“‘3:48’ is a film about living and dying in Ontario. I reassembled newsfilm and other footage to write an allusive and associative history that suggests the laws of memory and the processes of dream. The images date from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and depict the everyday: garbage collection, a picket line, children playing in the snow, a building on fire. Most lack the age or resonance that might inject them with nostalgia. However, they do trace the outlines of the small ways we try to make life in this sad place better.” – Blaine Allan
Filter Films
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On September 15th, 1830, during the opening ceremony of the first major railway line in Britain, the member of parliament for Liverpool, William Huskisson, attempted to cross the tracks but was struck by the train and died of the injuries he sustained. “This is the end of me” sets out on a true documentary mission – to delve into this historical event – but gets continually sidetracked …. It’s about history, technology, memory, chaos theory, Canada, eyesight, books, trains, speed, death, and Saskatchewan. The film is visually as eclectic as its narration, including documentation (photos, paintings, diagrams, maps); footage of trains, tracks, classrooms and libraries; and stop-motion animation.
This is the end of me
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The film is “about” the fragility of the film medium and human vulnerability; both the filmic and the human images resist threat/intimidation/mutilation: the victim is defiant and the film strip also struggles on, both “under fire.” It is a somewhat violent drama but it is also an ironically comic work and there is a formal beauty in the destructiveness of the burning film. While the film (from section to section or from screen to screen, in the installation format) develops, becomes more visually complex, successively regenerates (as the figurative images degenerate), it nevertheless implies no finality; rather, even in its three-screen “vicious circularity” form, “3rd Degree” implies endurability, extension and on-goingness.
Third Degree
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“Things in Between” is a story about a wife, her husband, and his lover. The film invites viewers to share the self-discovery of two women: Betty, an East Indian, who has just left her husband Phil; and Betty’s girlfriend Cannes, a Chinese, who is secretly Phil’s lover. Caught between desire and friendship, they must now face painful choices…
Things in Between
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“Thin Ice” is an investigation into a number of dichotomies present within the prairie landscape. The prairies are highly three-dimensional in depth, yet at the same time two dimensional in horizontal flatness, empty and yet full of detail, static and yet always moving. The concerns within “Thin Ice” take on painterly attributes which are enhanced not only through compositional devices but through the use of a video camera, such that the technical aspects become a major tool for aesthetic consideration.
Thin Ice
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Only at a crisis do I see both the sense as I’ve been trained to see it (that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic, colors as we’ve been trained to call a color a color, and so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves – spots before my eyes, so to speak – and it’s a very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I’ve seen that every time a child was born …. Now none of that was in “Window Water Baby Moving”; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed all of my seeing at such a time. (SB)
Thigh Line Lyre Triangular
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“Between You and Me” (Tangled Garden, Act III, Scene I) looks at the internalization of homophobia and fatalism present in mainstream representations of the AIDS pandemic, as it reflects on the conflict between grief and desire in a gay man’s psyche. The film challenges the viewer to turn their red ribbons into real action both on the streets and in bed, and to resist the industry of AIDS. Also available on QUEERS ON THE VERGE.
Between You and Me
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The filmmaker documents the lives of four women in his family, using their shoes as a common reference and as a springboard for thoughtful and provocative contemplations about their experiences. These four women (paternal grandmother, mother, paternal aunt, sister) recount and discuss the cultural and socio-economic forces that have shaped their lives. From the four-inch “golden lotus” embroidered silk sandals designed to fit my great-grandmother’s bound feet during the Ching Dynasty in Imperial China, to the tennis shoes and Italian leather pumps sported by my career-minded chartered accountant sister, the poignant stories behind their shoes are revealed. The film ends with the speculations of these four women about their future as they walk along this crossroad, where the British Crown Colony will revert back to Communist Chinese rule in 1997. To where will they take their shoes next? In English and Cantonese with English sub-titles.
These Shoes Weren’t Made for Walking
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“There is a voice crying in the wilderness”, Catherine Clement and Hellen Cixous say, “the voice of the body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it?” It is they say, “the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage.” Introduction of “The Newly Born Woman” by Hellen Cixous and Catherine Clement. This film is an experimental psychodrama in which a woman goes through an incredible inner journey in which all fear, confusion, desire and attempts are bound and conquered towards a better understanding of herself. The doors represent the hearts of the others. Instead of being afraid of opening the doors, she eventually finds what her desires are and how to fulfill them.
There, Try Alive…
