Genres: experimental

  • Slap Happy Jim

    James Anderson’s exuberant paper cell animation “Slap Happy Jim” features a skinny man in a canoe (with a bicycle on his head) who faces all manners of unexpected travails.

  • Sluice

    It is a wooden silver-retrieving sluice – thus light-catch awash with something like “cheek and jowl clippings of Argentine bulls” (as Hollis Frampton reminds us) and many chemical residues of earth. My mind has grown TREE out of the forest of it all. (SB)

  • Smell of Burning Ants, The

    “The Smell of Burning Ants” is a haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. Through formative events of a boy’s life, we come to understand the ways in which men can become emotionally disconnected and alienated from their feminine side. The common dismissal that “boys will be boys” evolves into the chilling realization that boys frequently become angry, destructive, and emotionally disabled men. “The Smell of Burning Ants” illustrates how boys are socialized by fear, power and shame. The burning of ants is one of the…

  • Snorkel

    When a film camera is introduced into an unexpected setting it acts as a catalyst for spontaneous performance. “Snorkel,” which was shot in Super 8 and transferred to 16mm film, shows a group of friends gathered for a social evening. They put on various acts, including the garbled telling of some sci-fi movie’s plot, and snorkelling in a pail of water. McLaren’s camera is by no means an innocent bystander – it intrudes upon the scene, picks out particular activities, withdraws, and generally impels the action as mediator between event and document.

  • Snow Search

    “Snow Search” finds four performers searching for each other, each carrying one quarter of a photographic portrait of Michael Snow. A lyrical exploration through the city and an homage to Michael Snow.

  • Beauborg Boogie Woogie

    Rimmer takes a quick, playful romp through the Beaubourg’s paintings, twisting and bending their reflections to his own light rhythms.

  • So Is This

    This film is filmed text. The film reads: “This is the title of this film. So is this.” This film is an in between the author and you. It is communal reading. Within my work it could be described as a child of “One Second in Montreal” and “Rameau’s Nephew.” “A delightful film, full of humour and sentience, it is also an odd film: a text-film, a silent black-and-white talky in colour, a self-reflexive document and a fictive construct, a non-movie that paradoxically fulfills and subverts the implications in the titles of such books as ‘The Language of Cinema’ and…

  • Solidarity

    A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs, milling, marching and picketing with the word “solidarity” superimposed on the screen. The soundtrack is an organizer’s speech on the labour situation. Like her films “Rat Life and Diet in North America,” “Pierre Vallieres” and “Reason Over Passion,” “Solidarity” combines a political awareness, an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour unique in Wieland’s work. Image description: Plain black laced shoes and bare or white-stockinged ankles of a person standing on green grass, a metal-tipped umbrella at their side. White text superimposed over the middle…

  • Bed and Sofa

    A remake of Abram Room’s 1927 silent Russian feature, “Bed and Sofa”. Heralded as a revolutionary feminist film, Room’s version was suppressed for its radical treatment of sexual freedom, women’s rights, and abortion. Armatage’s version shifts the emphasis to the woman’s point of view and stylizes the narrative. A comedy.

  • Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion

    The bus stopped on the Mexican highway, placing us in full view of a young boy, motionless, on the hot pavement. In this film, the incident is revealed through a poetic text, derived from my written journals. The poetry mixes primarily with Mexican streetscapes which compliment the text in a tonal sense. Most images are 28 seconds long, the “breath” of the 16mm Bolex camera. A lone saxophone (Mike Callich) weaves its way through the narrative, blending to make stronger the tones and accentuations of the images. (PH)