“In Exile” examines in detail the lives and assimilation problems faced by the approximately 75,000 American war resisters in Canada in the early 1970s. As the Indo-China turmoil came to an end and demands in the U.S. for draft resister amnesty increased, there was growing interest in whether these men and women would remain in Canada or return to the United States. The film includes interviews on both sides of the debate. We hear from ten draft resisters and deserters, counselors at the Toronto Anti-Draft programme, and an editor of Amex, a war resister magazine in Canada. On the U.S. side, we hear from Senator McGovern, Congressman Koch, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, the family of a draft resister ,and officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. An interesting look at where these people were going after the anti-draft controversy had died.
Filter Films
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This piece of film was initially shown at the 1989 Toronto Experimental Film Congress and was not destined to be screened again in its present form. Thus the title “Impromptu” refers partly, due to people having asked to screen the reel, to the distribution of a print. However, each scene being a combined image, filmed frame-by-frame alternatively at two or more periods during a given day, a procedure depending for its exact execution on the manner in which the film situation evolved, “impromptu” also refers to the tendency of reality to veer towards the unexpected. The sound was supplied fortuitously by the lab and some attention should be given not to cut off the activity near the top edge of the film. (RL)
Impromptu
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A morass of memories begun in a Paris cafe in 1895, a side-tracked train from the mother’s womb, mewing and puking its own history by the light of Dr. Frankenstein’s lamp. A history of cinema as twilight sleep, a shroud for the entr’acte between birth and history. A horse embraced as the last act of an active mind falling to sleep, ushering in the new century.
Immoral Memories 1
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This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems preferable for starts. I think each film’s integrity of rhythm would allow viewing at a greater variety of speeds, were there the 16mm projectors to allow that exercise. So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation (even more than their Roman equivalents) and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space. Finally, then, the inspiration of all those modern (and a few ancient) composers I’ve most loved since my teens overwhelms the easier, and comfortably lovely, habits of jig and do-re-mi AND creates a visual correlative OF music’s eventuality – i.e. each Arabic is formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps pre-natal) structure of thought itself.
Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 14
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“A very demanding work of great complexity and rigour, ‘Illuminated Texts’ presents itself as a great debate between nature and technology, unity and dissolution, the divine and demonic, an irrecoverable past and the terrible velocity of time. Following on Elder’s previous films, the autobiographical ‘Art Of Worldly Wisdom’ and the structural essay in history ‘1857 (Fool’s Gold),’ ‘Illuminated Texts’ reenacts, this time on a single site, both the task of constructing a self and the progression of historical agony. “Although prolix in his use of texts – acted out, superimposed on the image, spoken in voice-over – and proliferate in the range of his imagery, Elder has constructed ‘Illuminated Texts’ classically as an inexorable movement from paradise to apocalypse, or in the formal terms the film uses, from plenitude to fragmentation. It is a sign of Elder’s continuing commitment to a romantic sensibility marking all his movies that the most horrific section of ‘Illuminated Texts,’ its apocalyptic conclusion, is also the most stunning 45 minutes Elder has so far committed to film.” – Bart Testa, Canadian Images “…an intensely emotional as well as demanding cerebral apocalyptic world view. It contains an encyclopedic barrage of spoken and written texts amid a continually changing pattern of electric and photographic images.” – Linda Gross, Los Angeles Times
Illuminated Texts
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“Almost any solitaire game is often humorously called ‘Idiot’s Delight.’” – Official Rules of Card Games Black-and-white images of waves dissolving over stills of gravestones, old fences, boats on the shore, and a voice meditating on the joys of celibacy.
Idiot’s Delight
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A look at private and public images of women and their “place” in society. The act of being placed on a visual pedestal of unrealistic proportions and its accompanying expectations. The operatic soundtrack written by the filmmaker is performed by Suzanne Palmer. “Photographs of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the Venus de Milo and Venus of Willendorf achieve their stunning resolution in the Louvre where a crowd waits for the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa to break into speech, to recover the distance betweeen her sitting and the time of our approach. What we watch with the filmmaker is not the painting at all but the people looking at it, as if a gaze were simply a pretext for looking, and that we had found in this inscrutable design a cipher for the body’s submission to its own eye. As they track acoss the screen we wonder how those man-made Venus’ relate to the body of the filmmaker, or the body of the camera as it moves throughout its surround, looking for a scratch to start from.” – Mike Hoolboom
Iconography of Venus, The
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“I.E.” is composed of a series of themes and variations involving the interaction of camera and filmmaker. There is a predominance of in-camera animation, and the resultant distortions and manipulations both reveal and conceal the process of the film’s making. “I.E.” deals with illusion, although there is no doubt that it verges on the autobiographical. What we see is the filmmaker inthe act of making the film, that is, we see the taces of this process, insofar as the procedures used are capable of transmitting them. The figures in the film finally lose their abstract value and become vehicles for the rhythmic, lyrical flow of imagery.
I.E.
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Part I, Prologue: 10 min Part II (Joanne): 10 min Part III (Milton): 17 min Part IV (Steve and Nadra): 19 min “I.D.” was filmed in Binghamton, N.Y. The main participants are, in order of appearance: Gayle Gorman, Joanne Thorne, Milton Kessler, Steve Grietzer, David Gresalfi, and Larry Klien. Dedicated to Lorie Blandin. Part 1 was produced in part by SUNY at Binghampton Cinema Department. Part II, III and IV wih the help of the Canada Council, over a number of years. A driving interest in this film has been the raw material of conflicts between the persona and the individual qualties of a person. Also an interest in superimposition partly as a disruptive device equally metaphorical of conflicts between interior and exterior spaces. The use of synch-sound “reality” with an eye on tension between offscreen and screen spaces. Lipsynch is used mostly in counterpoint. The procedure for the film involved interviewing people with relatively uninhibited and expressive personalities. I asked them about events which had made them feel estranged and alienated from things or people around them. Most talked about were traumatic events, although it is not necessarily what I was seeking. From these conversations, physical contexts were sought for their interactive possibilities. The participants were exposed to situations which were partly uncomfortable. The camera does not simply prod but is also an active participant; not so much to render meaningful but to appreciate and transpose. (VG) Collections: SUNY Binghampton
I.D.
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An autobiographical film ballad about dodging dog dung in New York City while dreaming of Prince Edward Island. “A hit with audience and jury…an absurd, irreverent report on canine pets and their owners (or vice versa)… Hancox’s spiky sense of humour was well received.” – Martin Melina, Montreal Star
I, a Dog
