Genres: experimental

  • Machine in the Garden

    Shot in Hi8 video using a high-speed shutter and a spinning turret camera mount, “Machine in the Garden” is inspired by, and an homage to, apparatus-oriented work such as D. Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera” and Michael Snow’s “La Region Centrale.”

  • Machine of Eden, The

    The three films [The Weir-Falcon Saga, The Machine of Eden and The Animals of Eden and After ] “go” very directly together, in the (above) order of their making: yet each seems to be a clear film in itself… The Machine (of Eden) operates via “spots” – from sun’s disks (of the camera lens) thru emulsion grains (within which, each, a universe might be found) and snow’s flakes (echoing technical aberrations on film’s surface) blots (upon the lens itself) and the circles of sun and moon, etcetera; these “mis-takes” give birth of “shape” (which, in this work, is “matter” subject…

  • Made Manifest

    “Every man’s work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” -1 Corinthians 111-13

  • Archaeology of Memory (silent)

    Beginning in scratches of light, this film evolves through colour, rhythm and multiple images tracing a history of cinema from mythical beginnings to the thread of personal memory, peering into the everyday pathology of family, sex and death. “A kind of double history that intertwines autobiography with the development of cinema, it’s a stunning, enormously seductive array of images …” – Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine

  • Magic Man

    A ritualistic mood piece with colour-rich images. With Robert Cowan, Mike Kuchar, Donna Kerness, Mr. E and others.

  • Making a Scene

    Offers passersby the opportunity to don a mask and become either an elephant or a mosquito. A look at people’s inhibitions.

  • Maltese Cross Movement, The

    “The film reflects Dewdney’s conviction that the projector, not the camera, is the filmmaker’s true medium. The form and content of the film are shown to derive directly from the mechanical operation of the projector – specifically the maltese cross movement’s animation of the disk and the cross illustrates graphically (pun intended) the projector’s essential parts and movements. It also alludes to a dialectic of continuous-discontinuous movements that pervades the apparatus, from its central mechanical operation to the spectator’s perception of the film’s images… (His) soundtrack demonstrates that what we hear is also built out of continuous-discontinuous ‘sub-sets.’ The film…

  • Mammals of Victoria, The

    Note: This film is a companion piece to “A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea.” This film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with mountains in the background, hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painting, abstractions composed of distorted (jammed) T.V. shapes in shades of blue with occasional red, refractions of light within the camera lens, sometimes mixed reflections of water – this “weave” of imagery occasionally revealing recognizable shapes of birds and humans, humans as fleeting figures in the water, as distant shapes in a rowboat, as human shadows, so forth. Increasingly…

  • Man in the Box, A

    Rather than looking outward, and creating a spherical universe around itself (e.g. Michael Snow’s “La Region Centrale” ), the camera is introspective, defining itself by how it “sees the world”; it never sees anything but itself. “A Man in the Box” is a camera’s photographic memory, trying to focus upon its own image. We realize that we see only what we want to see – that how we decide to see determines how we will see. Dedicated to Bill Wees, my eye’s mentor. Film to be screened twice, once forwards, and once backwards. (RR)

  • Archaeology of Memory (sound)

    Beginning in scratches of light, this film evolves through colour, rhythm and multiple images tracing a history of cinema from mythical beginnings to the thread of personal memory, peering into the everyday pathology of family, sex and death. “A kind of double history that intertwines autobiography with the development of cinema, it’s a stunning, enormously seductive array of images …” – Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine