The first half of “Weather Building” shows an empty room. Through the window is seen the film’s central emblem, the lighted tower at the top of an office building. A series of lighting and camera manipulations causes the planes of light in the room to shift and dissolve into one another. This and the soundtrack of footsteps (of someone who never appears) open for consideration a range of conceptions of filmic space. Part two repeats the “script” of the first half of the film – using a video playback of part one in the “role” of the weather building. There is no window in this second room, and these variations, together with the repetition, simultaneously explicate and complicate the spatial assumptions established earlier. “McLaren began his career co-founding the Toronto Super 8 Film Festival, the first in Canada. His film Weather Building (1976) is emblematic of this period. Super 8, edited in camera, science fiction meets visual abstraction. It is a dissolving, collapsing, repeating visual. It is the antithesis of Warhol’s ponderous Empire State and a sly homage to Michael Snow’s incessant panning camera. With its off-screen sounds, footsteps, wind blowing, there is an uncomfortable energy in Weather Building, and simultaneously something very cerebral in its abstracted imagery. The film is an enunciation of the time.” (Eldon Garnet, Images Festival Catalogue, April 2010)
Filter Films
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A five-foot, six-inch rappin’ vulva, in an unexpected parody of the music video genre, leads the viewer on a complete description of female genitalia.
We’re Talking Vulva
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The “Truths” of this film, which the title prompts, are slightly recognizable patterns of fish and animal biology, plant and flower shapes, and human anatomy which are interwoven with pastel cubes and other geometries – pastels as if “hung” in a white light interwoven with straight and diagonally bent black lines, eventually clear architectural forms. The recognizable patterns are literally etched on black leader (primarily) and interspersed with very organic painted forms on white. There is often an intended sense of hair and mucous membrane amidst these forms and interwoven with the electric “x-ray” sense of bones. The interplay between black-and-white sections and multi-colored sections increases until there is some sense of merging the two toward the end. (Note: Each frame is double-printed). This film is the second part of “The Hand-Painted Trilogy.” (SB)
We Hold These
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A film-essay on the earth’s body, “Black Earth” follows a woman’s journey through time and space. The film’s images and utterances and sounds poetically resonate a world as woman, a woman suffering the fate of humanity. “Black Earth” was filmed on location in India.
Black Earth
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“Honouring the tradition of optically-printed films, ‘We Are Experiencing …’ is a visual treat that manipulates, combines and recombines to dazzling effect. In this digital age, this optically printed film runs countercurrent to the trends. The film uses repeating imagery such as five autumn’s worth of leaves, or the same images repeated, and the effect is mesmerizing.” – Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival, 1997
We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties. Regular Programming Will Resume Momentarily.
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“Waving” is a short film exploring the cyclical rituals of life, death and the family. A personal narrative chronicles the relationship between the author and her grandmother. Visual imagery works to create a strong metaphor, suggestive of the overwhelming, consuming power of grief.
Waving
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“The outstanding film of 1968… a very beautiful and important film.” – Jonas Mekas, Village Voice “‘Wavelength’ is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema.’” – Gene Youngblood, L.A. Free Press, 1968 “Michael Snow’s ‘Wavelength’, a pure, tough 45 minutes that may become ‘The Birth of a Nation’ in Underground films, is a straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt. For all of the film’s sophistication (and it is overpowering for its time-space-sound inventions) it is a singularly unpadded, uncomplicated, deadly realistic way to film three walls, a ceiling and a floor… it is probably the most rigorously composed movie in existence.” – Manny Farber, Artforum
Wavelength
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The waterworks in the Beaches area of Toronto is the source of an eidetic-like image from early childhood. It was always an enigma to me, and after returning years later to shoot this film, I was still not satisfied it was merely a filtration plant. Its architecture functioned more significantly as some kind of temporal metaphor. Wallace Stevens’ ironic and equally enigmatic poem, “A Clear Day And No Memories,” was sought out to address this phenomenon, and to appear as interruptive graphic for the same reason the editing is interruptive – that is, to both work with the alluring nature of the image, yet force an intellectual distancing. Just as the supposedly clear air is used as the protagonist in Stevens’ poem, the precisionist clarity of imagery is foregrounded in the film. The structure reinforces human memory processing, and later, when the first half of the film is repeated (recalled), the Stevens’ text, generated by computer memory, runs across the screen in a style contradicting the mood of the picture and sound, which are now forced into the background. (RH) “What I find most impressive about ‘Waterworx’ is Hancox’s ability to fuse Stevens’ poem and his own imagery and sound, not only without doing damage to the poem, but so that the film provides an effective reading of it… The clear, empty vistas of the film (empty action, of people) reflect those of the poem, and yet both are haunted by the presence of the poetic mind in its process of forming what we are experiencing.” – Scott MacDonald, Afterimage, March 1986
Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories)
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I decided to make a film at my kitchen table, there is nothing like knowing my table. The high art of the housewife. You take prisms, glass, lights and myself to it. “The Housewife is High.” “Water Sark” is a film sculpture, being made while you wait. (JW)
Water Sark
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This film uses archival footage and still photographs to trace the history of water power and visits operating units of various small sizes. Manufacturers and consultants are interviewed. The filmmaker speaks from personal experience. We watch the development pf his own micro-hydro unit in rural Nova Scotia from conception to production of power. This is a warm, evocative film full of useful information that matches its subject matter beautifully. “An excellent overview of the history and urrent uses of hydropower.” – Southeast Small Scale Hydropower Bulletin “An interstesting film which makes a good argument for the development of alternate energy sources.” – Landers
Water Power
