“Bouquets 1-10” consists of ten one-minute films covering a variety of subjects. The procedure entails using the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed. Each bouquet of flowers is also a bouquet of frames, mingling the plants to be found in a given place with activities that happen to be there at the time. Bouquet 1: The Mount Ventoux, from top to bottom over a distance of twenty miles: yellow poppies and mountain flowers mix with people eating their lunch, scrambling or cycling up the slopes leading to a scale of colourful candies on the summit. Bouquet 2: The village of Brantes and a school cycling party on the borders of the Vaucluse and Deome departments. Bouquet 3 : A Sunday afternoon on the way to, and in, the village of Roquevaire (Var Department) on the banks of the Huveaune River. Bouquet 4: On the sands of Beauduc (Camargue, near the national park area) people have built a small village out of a bric-a-brac. One of the cabins has a local Provencal scene painted on its fences: a Camargue bull is depicted in its bullring with windmill, cypress tree and spectator (or bull fighter). The sea air is rapidly peeling off the paint. The local authorities are threatening to remove all the homes. Bouquet 5: A slope on the main Marsaille to Paris railway line by the organic food cooperative just outside the ramparts of Avignon. Bouquet 6: Sunset in la Vesse, a tiny fishing harbour on a rocky inlet near Marseille. Bouquet 7: A famous round medieval wash house built on an equally famous spring, (the Fosse Dionne, in the medieval town of Tonnerre) mingled with wild flowers from the abandoned terraces, cultivated plants in the surrounding park leading up to the church on the hill, flowers in hanging pots, their reflections and others growing in or around the water’s edges. Bouquet 8: The beach at Beauduc with people boating, sailboarding or fishing for shellfish. Bouquet 9: A field of buttercups onthe way to Signes (Var) with families on a Sunday outing, and some of the rubbish they leave behind. Bouquet 10: The mountain slopes and leisure activities surounding the artificial lake of Serre-Poncon (Hautes-Alpes) as a flock of sheep roam the camping site and a launch visits the church on an island, the only flooded village item remaining above water level.
Filter Films
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This is a hand-painted work which involves a variety of colours applied within gouged and scratched shapes which approximate both swift shifts of bird-shape (legs, beaks and feather-spreads especially) and the Bird of Paradise flower-form as well, the former tending to metamorphize into the latter across the course of the work.
Birds of Paradise, The
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“‘Platform’ focuses on the meanderings of a hip prima donna (Kimberly Pike) who picks her platformed feet up from cords tangled on the floor of a studio filled with movie lights of all shapes and sizes. A tight, hard-edged and extremely self-reverential work of mixed media influences.” – Donna Lypchuk, eye Magazine
Platform
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Producer: Jane Farrow Writer/Director: Roy Mitchell An intimate, funny, and completely engaging family photo album of a thriving little queer community buried in the heart of the rugged and isolated Ontario steeltown of Sault Ste. Marie. Bob Goddere is at the centre of this historic demi-monde. Director/writer Roy Mitchell accesses this intriguing story through his personal relationship with Bob and the community as someone who grew up in the Sault, and like so many young queers, came out at Bob’s parties in the 1970s and 80s. Conventional wisdom has it that good fences make good neighbours. But when you meet the much-loved retired gay steelworker Bob Goddere, you will question that notion. Mother Goddere, as he’s known to most, hosted over two decades worth of queer dance parties in the basement of his small town house with his lover Jean-Guy. He was the central figure of Sault Ste Marie’s gay underground – its organizer, therapist and archivist. His basement was a pride laboratory and just about anyone queer in Northern Ontario knew about these parties as word traveled fast between the other “mothers” of nearby towns such as Sudbury and Sault, Michigan. The socials often lasted for three days including a dinner party on Friday, featuring Bob’s famous meatloaf, a big bash on Saturday night with drinking and dancing, and a cozy social brunch on Sunday. “I Know a Place” is an important and refreshing contribution to queer history and geography.
I Know a Place
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A dyke whines about her boredom with vanilla sex and her lover offers suggestions to solve the problem. “The Lesbian Tapes (After Ilene Segalove)” is a remake of an early 1974 black-and-white video called “The Mom Tapes” by Ms. Segalove, in which Ilene is whining to her mother about her boredom. Her mother offers suggestions of things Ilene might do instead.
Lesbian Tapes (After Ilene Segalove), The
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Have you ever dated a woman named Lisa? Is it possible that more dykes are named Lisa than any other name? Find out what 22 women in Chicago had to say about it.
Lisa Lisa
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A contemporary fairy tale. Robert, an aspiring filmmaker, isn’t getting laid. His live-in lover of three years, Susan, has lost her desire for him. He attempts to rectify the situation by employing a Celtic anti-frigidity spell. Susan becomes more mysterious, inspiring jealousy in her spouse. Desperate to find out whether Susan is cheating, Robert places her under video surveillance. Upon viewing the footage he sees his lover making love to an elderly man. What Robert discovers, at a devastating personal cost, is the impossibility of ever conrolling or even knowing another person.
Badger’s Paw, The
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This is a film about the progression and the passing of life. Without dialogue and music, the story centres on the evolution of love and friendship between a Japanese monk and the young novice who has come into his life, from their initial encounter to their final parting. In rejecting his own faith and drowning in self-doubts, the novice leaves his life of unfulfilled potentials. The passing of life is demarcated by the progression of seasons. The only force that propels the narrative forward is the poetic seasonal variations in nature. The passing of life, in this life, in this film, is as natural a progression as the passing of seasons. The offering that passes repeatedly between the two men is symbolic of love and affection, which, like life itself, are the most fragile yet powerful and tenuous link between any two human beings, at any point in any lifetime. Through the universal experience of death and of mourning, this elegiac meditation affirms the acceptance and the respect for what life and nature have to offer, regardless of the ideological and cultural differences that separate all of us.
Offering, The
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The idea for “BOOKCASE” came out of my desire to educate myself by creating a catalogue of film techniques. I was attempting to distill the elements of film to a pure state by stripping away any meaning from the images, to explore film as simply the masking and filtering of light. For subject matter I shot things which had, at one time or another, struck a chord within me. In doing so, I realized that I was also creating a catalogue of my own memories. I have always seen memories as discreet units of light, not unlike books on a shelf… “BOOKCASE” became not only an experiment in “pure” film, but a reflection on the concept of memory as well. In the convergence of these two ideas, light is the common basic element. (TS) “The more we become familiar with the experiences that perception brings, the more we become aware of an inherent gentleness in the intercommunion of oneself with things.” – Jack Chambers
BOOKCASE
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Mildred is a professor who has lived as a lesbian for as long as she can remember. Doris, a mother of grown children, is taking classes and is falling in love with a woman for the first time. From different backgrounds and circumstances, Mildred and Doris try to carve out a life together. The film investigates the pleasures, uncertainties and ambiguities of late-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity within the confines of a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance. The story is haunted by the ghosts of Doris’ mother Jenny and an 18-year-old Mildred. Running parallel is a commentary by Rainer, disturbing the narrative with the asymmetries of her mastectomized chest. “MURDER and murder” deals with “deviant” sexuality, female aging, and breast cancer, reflecting upon cultural and scientifically determined perceptions of disease. Rainer employs humour, slapstick and visual metaphor to examine notions of pathology. Deliciously wry and articulate, “MURDER and murder” challenges as it rewards.
MURDER and murder
