“A five star gross-out, ‘Shiteater’ features a body in revolt… Andrew Wilson gives a tour de farce performance as the shiteater and Hoolboom’s camera work is never less than sublime.” – Gina Hampton, Herald
Filter Films
-
This early short already shows Kneller’s characteristic image manipulations, lyric sensibilities, and insistence on a simultaneous presentation. The central figure of this film poem is a distorting mirror, reflecting from a distance the stern grid of an apartment block, rendered now in wavy lines of loopy abstractions. This conversion of material into immaterial closes with an image of a window plant, as if these cycles of transformation had emerged from a plant’s vision after all, its conversion of sunlight into oxygen (photosynthesis) an emblem for the transformative power of seeing.
Shimmer
-
A man counting sheep as he sleeps. I have never seen sheep as I sleep. The sheep relax the man, he falls into a deep sleep. You are wide awake, moving through the man, maybe sleeping counting sheep. The alchemy, the dream, the scene. (CB)
Sheep
-
The film’s projected time is the basic material of this film and is wrought into a simple form which, by its radically reductionist structure, transforms the material of the dramatic form into a tone poem of waiting and anticipation. (RBE)
She Is Away
-
This film completes a trilogy of landscape/poetry films, which include “Waterworx” (1982) and “Landfall” (1983), and was shot near the family home on the Northumberland Strait in Prince Edward Island. In writing the text for “Beach Events”, I wanted to challenge the cinema’s dominant present tense by imitating primitive “event” poetry, referring superficially to action present on the screen, but gradually slipping out of synchronization with its referent. This practice, together with reading a kind of sub-conscious, internal monologue (also based on the film’s events, but only those past and future), helps the viewer transcend the spectacle of the present, and be aware of a larger temporal universe. In this film it informs a dialectic of internal and external nature, temporal presence and absence, the conscious and sub-conscious. (RH) “…a work in which all parts functioned equally to create a filmic-poetic form, in which each element was subsumed into a larger, organic unity… an effective unity of this sort was achieved in Rick Hancox’s “Beach Events”.” – Scott MacDonald, Afterimage, March, 1986
Beach Events
-
“Shadows” is a marriage of dance, music, and digital visual effects. The choreography and the visual effects work integrally together to create a piece that could only exist in this medium. Images of a dancer and of a solo harpist are manipulated and combined electronically, so that they pass through each other, transform one into the other, and bend and ripple to the music, as the harpist plays one of John Weinzweig’s haunting “Fifteen Pieces for Solo Harp.”
Shadows
-
Directly in the tradition of “Sexual Meditation No. 1: Motel…” this “sequel” does explore further the possibilities of nudes in a room… (SB)
Sexual Meditation: Room with a View
-
“The quintessential boy meets girl story, ‘Sex Without Glasses’ is a tale about relationships – of various kinds. This film has everything from alphabets (manual) to zithers, and features some of Toronto’s most celestial bodies.” – Anna Gronau
Sex Without Glasses
-
A visual symphony in which the striking notes include: hoodoo formations created by eons of erosion that give a strong sense of decay, by Japanese gardens whose layouts provide a structure and acts as a tool for quiet contemplation, and by birds which act as a symbol of man’s soaring spirit and other-worldliness. Music and soundtrack by Darryl Miller.
Serenity
-
“Self Portrait” is a pixillated film that takes the filmmaker’s head on a whirlwind tour. In ten short minutes the background changes from waves and woods to Eastern mosaics, Indian architecture, and European monuments, while the figure of the head alters its appearance. A soaring soundtrack employs pan-global elements as well, including samples of Balinese and Tibetan chants, Inuit throat singers, and various choirs. The film illustrates oppositions between natural and man-made environments, the monumental and the ordinary, as well as history and timelessess. Underlying all this is a concern with spirituality and morality that gives this personal film a universal appeal.
Self Portrait (by H. Gayer)