Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. In Michelle Mohabeer’s films and videos, form and content are inextricably connected. Re-working the transformational film aesthetics of “third cinema,” Mohabeer’s experimental documentaries blend archival footage with personal memory, infusing each work with a signature pastiche of political consciousness, poetics and performance. Study guide includes an essay by Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University. “I recommend these films for researchers working on feminist theory, and the history of feminism, especially those with an interest in Canada and Canadian political identity or Caribbean/South American identity. These films will also be of use in the upper-level women’s studies classroom, especially courses in feminist theory.” – Ciara Healy, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh for EMRO (full review at http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=3492) 1) EXPOSURE 2) Coconut/Cane & Cutlass 3) Echoes 4) Tracing Soul 5) Child-Play
Filter Films
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Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Wrik Mead, Canada’s prolific poet-priest of pervert pixilation, has accumulated an impressive body of animated shorts in his twenty-year career. Known for his play with texture, light and colour, Mead’s films weave queer fantasies, parables, and even documentary, while exploring the relationship between stigma, shame, and sexuality. Study guide includes an essay by Tom Waugh, Concordia University. 1) What Isabelle Wants 2) Warm 3) Haven 4) Homebelly 5) Closet Case 6) frostbite 7) guise 8) stage fright 9) camp 10) Hand Job 11) Manipulator
Artist Spotlight Series: Wrik Mead
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Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. For more than thirty years, Barbara Sternberg’s filmmaking has considered the mysteries of human existence. Drawing on the creative power of the cinematic medium to make the invisible visible, Sternberg’s films use a resolutely personal approach to explore rhythm, time, space, and the nature of the everyday. Featuring: Opus 40; Transitions; Like a Dream that Vanishes; and Burning. Study guide includes an essay by Barbara Godard, York University. 1) Opus 40 (1979, 16mm, 14:30 min.) “Opus 40” is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to form pattern and rhythm, repetition in order and in revealing. “Opus 40” was filmed in the Enterprise Foundry, Sackville, New Brunswick, and has excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s writings. 2) Transitions (1982, 16mm, 11:30 min.) “Transitions” is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being between – between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being. These metaphysical themes are evoked by the central image of a woman in white over which layers of images and sound (voices) are superimposed. 3) Like a Dream that Vanishes (1999, 16mm, 39 min.) “Like a Dream That Vanishes” continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses. (Your life is like a candle burning.) Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles. 4) Burning (2002, 16mm, 7 min.) A multiplicity of diverse images – cut together rhythmically flicker with energy fire, light, life. “Your life is like a candle. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning.” – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Artist Spotlight Series: Barbara Sternberg
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Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Described as Canada’s “pre-eminent diary filmmaker,” Philip Hoffman has been making work since the late 1970s. Expanding the boundaries of the personal documentary, his films explore themes of family, memory and loss while at the same time interrogating the film medium and the authenticity of the photographic image. “Philip Hoffman is a precious resource, one of the few contemporary filmmakers whose work provides a bridge to the classical themes of death, diaspora, memory, and, finally, transcendence.” – Martha Rosler. Study guide includes an essay by Michael Zryd, York University. 1) Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984 16mm 6 min.) “Somewhere Between… is a Catholic drama of life and death played out in the streets of North America. Its gesture is a public circumstance: a horn band in Guadalajara, a Catholic procession in Toronto, distant passing traffic in Colorado. These scenes are presented, each in their turn, as separate and discrete events moving between titles describing a boy lying dead. They are a discourse that moves a geography of surface into concert with a transcendental history, a history of death.” – Mike Hoolboom, Vanguard 2) ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986 16mm 23 min.) “?