Before Keltie came along, the women in her family removed their facial hair and told no one. Keltie is proud of her beard and tells her story to us in this single-take film.
Filter Films
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Whether you’re in Honduras or in California, the symbols of the good life are the same… Coca-Cola, lottery tickets, and designer jeans… the difference is that in Honduras, most people can’t afford to buy. To combat the desperate poverty, the women of Honduras have started to organize. “Just Before the Dawn” focuses on three groups of women in rural Honduras who are discovering they can effect changes they never even dreamed of.
Just Before the Dawn
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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 2
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80-year-old Julie Lyon, sister of Old Time fiddler Tommy Jarrell, lights up this gem of a film as she spins tales of her Appalachian childhood in North Carolina – and her first romance.
Julie: Old Time Tales of the Blue Ridge
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In “Journeys from Berlin/1971” there are five characters: a man, woman, and adolescent girl who “appear” only on the sound track; a female psychoanalytic patient in her early 50s; and a therapist, or analyst, played alternately by a man, woman, and nine-year-old boy. The speech of the analytic session is synchronous with the image. The voice-over of the other three people bears a constantly shifting relationship to a recurrent gamut of images: views from a moving train window and from various apartment windows in Berlin, London, and New York; tracking shots scanning a mantlepiece cluttered with objects; aerial views of Stonehenge and the Berlin Wall; and a sequence of highly formalized editing that deals with a man and woman walking in an outdoor urban space. The patient reminisces, falls asleep, harangues the analyst, complains, and finally gets around to examining her own suicide attempt in Berlin in 1971. The man and woman of the soundtrack prepare dinner and read to each other from the writings of various revolutionaries. The inevitable comparisons are made – and rejected – between 19th-century Russian and contemporary German acts of political violence. Interwoven with these voices is the adolescent girl reading from a (her?) diary, kept during the 1950s. The subject matter of the film is pursued and elaborated in parallel – sometimes contingent, sometimes contrasting – investigations of political violence/suicide; self-determination/the power of the State; psychological introspection/political engagement; self knowledge/altruism; and American/European relations to these matters. The film utilizes formal strategies that gained prominence in 1960’s art and dancemaking, namely the inherent expressiveness of quotidian gesture and imagery, and the relativity of meaning resulting from “radical,” random, or ambiguous juxtapositions.
Journeys from Berlin/1971
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Staring out a moving subway car window, we see the world pass with a deadly ominousness- achieved through high contrast film, Gregorian chants, and the visual invasion of the standard cinematic frame.
Journey
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“Johnston…Johnston” is about a nervous stockbroker who locks himself into a daydream to escape aggressive management and his meaningless corporate existence. In an attempt to renew his spirit, Johnston’s consciousness tries to break into his dream-state to forcibly regain control over his soul. Returning to reality, however, is out of the question and violence erupts. The disastrous consequence of his inner turmoil leads to his incarceration in a circular timewarp of repeating events.
Johnston…Johnston
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John Nesbitt is one of Canada’s greatest sculptors. Born in Montreal in 1928, he became prominent in art circles in the 1960s. After living in New York for a time, he returned to Canada in the 1970s to live on Cape Breton Island. Since the 1960s, Nesbitt has chosen to avoid public exhibitions in favour of producing a huge body of work outside the commercial environment. However, in the 1980s he is once again exhibiting his work and gaining recognition. “John Nesbitt – Sculptor” is an intimate portrait of the artist at home and at work. The film explores Nesbitt’s work, ideas, and environment. It is a portrait of a man totally dedicated to producing art.
John Nesbitt – Sculptor
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Ever wonder what it would be like to run for political office? Sure you have! Actor and theatre director John Dunsworth exercises his curiosity about the political process in this look at his life on the campaign trail during the 1988 Provincial election in Nova Scotia.
John Dunsworth – The Candidate
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This visual poem for children utilizes silhouette paper doll cut-outs and characters to follow a young boy and his pet frog on an early morning paper route. The characters dance in time to the music, a traditional American folk tune, from which the film takes its title.
Jimmy Brown the Newsboy
