“Three women live communally together, fixing up their new apartment, watching TV, preparing food. One is a television personality, another a young girl (a daughter?), and the third – a lover? As we watch these women go through their daily lives, hear the voices and almost – the intimacy of the film is so intense – breathe their air, we form impressions of them and their relationships. “The viewing of the film compares to coming upon a photo-album left behind in an empty house. Without ever having known the subjects of the photos, you would nonetheless form an idea of who they were, how they lived. And it is these shared perceptions of relationships, of human lives, which are the means of revolution in this film. One of the characters says that the individual revolution is the only means of action left to her now, and the film makes clear that individual revolution can only be pursued in the field of human relationships. “‘Revolutions’ has been compared favourably to the films of Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. Its stillness, intimacy, the painterly quality of its images, and its confidence of purpose mark it as a stunning first feature.” – Toronto Festival of Festivals Note: French language and English sub-titled versions available
Filter Films
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A vivid cinema-verité documentary on street-corner revivalism in Toronto, this film probes the compulsions of self-appointed voices in the wilderness. Fast-paced, beautifully edited.
Revival
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This film started out as a community project involving my students at Sheridan College. On one level, it documents a remarkable reunion of people from as far away as Australia and New Zealand who converge on a small town in rural Ontario, where 2,436 Allied pilots received their training during World War II. A subtext emerges in the dialectic between our own newsreel footage of the event in 1979, and home movies shot by the veterans, including reunions at the base before it became a giant turkey farm. This allows for some revealing interruptions of conventional documentary codification, and serves as a reminder of the complex nature of film, time, and memory. (RH) “Working with material from several sources posed special problems … but Hancox has met the challenge with skill and imagination. The result is an interesting film in which both the filmmaker and the veterans can take justifiable pride.” – Hamilton Spectator “… certainly animated characters. Footage … from a 1956 reunion is first-rate, sidesplitting slapstick. This soars above a home movie and does a three-point landing.” – Ontario Film Association Newsletter Awards: Golden Sheaf Nomination, Yorkton Film Festival
Reunion in Dunnville
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“This innovative feature documentary deals with both painting and documentary filmmaking as fictional processes. While the camera records, in extreme close-up, the chronological development of the super-realist painting, ‘Return to Departure,’ a multi-level asynchronous soundtrack builds up a parallel sound portrait of the (unseen) artist at work – a rambling, cheerfully free-associating monologue interspersed with radio music, children’s voice, telephone interruptions. “Gradually, we see more and more of the surface of the painting and of the working artist; beautifully shot and manipulated footage conveys the mixing of pigments, minute accumulation of figurative detail, endless compromises between vision and canvas. By transgressing the boundaries of what we normally call ‘documentary’ and ‘fictional’ cinema, Tougas presents a profound metaphorical statement of the elusive essence of the painting and filmmaking process.” – Russell Wodell “A film not only about painting, but about politics, lifestyles, love, cultural history, metaphysics, work and other elements of the soil from which art emerges… ‘Return to Departure…’ has the courage to speak to us within an aesthetic experience, offering discovery rather than descriptions. In comparison, it makes most films about art-making seem timid and superficial.” – Amnon Buchbinder, Cinema Canada “By transgressing the boundaries of what we normally call ‘documentary’ and ‘fictional’ cinema, Tougas presents a profound metaphorical statement of the elusive essence of the painting and filmmaking process.” – Russell Wodell, Pacific Cinematheque
Return to Departure: The Biography of a Painting – Or Watching Paint Dry and Other Realisms
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“The whole of ‘Remedial Reading Comprehension’ is a film of short phrases in an ambiguously didactic sequence. Dream inspiration and academic education are conflated and the viewer is constantly reminded of his status as a reader.” – P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film
Remedial Reading Comprehension
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Here are four films, the interrelationship of which constitutes a complex quarto-thought-process: Not that the four sets-of-thinking are “parallel” in any sense, or that themes of each film inter-weave meaningfully in the three others, but rather as four “mobiles,” each seen separately, might be remembered as turning all at one in the same space without interfering with each other. (SB)
Rembrandt, Etc. and Jane
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A man wonders, measures, views relationships, people, places, things, time, himself. A sensual journey through a series of subjective reflections. “The artist’s search for meaning of his own existence is never-ending and takes many forms. Ed Emshwiller’s remarkable epic, ‘Relativity,’ continues this exploration with extraordinary frankess and rare technical skill.” – Willard Van Dyke
Relativity
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“This new, three-hour film by the Canadian Michael Snow, is an extraordinary cinematic monument. No physical action, not even the presence of man, a fabulous game with nature and machine which puts into question our perceptions, our mental habits, and in many respects renders moribund existing cinema: the latest Fellini, Kubrick, Buñuel etc. “For ‘La Region Centrale,’ Snow had a special camera apparatus constructed by a technician in Montreal, an apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral. The film is one continuous movement across space, intercutting occasionally the X serving as a point of reference and permitting one to take hold of stable reality. Snow has chosen to film a deserted region, without the least trace of human life, 100 miles to the north of Sept-Isles in the province of Quebec: a sort of plateau without trees, opening onto a vast circular prospect of the surrounding mountains. In the first frames, the camera disengages itself slowly from the ground in a circular movement. A sound track, rigorously synchronized, composed from the original sound which programmed the camera, supplies a permanent counterpoint. “Michael Snow pushes toward the absurd the essential nature of this ‘seventh’ art, which is endlessly repeated as being above the visual. He catapults us into the heart of a world before speech, before arbitrarily composed meaning, even subject. He forces us to rethink not only cinema but our universe.” – Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde, Paris Sept. 28, 1972 “…an unimaginable film, literally like nothing you have ever seen before…” John W. Locke, Artforum, November/December 1973 “‘La Région Centrale’ is arguably the most spectacular experimental film made anywhere in the world…. Snow presents a reflexive impression of the camera as the ultimate transformative, creative apparatus, capable of any magic.” – Peter Rist, Offscreen, November 2002
Région Centrale, La
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“Male-female interactions in a bleak and oppressive New York tenement; includes scratching on the film’s surface, as an early Brakhagean ‘metaphor on vision.’” – Marilyn Jull
Reflections on Black
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Multi-layered imagery of natural forms and textures. Synthesizer music by Ron Smulevici.
Reflections (Lipskis)
