The sub-personalities of me, my baby, athlete, witch, and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and colour layers coming quietly together through the healing powers of natural touchstone. (BH) “…I would gladly go out of my way to see it again and would travel some distance to a retrospective of its author’s work.” – Tom Dowling, Washington Star “Ms. Hammer, a feminist artist in a male-dominated industry, is clearly someone who has ideas which go beyond male-female roles into the very nature of the film experience. Her awards and prizes include the Louise Riskin Prize and her short films are nationally distributed and have received praise at the New York Women’s Experimental Film Festival, the Women’s Media Festival and the Pasadena Film Forum, among others.” – Ron Cowan, The Oregon Statesman
Filter Films
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Fear of driving. Using every excuse not get a driver’s license doesn’t work anymore and with the assistance of a “gay friendly” driving school, the protagonist moves slowly toward his goal.
Proud Drivers of Canada
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The film began with the idea of doing a “remake” of “Moby Dick” using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted from his version. A number of other issues began to take precedence however: the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic writing; the possible intersections of (auto) biography and fiction; the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo) sexuality. (MC)
Prologue: Infinite Obscure
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LIGHT was primary in my consideration. All senses of “process” are (to me) based primarily on “thought-process”; and “thought-process” is based primarily on “memory re-call”; and that, as any memory process (all process finally) is electrical (firing of nerve connection) and expresses itself most clearly as a “back-firing” of nerve endings in the eye which DO become visible to us (usually eyes closed) as “brain movies” – as Michael McClure calls them. When we are not re-constructing “ a scene” (recalling something once seen), then we are watching (on the “screen” of closed eye-lids) the very PROCESS itself. (SB)
Process, The
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The most remarkable thing was the silence that emanated from friends and family regarding the details of my single middle age. When I was younger, my sex life had been the object of all kinds of questioning, from prurient curiosity to solicitous concern. (YR)
Privilege
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“Having acquired a set of family snapshots at an auction sale, Doyle traced their origins to an Ontario family. She talked with the now-elderly women and reconstructed the photographs and the dialogue in this film which confronts issues of photographic representation and its uses in family history.” – “Toronto: A Play of History,” The Power Plant, 1987
Private Property / Public History
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“I have breathed you in and there are no words to exorcise you from my soul.” – Eleanor Crow “An auto-portrait of maternity, ‘private patch’ shows Toronto filmer Tracy German quietly expectant, keening through winterludes of surprise before the birth of her first child. Episodically structured and materially assured, German’s exacting observational sense re-creates her domestic surround from the point of view of her boy-to-be, lurking over woodpiles and rock with eyes wide in wonder, turning the surrounding bush into a softly focused pastel glaze. “Deftly intercutting interiors and exteriors, ‘private’ opens on a wintry porch, a liminal architectural space which is both inside and out, metaphor here for the maternal body which has become the first home of her child (inside), growing quickly towards their moment of separation (outside). A dazzle of crimson flares ensue, miming the boy’s closed-eye womb visions, before the filmmaker’s face appears, softly turning in a patina of grain, reaching for a closed door. An eye unused to outside receives impressions of winter, closing with a snow forest divided by a path leading to the unknown. “The central gesture of interiority occurs in two brilliantly photographed scenes in the bath where German’s body appears as an accumulation of parts looming into the lens, giant of flesh, passing in and out of focus. A sense of possession pervades , as if the body we are seeing belonged to someone else, that nudity is not naked, its silent partner holding its double in suspension, adhering to old laws written in blood. Throughout a delicately woven amalgam of tones, snippets of conversation and a host of baby’s utterances sound off on the track, darkly atmospheric, the muffled roar of a world heard at one remove, from a sealed chamber of blood and tissue refashion the theatre into a darkened cradle. A trio of horses feed in a misty, surreal stillness, Bateman come to life, one of their number breaking from the pack to nuzzle their witness. A kitchen waits with water on the boil, architectures of premonition, vigil by a window and at last he appears, swaddled in sunlight, eyes not yet ready to glimpse a world grown suddenly large. Trees blossom, a dog looks up from the remains of a fading winter, horses reclaim fields of colour. Springtime.” – Mike Hoolboom
private patch of blue, a
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The son (and my Godson) of one of the Directors, Mr. Garegin Zakoyan, who is the founder and the General Manager of the Cenematheque Armenia, was imprisoned in 1994 on false charges. Trips to a prison became a routine for the family, and prompted us to make use of our access to otherwise forbidden domain of the penitentiary system. Thus the film was conceived. 90 percent of the narration is taken from the letters of my Godson and Sergey Paradjanov. (MB)
Prison Art
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“… his sternest film, titled with a sign for back and forth motion. A specially rigged camera swings right-left, left-right, before a homely, sterile classroom wall, then accelerates into an unbearable blur (the same frenzied scramble, as though the whole creative process was going berserk, that occurs three quarters of the way through ‘Abbey Road’)… In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention and, as much as any single element, created the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” – Manny Farber, Art Forum “Not only did ‘Back and Forth’ expand the possibilities of cinematic framing as postulated in ‘Wavelength’; it actually expanded the parameters of movie narrative as we’d previously recognized them, expanded them even beyond Godard’s bold effects in such films as ‘Weekend.’ For in ‘Back and Forth,’ Snow was able to completely suffuse form with content, while not relinquishing the traditional elements of characterization and acting. The relentless back and forth pan stresses similar concepts which Snow had engaged in his sculptures and carries still further the experiments with perception and illusion which began in ‘Wavelength.’” – Gene Youngblood, L.A. Free Press
<---> (Back and Forth)
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When a son and his estranged father embark on a fishing trip together, something goes wrong. “Print No Charge” is the story of a distant and strained relationship with a thought-provoking ending. As a teaching device, the film’s form articulates its content. The film stimulates creative response.
Print No Charge
