Santa gets his picture taken with a typically bizarre assortment of children of all ages – amateur sociology dredged from the Pacific Centre Mall. Gallagher’s deadpan treatment isolates the ritual moment of image making. As each of the mandatory still souvenir photographs is shot, Gallagher rolls off a few feet of movie film. The soundtrack is a persistent laugh track; Santa’s repeated “Ho Ho Ho.”
Filter Films
-
“Sandpaintings” combines cutout, computer animation and live-action in an exploration of the meanings of symbols in our culture. In the film we see two figures (modelled after characters from Navajo sandpaintings) as they take a journey through an artist’s space, searching for their own meaningful symbols.
Sand
-
“Sanctus” is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as its protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate. “In ‘Sanctus,’ Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she cretes images. She has transformed ‘found footage’ – scientific x-ray films from the 1950s – into a lyrical journey, into a celebration of the body as a physical and spiritual temple. For 19 mesmerizing minutes – between the SMPTE test film which contains the static image of a woman’s face used for focus purposes at the head of the film, to the rumbling sprockets at the tail of the film – discarded x-ray images of human forms performing everyday functions are vividly given a new life.” – Jon Gartenberg, Film Dept. Museum of Modern Art, NY
Sanctus
-
Sammy was a dog I had when growing up in Dundas, Ontario. I found old Super 8 footage of Sammy long after he had passed away, and I decided to work with these images on both a rotoscope and optical printer, to playfully and rhythmically evoke my emotions, memories, and image of little Sammy.
Sammy
-
In this lively, intimate film, a large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and sexual difference. Off-screen women’s voices and scenes form the 1960 Hollywood miscegenation melodrama “The World of Suzie Wong” counterpoint Sally’s own interracial encounters and emerging self-awareness. A stylish and playfully impressionistic account of racial expectations and role-playing which critiques Western stereotypes of Asian femininity. “…challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, wittily tracing a character’s move from stereotypical object to sexual subject.” – Laura U. Marks, Afterimage “Framed as a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty, this narrative is juxtaposed with a brilliant meditation on spectatorship.” – Richard Fung, Fuse Selected screenings: Toronto International Film Festival; Los Angeles Asian Pacific American Film Festival; New York Asian American Film Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival; Juror’s Award, Black Maria Film Festival
Sally’s Beauty Spot
-
It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verité or direct cinema.
Salesman
-
“‘Sailboat’ has the simplicity of a child’s drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seems to underline the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way a child might draw a picture of water and write word sounds on it to make it as emphatic as possible. The little image is interrupted at one point by a huge shoulder appearing briefly in the left-hand corner.” – Robert Cowan, Take One “This little Sailboat film will sail right through your gate and into your heart.” – Joyce Wieland “A day at the Beach, at the Sea, at the Sky and at the Sailboats.” – Michael Snow
Sailboat
-
A conceptual lap dissolve from “water currents” to “film strip current.” Dedicated to my son, Christopher. (PS) “In his earlier flicker films, Sharits explored the mechanisms of perception and projection, and now he takes his investigations to their logical extreme – to the nature of the film-strip itself. His analysis is constructed on close-up footage of water currents in a streambed. In each of the three, fourteen-minute loops, he progressively decreases the number of superimposed current directions from six to one. On this film he adds continuous straight scratch lines in multiples of three, so that by the end of the work the screen is a grill of twenty-four lines, behind which we see the coursing water. “The sound track, operating on entirely different rhythms, is a series of word loops. Superimposed are electronic “beeps” that phase into sync with their splice-dam referents. The fascination and energy of the film derive from its multi-dimensional dialectics, in which all available systems of experience are contrasted with their logical opposites/complements: sound against vision, film as representation against film as object, circular against linear structure, progression against regression, part against whole, meaning against abstraction. “What makes this work especially compelling is that its succinct formal analysis is accommodated in the purely sensual experience offered by the free-form motion and colours of the stream, and the antiphonal approach and retreat of the voices. Sharits creates both lyricism and drama from celluloid itself.” – David James, Art and Cinema Catalogue
S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED
-
Through the art of realism and East Coast story telling, this short experimental documentary reconsiders the fine line between documented truth and the everyday interaction of relating personal experiences.
Ryland’s True Story
