A short exploration of the symbolic ambiguity of corporate versus sensual power. Does a woman adopt the mannerisms of a man when she enters the “male” territory of corporate power? There is of course no correct answer, and perhaps there is really no question. The body is language. Power seduces and is seductive.
Filter Films
-
Co-directors: Elizabeth Mackenzie, Bruce McNiven, Joshua Nefsky, Cynthie Withers
There Goes the Neighbourhood
-
This film is a series of five little hand-painted and elaborately step-printed sections which are individually titled but so inter-related I’ve decided they should always be shown in this order together, but each such a distinction of the essentially un-nameable subject matter they variously facet that they should retain the character of individual pieces within their shared context … a context I’ve attempted to represent by a small “b” for my name “Brakhage.” The film begins with Old Testament, a two-and-a-half minute historical section titled RETROSPECT: THE PASSOVER and its evolution of forms is meant to suggest the Biblical story from which the Jewish religious rituals evolve – an essentially blue-green phosphorescence of forms finally in flight through, yes, parted seas of paint and “armies of the night,” as one might put it. BLUE BLACK: INTROSPECTION is, then, the painted meditation upon the previous section – its forms rhythmically interspersed with some stately pauses of solid thoughtful darkness, like jewels of idea embedded in black velvet. It is about two minutes in length. It begins with suggestions of “landscape.” The three-and-a-half minute BLOOD DRAMA section pulses with red, involves glyphic stitches of red amidst its phosphors of blue-greens, all forms tending to take thought-forms of the previous section through to recognition of internal body, the bloody meat of being human. The fourth section I AM AFRAID: AND THIS IS MY FEAR is a direct reaction to the third section. The “spark” of a “sky-scape” leads to the subsequent evolution of the same forms in “mental flight,” as it were. It is approximately three minutes. The fifth, and final section is the culmination of all previous visuals, the (by now) very recognizable forms of the original story, of inward speculation on narrative, of the disruption in a sense of a spill, or spell, of blood, the non-narrative thought-flight from all this, now (in Finale) becomes an almost unbearable complexity of forms taking on a beseeming “weight” or thickening of those inter-woven shapes. It is an appropriately titled three minute section called SORROWING. The fifth section is dedicated to Gregory Markopoulos. This work was complexly printed off strips of film which were primarily painted in order to achieve negative color.
b series
-
“‘Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present’ posits, in ingeniously compact visual/aural form, a multitude of eternal dichotomies, among them darkness and light, and the psychic separation of spiritual/sexual (inward) vs. material/sexual (outward) striving. “Instead of a ying/yang antimony: God and the Devil in female guise. The fervently whispered prayers of the woman whose face is seen in close-up have transported her to a nearly sexual, religious ecstasy; and each reappearance of the worldly, sexually powerful ‘corporation’ woman is heralded by a sharp, synchronous thunderclap and camera flash. Yet it is she – the world woman, Venus in furs – full colour, in glory, who nods in assent, in sole possession of the screen at film’s end.” – John Luther Schofill
Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present
-
Time exposures of dancer Becky Arnold create a flickering vibrating image juxtaposed against the immobile face of Mac Emshwiller. An experimental film creating and portraying a state of anxiety. Heartbeats and ripsaws on the soundtrack contribute to the intense effect.
Thanatopsis
-
“All that is is light.” – Duns Scotus Erigena “To see a world in a grain of sand.” – William Blake These were the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the “first spark” of refracted film light. (SB)
Text of Light, The
-
Jen Roberts, a young photographer in her mid-twenties, has many friends, a partner she cares about, and a flourishing career. Upon discovering she is HIV positive her world turns upside down. The film addresses the issue of women and AIDS and helps to dispell the myth that AIDS is an exclusively gay disease. The story is open-ended as the central character is brought to a point of decision, leaving viewers primed to question their choice(s) in similar circumstances.
Between Friends
-
To the child mind, the transformative sacrificial power of “O, Lamb of God” is a daily manifestation – not as an adult shift-of-interest, but rather as ritual magic in which a toy train (“-of-thought,” an adult might say) becomes medium of shifts-of-scene, soforth, wherein an elephantine shape transforms to a more “real” (i.e. less metaphorical) train, in sacrifice of transformative elephant, so on-&-on. An earlier film, “The Machine of Eden,” is of some similar construct (as is a good deal of western painting) in its insistence upon contemporary mise-en-scene as grounds for Biblical lore.
Agnus dei Kinder Synapse
-
“The Devonshire Hotel in downtown Vancouver was destroyed by blasting: Gallagher recorded the event with a camera that shot 200 frames per second and manipulated the sounds recorded at the time so they play back at the same speed as the images. The ‘unnatural’ destruction of the structure is rendered mysterious as explosives accelerate. Camera retards natural rhythms of entropy, a man-made rock implodes into a static ‘heaven’ of smoke and dust: city becomes cloudscape; cheering and whistling, spirit calls heralding the void.” – Tony Rief
Terminal City
-
The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind. The filmed images are predominantly houses: houses seen in passing, along the horizontal; houses reflecting sky and trees in their windows; houses partially hidden by trees or the shadows they cast; houses and office towers simultaneously pictured in stages of demolition and construction. The images dissolve in and out of the flickering light and dark (sunlight and shadow and the emulsion of the film itself). The site of the self is home. A house is a construct and, per Heidegger, language is the house of being. “Suddenly you are here, at home, and the reality is revealed. The reality was always there, you were not there, at home, and the reality is revealed. The reality was always there, you were not there. It is not the truth which has to be sought, it is you who have to be brought home” (Rajneesh).
Tending Towards the Horizontal
