Genres: experimental

  • Performance by Jack Smith, A

    In October of 1984, the highly acclaimed New York artist, Jack Smith, came to Toronto for a week long performance/Halloween ritual at the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre. This performance, true to Smithesque form, went by three different titles: “Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application,” “Brassieres of Uranus,” and “Impacted Croissants From Outer Space.” Accompanied by the music of Yma Sumac, this short piece remains the last film documentation of this historic event.

  • Perfumed Nightmare

    “One of the year’s ten best films.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice “There’s nothing even remotely nightmarish about ‘Perfumed Nightmare.’ It’s an enchanting and poignant experience, a totally original seriocomic creation with an infectious and exuberant energy. The film is a semi-autobiographical fable by a young Philippino named Kidlat Tahimik, about his awakening to, and reaction against, American cultural colonialism. Born in 1942 during the Occupation, Kidlat spent ‘the next 33 typhoon seasons in a cocoon of American dreams.’ This, then, is his perfumed nightmare: the lotus land of American technological promise. “In his primitive village he worships the heroism…

  • Azure Serene

    “Inspired by the poets of Rainer Maria Rilke, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound…Elder’s latest film…is a visually lush collage,” and “an ironic attempt to construct a ‘Divine Comedy’ for modern times.” – Jim Shedden

  • Perils

    An homage to silent films: the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy; seduction, revenge, jealousy, combat. The isolation and dramatization of emotions through the isolation (camera) and dramatization (editing) of gesture. I had long conceived of a film composed only of reaction shots in which all causality was erased. What would be left would be the resonant voluptuous suggestions of history and the human face. “Perils” is a first translation of these ideas. (AC) “Even more emphatic in its expose of movie methods is ‘Perils,’ which stages stylized fight scenes, with an occasional appearance by a camera on a…

  • Permutations and Combinations

    Aleatory procedures are used to create movement at the points of fusion of the still images of which the film is constituted. For this reason, all movements within the film are completely reversible. This reversibility is extended into the film’s overall structure, as the film is formed into a loop – a closed container for the film’s chance elements. Such a structure, I believe, results in the complete elimination of all vestiges of drama from the film. Hence this film is a companion piece to “She Is Away.” The sounds of the film though determined in their occurrence by specific…

  • philter

    A visual essay based on the sound piece “Toxic Philter.”

  • Picture Start

    This lyric brief is a meditation on the natural world, its carefully wrought superimpositions of sky, leaves and chromatic close-ups a powerfully felt evocation of animistic surround. Photographed with a keen eye for detail, Kneller’s painterly overlays collage these moments into a gently flowing homage to the present.

  • Babylon Series #1

    After a six -or seven- year study of Hammurabi’s Code, original Babylonian Text and translation, I’ve tried to feel my way into the moving visual thought process of this ancient culture (whose numerical system is composed primarily of building materials, nails, joints and the like): this, then, is a visual music which balances the two thought processes of Structure and Nature.

  • Pierre Vallières

    He delivered three essays, without stopping, except for reel change and camera breakdown: 1) Mont Laurier; 2) Quebec history and race; 3) women’s liberation. Everything which happened is recorded on film. It was a one-shot affair, I either got him on film or I missed. What we see on film is the mouth of a revolutionary, extremely close, his lips, his teeth, his spittle, his tongue which rolls so beautifully through his French, and finally the reflections in his teeth of the window behind me. (JW)

  • Pioneers of X-Ray Technology

    “In Ann Marie Fleming’s ‘Pioneers of X-Ray Technology’ (a film about Grandpa), super-8 home movies are only one part of the film’s cooly complex structure. The first time I saw ‘Pioneers’ it looked like an uncomplicated portrait of Fleming’s grandfather, Dr. Ernest To, who was a photographer, amateur filmmaker and Hong Kong radiologist. On second viewing, the film’s ambivalence towards its subject becomes clear. “Fleming (‘You Take Care Now,’ ‘New Shoes’) is known for the ‘quirkiness’ of her films, but she’s above all a brilliant editor, both cinematographically and conceptually. Like nearly all her films, ‘Pioneers’ benefits from remarkable compression.…