“Priceville Prints” is a video about collaborative printmaking. Taped at Otis Tamasauskas’ Priceville Ontario studio, the video records the interaction between the printmaker Tamasaukas and the painters Robert Markle and Harold Klunder. The artists are followed through the various procedures of lithography and etching while Tamasauskas discusses and considers with the artists the possibilities and consequences of the media and its techniques. The artists speak about their attitudes to their art in general, their attitude toward printmaking and engage in a critical discussion about the products of the printmaking session. This is not a “how to” video. The video communicates the aesthetic values of printmaking, the experimentation and discovery that takes place during the making of a print, the evaluation of the various states of a print until it is finally declared “ready to print,” and the interpretation and translation of the aesthetics of one art form, painting, into the different media demands of printmaking.
Filter Films
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“This short animated film represents the recollections of a woman whose native ancestry was obscured by the social mores of the recent past. Tracing fragments of information as she walks, the woman speculates on what really happened to her ancestors and herself.” – Frances Leeming
Pretending We Were Indians
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“The Pressures of the Text” integrates direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language, and simultaneous translation to investigate the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness. A parody of art/critspeak, educational instruction, gothic narrative, and pornography, it has been performed as a live work at major media centres and new music festivals nationwide. The piece was written, directed and delivered by Peter Rose; co-directed by Jessie Lewis; with sign language and ideographic symbols by Jessie Lewis; and with English simultran by Fred Curchack.
Pressures of the Text, The
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“The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens ‘Presents’ literally opens into a film within the film. When its figures awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a Plexiglas sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye of nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drumbeat that coincides with each edit in this elegiac section announces each moment of life’s disappearance.” – Phillip Monk, Art Express “…the camera seems to follow her progress as the actress walks to the door. We’re so used to reading this kind of lateral motion as panning that even though the relation between set and camera is reversed, that latter is what seems to be mobile. But it’s as if Snow’s camera is radiating a force field. The statuesque actress totters on her high heels, lamps swing precipitously, the furniture lurches, the walls shudder, and a potted plant topples. Absurdly, a small phonograph is playing a Bach cello piece and as the action demands more rapid ‘planning,’ the needle jumps all over the record. Suddenly, the floor pitches upward in a simulation of a camera tilt – objects slide off the table, which soon goes careening after them. When Snow’s camera finally does decide to make a move, it’s to complete the demolition of the set. Dollying behind a Plexiglas shield the camera resolutely explores the living room, casually ploughs the remaining furniture through the flats. The sequence lasts about 15 minutes and its dramatizing of the perceptual disruption of a moving camera is one of the most brilliant sight gags I’ve ever seen.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 1981
Presents
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“The Presence” reflects some sight of Insect as Being. The imagined aura and environment of a beetle creates a “world” wherein this solitary insect may simply be seen.
Presence, The
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This is an architectural garden of the variably brash rock-solid liquid-encompassing, but always imitative, human mind as it processes the given light thoughtfully. This film is about that.
Babylon Series #3
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“Poulet Poulet” is a light-hearted sociological look at the many roles of poultry in human life. The emphasis is placed on the lesser-known aspects of human/chicken relationships. Writer and broadcaster Margaret Wisser discusses the evolution of the interaction between people and chickens, including their poor example as sexual role models. Members of the Feather Fancier display their prize-winning birds. Songs, toys and chickens round out this picture.
Poulet Poulet
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In Japan, a man works with his sons and apprentices fashioning pots. A woman scoops off water from a clay settling tank while another lifts out heavy, wet handfuls of clay. An ancient brick kiln is walled up at night. Working with understanding and affection, refusing such aids as commentary and music, th filmmaker, creating from the pattern of the potter’s work, shows precisely how pots are crafted and has captured a vision of creativity radically different from western concepts of art-making.
Potters at Work
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A sister film to “Water Power,” “A Portrait of Small Hydro” concentrates on three hydro entrepreneurs who bought up old dam sites in New England and rebuilt them for production of power. In 1978, the US Congress passed the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) which requires utilities to buy power at fair rates from private producers. With a guaranteed return, investors scurried all over the country looking for suitable sites. Charles MacArthur found his “bottomless oil well” in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. In1977, his 600 kw output was worth $12,000 a year. In the early 1980s, it was worth $120,000. But, as the film makes clear, it’s not just technology, but the history and the simple elegance of this method of generating power. Besides contributing to our nation’s energy picture, these entrepreneurs delight in the fact that things have come full circle and that the water power which built these communities is once again responsible for their revitilization.
Portrait of Small Hydro, A
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The emotional life of a young art student is expressed in Freudian terms through a succession of images and symbols, constantly combining themselves into famous paintings and sculptures. A barrage of images that tell different stories to different viewers.
Portrait of Lydia
