Genres: experimental

  • Ants on a Log

    A look at the popular children’s novelty snack (celery, Cheeze Whiz, raisins) as it is swarmed by real ants on an actual log. The piece aims to stimulate discourse on human objectification of nature and ecological hierarchy. Though humans may be able to create triumphant scientific accomplishments like Cheez Whiz, the ants’ ability to organize and colonize will long out live that of the humanity. This film can be screened also be screened as 16mm loop.

  • Gabey and Mike: A Jewish Summer Camp Love Story

    Gabey and Mike: A Jewish Summer Camp Love Story takes its name from a song by Mermaid Café – a folk band comprised of Andi D., Joe A. Rider and Merrill Nisker (now known as ‘Peaches’) that gained popularity at Canadian Jewish summer camps in the early 90s. The video juxtaposes the tale of the band with playful re-creations of the story of Gabey and Mike, in a queer re-staging of the classic summer camp movie. Gabey and Mike uses the tropes of this genre alongside references from iconic queer films in order to grasp the significance of this band…

  • Hang Twelve

    Encores live yet / Slice every note, each notice sincere in secret / Lovers covet eyeliner to recite in vein or vesicle / Clever noise, silence or else.

  • Faust Film: An Opera: Part 1

    A collaboration between composer Rick Corrigan and Stan Brakhage, featuring Joel Haertling as Faust, Gretchen LeMaistre as Gretchen, Phillip Hathaway as Faust’s friend, and Paul Lundahl as Servant. This is the realization of a 30-year-old dream (grant applications and fragments of script from the 1950s published in Brakhage’s “Metaphors on Vision”), a wish of the young filmmaker to film a “modern” Faust (quite opposite of the traditional Fausts) which finally came to a fulfillment as unpredictable and as absolute as, say, three decades of living experience.

  • Dominion

    The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined, a vision in the longhouse, a dream in the wilderness.

  • Conservatory

    Stamens and pistils are lit in rapid succession behind the dome of the Palm House at Allan Gardens in Toronto. The plants trade colour, making alien scenes in the conservatory. Solid forms, too near to the eye, become muddied and indistinct, in constant passage, but the dome and the grid are fixed.

  • Ravine

    In Toronto’s Nordheimer Ravine, an environment of thick brush and dead wood flattens into fields of colour. Its paths lead to Winston Churchill Park, where the entrance to a city reservoir overlooks a green vale.

  • Dark Adaptation

    Dark Adaptation extends the experiments with alternative optical systems I began in Refraction Series (2008). These films are rooted in the experiments and writings of Ibn Al-Haytham and Isaac Newton, pioneering investigators of the nature of sight and light. In them I use fundamental phenomena such as refraction and thin-film interference to create images of pure prismatic colour in motion. Dark Adaptation is both a true representation of a series of tiny performances with light that were recorded by the camera, and an analogue for an interior journey. The music is by Graham Stewart of Violence and the Sacred. “Dark…

  • A Doll’s Eyes

    In his personal essay film, filmmaker Jonathan Wysocki searches for the meaning behind his lifelong obsession with the movie ‘Jaws.’ Wysocki recounts the terror that kept him out of the ocean during his childhood and the dark desire that drew him back as an adult. He returns to the ocean to discover a fear deeper than the shark stalking his imagination.

  • Athyrium filix-femina

    The second in a series of “quilt films” that pay homage to the work of pioneering female artists, “Athyrium filix-femina” reimagines Anna Atkins’ founding work in photography as a moving image. In 1843, Anna Atkins published the first book of photography, “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions”, an exploration of regional botany that classified different kinds of algae using direct prints of the plants. The cyanotype process was a relatively short-lived as a dominant form of photography, however, it found refuge in the domestic sphere where it was used to decorate fabric for pillows, drapes and clothing. By combining filmmaking…