Genres: experimental

  • Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 3

    This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems…

  • Kisses

    “Betty Ferguson’s ‘Kisses’, an hour-long anthology of film clips presented without titles or voiceover, is the sweetest and, in avant-garde terms, the most conventional film on the program. Although the kiss reached its supreme expression as the on-screen replacement for copulation in post-Code Hollywood, Ferguson’s material is drawn largely from silent classics and the less-fetishized European cinema of around 1960. She compares her film to a patchwork quilt, but it’s basically morphological, cataloguing clusters of shots where kisses are delivered to the hand, the neck, rained down on a beloved face, perfunctorily bestowed on a spouse, awarded to dogs, dolls,…

  • Kitchener-Berlin

    Part One: “A Measured Dance” 17 min. Part Two: “Prologue” and “Veiled Flight” 17 min. NOTE: Part One can be screened on its own. “Hoffman juxtaposes his home town, the Canadian city of Kitchener (formerly called Berlin), with its European namesake of the World War II era. The hyphen in the title suggests both severance from the past and connections to it. The history of the area underpins the film, but refuses to bind it or restrict it from free association. Hoffman assembles a wide range of visual materials including home movies, television, news footage, and archival film, as well…

  • Lady in a Chair

    This film documents the tragedy of senility as it affects the life of an elderly woman. Whereas she was once in command of language (and culture), she is now victimized by her inability to interact with it. The objects in her home offer no comfort; rather they combine to illustrate the imprisoning nature of her state. She questions the meaning of her continued existence and pleads for help that can never come. The voice used is that of the woman whose plight the film describes; the words are hers and, with two exceptions, the voice was recorded “straight.” Originally shot…

  • Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 4

    This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems…

  • Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World

    “How doth the city sit solitary, That was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations. Behold, Oh Lord; for I am in distress: My bowels are troubled; Mine heart is turned within me; For I have grievously revelled; Abroad the sword bereaveth, At home, there is as death.” “Lamentations,” which has a total running time of 435 minutes, comprises two parts: “The Dream of the Last Historian” and “The Sublime Calculation.” Each part can be rented separately. “Elder occupies a unique place in Canada. Both philosopher and filmmaker, Elder’s films,…

  • Landfall

    “Landfall” was shot in Prince Edward Island, near the family home on the Northumberland Strait. The original footage, shot in 1974, was a kind of interactive, camera “dance” with the environment. Poetry became important when the footage was later superimposed onto its own mirror-image, to help direct the viewer away from the luring yet limited world of image-identification. “I Thought There Were Limits,” by Quebec poet D.G. Jones, w as used to encourage the viewer to reject Newtonian notions of space and time, and to conceptualize the film’s interplay between absence, desire, and presence. Eventually, the limitation of text as…

  • Landscape

    Using fixed frame timelapse, 15 hours of a day in the mountains, showing the changes in the sea and sky, is compressed into eight minutes. Designed originally to be rear-projected onto a plexiglass screen framed in a false wall by a traditional wooden picture frame.

  • Landscape Suicide

    “In ‘Landscape Suicide’ Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. “Benning has created a script which…

  • Last Days of Contrition, The

    Shot in the late 1980s in deserts of the American southwest, LAST DAYS is a poetic, harrowing vision of the apocalyptic consequences of militarism and the bankruptcy of the American ideal. Set after the fall, disembodied voices prophesize and attest over a swirling ménage of unsettling desert landscape, weaponry, and dystopian nationalist symbolism.