“Much of the imagery seen on TV is first captured on film; here the filmmaker has reversed the process. As the title suggests, this film foregrounds the aesthetic nature of the television/cinematic medium by manipulating its pictorial qualities – image grain, scan lines and its luminous colour qualities. “The structure of the film alternates between looped, processed stock TV imagery and a blank, static blue screen. This formal motif – a blank frame or screen onto which the artist projects imagery which expresses inner emotions and anxieties – is a motif which recurs throughout Rimmer’s filmic oeuvre. ‘As Seen on TV’ is a moving film which conveys a deep-seated human experience.” – Maria Insell
Filter Films
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Duchamp once said about his bicycle wheel piece, “One day I had the happy idea to mount a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool and watch it spin.” One summer I had the happy idea of taking a bicycle trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay. The bicycle trip was recorded with a tiny “Keystone” camera. I leave out important events like eating and camping and concentrate mainly on what is seen from the moving bicycle. After a time the camera, bicycle and myself become entangled, involved, friends and enemies. A film on moving. As a film I often mount it on a projector and happily watch my memories spin on the screen. (JA)
Moving Bicycle Picture
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The work of art in the age of genetic reproduction. Based on the practice of lip-reading, this short animated film explores the visual “code” of verbal pronunciation by animating pairs of lips cut out from magazines according to the position of the mouth in pronouncing a sound of spoken language. But, beyond a mere demonstration f lip-sync, this film employs the 24 frames per second cinematic “code” of motion to also explore Alexander Calder’s goal of achieving “a sense of motion on sculpture…where just as one can compose colours, or forms, so one can compose motions.”
Mouthpiece
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Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black. “Brakhage made ‘Mothlight’ without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine.” – Jonas Mekas “‘Mothlight’ is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter’s struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. ‘Mothlight’ is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being.” – Ken Kelman
Mothlight
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This film is animated in the rough collage style that James MacSwain has made his own. Utilizing a series of vignettes, the film traces the story of the child born to Marilyn Monroe and President Kennedy. As the satire unfolds, the story becomes a metaphor for the collapse of the American Empirre due to mysticism and drugs. Also available on DVD on the compilation “James MacSwain Retrospective.”
Mother Marilyn
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“Moscow Summer” is a street-level portrait of Moscow and its people. This lyrical documentary interweaves compelling visual sequences with impromptu interviews to create a rich and realistic portrait of the city. While Moscow’s political and social turmoil form an undercurrent in the film, ultimately “Moscow Summer” is a film about love and humanity – and those are the qualities with which it has been made.
Moscow Summer
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“Mosaic’s carefully tuned strategies of montage are already present in its opening title sequence. Isolating the individual letters of its entitlement, it shows them in succession before gathering them all together. Likewise, Chambers recasts details from his surroundings in a symbolic lyricism that joins the rhythms of mortality and rebirth. Its fragmented collage collects a fly infested corpse, a woman strewing flowers, a runner, an old man standing, and a child nursing from his mother’s breast. An elegant and sophisticated reshuffling of domestic temporality, ‘Mosaic’ boldly anticipates the themes of Chambers’ well-known later work.” -Mike Hoolboom “It was in the summer of 1964 that I made my first movie, ‘Mosaic’. I shot literally miles of film since I was also learning to use the camera. The film finally ended up nine minutes long…”- Jack Chambers
Mosaic
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Joyce Wieland was, for well over thirty years, one of Canada’s most exciting and innovative artists. She worked in virtually every artistic medium, including cloth works, pastels, coloured pencils, oils, bronze, watercolours, and films of all gauges. One of the founding group of what came to be known as structural filmmakers in New York in the late 60s, she was also one of the first artists of this century to break into women’s traditional crafts as an art form, and used both film and cloth works as platforms for her principal political subjects – ecology, Canadian nationalism, and feminism. This documentary film combines expressionistic uses of cinematography and sound to examine Wieland’s work in all media. Avoiding both the chronological treatment usually found in retrospective considerations of artists’ work and the conventional voice-over narration common to films on art, “Artist on Fire” offers an analysis of thirty years of Wieland’s work that is rich in both detail and contextual information. Armatage combines a complex interweaving of multiple unscripted voices which are intricately edited and embedded in an evocative soundtrack of effects and music (mostly modern, electronic and Canadian) with an illuminating juxtaposition of images: excerpts from Wieland’s work over twenty years, artworks in many modes and actuality footage of Wieland at work. “An astoundingly dynamic piece of filmmaking – an intense marriage between Armatage and Wieland’s art.” – Carole Corbeil, Globe and Mail.
Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland
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This film is a documentation of variations of sunlight and shadow patterns over a period of time in a corner of our room – the Morning Room.
Morning Room
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“Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, “Moose Jaw” is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along with a giant moose), and schemes to restore yester-year boast the motto “There’s a future in our past” – ironically adopted by Hancox himself in this one-hour, experimental documentary filmed over the course of a decade. A poetic, multi-levelled excavation of personal memory, social and political history, and the pre-historic, “Moose Jaw” is also a reflective portrait of the filmmaker’s hometown as a faded symbol of Empire, and “storm centre” on the frontier of a museumized future. “Rick Hancox’s ‘Moose Jaw’ is a poetic prophetic analysis into a personal and deeply existential journey…a meeting point of autobiography and history… Here the museum has finally come inside.” – Arthur Kroker, “The Possessed Individual,” New World Perspectives
Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past
