Genres: experimental

  • Our Trip

    “Feminist filmmaker and performance artist Barbara Hammer has celebrated her recent trip to Peru with her friend Corky Wick through a diaristic animation of photographs they took during their travels. Landscapes and portraits are given growing patterns of framing and texture with magic markers and tempera paint, expressing the richly evocative folk art of the Incan people they saw as we hear their native music resonate on the soundtrack.” – Anthony Reveaux

  • Out In the Garden

    Set in and around the house and garden of a middle-aged upstate New York academic, Grenier’s intimate experimental documentary portrait explores, in an innovative form, the thoughts and feelings of one man dealing with AIDS. Awards: Michael Moore Award, Best Documentary, 16th Atlanta Film & Video Festival 1992; Cash Award at the 1992 Edison Black Maria Film & Video Festival; Cash Award at the 23rd Sinking Creek Film Celebration Part of the TALKING PORTRAITS series.

  • Oxford Hotel

    The shape of the film is determined by an innovative optical printing technique which forms a rhythmic pattern, a kind of vibrating image that results in a dazzling display of colour, movement, and interplay of form and space.

  • Paranoia Corridor

    This film is an elaborately hand-painted step-printed work composed primarily of luminescent greens and blues in constantly shifting symmetrical shapes which suggest, rather than delineate, passage through a corridor. An increasingly menacing evolution of patterns is finally interrupted by a series of static shapes which almost appear to be symbols of resolution, ending on an almost-thigh-bone image.

  • Parcelle

    The French term “parcelle” refers to a fragment, particle or bit. Filmed frame-by-frame in the camera, the film rests upon the alternate appearance and duration of tiny coloured squares and circles placed on a black background. Inserted in series between plain white or coloured frames, the particular arrangement of the items on separate frames forms, when projected on the screen, certain visual relationships producing a specific perceptual experience.

  • Away

    “The story of a man’s search for a long-lost brother set against the backdrop of a famously deranged movie production, ‘Away’ draws from everything from Conrad and Chris Marker to Coppola and daytime TV for its inspiration. Yet, given the diversity of these influences, it remains a sharply focussed and emotionally intimate work: Steve’s search for his brother is after all a search for something like home or self, a truth that rings with perfect clarity through the din of craziness swirling around it.” – Geoff Pevere “An addictive mixture of fact, fiction and found footage, all whipped – through…

  • Pas de Trois

    “The question of whether certain kinds of film formalism tend to be sexually reactionary is encapsulated in this little triptych. Each of the three sections includes three kinds of information. In the first section, we see single frames of strippers dancing, single frame clusters of red and then yellow, and single frame clusters of what looks to be a light source. The imagery and clear colours mix retinally, and with the flickering light source, makes this section reminiscent of looking into a movie projector. In the second section we see live action footage of a little girl presumably competing in…

  • passages

    The entire film takes place in one space – a room of which we see only one wall, upon which is the moving shadow of a tree being blown by the wind. In the window we see images, which act both as mirrors reflecting back what is happening inside the room, and as glass, allowing us to see what is happening outside the room. The film is divided into four sections plus an introduction with each section separated by a slow zoom in towards the window, drawing us through the successive levels of life and existence of the space of…

  • passing through / torn formations

    Music by Tucker Zimmerman. passing through/torn formations looks at a family blown apart by the migration from Czechoslovakia to Canada, the collision between old world and new. “‘passing through/torn formations’ extends from Eastern Europe and back again – an unraveling tapestry of family relations that speak of migration and translation.” – Marian McMahon “Philip Hoffman’s ‘passing through/torn formations’ is a wide open ramble through the labyrinth of memory, considered primarily as a family affair. The film deals with the life and history of Hoffman’s Czech-born mother and her family, as presented as a kind of polyphonic recitation of words, of…

  • Passion Crucified

    “Passion Crucified” is an episodic rite of passage rendered in tableau style. Part creation myth, part medieval science fiction, it enacts a typology of the body – offering us glimpses of Adam, Eve, Christ and Joan of Arc. Together they are figured as subterranean ideals, which continue to haunt us, even as they provide the means by which we might come to understand our own bodies. Begun as a dance performance, Torossian recasts her naked charge into a series of phantasmagoric settings – trees whose fruit show the faces of Medici children, drunken underground rooms filled with a rotting, natural…