“Landfall” was shot in Prince Edward Island, near the family home on the Northumberland Strait. The original footage, shot in 1974, was a kind of interactive, camera “dance” with the environment. Poetry became important when the footage was later superimposed onto its own mirror-image, to help direct the viewer away from the luring yet limited world of image-identification. “I Thought There Were Limits,” by Quebec poet D.G. Jones, w as used to encourage the viewer to reject Newtonian notions of space and time, and to conceptualize the film’s interplay between absence, desire, and presence. Eventually, the limitation of text as spoken signifier is exposed through dynamic visual techniques reminiscent of concrete poetry. (RH) “While the camera swings and sweeps around an ocean cove in P.E.I. the interjection of frozen frames reveals the shadow of Hancox holding a Bolex camera above his head…the words, which now appear as text upon the screen, know no gravity as well… ‘Sense’ in Hancox’s poetical exploration, becomes non-sense. We can only know through repetition, in an enigmatic flash, the presence of the unconcious through absence.” – Dot Tuer, Vanguard “..typography and graphics become significant considerations, not to mention the timing and method of making the words appear and disappear. Comparable elements…when the poem is spoken on the soundtrack… ‘Landfall’ offers an excellent reading of the poem, which is, in turn, well integrated with the film’s visuals.” – William Wees, Words and Moving Images
Filter Films
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“How doth the city sit solitary, That was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations. Behold, Oh Lord; for I am in distress: My bowels are troubled; Mine heart is turned within me; For I have grievously revelled; Abroad the sword bereaveth, At home, there is as death.” “Lamentations,” which has a total running time of 435 minutes, comprises two parts: “The Dream of the Last Historian” and “The Sublime Calculation.” Each part can be rented separately. “Elder occupies a unique place in Canada. Both philosopher and filmmaker, Elder’s films, particularly his more recent, combine in a distinctively Canadian synthesis the cosmic emotionality of a Stan Brakhage with the didacticism of a Jean-Luc Godard who might have studied Heidegger instead of Mao Tse Tung.” – Michael Dorland, “Bruce Elder: Lamentations and Beyond,” Cinema Canada, November 1985
Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World
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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 4
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The problem of overgrown lakes detracts from the great tourism industry of Northern Canada, so researchers discovered weed harvesting as a means of restoring the delicate plant balance. This film looks at the process of harvesting lake weeds and recycling the material for animal fodder and compost. Excellent nature photography presents this case of creative environmental management.
Lake Odyssey
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This film documents the tragedy of senility as it affects the life of an elderly woman. Whereas she was once in command of language (and culture), she is now victimized by her inability to interact with it. The objects in her home offer no comfort; rather they combine to illustrate the imprisoning nature of her state. She questions the meaning of her continued existence and pleads for help that can never come. The voice used is that of the woman whose plight the film describes; the words are hers and, with two exceptions, the voice was recorded “straight.” Originally shot in Super 8 in 1985, the film was blown up to16mm in 1987.
Lady in a Chair
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Native people young and old speak about land issues, the environment, and the culture and history of Lac La Croix Ojibway peoples of northwestern Ontario. The film examines issues such as the community ban on liquor, the fight against welfare dependency, and the effects of the media on young people. “Lac La Croix” was made with the full cooperation of the Lac La Croix community. In the film, many different people speak about their lives and their current political struggles. This is a film about a Native community fighting successfully for survival, blending the old and the new.
Lac La Croix
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Part One: “A Measured Dance” 17 min. Part Two: “Prologue” and “Veiled Flight” 17 min. NOTE: Part One can be screened on its own. “Hoffman juxtaposes his home town, the Canadian city of Kitchener (formerly called Berlin), with its European namesake of the World War II era. The hyphen in the title suggests both severance from the past and connections to it. The history of the area underpins the film, but refuses to bind it or restrict it from free association. Hoffman assembles a wide range of visual materials including home movies, television, news footage, and archival film, as well as his own characteristically enticing images, to build complex layers of superimpositions analogous to the impressions of memory. The film’s opening segment ‘A Measured Dance’ is fluid and seductive, with deliberate and rhythmic camera movement and complex editing. Its second part, ‘Veiled Flight’ (introduced with an astounding ‘Prologue’ drawn from archival sources), is more enigmatic, turning inward with the visual metaphor of underground exploration, and suggests the extent to which film-makers are engaged in the work of making ghosts of the past for the future.” – Blaine Allan
Kitchener-Berlin
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“Betty Ferguson’s ‘Kisses’, an hour-long anthology of film clips presented without titles or voiceover, is the sweetest and, in avant-garde terms, the most conventional film on the program. Although the kiss reached its supreme expression as the on-screen replacement for copulation in post-Code Hollywood, Ferguson’s material is drawn largely from silent classics and the less-fetishized European cinema of around 1960. She compares her film to a patchwork quilt, but it’s basically morphological, cataloguing clusters of shots where kisses are delivered to the hand, the neck, rained down on a beloved face, perfunctorily bestowed on a spouse, awarded to dogs, dolls, gun, etc. The most cinematic series is a succession of long looks leading up to wordless clinches as the equally ecstatic camera dollies in for a close-up. “Ferguson includes some longer scenes and there’s a certain charm in knowing how each of these situations will end. Thus the entire ice-floe/waterfall sequence from “Way Down East” becomes an epic prologue to Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess’ chaste embrace. More surprisingly, a dwarfish second-storey man literally smooches the earrings off a sleeping society dame without waking her, and Hedy Lamarr’s nude swim in “Ecstasy” climaxes with a shot of two nuzzling horses. “…excellent finale – a five-minute excerpt from a 1956 episode of ‘Superman’ wherein Lois Lane dreams that the Man of Steel has finally popped the question. Ferguson’s inspired contribution is to hand-tint various objects – Lois’s hat, the box of flowers Superman sends her – as they float from shot to shot. These amorphous blobs of colour are the perfect corollary to the TV show’s wonderfully infantile fantasy world.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Kisses
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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 3
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The phrase “kick that habit man”, which is also a poem by Brion Gysin, is re-arranged in every possible order in this clever blend of sound, image, and optical printing.
Kick That Habit Man!
