Genres: experimental

  • Mine’s Bedlam

    Life is like a gigantic phonograph record fifty feet across. Or like one of those whirling discs at the old amusement park. You get on the disc and it’s spinning and the faster it goes, the more centrifugal force builds up to throw you off it. The speed on the outer edge of the disc is so great you have to hold on for dear life just to stay on. The closer you get to the center of the disc, the slower the speed is and the easier it is to stand up. In fact, at the very center there…

  • Mirage

    Typical imagery of a naughty wahine dancing while removing her sarong is looped and superimposed on images associated with Hawaii such as fish, surfers, volcanoes and the Kodak Hula Show. The sound is a loop from the Elvis song “Dreams Come True in Blue Hawaii” and the effect is haunting with a touch of humor. The juxtaposition of these three elements parodies a travel film enticing one to the islands by associating sensuality and sexuality with everything from Kahunas to Pearl Harbor. It is a kind of pop, twisted mantra invoking an exotic space that perhaps only exists in a…

  • Art of Worldly Wisdom, The

    Composition from journals kept during 1976-78. Moving Kodak snapshots taken during travels abroad and while at work back home; random glimpses of sites seen and persons visited, fragments of afternoon reveries and night dream visions with garrulous non-stop descriptions of education – in family, at school, while ill – trying to make sense of it all.”The dark wood encountered in the middle of life’s journey” (Dante). This is the first composition of material from my ongoing film diaries. “A compelling and revealing exploration of one’s person psyche in crisis.” – Linda Gross, Los Angeles Times) “… a tour de force…

  • Mondrian Voor Rebecca

    I’m very certain it’s about the 30 km dyke in the north of Holland, the “Afsluitdijk.” I’m sure that the lines, the colours and the horizon figure heavy into grids, squares and rectangles. I’m positive it’s about being on an exquisite land/water edge and I’m assured it involves Rebecca, whom I barely know, and Mondrian, whom I barely know, and windmills. So I’m decided that much that is beautiful of Holland, apart from Rebecca, lies in the instinct that has refined the elements, and has become Science – not the other way around. (JG)

  • Monitoring the Unstable Earth

    A (re)collection, a (re)ordering of the elements of our external world, filmed during travels in California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. A sort of “topological revue.” Salt flats, deserts, mountains, forests, cityscapes, plus meditation on Christo’s “Running Fence” and Duane Hanson’s figurative sculptures. Fantastic landscapes transmuted/reduced to their distinctive aesthetic qualities. Patterns of symmetry, of pure form emerge. Here shape and texture, colour and light overcome meaning to affect perception on a primary, visceral level. Sensations evoked by certain (sometimes archetypal) images: a profound feeling of peace, a disturbing sense of unease, a tug of nostalgia … “Michael Wallin’s ‘Monitoring the…

  • Monuments

    Utilizing the poetic voice to give language and meaning to the downtown monuments of Halifax, Nova Scotia, we discover that, if they could, our monuments would destroy the human race rather than face the onward thrust of history.

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past

    “Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, “Moose Jaw” is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along with a giant moose), and schemes to restore…

  • Morning Room

    This film is a documentation of variations of sunlight and shadow patterns over a period of time in a corner of our room – the Morning Room.

  • Mosaic

    “Mosaic’s carefully tuned strategies of montage are already present in its opening title sequence. Isolating the individual letters of its entitlement, it shows them in succession before gathering them all together. Likewise, Chambers recasts details from his surroundings in a symbolic lyricism that joins the rhythms of mortality and rebirth. Its fragmented collage collects a fly infested corpse, a woman strewing flowers, a runner, an old man standing, and a child nursing from his mother’s breast. An elegant and sophisticated reshuffling of domestic temporality, ‘Mosaic’ boldly anticipates the themes of Chambers’ well-known later work.” -Mike Hoolboom “It was in the…

  • Mothlight

    Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black. “Brakhage made ‘Mothlight’ without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine.” – Jonas Mekas “‘Mothlight’ is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter’s struggle to assume…