“Reel” is a meticulously crafted experimental narrative from a young Norwegian filmmaker – a film poem. An old woman is sitting by the reel and working with her yarn, her mind flows between different stages in a woman’s life.
Filter Films
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A comedy about a young Chinese-Canadian girl obsessed with her large egg-like forehead. “A deftly funny work.” – Peter Goddard,The Toronto Star
Bangs
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In 1929, there were speakeasies, Charleston dancers, gangsters and jazz. It was the year the stock market crashed and a group of men sat down to design the streetcar of the future. They were ten feet high, forty-six feet long and weighed twenty tons. The manufacturer called them streamliners, the public called them “Red Rockets.” The film captures the spirit and grace of the now-famous streetcars which have fired the imagination of rail buffs and the public alike for three generations.
Red Rocket
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“Red Church” opens with a lush, red-toned image of a church altar before a stained-glass window. On the soundtrack is an awesome roar. The rest of the film involves a complex transposition of that image through multiple exposures within the camera. Over the course of 200 exposures, the image becomes more abstract and as the emulsion wears down, the image becomes lighter and achieves a glowing, translucent quality.
Red Church
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A cinematic demonstration of an antiquated form of “additive” film colour, in which alternate black-and-white frames are filtered red and blue-green, or red, blue, and green. Kinemacolor was patented in 1906, and its derivations were in use until the ’30s when “subtractive” colour systems were perfected. Colour television, which consists of luminous red, blue and green spots, is also “additive.”
Red Car, The
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“Reasonably Barbie” was developed out of frustration with the North American “Beauty Guidelines,” outlined by mass media and advertising. Divided into two parts, the film allows many women (and men too) to take an objective look at the North American “Beauty Myth” starting with a splash of humour and then moving to a more serious approach. The filmmaker hopes that the film will encourage young women to stop hurting themselves for fashion and inspire them to come to realize their own self worth.
Reasonably Barbie
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“Joyce Wieland’s films are among the most endearing I have ever seen, making her point and sealing the issue in a womanly way without any concern for ragged edges. ‘La Raison Avant la Passion’ is a whirlwind view of Canada with an anti-dialectical premise.” – Douglas Pringle, ArtsCanada “REASON OVER PASSION… is Joyce Wieland’s major film so far. With its many eccentricities, it is a glyph of her artistic personality; a lyric vision tempered by an aggressive form and a visionary patriotism mixed with ironic self parody. It is a film to be seen many times.” – P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture
Reason Over Passion
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Using cutout pictures from magazines, animated to a harmonica soundtrack, the audience is asked to look around and figure out what is important to us. Perhaps it is not “the automobile and some of the other consumer products that we seem to dote on” (Grand Rapids Press).
Reality Check
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Selected moments from eight months of street life outside a Manhattan pizza parlour, as seen from a fourth-floor loft. People coming and going, changes in weather, light. My first dramatic film. (DR) “A cheerful, slightly crazy jauntiness prevails that may be as close as film form can come to really capturing a mood of the city.” – Roger Greenspun
Real Italian Pizza
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A travel log of a technical object keeping time on a big train. Camera: never is the camera looked through during the making of this film; most shots are hand held, kept level with the horizon & always points east with the train’s direction. Sound: 2 train tracks looped, 2 tracks blues guitar by Erich Fox. Opening: Vancouver at Nanaimo St. Bridge with a motorcycle mirror. Movement: 12000 frames. 4000 miles from Vancouver to Halifax with 3 frames of film shot for every mile. (90 telephone poles every 30 miles – 5 second sequences). Closing: Halifax at Young Ave. bridge at sunrise.
Reading Canada Backwards
