Genres: experimental

  • Région Centrale, La

    “This new, three-hour film by the Canadian Michael Snow, is an extraordinary cinematic monument. No physical action, not even the presence of man, a fabulous game with nature and machine which puts into question our perceptions, our mental habits, and in many respects renders moribund existing cinema: the latest Fellini, Kubrick, Buñuel etc. “For ‘La Region Centrale,’ Snow had a special camera apparatus constructed by a technician in Montreal, an apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral. The film is one continuous movement across space, intercutting occasionally the X serving as a point…

  • Relativity

    A man wonders, measures, views relationships, people, places, things, time, himself. A sensual journey through a series of subjective reflections. “The artist’s search for meaning of his own existence is never-ending and takes many forms. Ed Emshwiller’s remarkable epic, ‘Relativity,’ continues this exploration with extraordinary frankess and rare technical skill.” – Willard Van Dyke

  • Rembrandt, Etc. and Jane

    Here are four films, the interrelationship of which constitutes a complex quarto-thought-process: Not that the four sets-of-thinking are “parallel” in any sense, or that themes of each film inter-weave meaningfully in the three others, but rather as four “mobiles,” each seen separately, might be remembered as turning all at one in the same space without interfering with each other. (SB)

  • Remedial Reading Comprehension

    “The whole of ‘Remedial Reading Comprehension’ is a film of short phrases in an ambiguously didactic sequence. Dream inspiration and academic education are conflated and the viewer is constantly reminded of his status as a reader.” – P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film

  • Return to Departure: The Biography of a Painting – Or Watching Paint Dry and Other Realisms

    “This innovative feature documentary deals with both painting and documentary filmmaking as fictional processes. While the camera records, in extreme close-up, the chronological development of the super-realist painting, ‘Return to Departure,’ a multi-level asynchronous soundtrack builds up a parallel sound portrait of the (unseen) artist at work – a rambling, cheerfully free-associating monologue interspersed with radio music, children’s voice, telephone interruptions. “Gradually, we see more and more of the surface of the painting and of the working artist; beautifully shot and manipulated footage conveys the mixing of pigments, minute accumulation of figurative detail, endless compromises between vision and canvas. By…

  • Reunion in Dunnville

    This film started out as a community project involving my students at Sheridan College. On one level, it documents a remarkable reunion of people from as far away as Australia and New Zealand who converge on a small town in rural Ontario, where 2,436 Allied pilots received their training during World War II. A subtext emerges in the dialectic between our own newsreel footage of the event in 1979, and home movies shot by the veterans, including reunions at the base before it became a giant turkey farm. This allows for some revealing interruptions of conventional documentary codification, and serves…

  • Rhapsody on a Theme from a House Movie

    “…creating a subtle, shifting collage of static dwellings and abstracted, moving dwellers. Focusing in, yet never invading, suggesting depths by softly touching surfaces, the film concentrates on the exterior yet indicates an interior in which houses become homes become community…” – Helle Viirlaid When I first conceived the film, I saw it as a purely formal investigation of the visual effect(s) of creating a constant rhythmic series of lap dissolves. My original expectation was that by dissolving together overlapping static-camera shots, an illusion of movement might occur. After viewing the initial film footage, I realized that, apart from the intended…

  • Rhythms of the Heart

    “Cinema weaned from the monogamy of sound and image in a film equal to one’s capacity for wonder… In ‘Rhythms of the Heart,’ Steve Sanguedolce’s affinity for expressionistic documentaries turns to the depiction of a ruined relationship. “Sanguedolce belongs to the Escarpment School- a loosely knit group of filmmakers born and raised along the craggy slopes of the Canadian shield. Their work typically joins memory and landscape in a documentary based production. Inheritors of the 19th century Lake poet romantics, ‘nature’ is typically figured as a metaphor for consciousness. ‘Rhythms of the Heart’ typifies many of these Escarpment School concerns…

  • Riddle of Lumen, The

    The classical riddle was meant to be heard, of course. Its answers are contained within its questions; and on the smallest piece of itself this possibility depends upon SOUND – “utterly” like they say…the pun its pivot. Therefore, my “Riddle of Lumen” depends upon qualities of LIGHT. All films do, of course. But with “The Riddle of Lumen,” the “hero” of the film is light/itself. It is a film I’d long wanted to make – inspired by the sense, and specific formal possibilities, of the classical English language riddle… only appropriate to film and, thus, as distinct from language as…

  • river

    The Saugeen River was named Sauking, “where it all flows out,” by the Ojibwa in the early 1800s. It runs into Lake Huron, in central Ontario. The place where I know it is twenty miles south of Owen Sound, near Williamsford, where I spent lots of time in my youth exploring. Over the past twelve years I’ve returned there to film, and collected these moments in a fifteen-minute meditation called simply, “river.” In 1997, I arrived with a wind-up 16mm Bolex and one roll of 16mm colour film; in 1981 with a half inch, reel-to-reel black-and-white video portapak; in 1984,…