While sitting in a pig-sty meditating on gloom and squirming compost, a spurned lover begins to spontaneously levitate. At first she’s unimpressed: “Not much of a levitation, a couple of inches, useful in places where the seats are hard, like customs offices, buses, churches, yoga class, but other than that, what’s the use?” But then, a revelation: “Maybe when she sees how spititual I’ve become, maybe then she’ll love me like she ought to.” She floats to her lover’s door in a desperate attempt to win back lost love. No dice. Things just go from weird to worse. “A pixillated panopoly of pathetic devotion in the energetic, eccentric style of the director’s ‘I’m Happy. You’re Happy. We’re All Happy. Happy, happy, happy.’” – Pacific Cinematheque “Leave Me Alone Don’t Ever!” is stunningly photographed with incredible colour saturation, set in the flowering meadows and surreal sandstone formations of BC’s Galiano Island. The film was originally created as part of the Cineworks Omnibus film “Breaking Up in Three Minutes,” a series of short films on relationships gone bad. As part of the requirements of the project, the film was shot in sequence, with only three edits.
Filter Films
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The film conjures up images and sounds of Canadian poet Irving Layton through various media sources. The subject is the image of Layton and the surface of the film image. The footage was optically printed and hand-processed. “I find these images disturbing; I see my own death in them.” – Irving Layton
Layton Symphony
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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 5
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An examination of the factors which hinder people, especially women, from finding a voice. “Interruption is a mechanism by which: A) men can prevent women from talking, and B) they can gain the floor for themselves…” – Dale Spender . “After all, the whole point of a sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place.” – John Osborne The roughness of the film is a testament to the determination to work through all the technical problems of the production.Throughout, the questions – how are images (of self, of others, on film) constructed? and how are engineering and filmmaking related? (and why do filmmakers remind me so much of engineering students?) – served to guide the choices made in text, image and structure. In the end, Newton’s Laws prove true as inertia keeps the body/camera/optical printer in motion until the film is finished.
Accident/Interruption
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“The Law Is in the Seed” is a video of a poem by the same name written by Alex Jacobs, a Mohawk Indian poet from Akwesasne (New York State). The poem is about the Native American concept of democracy as contained in the Great Law, an oral document which originated with Deganawida, the Huron co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Great Law was the model for the United States Constitution. As Jacobs begins to recite the poem on camera, the video mixes to the faces of Mohawk children and women, their lips moving in and out of sync with Jacobs’ voice. This treatment represents the oral passing of the Great Law from generation to generation, and the continuation of tribal law from Deganawida to the present generation. This video was shot at the Kahnawake reservation after the 1990 Oka crisis in Quebec. The women and children in the video were witnesses to the reqional conflict between the Canadian Army and the Mohawks at Kanehsatake and Kahnawake. Consequently, they understand the meaning of the poem in the context of their own tribal history and future. Prior to the reading of the poem is a speech in Mohawk by Billy Two Rivers, a Kahnawake Council Chief. The speech represents the words of Deganawida welcoming the final nation to the Confederacy. The wampum belt shown under the title is from the National Museum of the American Indian and is said to be the actual wampum belt of Deganawida, which marked the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy. The archival photos are of the Seneca and Oneida, two nations of the Confederacy.
Law Is in the Seed, The
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Late afternoon light is usually viewed as “the magic light,” the most beautiful light of the day. But it is too short for people to really enjoy it. So is the love between human beings. The love story of two women in this video represents love in general. Although love is momentary, it is unforgettable – which is the whole meaning of the life we are living.
Late Afternoon
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Sometimes words and phrases have higher meaning at specific moments. Sometimes words spoken take on significance much later. There’s just massive “stuff” to absorb each day, and some days are sponges. “The Last Night of Charles Bukowski” is about such moments.
Last Night of Charles Bukowski, The
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Shot in the late 1980s in deserts of the American southwest, LAST DAYS is a poetic, harrowing vision of the apocalyptic consequences of militarism and the bankruptcy of the American ideal. Set after the fall, disembodied voices prophesize and attest over a swirling ménage of unsettling desert landscape, weaponry, and dystopian nationalist symbolism.
Last Days of Contrition, The
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“In ‘Landscape Suicide’ Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. “Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. The two monologues are embedded in Benning’s characteristic meditations of landscape: long shots of the Wisconsin farmlands, general stores, dirt roads and pick-up trucks, and the carefully tended lawns, swimming pools, sprawling bungalows and malls of the middle-class California suburb. These images are offered in the classically spare mise-en-scene, which Benning has perfected in his work as a cinematic poet of the contemporary American environment. Here, in his most accessible film so far, the beautiful, open vistas are dense with the significance of the catastrophes they engendered.” – Kay Armatage, Toronto Festival of Festivals, 1987
Landscape Suicide
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Using fixed frame timelapse, 15 hours of a day in the mountains, showing the changes in the sea and sky, is compressed into eight minutes. Designed originally to be rear-projected onto a plexiglass screen framed in a false wall by a traditional wooden picture frame.
Landscape
