The film was originally photographed in 1972. Birds from my window were filmed during the winter, through to the spring, with the early morning light. I became caught up in their frozen world and their ability to survive the bitter cold. I welcomed their chirps and their songs which offered life and hope for spring. In 1984 I was part of a cultural exchange between Canada and Israel. During my visit my unfinished movie came to mind. A connection was established in my mind – so that the suffering of the birds became, in a sense, symbolic of the Jews and their survival through suffering. The film begins with the reading in Hebrew of the 23rd Psalm. This lays the spiritual ground to the film. I dedicate this film to Ayala. (JW)
Filter Films
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A winter landscape in a hardwood forest. Changing rhythms of camera movement and editing, shifting light qualities, zooms, and other cinematic techniques evoke a sense of a brooding, perhaps menacing, spirit animating the frozen woods.
Vertical Horizon
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An autobiographical dramatic exhibition of the inherent conflict between film and reality. Cinema verité and conventional narrative forms weave the viewer toward a further understanding of the mirror-like worlds of a filmmaker’s personal and cinematic lives.
Verite
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“Velveeta Afternoon” explores the world of a 50’s homemaker who, 30 years later, feels a need to come to terms with the changes that have challenged her morals, beliefs and dreams. It is an exploration of a woman’s need for self-validation and understanding, where truth can become a misty line between romanticized, idealized personal fiction. The film moves in the slow rhythm of a long afternoon conversation, where true desire, sentiment and prejudice begin to disturb the calm surface of polite small talk. The intimate and minimal format eventually creates a claustrophobia; the discomfort of falling witness to a stranger’s very personal revelations. The dissonant voice, harmony, and slide guitar of the Celtic Gales compliments and at times interprets the interplay between the two women.
Velveeta Afternoon
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“The basic image is a female factory worker unrolling a large sheet of cellophane… The film resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction.” – Kristine Nordstrom, The Village Voice
VARIATIONS ON A CELLOPHANE WRAPPER
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The dictionary defines art as the product of a skill to create, a definition implying the importance of human skill over that of nature. To my thinking, art is not so much found in the “greatness” of creation; rather, it is a testament to our power to define. In the four sections of the film, two are defined as “art” and are accessible as such. The opening title acts as a prologue for the first section, which is an example of abstract expressionism. The definition of art, combined with the voice of a tour guide, similarly strengthens the reception of the third section as “art.” The lack of definition given to the second and fourth sections prevents them from being readily accepted as such. As all the sections were created randomly, the confusion created by their juxtaposition seeks to foreground the power of definition, and hence recognition, in the world of art.
Vancouver Art Show
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Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso en Santa Cruz de la Soledad.
Valentin de las Sierras
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The intermittently heard voice-over talks about a woman’s self-awareness – being unable to know if she has really changed or not. The images are esoteric and hard to interpret: young women in black in various urban settings, something moving rhythmically. A personal, yet intriguing film.
Bird that Chirped on Bathurst, The
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A private discourse between photographer Jurgen Baldiga (1959-1993) and filmmaker Michael Brynntrup; a personal investigation into how to deal with images of life and death.
AIDE MÉMOIRE – ein schwules Gedächtnisprotokoll | AIDE MÉMOIRE – Gay Document For Remembering
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I selected a fragment of film and, using an optical printer, reprinted it over and over. A few frames at a time, I replaced the image with frames of pure colour. Similarly, on the sound track, I recorded a sentence and replaced it with the letters that spell out the words of the sentence. I was interested in breaking down some basic units of films and writing- the shot and the sentence- into smaller and smaller pieces in a brief, concentrated film. The correspondences between the image and the sentence and the way visual and verbal order disintegrates in the film convey a kind of entropy to me. (AB)
V-2’s Blues
