Catalogue 1984
Index and Introduction | Films and Related Work A-J L-W | Appendix
Supplement 1987 Index and Introduction | Films and Related Work A-J L-Y | Appendix
Below: ARTISTS
A-J, Pages 8-24
Blaine Allan, David Anderson, Jim Anderson, Rebecca Baird,
Raphael Bendahan, David Bennell, Douglas Berquist, Deborah Clarkin,
Ian Cochrane, Martha Davis, Judith Doyle, Peter Dudar, Bruce Elder,
Fast Wurms, Mikki Fontana, Eldon Garnet, Ric Greenwald,
Vincent Grenier, Anna Gronau, Robert Gutteridge, Barbara Hammer,
Frieder Hochheim, Nicolas Jenkins, Patrick Jenkins.
THE FUNNEL: FILM AND RELATED WORK
BLAINE ALLAN
Born: Toronto, 1954
Blaine Allan works in both filmmaking and film studies. He has published articles on film and film theory in several journals, including Film Reader, Cine-Tracts, and Parachute. He has written a book-length reference guide to the work of filmmaker Nicholas Ray and is currently compiling an encyclopaedia of Canadian television programs. He has studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. His doctoral dissertation, to be completed in 1984, examines the relations of the beat generation and independent film in the late 1950s, setting the experimental cinema into socio-political and cultural contexts.
Blaine Allan's films are informed, but not confined, by his extensive background in theory and criticism. They appeal to and work against patterns of perception. Their themes include our desire to turn experience and memory into patterns and narrative.
Living and working in Kingston, Blaine Allan has been an active member of the Eastern Ontario Film Cooperative and has helped promote experimental film through programs at the National Film Theatre and at the Kingston Artists' Association.
YUKON POSTCARDS (1983, Black and White, Colour,
16mm, 18 minutes, Sound)
"The central character reads his version of incidents that he may
have witnessed as a mineworker in northern Canada. These passages—observations
of nature or individuals, the story of an accident—are not especially
meaningful in themselves. They are simply the type of story we tell
after having been elsewhere. A series of snapshots re-tell these stories
in a less personal more oblique fashion. The stories and the pictures
appear to have continuous connections to personal experience. In addition,
each seems to confirm the truth of the other. Yet they also comprise
fictions, fabricated oral and photographic histories.
"In Yukon Postcards I was concerned with the ways we construct stories to order our experiences and memories. Experience and memory are ongoing processes, without boundaries. However, we edit and organize on narrative principles in order to share our history and to make events meaningful to ourselves." B. A.
The film engages the audience in a process that mirrors its construction. The stories and pictures, and the structure of the film itself invite a deciphering and piecing together of the traces of real events from another time and place.
With Sarah Kobs, Tracey Alexander and David Obermeyer.
DAVID ANDERSON
Born: Toronto, 1948
David Anderson received his training in drawing and painting in Amsterdam and Toronto. He continues to paint and has extended his graphic work to the production of xerox installations and one-of-a-kind books. Toronto audiences are familiar with Anderson's work through his exhibitions at Gallery Quan, YYZ Gallery and the Chromazone Gallery, the site where New Image Painting emerged as a movement in Toronto.
His film work developed at least partly as a result of his proximity to the work of his brother James, and Keith Lock. As well David Anderson and Lock were responsible for managing a series of film screenings entitled `New Films' in their studio on Adelaide Street in Toronto in 1977. The energy and audiences from the studio screenings joined forces with the Funnel.
Anderson's films are mostly in 8mm or Super 8mm and borrow from the vocabulary of the 'home movie' in that they deal largely with the objects and events in the artist's every-day life. As with his drawing, there is an intent to record and reveal from this context of the everyday with the draughtsman's eye for gesture, contrast and composition. Through a play with rhythm, repetition and highlighting, aspects of that reality are intensified.
THREE POEMS (1972, B & W, Silent, 16mm, 15
minutes)
These are 3 early films. The first film was shot in the bathroom and
is basically a still-life with toilet, bathtub and sink using a hand-held
16mm camera. The second is a portrait of my brother Jim, mostly in his
pyjamas in the apartment that we shared. The third "poem"
is an out-take from a film that Jim and Keith Lock were working on at
the time, showing a friend Mary Jane Card on Yonge Street. D. A.
