This film features a sound composition and performance by poet Gerry Shikatani, and explores the relationships surrounding language, image and sound, set to the backdrop of a gravel pit. “When I got the footage back from the lab, I was disappointed because of the periodic flipping of the image. After screening the footage several times I realised that the malfunctioning camera rendered the filmed-nature, unnatural… and this poses questions: What is nature? What is natural?” – Phil Hoffman
Filter Films
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For those who haven’t yet been there, “Got 2B There” offers guest-list access into the world of gay circuit dance parties – the hedonistic social epicentre of North America’s “A” list gay men. Born out of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, the circuit scene has become something of a paradox. On one hand, the parties raise thousands of dollars for AIDS organizations. On the other, critics charge that the circuit itself contributes to the spread of the disease and encourages the widespread use of crystal meth and GHB. This provocative film gives ample time to both sides. Shot at circuit events across North America, it combines throbbing footage of thousands of buffed, sweating torsos with a who’s who line-up of commentators including party promoter Jeffrey Sanker; DJs David Knapp, Susan Morabito, Julian Mash and Buc; and circuit critic Michelangelo Signorile.
Got 2B There
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The biblical prohibition of images word for word. God’s life story in the form of a trailer: from zero B.C. to the Second Coming of Christ – coming soon. See the eternal mysteries – NEW! Experience the miracles and sensations – LIVE! Feel the pain of crucifixion – YOURSELF! Enjoy the everlasting life – NOW!
veronika
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“I feel closer to this epic-maker Elder than to any other living film-maker: and yet I feel an aesthetic opposition of such intensity that I’m certain I’ll be the rest of my life working Uphill to off-set this grand haunt.” Stan Brakhage THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD (1975-1994) The Book of All the Dead is comprised of three sections: The System of Dante’s Hell, Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) and Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving). The cycle is made up of all the films listed here and some others (both completed and uncompleted). I have no better explanation for the choice of the term ‘book’ that Duncan’s comment: “Oh lasting Sentence/Sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be.” (From The Structure of Rime I) The Book of All the Dead concerns recovering what has been lost in the modern era, a sense of subjectivity and personal as well as cultural values, an awe before God and Nature. As Elder has stated, “The cycle begins with the emergence of Nature out of nothing and ends with the New Beginning. Moreover, the interweaving of themes in The Book of All the Dead constitutes a gigantic metaphor for the development and conflicts within an individual whose development in turn stands for the historical process itself. On the more psychological level, its main them is love and the irreconcilability of love with domination. Along with this there is a social or political level of import which deals with the attempt to rescue a corrupt world presided over by degenerate idols….The protagonist of the cycle is Time.” PART ONE: THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL Breath/Light/Birth b&w. 6 min. (1975) Video transformation of documentary footage of a woman giving birth, assisted by members of a religious commune. Isolation confronts the communal, the gruesome confronts the holy in this most mysterious of events. RBE Sweet Love Remembered 14 min. (1980) Inspired by remarks made by Freud, “Eros nowhere makes its intentions more clear than in the desire to make two things one” and by Nietzsche, “What must these people have suffered to have become this beautiful.” RBE The Art of Worldly Wisdom 55 min. (1979) “The dark wood encountered in the middle of life’s journey.” (Dante) Los Angeles Critics Award, Best Experimental Film “A compelling and revealing exploration of one person’s psyche in crisis” Linda Gross / “Combines elaborate split-screen and multi-voice soundtrack to produce a self-portrait at once satiric and poignant.” AGO Trace 1 min. (1980) The memory of a nearly perfect evening. RBE Permutations and Combinations 8 min. (1976) A close container for chance elements. Together with She Is Away, makes apparent some features of the material form of which the entire cycle would be composed. RBE 1857 (Fool’s Gold) 25 min. (1981) Audience Award, Montreal Poetry Film Festival Honorable Mention, San Francisco Poetry Film Festival “an act of celebration….He reproduces – with light and colour, sound , stillness and movement – the ineluctable rhythm and energy of the natural world.” Carol Zucker Look! We Have Come Through! b&w. 12 min. (1978) “a revelation of the editing process…done with remarkable care and precision….The interrelationship between moving body and moving camera is heightened to the intensity of a struggle.” Joyce Nelson Illuminated Texts 180 min. (1982) “Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism.” AGO Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985) Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian 195 min. A “meditation that deals with the state of human consciousness in the postmodern world….a truly monumental film.” Katie Russell / “transcends conventional form in an accessible, exciting shape that is likely to change the way all of us see movies.” Robert Haller She Is Away 13 min. (1976) “evokes absence through elliptical continuity and loneliness through the repetition of…archetypal images.” Ian Birnie Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985) Part 2: The Sublime Calculation 240 min. Barbara Is a Vision of Loveliness b&w. 8 min. (1976) Canadian Film Award, Best Experimental Film The optical manipulation of tone, shape, line and movement creates a purely cinematic choreography. RBE PART TWO: CONSOLATIONS (LOVE IS AN ART OF TIME) Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) (1988) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods 220 min.; Part 2: The Lighted Clearing 220 min.; Part 3: The Body and the World 240 min. “Elder’s most philosophical film…subtly woven connections…proceed under a contemplative regime” that “solicits the memories of the whole cycle in more delicate ways.” Bart Testa / “Elder is on the right track, the only track, and his film, despite the overbearing length, is harmonious, lucid and emotional.” Helen Knode PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING) Flesh Angels 110 min. (1990) “A beatific vision of the imaginary landscape of paradise, inspired by the poetry of…Blake.” Pacific Cinematheque / “the latest image technology and exotic new computer mathematics like fractals and cellular automata rhym[ed]…with Dante’s medieval cosmology….a heady blend of the high-tech and the antique…that dazzles the eye.” Bart Testa Newton and Me 110 min. (1990) Newton was the greatest of all the natural magicians, learned in matters musical, theological and in Apocalyptic literature. He believed bodies were composed of “certain aetheral spirits, or vapours”; one…is the ether, “the succus nutritius of the earth, or primary substance”; the second substance disseminated through the first, is light. RBE Azure Serene 95 min. (1992) “Inspired by the poets of Rainer Maria Rilke, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound…Elder’s latest film…is a visually lush collage,” and “ironic attempt to construct a Divine Comedy for modern times.” Jim Shedden Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving 90 min. (1993) Moves toward the vision of time when Heaven descends to earth and makes all earth one with Heaven…when the outside becomes as the inside, and the inside as the outside; when the male and the female become one and the same…when the end returns to the beginning and the beginning finds completion in the end. RBE Burying the Dead: Into the Light 90 min. (1993) The confrontation with death and finitude….Death animates the sense of the intimacy of life whose measureless flow is a danger to the stability of things. RBE Et Resurrectus Est 135 min. (1994) “Behold, I show you a mystery. Not everyone shall sleep, but everyone shall be changed.” “The Book of All the Dead” contains three regions: The System of Dante’s Hell, Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) and Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving). For further information on “The Book of All the Dead,” please see listings for the individual films.
