Film Format: 16mm

  • Rhapsody on a Theme from a House Movie

    “…creating a subtle, shifting collage of static dwellings and abstracted, moving dwellers. Focusing in, yet never invading, suggesting depths by softly touching surfaces, the film concentrates on the exterior yet indicates an interior in which houses become homes become community…” – Helle Viirlaid When I first conceived the film, I saw it as a purely formal investigation of the visual effect(s) of creating a constant rhythmic series of lap dissolves. My original expectation was that by dissolving together overlapping static-camera shots, an illusion of movement might occur. After viewing the initial film footage, I realized that, apart from the intended…

  • Bapuji – The Path of Love

    A film portrait of Swami Shri Kirpalvanadji, one of the greatest living masters of yoga in the world today. For the past thirty years Bapuji, as he is affectionately called by those who follow his teaching, has spent ten hours of every day in deep meditation. His unique journey through the struggles of the spiritual path have brought him to a stage of consciousness that yogis say occurs only once every five hundred years. This is one of the first films to reveal the daily practices of a great master – practices usually carried out in solitude. His life and…

  • Rhythms of the Heart

    “Cinema weaned from the monogamy of sound and image in a film equal to one’s capacity for wonder… In ‘Rhythms of the Heart,’ Steve Sanguedolce’s affinity for expressionistic documentaries turns to the depiction of a ruined relationship. “Sanguedolce belongs to the Escarpment School- a loosely knit group of filmmakers born and raised along the craggy slopes of the Canadian shield. Their work typically joins memory and landscape in a documentary based production. Inheritors of the 19th century Lake poet romantics, ‘nature’ is typically figured as a metaphor for consciousness. ‘Rhythms of the Heart’ typifies many of these Escarpment School concerns…

  • Riddle of Lumen, The

    The classical riddle was meant to be heard, of course. Its answers are contained within its questions; and on the smallest piece of itself this possibility depends upon SOUND – “utterly” like they say…the pun its pivot. Therefore, my “Riddle of Lumen” depends upon qualities of LIGHT. All films do, of course. But with “The Riddle of Lumen,” the “hero” of the film is light/itself. It is a film I’d long wanted to make – inspired by the sense, and specific formal possibilities, of the classical English language riddle… only appropriate to film and, thus, as distinct from language as…

  • river

    The Saugeen River was named Sauking, “where it all flows out,” by the Ojibwa in the early 1800s. It runs into Lake Huron, in central Ontario. The place where I know it is twenty miles south of Owen Sound, near Williamsford, where I spent lots of time in my youth exploring. Over the past twelve years I’ve returned there to film, and collected these moments in a fifteen-minute meditation called simply, “river.” In 1997, I arrived with a wind-up 16mm Bolex and one roll of 16mm colour film; in 1981 with a half inch, reel-to-reel black-and-white video portapak; in 1984,…

  • Road Ended at the Beach, The

    In making this film I collected images and sound over six years of travel (not continuous) through Canada. Keeping daily both filmic and written records, I focused on people and places, my relationships to them, and the changes that occurred between each visit. I would collect these images freely: later to examine and make meaning of during the editing process. In this film I started to consciously pursue the relationship between a formal chronicle of events and my memory of those events. (PH) “The film is a series of ‘telling’ incidents in which events, which fall short of expectations, are…

  • Rochdale College 1970

    Rochdale College was an experiment with new ideas and ways of living while being conventionally forced to live within the old, dead civilization and its structures. The results inevitably show confusion and angered disillusionment. The new ideas and ways, never allowed time to evolve and produce positive results, were smothered for the sake of convenience and convention. The film is ultimately a nostalgic reminiscence of the Sixties.

  • Rock Video

    Poking a little fun at “rock video,” this film uses real rocks that are resilient and amusing.

  • ROM (Royal Ontario Museum)

    Objects on display at the museum are viewed, initially by a constantly moving camera that never fixes on anything for long. In the latter half of the film the camera continues to move, but concentrates on a specific artifact. Two kinds of scanning.

  • Roman Numeral Series l

    The Roman Numerals are nine films, commonly described as “abstract,” which explore the possibilities of making equivalents of “moving visual thinking” – that pre-language, pre-picture realm of the mind which provides the physical grounds for image making (imagination). Thus the very substance of the birth of imagery. (SB)