AMARYLLIS (1973, Colour, Silent, Super 8 blow-up
from Regular 8, 2 1/2 minutes)
The camera follows the growth of an amaryllis flower bulb to its climax,
a crescendo of double exposed red trumpets. D. A.
BIG WAVE (1973, B & W, Silent, 16mm, 6 1/2
minutes)
"A fundamental aspect of Ontario filmmaking emerges directly in
films which attempt to heighten the physical world without betraying
it. Dave Anderson catches some of the inherent irony in his own description
of Big Wave as an 'unashamedly lyrical look at a plastic tarpaulin covering
a vast salt pile.' " Ian Birnie (1977)
NINE BIRTHDAYS (1974-83, Colour, Sound on cassette,
Regular 8, 40+ minutes)
"The same event again and again. Time after time candles are blown
out and portions of cake are distributed to friends on the screen. The
images of cakes are initially luscious symbols of celebration, but rapidly
lose their dazzle when repeated. Behind the veneer is, of course, the
passage of time and one person's acknowledgement of this by the celebration
of the anniversary of his birth. Film has a remarkable ability to manipulate
time perception and Anderson has used this to make a film about time."
Anna Gronau, Funnel Newsletter Vol. 1, No. 2, (March 1980)
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Available with artist present only. Two cakes are prepared and placed on either side of the screen on tall stands. Halfway through the film the filmmaker lights the candles and then blows them out. This same image is repeated within the film itself. If the cakes are real it is distributed to the audience when the film is finished.
KINGSTON BY BUS (1975, Colour, Silent, Super 8
blow up from regular 8, 6 1/2 minutes)
This landscape is distinguished by the fact that it was shot from the
interior of a bus. Beginning with a series of repetitive pans of the
passengers, the film then plays with the constantly moving countryside
framed by the bus' windows in an increasingly disoriented manner until
arrival in a small town (with neat verandas and sturdy brick facades)
restores visual order.
TIM HORTON DOUGHNUTS
(1975, Colour, Sound, Super 8 blow-up from Regular 8, 5 minutes)
Watch Out: The Anderson Bros. take to the highway: Bronco, filling station,
doughnuts, fingers, postcards, etc. D. A.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Parts of the sound-track recorded at slow speed, do not adjust projector speed.
WASHAGO (1976, B & W, Silent, 16mm, 10 minutes)
Washago is a 'structural' film relying on successive pans of 180 degrees
to document the landscape on a 100 mile trip from Washago in Northern
Ontario to Toronto. I was hitch-hiking therefore some pans are made
from the road-side, while some are made from inside cars. To conserve
film, pans were made at 10 minute intervals. D. A.
"He took his bolex on one of the trips and decided to make a pan every 10 minutes—no matter where he was. The film starts with left to right pans (as were all but one) of a completely wooded area and gradually becomes more and more citified as the rides are getting him closer and closer to Toronto ... The rhythm and structure are very distinct, yet Washago has a loose and easy mood to it." Cinema Canada
EAT (1977, Colour, Silent, Super 8, 9 minutes)
A record of the rituals and joys of food. "Eating is the topic.
Back to basics." D. A.
MR. SIGNMAN, MAKE ME A SIGN (1977-78, Colour,
Silent, Super 8, 22 minutes)
Before beginning to record I had no idea of the succession of events
or how the film would conclude, my only plan being to respond to what
was happening around me. D. A.
