“Mirrored Measure” features two women separated by a generation. The older woman ceremoniously lays a table – she repeatedly spreads a cloth and smoothes it out. The table is set and glasses and jug filled with water. A balanced and controlled ritual follows in which the jug is passed round and water is repeatedly sipped. Water becomes the lens through which we see and the medium through which the protagonists connect. The sense of connectivity is abruptly severed when the first glass tumbles.
Filter Films
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“Swollen Stigma” nourishes the fantasy of its protagonist’s inner life and proposes a lesbian imaginary which takes leap into risk and displacement. The film opens with an entranced seated woman working her fingers through a single strand of hair and proceeds to explore her lived imaginary in which desire and fear interlace. She re-visions different moments in time which are haunted by an absent lover. Like a playful fairy princess, this lover appears upside down in an armchair, hanging legs-down from the ceiling, playing dead on the floor, or eating roses; her body continuously permeates the woman’s reality. The film’s shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external with the fluidity of blood into water.
Swollen Stigma
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“Cast” creates a claustrophobic and haunting space where people and things invade worlds in which they do not normally belong. Lifeless dolls are heaped inside drawers, dolled-up life size figures lie motionless on a windy beach at the water’s edge; a chair rocks in an empty room, a mirror reflects and observes, and a chest of drawers is caressed by the sea. The film has a dramatic sensibility that sets up a false promise of narrative. Its structure, instead, is akin to that of dreams where different scenic spaces collapse and the inanimate and animate interchange. Wide-angled perspectives, shifting points of view and juxtapositions of sound and silence force inner and outer realities to collide, creating an unsettling psychic world.
Cast
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Ritualised through performance to camera, “Stages of Mourning” is Pucill’s journey of bereavement. In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how our relationship with the dead is made different through film. The artist orders image fragments of her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire. By trying to physically immerse herself into photographs and film footage or by restaging these, Pucill forms a continuous stream of a life of two lovers. Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine that didn’t stop.
Stages of Mourning
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An homage to the cylists of the world and routes less traveled. Referencing The Smiths, Run DMC, and Kenneth Anger, this video follows six bike gangs through back alleys and side streets. The gangs travel to a park where a dance battle ensues.
Breakdance Hunx (Market Value Mix)
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Paul Keswick is an awkward middle-aged man. Paul Keswick is a data analyst at Interbank head office. Paul Keswick is a shy bachelor who lives alone. Paul Keswick is tired of Paul Keswick. Maybe that is why he decides to shave off his moustache. But regardless of his intentions, the result is quite unexpected. Almost immediately, women of all ages begin to approach Paul and mistake him for the famous literary rock star, David Hawk. Initially embarassed, Paul soon learns to enjoy their misguided attention, even thrive on it, eventually altering his clothes and physical appearance so as to fool his admirers and enhance his own experience.
Poet, The
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A meditative look at a mutable and hypnotic horizon. Grainy Super 8 imagery, optically printed 16mm footage and an atmospheric soundtrack evoke the stillness of mind reached when standing before expansive sky and water. Filmed at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, Lake Ontario (in my head) was created as part of LIFT’s 25th anniversary Film is Dead… Long Live Film! commissioning project.
Lake Ontario (in my head)
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“Twirl Girl” is a study of circular motion. It incorporates hand processing, xerography, rotoscoping and found footage in order to transpose the image of a woman dancing in circular fashion.
Twirl Girl
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“Resurrection,” a hand-processed Super 8 blow-up, uses direct animation techniques such as scratching, bleaching and painting onto the emulsion of the film, in order to invoke the awakening of the feminine.
Resurrection
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The spiders are organizing themselves…one day soon they’ll take over. “Phantasmic photograms crawl across the emulsion, their flow arrested via re-photography, these marks look like multi-hued spiders crawling towards a new berth. Again and again. Falling from the horizon of the frame line in warm hues of red and purple and brown. A movie of theme and variations, noting the small changes of tone and texture and opacity. Every day I don’t have a new best friend, a new job, a new home. I live within the frame, trying to find freedom in my restrictions, my life.” – Mike Hoolboom, 2007
Behind the Walls and Under the Stairs
