“The richest frame I have seen in any film when you take into consideration all movements, lines, the beautiful whites and reds and blacks.” – Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
Filter Films
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“Film About a Woman Who” is a multi-layered composite of images, texts, music, and speech that deals with oppositions of emotional life set off against the appearances of everyday behaviour. The story of a passage across an unspecified length and order of time is sustained by the intermittent narration of two off-screen voices (a man’s and a woman’s, never clearly identified with the on-screen characters) that reads, in the present tense, discrete paragraphs about the experiences of someone referred to only as “she.” On screen two men and two women and, occasionally, a child “play out” the valences of their interdependencies in word and gesture, gaze and stillness, in – to use Louise Brooks’s phrase -”unhinged fragments of reality.” Correspondence between image and narration at any given moment ranges from metaphoric cohesion to calculated incongruity. Subtitles and intertitles function as both counterpoint and connective tissue between sequences. The subjective, obsessive eye of the camera combined with the dry impersonal tone of the narration creates a constant flux of tension, absurdity, intense drama, and pathos.
Film About a Woman Who
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This is a short black-and-white film in the Andy Warhol style. A male hooker (Dick Large) and a female stripper (Ima Chicken) live together in a squalid flat. The two argue and bicker about feminism, stripping, hooking, sex and their relationship. The filmmaker (referred to as “the little masochist”) is a client who is talked about and talked to as the characters formally address the camera which is recording their actions. Ima leaves; Ima returns for a reunion. Like real life, there is very little plot and only a hint of melodrama.
Film (Fill’em)
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When I returned to 5 cité de la roquette, I found a sign on the gate announcing the reconstruction of the building. In the days that followed, I came back in early morning or evening, when crews were not working, to film the stairwells, the stones, the doors, to stand on the landings, to listen to the sounds of the empty building, to watch the light at the windows, to hear again the songs of this place.
5 cité de la Roquette
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This short explores light as a meditative state while encouraging the viewer to take a moment to be present within themselves. Taking footage from my narrative self portrait A Celebration of Darkness (2015) and recutting it to refocus on the various macro shots of crystals as an expansion on the theme of light and darkness. The images in this short was made possible by the LIFT/ImagineNATIVE 16 mm Film Mentorship in 2015, it’s post production was funded by the Ontario Arts Council Access and Development grant in 2016 and completed as part of my Media Artist in Residence with Workman Arts in 2015/2016.
Experiments In Light
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One night, Andrea, a young woman, comes back home from a party, a bit drunk. Her loving girlfriend Marie advices her to drink some water before going to sleep, so as to avoid an hangover. Andrea goes to their messy kitchen where she can’t find any proper water… until she sees a bottle of Holy Water, shaped in Holy Mary. She drinks it all. Some time after that night, Andrea finds herself vomiting a lot and getting bigger and bigger. Marie starts to worry that Andrea could be pregnant, but it’s impossible, Andrea never had sex with a man! They decide to go to a gynecologist, who turns out to be very unprofessional. Marie, who grew up in a Catholic family, then suggests that it could be a miracle… Andrea can’t believe it until some fantastic events make her doubt. Months after months, she keeps on getting bigger and tired of getting no help from anyone. She decides to seek for advice at church, where she meets two priests… But they don’t want to hear about a miracle either. The young couple therefore decide to live the pregnancy with joy and see where it goes. Christmas’ Eve is coming…
The Fruit of our Womb
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6 years ago two artists attempted to make a queer, sci-fi porno: it failed. What emerged 6 years later out of its campy/tragic/melodramatic ashes is this erotic experimental documentary; a meditation on the intersections of failure and fetish as well the meticulous, accidental processes of constructing of cinema and identity
Fluids
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“Fever” plays with the film convention of “it was only a dream,” positioning the audience/viewer as both the (mind’s) eye of the dreamer, and as the voyeur of the same naked, sleeping figure. In fact, much of the piece explores looking, as dream figures gaze upwards captivated by something unseen, inter-cut with the camera examining the sleeper’s body. The film culminates with the dream looking back at the dreamer, startling him to wakefulness. Perhaps longing is really the theme here, as the camera caresses a body the viewer can’t touch, a dog chases a fox frozen in a glass case, and people search the sky for something mysterious. Finally, when contact is made, the dreamer flees the dream.
Fever
