Reading the replies to a personal ad she has placed, a woman imagines herself in relationships with three different men. The film uses both layering and fragmentation to weave a web of associations and create a dynamic and fast-moving flow of images and events. Quick flashbacks, like momentary thoughts, accumulate. The reading voice is the constant, a soft steady interior voice around which the images dance and leap. The most dramatic moments of a given scenario are played out in a realistic fashion, and some scenarios, differently imagined, are repeated with each of the men: the restaurant, the dance, the bath, the bed. Each letter conjures up a very different man. The first is young, domestic and likable; the second rich, exciting and arrogant; and the third older, exuberant and vulnerable. The film runs the gamut of human emotions, from exuberance to melancholy, in its exploration of the thinking process. “(The film) sports the breezy lack of affectation characteristic of Davis’ best work.” – Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine “(Davis) has a sure comic touch and an absolute passion for the nitty gritty detail that makes our lives so interesting.” – Peter Goddard, Toronto Star
Filter Films
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When I was eighteen, I was young, I dove in the pool and it seemed like I was thirty before I reached the other side. In the water I was suddenly in a different world, the walls had gone and the darkness was not the absence of light but the presence of things unseen – of a whole world of being not known or realized before. I got out and looked at the ripples in the water extending away from me. I was looking into this time past, with his immensity of vision, straining my eyes to distinguish some form, listening for an intelligible sound. But as I stared, all that looked back was a reflection, that made the surrounding darkness seem transparent like a sky. I re-entered to find out why. “Re: Entry” is a film in which fear and anxiety are transplanted with techniques of relaxation. This cross-connection gives birth to a field of unexplored emotion. Through the colour and the movement, we move on this wave of feeling released, by nature, the nature of time, of terrain familiar and not so, and as the film progresses our conception of unrealized or felt vision becomes less solid, more fluid. A retention of water. (Carl Brown)
Re: Entry
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I took along a beach ball on my trip to California; it is bounced, rolled, tossed, kicked and carried by a motley collection of complete strangers who express a great range of attitudes towards the camera, the ball and me. This film incorporates an unusual improvised soundtrack for solo bassoon.
Ball in California, A
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Six women of different ethnic and economic backgrounds, ranging in age from early 30s to 60s, tell their individual stories of returning to school or job training, of juggling child raising and house keeping with school and jobs, of support by family and the support they feel is needed for women like them. Must women be superwomen to find fulfillment? These women’s stories are interwoven to produce inspiring and sobering reflections on many women’s lives. Produced for the Santa Cruz Chapter of the Older Women’s League (OWL).
Re-entry: Stories of Six Women
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“Experimental ‘Razorhead’ …is a jolt and a half that has little to do with any sort of haircut you can get on Astor Place.”- Eliot Stein, Village Voice, 1987 The film was made on the request of the participants as a record of a two-day erotic ritual. 400 feet of film were shot and later permission was obtained to treat the material as an aesthetic composition, approximately 250 feet long. Originally the film was intended as part of a series dealing with non-genital sex and symbolic eroticism.
Razorhead
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Although affirming projector, projection beam, screen, emulsion, film frame, structure, etc., this is not an “abstract film”/projector as pistol/time-coloured pills/yes – no/mental suicide & then rebirth as self-projection (sound: full volume, full bass). ” …I really do think you have a very fine film there of magnificent subtlety in its by-play with the texture of film and eye’s grain…” – Stan Brakhage “The retinal retention of after-images is remarkable.” – Ed Emshwiller Screenings/Collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Royal Film Archive, Brussels; Kolmischer Kunsteverein; United States Information Agency
Ray Gun Virus
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The film is, at once, a document of a great Canadian multinational facing perilous agricultural “sophistication,” and a lament – a witness to the element of ruin that plagues industry. The Massey Harris King Street Factory (Toronto) was built in 1879 to a chorus of consternation. The size and scope were unprecedented in Canada at that time, and it established this company (later to be Massey Ferguson) as a major manufacturing firm in the agricultural industry. The film is a journey through the remnants of the factory which, for years, served as the pillar of the corporation. Seen from afar, and then spiraling in to the courtyard, signs of destruction lay everywhere. The camera moves into the buildings, traveling through torn corridors and vast chambers. Outside, the smash of a hammer leads to the demolition in progress, as tractors, trucks, cranes and bulldozers, like so many insects, systematically raze the structure. The sound/title denotes a dying gasp; the violence of transformation.
Rattle
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“I can tell you that Wieland’s film holds. It may be about the best (or richest) political movie around. It’s all about rebels (enacted by real rats) and police (enacted by real cats). After long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of prison and escape to Canada. There they take up organic gardening, with no DDT in the grass. It is a parable, a satire, an adventure movie, or you can call it pop art or any art you want – I find it one of the most original films made recently.” – Jonas Mekas “The film is witty, articulate, and a far cry from all the other cute animal humanism the cinema has sickened us with in the past. Nevertheless it is a vital extension of the aspect of her films that runs counter to the structural principle: ironic symbolism.” – P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture “‘Rat Life and Diet in North America’ proves that she’s been looking long and affectionately at animal life, and is a sort of whimsical Evelyn Nesbit; never corny and creating with an intense female-ness.” – Manny Farber, Art Forum
Rat Life and Diet in North America
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“Ranch” is about The Alan Wood Ranch Project, a massive environmental art piece built on 320 acres in the foothills of the Rockies. Combining time-lapse photography, old Hollywood Westerns, television news and aerial photography, “Ranch” offers the viewer a refreshing new appreciation of the work. A film of breathtaking beauty and a document of surprising humour, “Ranch” is part experimental cinema, part documentary.
Ranch: The Alan Wood Ranch Project
