A tale told with a profusion of animated cut-outs, and the occasional intrusion of an authorial hand or head. Entering Deep Space, a team of scientists has been given the mission of discovering the Alpha Point, that point where our universe began in the Big Bang. Depression and elation flow through them, childhood memories haunt them, boredom drags at their extended lives.
Filter Films
-
“Letter to Margot” chronicles one woman’s experiences following the abrupt end of a long-term relationship with her lover and partner, Margot.
Letter to Margot
-
This film begins with points of light defining a dark space out of which a female dancer (Vivienne Palmer) emerges dressed in a semi-transparent green dress. Her dance is visually “echoed” by close-up superimpositions of her arms, legs and feet, and then later by her distant figure seeming to mimic and/or perhaps to control her fore-grounded, sometimes black-lit, image. She often pauses thoughtfully in her dance, breaks step, walks away, etc. defining the perimeters of the dance. Finally she appears naked, midst dance, and takes heraldic stance at end.
Dance
-
Dave and Glen, two fresh-faced kids straight out of college, set about to write the next Oscar-winning script. If they can overcome the laughter and dissent of their parents, friends, foes, and the shadow of a famous ex-girlfriend, they just might escape their suburban garage and capture the Hollywood Dream.
Garage Dreams
-
“What These Ashes Wanted” is one of those films that forces you to rethink the medium. There are pictures, yes, and movement, light and sound. There is however, no narrative, and yet there is emotion. “What These Ashes Wanted” is the result of several years of hard work coming to terms with the traces and fragments of a life that has ended but whose presence persists. The film draws on images and sounds gathered over the course of Hoffman’s relationship with Marian McMahon, from their early meetings in the mid-eighties to her unexpected death from cancer and beyond. The three parts of the film – He Always Thought They Would Grow Old Together, Four Shadows, and 17 – form a rich combination of hand-processed film, video diaries, sound recordings from daily life, and epistolary voice-over. “…Hoffman arranges the jagged bits of life he shared with writer Marian McMahon. Her early death in 1996 provoked this essay on mortality. Hoffman’s goal: ‘to illuminate the conditions of her death…the mystery of her life and the reason why, at the instant of her passage, I felt peace with her leaving…a feeling I no longer hold.’ Using painterly swatches of sunflowers, handprocessed film, found sound recordings, the ‘antiseptic fictions’ of doctors and other mortal icons, Hoffman takes us on journeys to London, Helsinki and Egypt. Pondering morbidity in its many forms, Hoffman discloses an early photographic assignment involving his deceased grand-father, a failed suicide, and his own personal numerology of death centering on the number 17. Through these and other memories, he develops a soul-searching vocabulary of love for one whose journey continues into the beyond. ‘If you had to make up your own ritual for death, what would it be? Would it be private or shared?’ asked his partner, Marian. Hoffman’s answer is this beautiful document.” – San Francisco International Film Festival Program Guide 2002 “‘What These Ashes Wanted’ (2001) places flesh on the poet Ann Carson’s words ‘…death lines every moment of ordinary time.’ With this work Hoffman resides in an acutely intimate time, a daily practise of loss lived precariously between the terror of psychic disintegration and the provisional solace taken through public rituals of mourning. ‘What These Ashes Wanted’ is not a story of surviving death, but rather, of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of every day experience.” – Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto 2001
What These Ashes Wanted
-
A subtle little narrative; an abstracted interlude between sound and silence, motion and stability, and light and darkness. “Son of Dada” is the first act of the 16mm “Shadows and Caves” triptych that were produced between 1982-1984. In the first act, letters become forms, having been stripped from the context of words and language, and ultimately, from the logic of sentences. What remains? Pure cinema, perhaps … language-written … on the threshold of liberty and silence within the grips of suspense.
Son of Dada
-
This is the final confrontation with uncertainty. The sheer terror and joy of tomorrow’s newspaper – delivered today! In this, the third and final act of the “Shadows and Caves” triptych, the social and scientific dialectic between form, texture, and abstract and representational images puts forward the question: does one plus one equal three?
Pepper Steak
-
A blistering life-or-death run through cinema’s graphic jungle. “Didre Novo”, the second act of the “Shadows and Caves” triptych, establishes the second set of scientific criteria the language of movement on screen. Is it possible to perceive sound as movement? The perception of depth is the cave path ahead of us, and the sun’s light is beginning to diminish with every footstep we take.
Didre Novo
-
“‘Brownsnow’ presents a fascinating combination of two artistic visions: Carl Brown’s and Michael Snow’s. The form of this expressionistic documentary on Michael Snow’s artwork is a complete melding of Carl Brown’s rich manipulation of the photographic image with the fundamental concepts of Michael Snow’s aesthetic vision. “Brown’s strengths as a portrait photographer are also well-translated to the filmic medium as he situates key commentators on Snow’s artwork (Dennis Reid, R. Bruce Elder, Jonas Mekas, Peggy Gale and Regina Cornwell) in various dramatic Canadian landscapes. Like an abstract expressionist painting in motion, Brown’s brilliant work as a colourist deftly employs photographic chemistry to create textures and rhythms that vary across each scene and, in actuality, from frame to frame. The original music is by Toronto new music composer John Kamevaar.” – Susan Oxtoby, Cinematheque Ontario Programme Guide
BROWNSNOW
-
A short restoration comedic drama set in England’s 17th Century. Loosely adapted from Sir George Etherege’s restoration comedy “Man of Mode,” “An Intrigue” revolves around the grandeur lives and sexual innuendos of the upper classes of England. Our Protagonist, and renowned womanizer, Dorimant (Mahonen) is in pursuit of the fair lady Emilia (Dwyer). Through his scheming, Dorimant learns that “a certain Sir Fopling Flutter has recently arrived from Paris,” the en vogue city of the arts and high fashion, and has “certain designs on the fair Emilia…” Determined to be deemed the more favorable in the lady Emilia’s eyes, Dorimant hatches a devilish plan to outwit the extravagant Fop (Staines).
Intrigue of Manners, An
