Experimental

PLOT:
Vertov and his Kino group produced this lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbas who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the five year plan. Enthusiasm is most noteworthy for it’s creative use of the new sound medium. Vertov liberated the recording equipment from the studio and shot sound on location. He also used common everyday sounds and wove them into what can only be described as a symphony. In fact, after seeing the film Charlie Chaplin wrote: “Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician.”Read More »

Quote:
Nocturnes pour le roi de Rome is a French film directed in 2005 by Jean-Charles Fitoussi in Rome during the Pocket Film Festival and released on January 6, 2010. This film is the first feature film to have been shot with a cell phone equipped with a camera.

Quote:
An old German composer is invited in Roma by the King to compose for him eight Notturni. But the memories of tragic events he used to live there, in the very place he is now coming back, make him unable to write anything.Read More »

Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam—from both North and South—and the United States, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war.Read More »

Prolific underground filmmaker Fotopoulos’ enigmatic setting of the Coleridge poem, using both 16mm and digital film to create a shifting, layered visual accompaniment. From the linked review:

“Those unfamiliar with the source material needn’t be intimidated. Reacting to another artist’s work, Fotopoulos creates something intrinsically his own. Christabel might be interpreted as the account of a young woman’s dream-thoughts as she nears adulthood, and the four sections of the film (structured to accompany each fragment of Coleridge’s poem) guide her to different levels of introspection. Each layer is charged with specificity, forging connections on multiple levels: corporeal, familial, religious, daemonic, and sexual. The young woman, Christabel, struggles through the blending worlds of waking life and soul-possessed visions….Christabel exists in vibrant, painterly counterpoint to the purposefully bleak, stark minimalism of Fotopoulos’ narratives, Back Against the Wall and Migrating Forms.”Read More »

Synopsis:
Everything Everywhere Again Alive is a landmark work of Canadian underground cinema, a film diary with mystic and symbolic overtones. In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living. Lock filmed the achievements and daily rituals of his fellow communards, his camera bearing witness as a community assembled and dispersed. The resulting film uses poetic strategies, including logograms and other graphic disruptions, to extend its themes of renewal and rebirth, and to mark the encounter between reason and imagination, the concrete and the abstract.Read More »

In the shadows of Low Life, a secret ceremony dedicated to thirteen guardians of humanity’s common treasures, love and resistance, youth and poetry, equality and difference, insurrection and revolution. Saxifrages – These rootless plants’ windblown destiny is a soft perseverance doubled by an imperceptible intransigence, which, in time, imposes on the hardness of stones a patience that can break them.Read More »

Synopsis:
A group of boys spend their day outdoors exploring, wreaking havoc and letting their imaginations run wild.Read More »

2013/35mm & 16mm & 8mm film → HD/16:9/30min
Music by Makino Takashi

Everything I saw during 2012. This work will show you the dynamic moment of changing from film image to digital image. —Takashi MakinoRead More »

Quote:
Prolific background actor Jill Goldston takes centre stage in this unique portrait. Constructed entirely from Jill’s performances – captured fleetingly in everything from Mr. Bean to The Elephant Man – the film is a lyrical journey through popular culture, and a haunting study of life lived out of focus.

As a background artist, Jill Goldston has worked on countless films. This collage of fifty years of cinema and television history is a tribute to her and to all the figures in the background without whom those in the foreground would be unable to take centre stage.Read More »