Genres: experimental

  • White Palace

    My early performances in thriller genres are reconsidered in a rehabilitation of images in this film. Though once renounced by me as complicit and misogynist, my filmed body is treated as recoverable for liberation of my memory.

  • Sparklene

    This is a story of the transformative effects of sparking, speculative frenzy. It questions whether embodied contact with objects and living creatures can occur outside fixed clichés of perception so that eyes can have multi-sensory effects.

  • Accidental, The

    This film is about inappropriate attention to sensory experiences other than the visual while driving and in response to an accident. Sound, touch and taste may disrupt safety to others and might threaten public order when not kept in check by the dominion of the visual. Dogs know all about this.

  • New Atlantis

    Landscape and drive-thrus transformed by real estate speculation are reanimated with magical thinking and an embodied language written in breath on a windshield. “A bird’s mind can hold only one sample. How to come here and how to return. This loop has been corrupted by blooming rot. The cat knows the curse to reset it.”

  • Lola

    Through the eyes of pure content in light and darkness, to objects strange and shifting, a cat’s curiosity of all things moving.

  • Diaries Notes and Sketches: Lost, Lost, Lost

    NOTE: Includes reel #1 and reel #2 only. 60 minutes total. Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, on still others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this…

  • anamnesis

    “anamnesis” is a handmade diary film exploring home, memory, and history through heavily processed painterly sequences. The film was shot at the Independent Imaging Retreat (the Film Farm) in Mount Forest, Ontario. Selected Screenings: Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, 2009 (Montreal, QC); Berlin International Film Festival, Forum Expanded Section, 2009 (Germany)

  • Uphill Descent, The

    A visual meditation on the natural cycle that leads the viewer through an underworld landscape and culminates in a violent, colorful rebirth.

  • Refraction Series

    “Refraction Series” offers an experimental approach to optics, using simple materials and techniques to generate a range of images of pure light and color in motion. The film is inspired by the ideas of early scientists who investigated the nature of light and visual perception, particularly the experiments and writings of the tenth-century Arab mathematician/scientist Ibn al-Haytham and the English mathematician/scientist Isaac Newton. Selected screenings: TIFF Wavelengths Programme, 2009; Media City Film Festival, 2010; WNDX Winnipeg, 2010

  • Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis

    “Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis” is Saïto’s second collaboration with musician Malcolm Goldstein, who composed and performed the original structured improvisation score for the film. The film explores familiar landscape imagery Saïto and Goldstein share in their neighbourhood at the foot of Mount-Royal Park in Montréal. Using images of maple trees in the park as the main visual motif, Saïto creates a film in which the formations of the trees and their subtle interrelation with the space around them act as an agent to transform viewer’s sensorial perception. Richly colored and entirely hand-processed, “Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis”…