Film Format: 16mm

  • Visions

    A film-within-a-film exploring the body in motion, frame by frame. Built with four frames within one, half of the screen in motion, the other still, this film makes the viewer feel that they are watching a “moving picture.” The sensation one gets is of tension…expectation…shock. It freezes one in a frame. The glorious, trenchant music of R. Murray Schafer in the background further adds to the intense “high” of the film. The film consists of images of a dancer in motion alongside still images of bodies and faces in intense masturbation. These powerful images and motions coincide with the chaotic…

  • Visions in Meditation #1

    This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation,” in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism “indicative of that field-of-consciousness within which humanity survives thoughtfully.” It is a film “as in a dream,” this first film in a proposed series of such being composed of images shot in the New England states and Eastern Canada. It begins with an antique photograph of a baby and ends with a child loose on the landscape, interweaving images of Niagara Falls with a variety of New England and Eastern Canadian scenes, antique…

  • Visions in Meditation #2 Mesa Verde

    This meditation takes its visual imperatives from the occasion of Mesa Verde, which I came to see finally as a Time rather than any such solidity as Place. “There is a terror here,” were the first words which came to mind on seeing these ruins; and for two days after, during all my photography, I was haunted by some unknown occurrence which reverberated still in these rocks and rock-structures and environs. I can no longer believe that the Indians abandoned this solid habitation because of drought, lack-of-water, somesuch. (These explanations do not, anyway, account for the fact that all memory…

  • Visions in Meditation #3: Plato’s Cave

    Plato’s cave would seem to be the idee fixe of this film. The vortex would, then, be the phenomenological world – overwhelming, and thus “uninhabitable.” The structures of thoughtful meditation are naturally, therefore, equivocal so that, for example, even a tornado-in-the-making will be both “dust devil” and “finger of God” at one with the clock-work sun and the strands of ice/fire, horizon, rock, clouds, so on. The film is, I believe, a vision of mentality as most people must (to the irritation of Plato) have it, safely encaved and metaphorical, for the nervous system to survive. All the same, I…

  • Visions in Meditation #4: D.H. Lawrence

    I’ve made three pilgrimages in my life: the 40-some-year home of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and the mountain ranch and crypt – would you call it? – of D.H. Lawrence, outside Taos. I keep returning to the Lawrence environs again and again; and this last time attempted photography in that narrow little building where his ashes were (or were not) deposited (contradictory stories about that). There is a child-like sculpture of “The Phoenix” at the far end of the room, a perfectly lovely emblem to deflate any pomposity people have added to Lawrence’s “I rise in…

  • Black & White

    “‘Black & White/Noir et Blanc’ is an eight-minute experimental film poem. The first half is the play of white light on grey background, and coupled with the soundtrack built of amplified bursts of white noise, it is designed to put the spectator into a more receptive mood for the second half – a naked black man dancing, captured sensitively by Raphael’s variable-speed camera. The editing was done right in the Bolex and the rhythm works; it speeds up and slows down just at the right times to create a continuous flow of movement and energy.” – A. Ibranyi-Kiss, Cinema Canada

  • Voices

    “Voices” is a re-construction of historical events leading to today’s villages in Northern Labrador, Canada. Using archival films, stills, video interviews with Inuit elders, new leaders, former Moravian missionaries and provincial health workers, “Voices” documents the dramatic impact of white contact on Labrador’s Inuit from the Moravian presence in the late 1700s, Newfoundland’s resettlement program in the 1950s, to present-day Labrador.

  • Waiting for the Train

    A one-shot film exhibiting traditional short story structural techniques. A sense of anticipation is built, allowed to subside, and then “paid off” in a way that is both satisfying and humorous.

  • Wake Up Wake Up

    This amusing animation, utilizing music and sound effects, begins with a group of sleeping angels who wake up to enjoy a picnic on the clouds. They are interrupted by a flight of bombers. As they move higher and higher into the sky they are interrupted by missiles, then by armed satellites. A flying horse and a hungry cloud contribute to the solution of these war machines in an ending that is imaginative and thoughtful.

  • Wake, The

    The sensations, moods and passages of grief are explored in “The Wake”, which uses emotionally evocative landscapes and poetic text to extract a poignant beauty from the depths of human trauma.