Genres: experimental

  • Swell

    Desire disorients and bodily swellings result. “A lovely concoction of hand-tinted and scratched film evoking a woman’s flight from concrete to nature – spurred on by a kiss.” – Gordon Bowness, Xtra!

  • Four Corners

    “‘Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.’ These words, attributed to the Oglala Sioux medicine man Black Elk, are the final bit of text to appear in veteran filmmaker James Benning’s ‘Four Corners,’ which uses a specific geographical location to pose larger questions about the United States. Here, the geographic and wholly imaginary place Four Corners, that favorite tourist destination where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet, becomes a kind of theoretical ground zero, the site from which Benning can give voice to other, pointedly unofficial of spurious conspiracy (the history of the United States), but one in which each…

  • UTOPIA

    The opening credits for “UTOPIA” read: Except for some additional ambience, the entire soundtrack of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, The Bolivian Journal. A film by Richard Dindo, the images were found in the desert landscape from Death Valley south to, and crossing, the Mexican border. The text at the end of the film concludes: A sidewinder moving across the desert sand leaves in its wake an angled trail of J’s. A kangaroo rat ingesting seeds produces water by extracting hydrogen and oxygen from their carbohydrates and recombines the gases into H2O. Ridges in…

  • 62 Injections

    Get up, shower, shave, coffee, right? How about get up, jab finger, draw blood, give yourself a needle? Again and again … This film presents the daily routine of the film’s director, an insulin-dependent diabetic. The film records his morning regimen of blood sugar testing, needle preparation, and insulin injection, climaxing with a montage of a month’s worth of needles into various sites on his body. Afraid of needles? This won’t hurt a bit.

  • Natural Selection

    In a seemingly placid country setting, a young woman is pursued, and ultimately consumed, by unseen desires.

  • Bois de Balzac, Le

    “Since 1973, the filmmaker had made pilgrimages to Queen’s Park in the heart of Toronto to film a certain tree. With this collection of footage he produced ‘Le Bois de Balzac’ – completed in 1981. The entire film literally ‘revolves’ around the tree which becomes transformed and imbued with character and meaning. At times the tree is a mythological being and at others, an object of meditation. At one point it resembles the Rodin sculpture of the writer Balzac. The space surrounding it expands through the soundtrack to distant places on the globe, and the single tree in the park…

  • MURDER and murder

    Mildred is a professor who has lived as a lesbian for as long as she can remember. Doris, a mother of grown children, is taking classes and is falling in love with a woman for the first time. From different backgrounds and circumstances, Mildred and Doris try to carve out a life together. The film investigates the pleasures, uncertainties and ambiguities of late-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity within the confines of a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance. The story is haunted by the ghosts of Doris’ mother Jenny and an 18-year-old Mildred. Running parallel is a commentary…

  • BOOKCASE

    The idea for “BOOKCASE” came out of my desire to educate myself by creating a catalogue of film techniques. I was attempting to distill the elements of film to a pure state by stripping away any meaning from the images, to explore film as simply the masking and filtering of light. For subject matter I shot things which had, at one time or another, struck a chord within me. In doing so, I realized that I was also creating a catalogue of my own memories. I have always seen memories as discreet units of light, not unlike books on a…

  • Platform

    “‘Platform’ focuses on the meanderings of a hip prima donna (Kimberly Pike) who picks her platformed feet up from cords tangled on the floor of a studio filled with movie lights of all shapes and sizes. A tight, hard-edged and extremely self-reverential work of mixed media influences.” – Donna Lypchuk, eye Magazine

  • Birds of Paradise, The

    This is a hand-painted work which involves a variety of colours applied within gouged and scratched shapes which approximate both swift shifts of bird-shape (legs, beaks and feather-spreads especially) and the Bird of Paradise flower-form as well, the former tending to metamorphize into the latter across the course of the work.