Genres: experimental

  • He Was Born, He Suffered, He Died

    The quote is Joseph Conrad answering a critic who found his books too long. Conrad replied that he could write a novel on the inside of a match-book cover, thus (as above), but that he “preferred to elaborate.” The “Life” of the film is scratched on black leader. The “elaboration” of colour tonalities is as the mind’s eye responds to hieroglyph. (SB)

  • Shores of Phos: A Fable, The

    “Phos” equals light, but then I did also want that word within the title which would designate place, as within the nationalities of “the fabulous” – a specific country of the imagination with tangible shores, etc. The film adheres strictly to the ordinary form of the classic fable. (SB)

  • Comingled Containers

    This “return to photography” (after several years of only painting film) was made on the eve of cancer surgery – a kind of “last testament,” if you will… an envisionment of the fleeting complexity of worldly phenomenon.

  • Thatch of Night, The

    As a poem might be said to contain the night through a weave of words, so have I in this film attempted such container with warp and woof of emblematic visions. (Homage to Marie Menken’s “Notebooks.”) (SB)

  • Sirius Remembered 1, 2 &3

    I was coming to terms with decay of a dead thing and the decay of the memories of a loved being that had died and it was undermining all abstract concepts of death. The form was being cast out by probably the same physical need that makes dogs dance and howl in rhythm around a corpse. I was taking song as my inspiration and for the rhythm structure, just as dogs dancing, prancing around a corpse, and howling in rhythm-structures or rhythm-intervals might be considered like the birth of some kind of son. (SB)

  • Cab 16

    A direct cinema account of public service award-winner Elmer Larter, a taxi driver who devotes himself to the transportation of crippled and deaf children in Charlottetown, P.E.I.

  • Loving

    “The greens of the forest, the flesh tonesof the lovers, the browns of earth, the sky and the sun evolve.” (SB)

  • Persian Series 13 – 18

    In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. This is a collection of singly- and doubly-printed (two frames for each one) hand-painted work in six parts: 1) Singly-printed multi-colored watery “blobs” and “feathery” streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there’s an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the beginning of the film. 2) This begins in a deep brilliant red which darkens…

  • Dance Shadows

    “Dance Shadows” is part of “The Caswallon Trilogy.”

  • Cornell’s Portrait of June

    No description available.