In the style of underlit plasticine on cel, “to bear oneself” is a short animated film about a bear who wants to be a man. His attempt to join the human crowd fails and the bear finds himself alone in despair. Ultimately he decides to accept himself as he is and starts acting like a bear.
Filter Films
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Three young men, diagnosed as having learning problems when teenagers, are seen around ten years later, carrying on their lives as young adults and holding jobs. The effects of their learning difficulties are sensitively explored. How they cope, the jobs that they have chosen and their relationship to their employer is shown to be related to the history of support they have had from family and friends. “To Be a Somebody” is a careful, sympathetic look at the process of parents, peers, and the young people themselves adapting to living with learning problems.
To Be a Somebody
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Animated mosaic tiles, shaped by a magical hand, tell a witty, slightly irreverent history of man.
Bible Plus
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Described as “a collection of ‘windows’ on a personal past” “Time’s Wake (Once Removed)” incorporates material from an earlier version. On the earlier version: made from material I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at L’Ile d’Orleans, Quebec. It includes both home movie and other types of footage. In this film, the camera “I,” in extension with home movie reality, is a living participating entity. The film represents an endearing but removed artifact, a strange contradiction between liveliness and frozenness. (VG) “A beautiful film that frames the landscape with multiple devices (camera, window, trees) but is free of the traditional Canadian fear of the land and the obsessive need to enclose it.” – Cathy Jonasson, New Experiments, Canada House, London
Time’s Wake (Once Removed)
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“In ‘Tiger,’ pre-eminent experimentalist David Rimmer intercuts the movements of a caged tiger with images of untamed nature to create an unexpectedly eerie film. Superbly layered, the film wordlessly leaves us pondering our attempts to harness the forces of nature.” – Toronto International Film Festival, 1994 Sound Design: Dennis Burke
Tiger
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“The Ties That Bind” tells the story of a woman who lived in Germany during the Second World War, and like most Germans has had to pay the price ever since for letting Hitler’s actions continue unchallenged. This woman is the narrator of the film as well as the filmmaker’s mother. “The best of New Directors/New Film Festival…The film is an original: a moving and courageous tribute from a achild to a mother’s beleaguered memory.” – David Edelstein, The Village Voice, April 1985 “‘The Ties That Bind’ is a scrutiny both of a mother/daughter relationship and the demands of natural identity. That the nation delineating this identity is Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s curiously multiplies the problematics of nationalism; ‘The Ties That Bind’ are not only the supposed benevolences of motherhood, but also the repressive dictates of the Fatherland.” – Barbara Kruger, Artforum
Ties That Bind, The
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“Through the Green Fuse” is a winterscape, a journey of rhythms: trees, ice floes, rushing water and a solitary figure. The film is based on a madrigal by Monteverdi that is itself based on a poem by Petrarch. Music and image intermix to speak of passions, beauty and solitude. It is a film in which voices celebrate, ice imprisons, water invites and the figure journeys. “…and so that my suffering may not reach the shore/A thousand times each day I die, a thousand I am born….”
Through the Green Fuse
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The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger, and the pressure of history on one’s identity – how do I identify myself as “I”, how as part of a “We”? The film is visual, perceptual; it was made in awe of the world that goes on with and without us and of our personal, human struggles. It is a film about life and death; a film of discrete units of the eternal and a film of living here and now. It was built up frame-by-frame. A film about power, played in insignificant terms, in the daily, barely notice gestures, scenes, frames. “Ida is her name. She was thinking about it, she was thinking about life. She knew it was just like that through and through.” – Gertrude Stein “The creeks are an active mystery, fresh faced every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation…the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty…the mountains are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given… …After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions and profligacies with ever-fresh vigour. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire. That which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” – Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
Through and Through
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This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara Feldman) on a Homeric poem: 1) “Diana holds back the night …” is represented by dark shapes suppressing (almost angularly interfering with) orange-golden effusions of paint and the reflective paint-shapes of early morning greens (as if silhouettes or arm and bodily profile were shading the light), 2) Homer’s “… rolling sea …” represented by hand-painted step-printed dissolves of blues in wave shapes, bubbles, and the soft browns and tender greens of seaweed, flotsam-jetsam, and 3) “Ah, love again, the light” represented by painted explosions of multiple hues and lines recurrently interrupted by the “blush” of soft suffusing reds.
Three Homerics
