Genres: experimental

  • Yukon Postcards

    I was concerned with the ways we construct stories to order our experiences and memories. Experience and memory are ongoing processes, without boundaries. However, we edit and organize on narrative principles in order to share our history and to make events meaningful to us. The central character reads his version of incidents that he may have witnessed as a mineworker in Northern Canada. A series of snapshots re-tells the stories in a less personal, more oblique fashion. The stories appear to have connections to personal experience and each appears to confirm the truth of the other. Yet they also comprise…

  • Zum Ditter

    A rare document of amateur sound poet and “stunter” extraordinaire, Allan MacKay, exploiting the greatest name in music – Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799). In this extemporary performance piece, camera and actor develop a tight rapport like two instruments in a jazz band. Nothing is rehearsed except the finale, itself discovered by accident. The narrative structure of the piece establishes a subversive dialetic as bizarre as the filmmaker’s own piano punk-tuations, added later. “Quite interesting – quite interesting indeed.” – Allan McFee, Eclectic Circus, CBC 1979

  • Codes of Conduct

    “Codes of Conduct” playfully upends the moral order by which man has historically seen fit to measure so-called “correct” behaviour. By ironically re-positioning the rules, Rimmer uncovers their arbitrariness.

  • Blue Movie

    “‘Blue Movie’ was made for the international Dome Show where it was projected down onto the muslin surface of David Rimmer’s geodesic dome. The audience lay on the floor looking up at it, the inside of each eye finishing the globe.” – Gerry Gilbert, B. C. Monthly Magazine, June, 1972

  • nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

    ASL is not English: it has a syntax of its own. Remaining true to e.e. cummings’ vision, the poem was transliterated metaphorically into the original syntax of the ASL rather than the SEE (Signed Exact English) to express the poet’s linguistic play in words. The poetic hand movements of the ASL/Art-Sign is to emphasize the dexterous quality of cummings’ perspective, to innovate a different kind of visual interpretation, best suitable for an avant-garde poem. This film, based on e.e. cummings’ poem, presents a penetrating, political-linguistic expression of humanity in a twisting, intertwining multi-choreographed collaboration of the several artists in Art-Sign,…

  • Panic Bodies

    “Filmed in the shadow of AIDS, ‘Panic Bodies’ is Hoolboom’s testament to the permanent impermanence of the flesh. The film’s six parts show the range of Hoolboom’s engagement with mortality, from rage to reverie … Whether he’s remixing ‘Terminator 2’ or concocting a female paradise, Hoolboom finds a balance between razor-sharp intellect and palpable love for images and sounds. To watch ‘Panic Bodies’ is to see what it means to live and die in the cinema.” – Cameron Bailey, NOW “Paul Rioeur said the toughest things humans have to face are that we die and not everyone loves us. ‘Panic…

  • last split second, the

    Toronto artist Andy Patton’s account of breaking his back was adapted to performance by Judith Doyle in 1981. Mounted at the now-legendary Funnel Experimental Film Centre in Toronto, “Transcript – On Pain” was presented in the form of recorded voice-over with slides of text. Andy Patton described his trauma with extraordinary clarity and insight. For “the last split second,” Judith Doyle uses her original voice recording from “Transcript” as a base for imagery. Glass shatters into light. A hospital corridor is reframed into the “tunnel vision” of shock. Medical scans, anatomical drawings, and animations of the brain and spine reveal…

  • Blue Venice / Red Hotel

    A meneral memory movie, “Blue Venice / Red Hotel” consists of seven loops of B&W film projected at various speeds and re-filmed off the wall; magnified, superimposed, filtered red and blue. The loops were built from “The Red Hotel,” an earlier film and one which was shot at high velocity frame by frame. This new film came out of a desire to explode seconds of Venice that appear in “The Red Hotel.”

  • bodies of water

    “Bodies of water” is a poetic memory of the filmmaker’s return to the Ganges River in India where her grandparents were cremated. It was only with her generation that daughters were included on the family tree. Was she now relevant? Impressionistic, meditative images of water are superimposed with slide guitar and tablas.

  • Pensão Globo

    A man facing his approaching death takes what is perhaps his last journey and ends up in “Pensao Globo” in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions throughout the city. With oversaturated colours, both sanguine and succulent, vision swims and slips away in echoing superimpositions. These overlapping exposures convey a sense of the permeable boundaries between life and death.