Genres: experimental

  • Vertical Horizon

    A winter landscape in a hardwood forest. Changing rhythms of camera movement and editing, shifting light qualities, zooms, and other cinematic techniques evoke a sense of a brooding, perhaps menacing, spirit animating the frozen woods.

  • Birds at Sunrise

    The film was originally photographed in 1972. Birds from my window were filmed during the winter, through to the spring, with the early morning light. I became caught up in their frozen world and their ability to survive the bitter cold. I welcomed their chirps and their songs which offered life and hope for spring. In 1984 I was part of a cultural exchange between Canada and Israel. During my visit my unfinished movie came to mind. A connection was established in my mind – so that the suffering of the birds became, in a sense, symbolic of the Jews…

  • Vesta Lunch (Cookin’ at the Vesta)

    A continuous-take, cinema-verité study of Toronto’s famous all-night diner. A film that studies the pulse of the after-hours urban environment, in real time.

  • Visible Compendium, The

    “The Visible Compendium” constructs bits of unnamed meanings, fragments of light. Photography is, to me, not about things, but about light. “The Visible Compendium” attempts to engage the mind, and particularly what is unknown in the mind, rather than what has been seen and known a thousand times over. “The Visible Compendium” reaches farther than any of my other animations. It goes off in many directions, held together, hopefully, by the sountrack, which itself goes off in a number of directions – strange sounds, some recognizable, others not. Some music. No voice, no silence. The film is a compendium, as…

  • Vision of the Fire Tree

    “Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves in the universe.” – D.H. Lawrence This little film, like a fire in the mind, seeks that “tree” along a line of metaphorical synapse.

  • Visions

    A film-within-a-film exploring the body in motion, frame by frame. Built with four frames within one, half of the screen in motion, the other still, this film makes the viewer feel that they are watching a “moving picture.” The sensation one gets is of tension…expectation…shock. It freezes one in a frame. The glorious, trenchant music of R. Murray Schafer in the background further adds to the intense “high” of the film. The film consists of images of a dancer in motion alongside still images of bodies and faces in intense masturbation. These powerful images and motions coincide with the chaotic…

  • Visions in Meditation #1

    This is a film inspired by Gertrude Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation,” in which the filmmaker has edited a meditative series of images of landscapes and human symbolism “indicative of that field-of-consciousness within which humanity survives thoughtfully.” It is a film “as in a dream,” this first film in a proposed series of such being composed of images shot in the New England states and Eastern Canada. It begins with an antique photograph of a baby and ends with a child loose on the landscape, interweaving images of Niagara Falls with a variety of New England and Eastern Canadian scenes, antique…

  • Visions in Meditation #2 Mesa Verde

    This meditation takes its visual imperatives from the occasion of Mesa Verde, which I came to see finally as a Time rather than any such solidity as Place. “There is a terror here,” were the first words which came to mind on seeing these ruins; and for two days after, during all my photography, I was haunted by some unknown occurrence which reverberated still in these rocks and rock-structures and environs. I can no longer believe that the Indians abandoned this solid habitation because of drought, lack-of-water, somesuch. (These explanations do not, anyway, account for the fact that all memory…

  • Visions in Meditation #3: Plato’s Cave

    Plato’s cave would seem to be the idee fixe of this film. The vortex would, then, be the phenomenological world – overwhelming, and thus “uninhabitable.” The structures of thoughtful meditation are naturally, therefore, equivocal so that, for example, even a tornado-in-the-making will be both “dust devil” and “finger of God” at one with the clock-work sun and the strands of ice/fire, horizon, rock, clouds, so on. The film is, I believe, a vision of mentality as most people must (to the irritation of Plato) have it, safely encaved and metaphorical, for the nervous system to survive. All the same, I…

  • Visions in Meditation #4: D.H. Lawrence

    I’ve made three pilgrimages in my life: the 40-some-year home of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and the mountain ranch and crypt – would you call it? – of D.H. Lawrence, outside Taos. I keep returning to the Lawrence environs again and again; and this last time attempted photography in that narrow little building where his ashes were (or were not) deposited (contradictory stories about that). There is a child-like sculpture of “The Phoenix” at the far end of the room, a perfectly lovely emblem to deflate any pomposity people have added to Lawrence’s “I rise in…