Genres: experimental

  • Solar Sight Part 2: Basking in Time

    Many of the approaches to the cut-out material are the same as in part I, however II is a much different film. It is more meditative. It has a somewhat slower pace. I tried to let the cut-outs float more gracefully. Again, John Davis’ music forms an integral part of the meditation. I have used that word ‘meditation’ because that is how some very astute friends of mine described it to me on first viewing. The approach is partly planned, partly improvised under the camera. There has been little or no editing outside the camera for many years in my…

  • Second Phase

    In observing the volatility and liquid nature of what appears to be solid, “Second Phase” exists as a discovery of form through process and quietly observes a community space that remains constant amongst all the things that pass through it.

  • Fresnel

    “Fresnel” is a short super-8 film that explores the optical effects created by the massive inverted fresnel lens at the centre of the Reichstag dome. The Reichstag’s fresnel lens works exactly like a typical light-house fresnel lens – but in reverse, magnifying and projecting the sun’s light down into the Bundestag chambers (the national parliament of German). Fresnel lenses reduce the amount of material required to project light compared to a conventional plano-convex lens of equivalent power, by dividing the lens into concentric prisms, which magnify the light. Following the ramp upwards, the camera’s lens captures splintered reflections of people…

  • My clothes were dragging me back

    In “My clothes were dragging me back”, I have continued to work with Delia Derbyshire’s radio show for the BBC: ”Inventions for Radio: Dreams” (1964). The stories, which are about being chased and awkward situations, are combined with found footage from a 1968 educational film about a school in Toronto that embraced various types of pedagogical practice. Short edits of children in different states of mind are repeated, like a pickup on a turntable stuck on a track. A superimposed image, a kaleidoscope moves quickly and serves as a white noise on these portraits.

  • Dynamique de la pénombre (Half light dynamics)

    An encounter in dark places, movements in chiaroscuro and the breath of a rising wind illuminate the darkness of the frame. An intimate dynamic is setting up. It will bring out, in all its magnitude, the light of day. “Half light dynamics” captures the nuances of an encounter, the apprehensions and desires that are forged in the depth and darkness of the frame. Glimpsed movements and possible outbursts offer to the eye and ear all the dynamism of an emerging world. Focusing on details of the gestures and on the presence of the body crossing the darkness, “Half light dynamics”…

  • Transit

    Undressing the human body either exposes a person to degradation or prepares him for beatification. The nude in western imagery draws a great deal of its power from the story of the passion and the image of Mary, and eroticism involves a transit between dressing and undressing in a world in which a god has become sexed. Transit is a series of 16 mm experiments in film documentation. The first of its three primary performances concerns the nude, the second blood sacrifice, and the last the passion of Christ.

  • Eighth Day, The

    The film systematically shows man destroying man. It is about war and inhumanity. Largely assembled from newsclips and elaborate montage of still photographs. While working on the film, I came to realize that the strongest thing about violence and the most abstract thing about violence is its sequential nature, that war has never stopped, and that it is just the leading of one conflict into another conflict. I could keep this film going forever…. Available on DVD on “Charles Gagnon: 4 Films.”

  • Transits of Venus, The

    The two films, the first black and white, the second in color, record the sky when Venus passed across the Sun on June 6th, 2004 and June 6th 2012. Transits of Venus occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits 8 years apart, separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. Each shot is contextualized with data detailing the various technical parameters that determine the peculiarity of the image. This data is an integral part of the work.

  • I Was Here

    Meditation on time, photography and traces.

  • Waiting Room

    The pulsating rhythms of fluorescent lighting not quite in synch with those of the video image, create a singular array of drifting yellows. Camera handler and son waiting for a pediatric doctor’s appointment, while playful taunts mingle with the curious decor, the focused patients, slow blurs and daily life unfurl. Chance encounters, accidental time, in spite of everything, small miracles of cinema and being.