Genres: narrative

  • Johnston…Johnston

    “Johnston…Johnston” is about a nervous stockbroker who locks himself into a daydream to escape aggressive management and his meaningless corporate existence. In an attempt to renew his spirit, Johnston’s consciousness tries to break into his dream-state to forcibly regain control over his soul. Returning to reality, however, is out of the question and violence erupts. The disastrous consequence of his inner turmoil leads to his incarceration in a circular timewarp of repeating events.

  • Landscape Suicide

    “In ‘Landscape Suicide’ Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. “Benning has created a script which…

  • Leave Me Alone Don’t Ever!

    While sitting in a pig-sty meditating on gloom and squirming compost, a spurned lover begins to spontaneously levitate. At first she’s unimpressed: “Not much of a levitation, a couple of inches, useful in places where the seats are hard, like customs offices, buses, churches, yoga class, but other than that, what’s the use?” But then, a revelation: “Maybe when she sees how spititual I’ve become, maybe then she’ll love me like she ought to.” She floats to her lover’s door in a desperate attempt to win back lost love. No dice. Things just go from weird to worse. “A pixillated…

  • Letter to a Long Lost Friend

    The processes of memory bringing forth, after. American Retreat. “An image I can live with.” The arc and shadow of time. We are presented with an image of trees which slowly fades to black. As it fades, quick luminous close-ups of branches with, and then without, leaves emanates from the darkness. We travel from the midst of a situation (not seeing the trees for the forest) to memory’s preoccupation with condensed luminous details. Finally it is only the details which we keep with us; the original situation fades into the past. On the soundtrack we hear a man reading from…

  • Lockjaw

    A babbling talking cure; an explanation; a walking tongue; a description of the juncture between I and you; the difference between what I feel and what I know; the body, the mind and what stands between – LOCKJAW.

  • Lost in the no-zone

    Guillaume’s obsession: prove that angels exist. Guillaume seeks proof, but the world he inhabits escapes definition. He doesn’t know, but he’s lost in the no-zone. A film made entirely from still photographs with animation… Angels, murder, mystery and intrigue… a sensual journey into the real of the fantastic. A fantasy photo novel in film.

  • Low Visibility

    This is the first feature directed by Patricia Gruben, who created the much-admired “The Central Character” and the award-winning “Sifted Evidence.” Gruben is one of Canada’s foremost filmmakers, part of a new generation which combines avant-garde techniques with narrative elements. “Low Visibility” finds a man wandering alone on a snowy mountain roadside, waving his arms and shouting at the sky. The enigmatic Mr. Bones, an apparent amnesiac, is unableor unwilling to explain what has happened to him. He arouses, as a result, the curiosity not only of the doctors and nurses of the hospital he is taken to, but also…

  • Man Who Envied Women, The

    Jack Deller, a professor of Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, is left by his artist-wife after four years of marriage. Deller is played by two actors; the wife is never seen. Her voice is heard throughout – it governs the film. The camera pursues him on the image track, while her voice pursues her train of thought. The structure of the film is elaborated in a constant interweaving of fiction and documentary, narrative and theory, amidst issues of sexuality, aging, power relations, and political activism.

  • Mary

    Mary is a kind of everygirl, living with her parents’ constant battling, but able only to deal with the kid stuff – the boy who picks on her at school, the embarrassment her best friend causes. I liked the kitschy ‘70s setting. It kind of reminded me, because I lived through that era, of the stuff I had to deal with when I was little. (VR)

  • Mary Mary

    Presented as an autobiography, “Mary Mary” interweaves the political with the mythical; visual and textual “quotes” from other films with fragments of children’s stories; and dreams and memories with history. “M” is an ambiguous figure: an English-Canadian woman filmmaker struggling with the representational structures that form and are formed by her as she tries to make a film. At first her script eludes her. Locked in her room, she becomes tangled in a web of memories, images and stories, quotations and histories. Yet even within these confines (narrative and psychic, as well as architectural) the possibility of new readings is…