Book of All the Dead, The
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Cindy was asleep under a maple tree/ Rolled over and said to me/ I dreamt of Air Cries/ I turned over, we were lying on the the/ dry cracked mud of a river bed/ Empty Water/ Puppies, Air Cries Only/ They don’t make a sound/ My eyes on fire with nothing/ to quell them/ A piece of steel in the heart/ Misery loves company When you’re on the job or at home, from far and wide, technicalities shatter at certain frequencies. Sensitivity between -10 and +4db is selectable, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. The speed of inhalation will vary with the volume of your attack. Mind you, there are differences neither aleatoric nor controlled – a higher method that promises clearer reception for everyone in the wireless future. Many a time you may be in-the-middle-of-almost-nowhere, inspite of the appearance of exteriority. Mind you, there are controls neither aleatoric nor different – the in-and-out luck table melody of the convisible. But you gotta win to get in. Knowcymbalswearnunnintendo? The procedure for constructing a two-point perspective view is essentially the same as for the one-point-perspective, except for the establishing of the two vanishing points. Sound: Kaiser Nietzsche Funded by Ontario Arts Council
Air Cries – Misery Loves Co.
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Through choreography and performance by Susanna Hood, and editing and effects in exposure caused by hand-processing, “The Light in Our Lizard Bellies” reflects the intensities that discombobulate us as we go through change and face parts of ourselves previously denied or unknown. “A beautiful capturing of the triumph of the human spirit.” – Barbara Goslawski (Toronto film critic) “I have never seen a dance film work so magically. It is cinematic instead of just choreographic. The hand processing is rich, pushing the film past time. The texture and contrast do that poetic thing of transporting you. Transcendent.” – James Herbert (American filmmaker) “Viscerally powerful… a careful balance of dance document and pure form.” – Chris Gehman (Cinematheque Ontario) DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: From the dark, the normalcy of our daily lives, something makes a sound – something unidentifiable. It slowly gets closer and louder; we struggle with welcoming and resisting it. It begins to challenge our familiar patterns of being. Soon, it relentlessly turns us upside-down and inside out, takes us so high and so low, ceasing only when it has succeeded in transporting us to a new beginning. The title of the film plays with the softness and vulnerability of lizard bellies, and the tendency for people to be disgusted by lizards; as people, we share the same characteristics as lizard bellies and often grow up feeling disgusted with ourselves. It is when we face our fears and learn to trust and honour ourselves that we find our light. The oscillations in the film’s exposure are like the constant changes in chameleon skin; the dancer’s hands stretch wide like gecko feet; and the narrator speaks of her skin hanging empty, paralleling lizard’s habits of skin shedding. The exposure shifts and bursts of light also symbolize the unknown – our light – as it calls to and disorients us. The dance in “The Light in Our Lizard Bellies” was originally part of a longer piece entitled “Four Ways of Approaching a Door,” choreographed and performed by Toronto-based Susanna Hood, who appears in the film. The layers of rhythms that create the film’s vocal score were composed and performed by Hood for the dance.
Light in Our Lizard Bellies, The
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Contemporary and archival images are contrasted against the text of a 1950’s industrial safety and training manual, exposing and critiquing the widespread belief in the existence of a weaker sex.
Women Are Not Little Men
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A short physical comedy about four extreme characters living in a four-story manor. On the top floor, a fiery 10-year-old tap dancer practices her loudest and most annoying routine. Find out how her neighbours are affected in this hilarious short film about patience, revenge, chaos and relationships.
Every Hour on the Hour
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A therapist and her client have the same dream. For both women, its is moment of celluloid synchronicity.
Slip
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“Human Remains” illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate portraits of five of this century’s most reviled dictators: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco, and Mao Tse Tung. We learn the private and mundane details of their everyday lives – their favourite foods, films, habits, and sexual preferences. Their personalities and psychological make-up are revealed through the details they convey. There is no mention of their public lives or of their place in history. The intentional omission of the horrors for which these men were responsible hovers over the film. “Human Remains” addresses this horror from a completely different angle – irony and even occasional humour are sprinkled throughout the documentary. The film is based entirely on fact, combining direct quotes and biographical research. Though based on historical figures, “Human Remains” is contemporary in its implications and ultimately invites the viewer to confront the nature of evil.
Human Remains
