not so much found in the “greatness” of creation; rather, it is a testament to our power to define. In the four sections of the film, two are defined as “art” and are accessible as such. The opening title acts as a prologue for the first section, which is an example of abstract expressionism. The definition of art, combined with the voice of a tour guide, similarly strengthens the reception of…

  • VARIATIONS ON A CELLOPHANE WRAPPER

    “The basic image is a female factory worker unrolling a large sheet of cellophane… The film resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction.” – Kristine Nordstrom, The Village Voice

  • Velveeta Afternoon

    “Velveeta Afternoon” explores the world of a 50’s homemaker who, 30 years later, feels a need to come to terms with the changes that have challenged her morals, beliefs and dreams. It is an exploration of a woman’s need for self-validation and understanding, where truth can become a misty line between romanticized, idealized personal fiction. The film moves in the slow rhythm of a long afternoon conversation, where true desire, sentiment and prejudice begin to disturb the calm surface of polite small talk. The intimate and minimal format eventually creates a claustrophobia; the discomfort of falling witness to a stranger’s…

  • Verite

    An autobiographical dramatic exhibition of the inherent conflict between film and reality. Cinema verité and conventional narrative forms weave the viewer toward a further understanding of the mirror-like worlds of a filmmaker’s personal and cinematic lives.

  • Vertical Horizon

    A winter landscape in a hardwood forest. Changing rhythms of camera movement and editing, shifting light qualities, zooms, and other cinematic techniques evoke a sense of a brooding, perhaps menacing, spirit animating the frozen woods.

  • Birds at Sunrise

    The film was originally photographed in 1972. Birds from my window were filmed during the winter, through to the spring, with the early morning light. I became caught up in their frozen world and their ability to survive the bitter cold. I welcomed their chirps and their songs which offered life and hope for spring. In 1984 I was part of a cultural exchange between Canada and Israel. During my visit my unfinished movie came to mind. A connection was established in my mind – so that the suffering of the birds became, in a sense, symbolic of the Jews…

  • Vesta Lunch (Cookin’ at the Vesta)

    A continuous-take, cinema-verité study of Toronto’s famous all-night diner. A film that studies the pulse of the after-hours urban environment, in real time.

  • Villanelle

    Elizabeth Lewis’s “Villanelle” is based on a poem of the same name by Earle Birney, one of Canada’s best-known poets. In a live action segment preceding the animation, Birney introduces the poem, describing the circumstances that led him to write it. He tells of how he spent one summer of the 1960s at Bowen island, north of Vancouver. During the week he was alone. But on the week-ends, friends and students would join him. Only one of those friends, a promising young student named Betty Lamert, was able to join him on his two-mile swims in the icy bay water.…

  • Visible Compendium, The

    “The Visible Compendium” constructs bits of unnamed meanings, fragments of light. Photography is, to me, not about things, but about light. “The Visible Compendium” attempts to engage the mind, and particularly what is unknown in the mind, rather than what has been seen and known a thousand times over. “The Visible Compendium” reaches farther than any of my other animations. It goes off in many directions, held together, hopefully, by the sountrack, which itself goes off in a number of directions – strange sounds, some recognizable, others not. Some music. No voice, no silence. The film is a compendium, as…

  • Vision of the Fire Tree

    “Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves in the universe.” – D.H. Lawrence This little film, like a fire in the mind, seeks that “tree” along a line of metaphorical synapse.