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) is ostensibly about the making of Peter Greenaway’s feature film, A Zed and Two Noughts, the production of which Phil Hoffman was invited to the Netherlands to observe. However, Hoffman’s film actually concerns the terms and conditions under which it was itself made. In part, the film translates actuality and memory into invention and fiction in which the symbolic father is cast as a real ancestor. Hoffman rewrites the Canadian documentary tradition into a family memory and romance.” – Blaine Allan, A Play of History 3) passing through/torn formations (1988 16mm 43 min.) “Passing through/torn formations is a wide open ramble through the labyrinth of memory… The film deals with the life and history of Hoffman’s Czech-born mother and her family, as presented as a kind of polyphonic recitation of words, of images and of sounds.” – Robert Everett-Green, Globe & Mail “passing through/torn formations accomplishes a multi-faceted experience for the viewer. It is a poetic document of family, for instance- but Philip Hoffman’s editing throughout is true thought process, tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound.” – Stan Brakhage For a review of the DVD on Educational Media Reviews Online (EMRO),go to: http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=3771
Artist Spotlight Series: Philip Hoffman
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Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Christina Battle’s hand-processed, coloured and manipulated films explore the material and transformative possibilities of the film medium. Using techniques such as cameraless animation and collage, she “paints and sculpts” on film. Her work explores built and natural environments, history and the act of collective remembering, and a fascination with weather and storms. Study guide includes an essay by Janine Marchessault, York University. 1) hysteria (2006 35mm 4 min.) An unstable community leads to accusations and panic. Re-considering the Salem witch trials of 1692. Then doesn’t always seem so far off from now. 2) traveling thru with eyes closed tight (map #2 – january 03 thru january 06) (2006 35mm 4 min.) a yellow field meets clear blue skies. a mist of water over bright green grass. a well worn sidewalk in grey and white. a lone black crow on a sandy beach. a lowering sun fades into the sea. 3) migration (2005 16mm 5.5 min.) A late summer prairie storm as heard from above… someplace between this atmosphere and the next… 4) nostalgia (april 2001 to present) (2005 16mm 4 min.) “The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality…” – Noam Chomsky 5) the distance between here and there (2005 16mm 8 min.) Traveling through an invented landscape… the space between here and there. 6) fall storm (california 2003) (2004 16mm 3 min. ) Sitting in a quiet room; listening to a storm out the window. 7) following the line of the web (2004 16mm 2.5 min.) Creating an intricate visual map, photograms provide an opportunity to travel through the space of a spider’s web. 8) buffalo lifts (2004 16mm 3 min.) Awash in sumptuous colour, a herd of buffalo desperately try to hold on as they struggle to cross the film frame. 9) paradise falls, new mexico (2004 16mm dual-projection 4min.) “The desert wind from America’s Southwestern ghost towns blows through the film’s emulsion, stripping away the myth behind the imagery of shoot-outs, outlaws and the lone gunmen from Hollywood Westerns.” – Images Festival, Toronto, 2004 10) Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th Street (2002 16mm 3 min.) Highlighting the repetitive nature of oil wells in northern Alberta, this film documents a sighting common to the Canadian prairies. 11) Cooper/Bridges Fight (2002 16mm 3 min. ) The anxieties and frustrations of McCarthy-era Hollywood are integrated into this reconstruction of an infamous scene from “High Noon.” The struggle between a sheriff and his deputy become one with the film’s emulsion.
Artist Spotlight Series: Christina Battle
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Movements from just one point of view, movements within one setting, movements against a ubiquitous background: this is what this short film is documenting.
toronto mov.
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“sonntag morgen” tells the story of a split up – of two women, two lovers. A song of the same title provides the pace, the lyrics, the dialogue.
sonntag morgen (sunday morning)
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Shot during the opening stages of the First Gulf War, Kerr’s “Cruel Rhythm” revisits the American desert for a cinematic tone poem in the vein of ‘The Last Days of Contrition’ A canopy of sound bites of media coverage on the build-up toward the war is juxtaposed with the alienness of windmills in the desert, and a startling sequence of drifting faces of a crowd coming towards the camera in slow motion. A thought-provoking piece on media’s construction of societal paranoia “Cruel Rhythm” is an attempt to make a public, shared feeling intimate, or conversely, to make a subjective feeling of floating anxiety and dread into a shared representation.” Unsettlingly, its ambiance is as poignant today as ever.
Cruel Rhythm
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The filmmaker, his father and his youngest child walk past the house in Chinatown where the filmmaker’s father was born, triggering a sublime moment.
Dreaming House, The
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Two lovers – a sailor and an artist – made of different fabrics (one skin, one pleather) spend their last afternoon together.
(panacea)
