This compelling film profile of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart uses archival material, interviews with family and friends, readings and dramatic re-creations to portray a writer who was mythologized in her own lifetime. Elizabeth Smart died in England in 1986, at the age of 72. She is best known for her novel “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” published in 1945, a story of passion and obsession inspired by her love affair with the English poet George Barker. The years subsequent to that dramatic period – the complex relationship she developed with Baker, the period of literary exile and her eventual recognition – are also examined. This film sheds light not only on a writer and her work, but on the forces that work against creativity, and the conflicting claims of life and art. Stars Jackie Burroughs as Elizabeth Smart. Narration by Michael Ondaatje. Red Queen Productions: https://redqueenproductions.com/productions/
Filter Films
-
We all have an intimate relationship with time, but when you try to picture it, what does time look like? Our efforts to gauge and measure time’s physical properties reveal the limits of science and the reaches of creativity. Essentially 88 one-minute movies, Gallagher’s philosophically and formally adventurous Time Being fits in the tradition of essay films by European masters Chris Marker and Joris Ivens. Time Being charts an epic journey, playfully exploiting space and motion to revel in the wonderful paradox that is time. – Tom Charity, Vancouver International Film Centre
Time Being
-
A simple intersection in Wuppertal, Germany becomes a microcosm of the patterns of everyday life. Cars trace the angles of the streets, pedestrians forge new paths and Wuppertal’s famed Schwebebahn turns our expectations upside-down. Shot on Super 8 in Wuppertal April 28, 2009, while making Phantoms.
Schuh Schnell Service
-
Three grids are placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario. They become devices through which the stationary camera, pointing upstream, delineates the landscape. They motivate the movement of the zoom, which intensifies our sense of the field of view, narrowing vision and flattening space. The river, framed momentarily, flows past. Financial assistance provided by the Toronto Arts Council.
Brimstone Line
-
“Have you ever seen anything that looked so out of place that is haunted your subconscious and you could never let it go? Well I have… Field of Stones is my personal 43:17 minute journey inspired by a strange cemetery location that took me deep into a study of religion and science. Are the two connected? Is there something more to our lives and what is next after this life? These are just some of the questions that I would eventually find answers to as well as answers to questions I was unaware I was even asking. His journey changed the way I view every aspect of my life and aspects of our culture that used to comfort me, until now…Please enjoy.”
Field of Stones
-
A concise exploration of how life informs poetry. Rick Patrick had a difficult childhood, growing up with an abusive father. He matured into adulthood with some anger about the world and found redemption by writing poetry, persisted through numerous rejections and finally got published.
Living Poetry with Rick Patrick
-
Semper Porro is a rhythmic composition of abstracted images derived from nature and droning -generative sound derived from the film-material itself. Shot on location in Wellington North County, Ontario, at the Film Farm – the film’s title is also the motto for the county, a Latin term meaning always forward or ever forward. While implicating the linear and temporal nature of film as a medium the title simultaneously makes reference to the geographic origin of the films content. The film is a process-based work, created using high-contrast 16mm black and white film that has been heavily manipulated by optical duplication, hand-processing experimentation and colouring by a hand split-toning method. Leveraging a range of techniques and processes unique to the medium, the films’ main subject becomes a self-reflexive and organic meditation on the celluloid object itself, primarily concerned with its own unique material qualities.
Semper Porro (Ever Forward)
-
Axis is an experimental film made through entirely photomechanical and photochemical means. The film fits into the experimental sub-genre of “optical printer film.” Some practitioners who have inspired me include Jordan Belson, John Whitney, David Rimmer, Pat O’Neill, Al Razutis, Gary Popovich, Bruce Elder and Norman McLaren. Axis takes as its subject matter the mundane, faceless urban landscape with its gleaming towers and factories. The workaday humdrum… drones to the hive. So I take to the streets, with my homemade Bolex robot, affectionately known as “BOLBOT.” It is a time-lapse motion control machine capable of smoothly spinning through X-Y-Z axes continuously or in a stop/go pattern. The resulting footage is a transformed view of the city; urban scenes are in a continual state of exaggerated movement. A main idea of this film is to take mediated views of everyday city scenery and to elevate the city to a frenzied cosmic rendering with orb-like symmetries abounding. The city, and nature are transformed into a seething and pulsing mandala. The hope is that the spectator experiences meditative, trancelike states. The message of the film is to open one’s eyes and see the world in different ways. It is also an affirmation; to look at the world as a system of possibilities as opposed to a corporate, faceless façade. Even within the constructed façade artistic possibilities and invention abound. Revolutions!
Axis
-
When our intrepid heroine Darcy gets her heart broken on her 30th birthday, her friends rally around to help her recover. To lift her spirits, they concoct a two-step plan: 1. Get revenge on the heartbreaker 2. Get Darcy fast hookups via online dating sites Mayhem ensues.
Click
-
“One of the most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning’s 1976 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of image/sound pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and a fractured, painterly study of the American midwestern landscape, ‘11×14’ points toward the creation of a new, non-literary but populist cinema.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice Included in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Alternative 100 Top Films,” The Chicago Reader, 1998.
11×14
