“Destroying Angel” is an experimental documentary that relates two stories of illness, and weaves them into a filmic tapestry of family history, memory and loss. The narrator, confronted with his own mortality, guides us through a landscape of recollections, dreams, close friendships and family ties. Narratives about present-day events interplay with lyrical reminiscences of the past. Eventually, just as the past always informs the present, the two styles of narrative begin to merge. In the end, we are left with a moving portrait of the struggles involved in dealing with AIDS, cancer, memory and intimate relationships. “What was clear from the onset, was that Wayne and I would make a film together. We fell into the project by ‘accident.’ On his first visit to the farm we shot a few rolls of film which were hand-processed. The project took off from there, and after three years and several manifestations the film has found its form. Working in several formats, without a pre-conceived script, allowed us to bring in freely ‘snapshots’ of the past and present. This enabled us to change directions, and integrate into the film our passions, discoveries and misfortunes as the inexorable process of life rolled on.” – Philip Hoffman “Destroying Angel” is a moving picture of how, through remembering, the destructive duo of oppression and illness can be healed and brought into the sacred.
Filter Films
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Two young men, Alliocha and Bruno, have anonymous sex in a public bathroom and are prematurely separated when one loses his nerve. Bruno fears they’ve been watched. Later, the two men are reunited by chance in the same English as a Second Language class for new Canadian immigrants. Alliocha, the young extroverted Russian, tries to provoke his potential partner, Bruno into having a relationship. But their lack of common language leads them into a unique clash of cultures. One day, an unexpected event brings them together again and both men are forced to confront their assumptions of each other.
Somebody Is Watching Us
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Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan are followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. Near the film’s end the tram lands in Manhattan, as if it had reversed direction; as in all of Murray’s films, the images and the editing can pull several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through.” – Fred Camper “The film aims to illuminate a vital sense innate to perception where inversion is counterbalance and focal myopia the articulation of space.” – JM
If You Stand With Your Back To The Slowing Of The Speed Of Light In Water
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Live actions with hand scratched sound, this film presents the frustration of feeling the need to speak with nothing to say. Filmed by the artist’s husband at the time, the film also relates to subtle complexities of communication within marriage.
Forever Hold Your Peace
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Loosely exploring the historical weight of institutionalized religion in a postmillennial society, and its relationship to individual spirituality, the filmmaker places herself into the Jacob myth on the Pentateuch. She plays the role of Jacob in an attempt to come to terms with her religious upbringing, and her anxious ambivalence towards her own agnosticism. Inspired by the in-camera techniques of the early cinema of Meliese, the film and all of its special effects were shot and edited entirely in-camera in one take.
Playing Jacob
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A diaristic film in which the filmmaker comes to terms with her new life in Vancouver, “16mm Postcard” is a bittersweet letter back home to the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative in Halifax. Like in any letter, it becomes painfully obvious that one can never fully communicate, and the result is a series of random tidbits that point to a larger experience.
16mm Postcard
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Throughout the journey, meanings that symbols once held for us shift and change as black and white blend to form grey. We see ourselves reflected in the world around us and the world around us envelops us. Things that were once threatening become comforting arms of solace while things that were once sanctuaries threaten to drown us. Water has the power to cleanse as well as the power to drown while the forest is both protective and foreboding.
Turning
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“Knowledge of Good and Evil” is an abstract exploration of the tension surrounding women and stereotypical representations of their knowledge. This film was created from footage shot at Phil Hoffman’s independent imaging retreat (aka “the film farm”) in Ontario as well as from footage shot in Vancouver (where I had given myself the challenge of shooting 100 feet of film every month). All of the footage was hand-processed, and some of it was contact printed by hand and treated in baths of potassium ferricyanide. The final film was created through various optical printing techniques.
Knowledge of Good and Evil
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Created from super 8 footage that was shot in the 1970s of the family dogs and the trains that my father worked on, this film explores the decay of memory and image. The super 8 film grew fungus while stored in a basement. It was then optically printed up to 16mm and slowed down so that the snowflake shaped fungus could be studied. Narration presents fragmented stories of childhood memories. This film was created as a source film, which was later physically cut up and reprinted with a flashlight to destroy the image and sound for the subsequent film “Mechanical/Animal Memory” which is owned by the NFB.
Mechanical Memory
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This experimental dance film employs a bastardized version of the 1930s’ three-strip Technicolor process. Shot entirely on black-and-white film through colour filters, the images were recombined into full colour through optical printing techniques, one frame at a time. The gestures in this dance work explore the psychological fracturing and reunification in representations of the female body.
Three Part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1
