The radical change from an institutional residence to an apartment complex promoting independence sets the stage for this film about the people at Bellwoods Park House in Toronto. Founded in 1967 by the Adult Cerebral Palsy Institute, Bellwoods is one of the first residences for the disabled in North America. This film puts a face on people too often masked by our perception of disability. Produced for The Adult Cerebral Palsy Institute of Metro Toronto.
Filter Films
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“Nice Girls Don’t Do It” is a not-quite-conventional documentary about female ejaculation. While referencing some of the codes of pornography (i.e. out-of-focus, leather, explicit close-ups), the film clearly works against conventional pornography in its use of black and white film, text, and in its positioning of the spectator. The film serves less as a treatise than as an invitation to its spectators to fill in the gaps created by the film – to query, challenge, investigate, object, corroborate, perhaps inveigh against, but ultimately to create a space for others to speak about a part of female experience long-shrouded in silence.
Nice Girls Don’t Do It
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Yet another girl sitting by the phone waiting for a roving boy to ring. The same old story – until she meets his latest girlfriend…
Nice
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Drawing on both the substance and spirit of hardcore music, “Niagara” sets in motion a number of male-female scenarios designed to challenge male aggression. A couple’s argument in the back seat of a car erupts into violence when the man suspects his lover of having an affair in Niagara Falls. Another couple arrives home from a dinner party and encounter an intruder in their home. As a gang runs around and commits random acts of violence, they sing the film’s chorus: Do you think he did it?/Wouldn’t be right. Would it?/he’s not the type anyway. Is he?/Hit!Hit!Hit!/He’s all rage and hate, you see.?He’s feel no guilt, you see./Oh no?-Not one bit!
Niagara
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“What’s involved in love?-power, control-is that what we’re talking about?” This film is about love-relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular. Another voice-over reads parables, which present a context for the possibility of love or spirit in the world at large. The film ends optimistically: a smile slowly spreads on a man’s face; women addressing men in their own voices. “He stored the Divine Light in a vessel, but the vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst, and its shards, permeated with sparks of the Divine, scattered through the Universe.” – Adele Wiseman Collections: National Gallery of Canada
At Present
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Using fragmented personal imagery, “Next to Me” renders Cartier-Bresson’s theory of the “decisive moment” fully in cinematic terms. The film is an expressionistic exercise in editing, which explores the nature of time and memory, film and still photography, against the urban landscape of New York. “Renais-like, Hancox discovers the plastic qualities of time, the involving power of fragmentation… The work is inventive and fresh with a spontaneous approach made meaningful by some remarkably fine-edged cutting. He uses visual images like words and sounds in poetry.” – Cinema Canada, May 1974
Next to Me
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Newton was the greatest of all the natural magicians, learned in matters musical, theological and in Apocalyptic literature. He believed bodies were composed of “certain aetheral spirits, or vapours”; one…is the ether, “the succus nutritius of the earth, or primary substance”; the second substance disseminated through the first, is light. (RBE)
Newton and Me
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“One of the major achievements of the sixties. Mike Snow postulates an eye that stares at surfaces with such intensity… The image itself seems to quiver, finally gives way under the pressure. A deceptive beginning – silent: a flat white form sharply cut to the silhouette of a walking woman…More human images, love-making – a human epic now still ruled by the after image of the Walking Woman. As in no other film yet seen, its alternately soft and granite images lift us toward the year 2000; capturing not events, not objects, but again and again registering a ‘placement’ of consciousness – the subject matter of the future, really. Human energy on film…” – Richard Foreman, New York Film Co-op
New York Eye and Ear Control
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A rare combination of personal diary and travelogue, “New View, New Eyes” traces the filmmaker’s efforts to carve out her own identity, as she makes her first visit to her father’s homeland of India. The journey is an uncomfortable one, as she struggles with “western” preconceptions of India – poverty, beggars, disease – and realizes that she herself has come there as a stranger.
New View, New Eyes
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A straightforward account of what happens when a collector furnishes an apartment until he finally attains his ultimate collection…. He leaves behind his innocent, youthful romance and acquires instead human-objects, object-objects, and a life removed from his real surroundings. This story of a trivia-maniac questions extreme materialism and trivial taste.
At Home