"Mr. Signman, Make Me A Sign gets its title from a sign painted on a building. Images from advertising, particularly billboards abound. But there are other images—construction on a street, a man lounging in a lawn chair, a boy and girl kissing on the sidewalk—and we realize that these are signs as well. Each carries a certain amount of weight as a sign for some activity in our culture but what prevents the film from slipping into being merely a catalogue of cultural cliches is a feeling that grows steadily that there is a point of view here." Anna Gronau, Funnel Newsletter Vol. 1, No. 2 (March 1980)
BI-RITE (1978, Colour, Silent, Super 8, 11 minutes)
The camera assumes a more or less fixed position for most of the film
at the third storey window of a building at Carlton and Parliament Streets
in downtown Toronto. A rattan blind, occasionally raised and lowered
sets up a division between the interior and exterior. As the film progresses
we are permitted some looks inside the studio: the artist sitting on
a bed, some collages he is working on, and then, incongruously, a green
summer garden, like a dream of escape from the shuffle of everyday life
past the Bi-Rite sign seen constantly out the window.
JIM ANDERSON
Born: Campellford, Ontario, 1950
Jim Anderson, a long-time active member of the Funnel, began making films while still a high-school student. Some of his earliest films were painted-on-film animations. Anderson's collaborator at that time was Keith Lock, and while each continued to work independently, their working partnership continued for several years as they attended York University's Film Program and later became involved with the Toronto Filmmakers' Co-op. Anderson and Lock's best-known collaborative efforts are Arnold (1970) and its sequel Work, Bike and Eat (1972), a pair of black and white narratives. (See: Films by Jim Anderson and Keith Lock).
Anderson has also worked on other projects—with theatre director Paul Thompson and Louis Del Grande creating sets and films for theatrical productions; as one of the camera operators for Michael Snow during the making of his film Rameau's Nephew… (1974) and later on Snow's film installation Two Sides to Every Story; and with Peter Dudar and Lily Eng of Missing Associates in the production of several dance/film works.
Anderson's work in paintings and constructs has been as important as his filmmaking. It is worth noting that the artist's figurative, expressionistic painting style is now considered to include him as among the 'New Image' school of painters in Toronto, although it has been characteristic of his approach for over a decade. Anderson's films, paintings and constructs reveal an interest with the inexplicable fears and visions of the individual in the midst of a complex and ambiguous world. He is interested in the occurrence of knowledge through paradox, contradiction and defeat.
SCREAM OF A BUTTERFLY (1969, Colour, Silent, 16mm,
6 minutes)
Painted directly onto clear 16mm leader, this film (Anderson's first
16mm) shows a series of metamorphoses—from larva to butterfly
to collector's jar and so on.
Winner of Grand Prix, Tenth Muse International Student Film Festival, Amsterdam 1969
YONGE STREET (1972, Black and White, Sound, 16mm,
7 minutes)
In this film Anderson walks down Yonge Street from Bloor Street to the
waterfront recording the shifting intensities of the cityscape. "It's
as if you had flowed down Yonge Street along with all the pollution
of life and in the terror of the tunnel met death, and finally felt
your body emptied with the rest of the waste into the lake. As the camera
peacefully scans the water there is a feeling that everything is being
cleansed ..." Rick Hancox/Cinema Canada
Included in the National Gallery of Canada's `Filmmaker Series 1974'.
R. O. M. (ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM)
(1972, Black and White, Sound, 16mm, 10 minutes)
Objects on display at the Museum are viewed, initially by a constantly
moving camera that never fixes on anything for long. In the latter half
of the film the camera continues to move, but concentrates on a specific
artifact; two kings of scanning.
Included in National Gallery's 'Filmmaker Series 1974'
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Please note that this is to be played at silent speed with the sound on. If the projector sound does not function at silent speed then it may be shown at sound speed.
S-MO (1973, Colour, Sound, 16mm. 7 minutes)
The images were painted directly onto clear 16mm leader in 1973. The
film was reworked slightly in 1980. The sound is partly the result of
the picture "spilling" into the soundtrack area. "...
the film seems to be dealing with fear and anxiety, but some sort of
hope seems to occur at times." J. A.
GRAVITY IS NOT SAD BUT GLAD (1975, Colour, Sound,
16mm, 94 minutes)
This film consists of a series of episodes dealing with: images, sounds,
words, names, identifying, Canadian culture, mass culture, memory, representation
and so on. Anderson has said that the film is "about several people,
occupying a house with turquoise walls and red chequered floors, who
in various ways relate to each other and to their material surroundings."
