A mathematically ordered restructuring of two seconds (48 frames) of stock newsreel footage, primarily concerned with the frame as information unit and the change in formation between frames. “The first frame of the original shot is frozen for 1200 frames (approximately one minute), the next two for 600 frames, the next four for 300 frames, etc. The result is a slowly accelerating montage and a concretization of the ‘real’ event through time. It is as if a re-invention of the motion picture domain of ‘reality’ was being undertaken. The transformation of a ‘sea of anonymous faces’ into a ‘narrative of personalities’ becomes a distinct possibility as movement and reflexive action are consolidated.” – Al Razutis, Vancouver Art Gallery
Filter Films
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“Taking its title from a quote from Deng Xiaoping, ‘Black cat white cat – it’s a good cat if it catches the mouse’, this film was shot during a visit to the People’s Republic of China. Rimmer’s impressionistic, experimental travelogue is a dizzying dialectical portrait of the enigma that is modern China: an ancient society of a billion souls rushing headlong into modernity. “The measured, quiet grace of the traditional art of T’ai Chi gives way in Rimmer’s film to increasingly rapid sound and image montages. Western movie posters, ‘Surfin’ USA,’ burger stands, pre-recorded English lessons, Scientology advertisements, and modern traffic frenzies whirl past our eyes and ears. As the immutable is overwhelmed by the modern, Rimmer slows down to quote Deng Xiaoping, ‘To get rich is glorious.’ The speed of Rimmer’s images escalates again, and they rapidly burst into abstractions, just as the contradictions and paradoxes they expose will explode in the momentous event that gives Rimmer his coda: the massacre in Tiananmen Square.” – Jim Sinclair
Black Cat White Cat It’s a Good Cat if It Catches the Mouse
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“Watching” is a short ‘experimental documentary’ shot in super 8 format in Peru. The images reveal everyday life-people cooking, dancing in the street, young kids hanging out interspersed with the images of striking miners. This mix of anger, despair and joy are blended together to say that all of these are the ingredients of life here- one is not more important than the other. Together they reveal the power of ordinary people and culture. The‘ romantic’ music that accompanies the images and the use of ‘watching’ eyes serve to critique mainstream culture and its view of the ‘third world’.
Watching
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Wrik Mead’s dreamy “Warm” suggests the comfort of an embrace as a pixillated naked body flailing against a crumbling ruin… is released from the anguish of containment by another man’s touch.
Warm
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Fort Frontenac was established as a French trading and military post in 1673 but after the British takeover in 1758, the city of Kingston was built around and over the fort. “Walls Below the Pavement” follows the activity at the Fort Frontenac dig during the summer of 1984 as an archaeological team investigates the complex, multi-layered site. The videotape provides a useful introduction to basic archaeological procedures.
Walls Below the Pavement: Archaeology at Fort Frontenac
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A shy person, frightened at social settings, makes several attempts to communicate and then succeeds in a bizarre and unusual way. Deliberately focusing on the one who rarely gets much attention and recognition; the theory is that inside every introvert there is an extrovert and vice versa, and that there are myriad ways of expressing human experience, not always through conventional channels.
Wallflower
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The sensations, moods and passages of grief are explored in “The Wake”, which uses emotionally evocative landscapes and poetic text to extract a poignant beauty from the depths of human trauma.
Wake, The
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This amusing animation, utilizing music and sound effects, begins with a group of sleeping angels who wake up to enjoy a picnic on the clouds. They are interrupted by a flight of bombers. As they move higher and higher into the sky they are interrupted by missiles, then by armed satellites. A flying horse and a hungry cloud contribute to the solution of these war machines in an ending that is imaginative and thoughtful.
Wake Up Wake Up
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A one-shot film exhibiting traditional short story structural techniques. A sense of anticipation is built, allowed to subside, and then “paid off” in a way that is both satisfying and humorous.
Waiting for the Train
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“Voices” is a re-construction of historical events leading to today’s villages in Northern Labrador, Canada. Using archival films, stills, video interviews with Inuit elders, new leaders, former Moravian missionaries and provincial health workers, “Voices” documents the dramatic impact of white contact on Labrador’s Inuit from the Moravian presence in the late 1700s, Newfoundland’s resettlement program in the 1950s, to present-day Labrador.
Voices
