Cape Breton-based filmmaker Neil Livingston’s documentary is a psychedelic road movie about restlessness, breakfast recipes, the usefulness of male nipples and other assorted sundry. In other words, it’s a probing examination of the psyche in winter. Witty, irreverant, indulgent and self-mocking, “Licking the Window” confronts the filmmaker’s image of himself. The ensuing battle is entertaining, enlightening and worth the trip.
Filter Films
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“License to Kill, Part MCMXC” is a short animated film which reverses the role of hunter and hunted. It is a simple story about a bear who gets a hunting license and goes to the city to hunt man. It is animated by drawings of pencil crayon on white paper.
License to Kill, Part MCMXC
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“Taking her own last name as her primary organizing principle in approaching the past, Patricia Gruben has constructed one of the most inventive personal archeologies and family histories ever filmed. Over six years in the making, ‘Ley Lines’ eschews conventional narrative storytelling in favour of associative and cumulative revelation… “Gruben criss-crosses the globe as she traces the Gruben family back to Texas and then to Germany, only to end up in the present in Tuktoyaktuk. Her magical and unpredictable exploration makes innumerable stops along the way to consider such matter as satellites, DNA, geomancy, dowsing, Jimmy Dean, Hitler, the Thule Society, and a tycoon who willed $2 million to a lump of dirt. Gruben’s filmic exploration of the idea of family is illuminating, destabilizing and inclusive. A carefully shaped and resonant work of great imaginative power, ‘Ley Lines’ is guaranteed to fire neurons you didn’t even realize you had.” – David McIntosh, Toronto Festival of Festivals, 1993
Ley Lines
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Begun with a speech by Vito Russo, “Letters” enjoins a chorus of speakers to sound off on AIDS, love and death. Impelled with a variety of formal procedures, this series of mini-portraits are generously furbished with found footage extracts, hand-processed dilemmas, home movies, super-8 psychodramas, pixilated phantasms, intergalactic warfare and a hot kiss in a cool shower. “Mike Hoolboom has produced an absolutely sensational work, not only by the extreme density and intelligence of the witnesses who appear in the film, but also by the visual quality and inventiveness of his cinematographic language. Each shot, each edit has a message of pure aesthetics in this film. An overwhelming and luminescent reflection on death, AIDS and the living. Fifteen minutes to live!” – Image and Nation Catalogue, Montreal “For a work which transforms and transcends the essay film, for its stunning vision and intensely moving testimony of life in the age of AIDS, the 1996 NFB-John Spotton Award goes to Mike Hoolboom’s ‘Letters From Home.’” – Toronto International Film Festival Short Film Jury “‘Letters From Home’ is an impassioned investigation of the politics of disease. It is also something more. If a full comprehension of life including the recognition of death’s constant presence, even in our death-denying culture, ‘Letters’ offers a cogent, courageous rendering of this notion. It also demonstrates again that the penetrating and poignant films of Mike Hoolboom comprise one of Canadian cinema’s most compelling illuminations of those ephemeral outlines of perception we call life and death.” – Tom McSorley, Take One “‘Letters From Home’ is an intensely moving testimony of life in the age of AIDS. A speech by Vito Russo, in which he suggests that we all live with AIDS whether we are infected or not, is divided into a diaspora of texts read by many different people. Hoolboom adds his own narrative of seropositivity marking the discontinuity of his voice and the others through a montage of found footage, hand-held shots, home movies, super-8 sequences, pixilated phantasms and a hot kiss in a cool shower.” – Hot Docs Festival Catalogue, 1997 “An overwhelming and luminescent reflection on death, AIDS and living, ‘Letters From Home’ is a compelling montage of mini-portraits intercut with found footage, home movies, super-8 drama and pixilated imagery.” – Sheffield International Documentary Catalogue, 1997 Awards: Best Experimental, Oregon Film Festival, 1998; Honorable Mention, Arcigay Arcilbica Il Cassero, Bologna, 1998; Best International Short, Encontros International de Cine Documental, 1997; Best Independent Film and Best Experimental Film, Canadian International Amateur Film Festival, 1997; Interfilm Jury Prize, Oberhausen, 1997; Alexander Scotti Prize, Oberhausen, 1997; Best Experimental Short Documentary, Hot Docs, 1997; Jury Award, Ann Arbor Festival, 1997; Best Canadian Short Film, Toronto International Festival, 1996
Letters from Home
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The processes of memory bringing forth, after. American Retreat. “An image I can live with.” The arc and shadow of time. We are presented with an image of trees which slowly fades to black. As it fades, quick luminous close-ups of branches with, and then without, leaves emanates from the darkness. We travel from the midst of a situation (not seeing the trees for the forest) to memory’s preoccupation with condensed luminous details. Finally it is only the details which we keep with us; the original situation fades into the past. On the soundtrack we hear a man reading from a diary about touring through northern Italy; the things he sees, the people he meets, and the details which will be the only record of his passage when he looks back on his experience.
Letter to a Long Lost Friend
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“A Letter from Violet” is dedicated to the memory of Violet McNaughton, a Saskatchewan woman who was instrumental in women getting the vote in the province in 1916. Violet saw the vote as a tool towards social reform rather than the ultimate goal. She lived by the motto “the welfare of each is the concern for all” and firmly believed in both the equality of the sexes and the need for men and women to work together. Part of “Five Feminist Minutes.”
Letter from Violet, A
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This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems preferable for starts. I think each film’s integrity of rhythm would allow viewing at a greater variety of speeds, were there the 16mm projectors to allow that exercise. So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation (even more than their Roman equivalents) and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space. Finally, then, the inspiration of all those modern (and a few ancient) composers I’ve most loved since my teens overwhelms the easier, and comfortably lovely, habits of jig and do-re-mi AND creates a visual correlative OF music’s eventuality – i.e. each Arabic is formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps pre-natal) structure of thought itself.
Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 6
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Leila is haunted by dreams. Dreams of drowning, of a love long since gone cold, and the frozen place in the far north where it all happened – Rankin Inlet, NWT. Intoxicated by love, she travelled there long ago to live with her chosen one, only to fall victim to a crippling internal disease and a debilitating, hallucinatory winter that claimed her passion and, for a time, her sanity.
Let Me Wrap My Arms Around You
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In “Leftovers”, Janine Fung’s wild narration about misunderstandings in her traditional Chinese family plays over images of her mother carving turkey. Also available on QUEERS ON THE VERGE.
Leftovers
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Animal, fish and bird pictographs struggle to escape the filmic and musical presence of environmental poisons. Primarily an environmental picture, “Leaving the Poisons Behind” can also be seen as a forum for meditation on the idea of leaving behind personal poisons – smoking, drugs, drinking, abusive relationships, and so on. The film may also be of interest to those who are studying aboriginals and their environmental connections, and to those interested in petroglyphs and other figures from neolithic artists. It is a beautiful film as well as an innovative type of music video in film format, making it accessible to children as well as adults.
Leaving the Poisons Behind
