Genres: experimental

  • All That Rises

    Juxtaposition of seeing and sounding, sky and stone and all that’s in between. A short walk in an alleyway, to hear vision sounding images, blessed with light and darkness.

  • Chasmic Dance

    A visual metaphor for creative process as a sustained state of flux, whereby the deconstruction and reconfiguration of source material manifest themselves as a series of rapid abstract movements. Alluding to the cosmic dance of Shiva, the film is an expression of primal rhythmic energy, moving dialectically but without sublimation. Regeneration ignites destruction, and transformation invites mutation, through clashes of opposing modes such as video/film, surface/depth, and light/darkness.

  • Chiasmus

    An exploration into perceptual processes in the act of seeing and listening, “Chiasmus” takes film as a metaphor for the breathing body, through the intercrossing of the medium and the fragmented images of the body in movement. The rhythm and tension created by the interplay between sound and image, and their disjunction and conjunction, aspire to an organic and sensual moment where inside becomes outside, and outside inside.

  • Glide

    “Glide” is a short experimental animation depicting ice skating. A lone skater appears on the crisp white ice, making her way around the oval of the rink and the loop of the film. Drawn with India ink on watercolour paper, the fluid strokes of the skater’s motion is echoed in the watery brush strokes and the pools of dark glistening ink. Each time around the rink/loop, the frame rate of the animation is slowed down thus extending the skater’s motions and revealing more details in the drawings. Calming and meditative, “Glide” celebrates in the simple magic of ice skating as…

  • Ever Present Going Past

    Filmmaker Philip Hoffman and poet Gerry Shikatani combine to make a cine-poem about the making of gardens, films and poems. Excerpts from Shikatani’s `First Book, Three Gardens of Andalucia’.

  • All Fall Down

    “All Fall Down” is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question “what has been here before?” The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step-daughter) across two hundred years. “All Fall Down” explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that…

  • Dolce Vita, La

    “La Dolce Vita” is a short, fragmented film diary that explores the Saturday morning mayhem of a filmmaker and his family. This film recalls the cacophony of young children, cats, visitors and noisy neighbours. Is this the “sweet life”?

  • Fleeing Rotland

    In 1914, a man abandoned his horse and escaped the impending disaster that loomed overhead. Man, horse and barn. They are all either dead or destroyed – but their life on film exists forever. (Note: First two minutes are silent)

  • Retrato Oficial 2 | Official Portrait 2

    Retrato Oficial 2 | Official Portrait 2 animates the dissimulation and reconstruction of the great liberator of Chile, 19th-century revolutionary and republican Bernardo O’Higgins, and the historical reach of the late-20th-century dictator Augusto Pinochet. Based in part on a conceit borrowed from Raul Ruiz’s essay Images of Images and original footage shot by Patricio Guzman on September 11, 1973, the short video is an exploration of the mediated image and the mnemonic possibilities of video and still image technologies.

  • Statik der Eselsbrucken, Die

    English Title: Engineering Memory Bridges Formal proof through pregnant experiments on one’s own body. Rests and tests from the inquiry into prototypes. Even today birthmarks are attributed to sudden shock during pregnancy. Some people see them as prophetic signs. Experiments with rats have shown that prenatal stress is a possible cause for male homosexuality. I am Michael Brynntrup. Born 7th of February, 1959. Identical twin brother still born.