Anderson continues "…the film undermines our faith in empirical
methods of knowing ... as soon as something is known in the film it
is often demonstrated to be knowable in another way as well. The viewer
may be left with a sense of helplessness at these ambiguities, and resolution
may only occur with a certain acceptance of the limits of knowing. In
spite of these limits the film is a tribute to some extent of our very
human attempts at communicating and making meaning out of the world.
The film is about tearing things apart that are together and putting
together what is apart."
CANADA MINI-NOTES (1975, Colour, Sound, 16mm,
15 minutes)
An episode complete in itself, exerpted from Gravity Is Not Sad,
But Glad, this film consists of a series of flip-books as a kind
of prototype of the film. Jim Hoberman of The Village Voice calls Canada
Mini Notes ". . . Anderson's epic, shaggy-dog musings on the
chimera of Canadian national identity."
Award winner at the Ann Arbor 16mm Film Festival 1978
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Sound is first heard part way through the film, but sound should be turned on from the beginning of the film.
MOVING BICYCLE PICTURE (1972-75, Colour, Silent,
16mm, 12 minutes)
The film was shot on a journey that the filmmaker made in the summer
of 1972. The bicycle trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay, Ontario was recorded
with a tiny `Keystone' camera. "I leave out important events like
eating and camping and concentrate mainly on what is seen from the moving
bicycle. After a time the camera, bicycle and myself become entangled,
involved, friends and enemies." A film on moving. J. A.
LE BOIS DE BALZAC / THE WOODS OF BALZAC
(1973-81, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 42 minutes)
Since 1973, the filmmaker had made pilgrimmages to Queen's Park in the
heart of Toronto to film a certain tree. With this collection of footage
he produced Le Bois de Balzac - completed in 1981. The entire
film literally `revolves' around the tree which becomes transformed
and imbued with character and meaning. At times the tree is a mythological
being and at others, an object of meditation. At one point it resembles
the Rodin sculpture of the writer Balzac. The space surrounding it expands
through the soundtrack to distant places on the globe, and the single
tree in the park becomes the touchstone for a journey of the imagination.
YELLOW WOMAN MEETS THE X WOMAN (1981, Colour,
Sound, Super 8, 6 minutes)
This is a crude film about the fashion machine. Yellow woman and her
sisters, black woman, green-headed woman, and blue-shoed woman, meet
X woman who wears X shoes, the latest fashion. "Like style and
fashion, this film gathers and falls, fades in and fades out; the film
continually threatens to fly apart." J. A.
Sound by The Elementals.
NOTE: Sound cuts in and out abruptly, this is intentional.
AUDREY: WAY UP NORTH (1982, Colour, Sound, Super
8, 10 minutes)
The film was originally a document of a visit by brothers Jim and Dave
Anderson to their sister in Red Lake, Ontario. However the discovery
of a strange voice on the magnetic soundtrack of the black leader cut
into the film produced a different effect that the filmmaker decided
to keep.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Sound will seem slow—this is intentional.
FILMS BY JIM ANDERSON and KEITH LOCK
BASE TRANQUILITY (1970, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 6
minutes)
A painting-on-film collaboration by Anderson and Lock, Base Tranquility
deals with our faith, obsession, enchantment and dilemma with the modern
day religion of science and technology.
Winner of the Best Animation Prize at the International Amateur Film Festival, Toronto 1970
WORK, BIKE, AND EAT (1972, Black and White, Sound,
16mm, 40 minutes)
The filmmakers were experimenting with dramatic form and cinema verite
techniques. The subject is a few days in the life of a slightly awkward
young man. If the aim was to be objective, the result is, none-the-less,
compassionate.
Starring John Turnbull.
Broadcast on PBS Buffalo 'The Frontier' series 1979.
REBECCA BAIRD
Born: Edmonton, 1954
Rebecca Baird's films represent part of an oeuvre that includes painting and environmental installations. Baird's focus is on post-modern utilization of interior space. Her work is quirky and humourous—for instance, she built a 9 foot cactus out of Rice Crispies for a Desert Environment. She makes us reconsider the meanings of common materials by relocating them in oddly informed spaces. Some of her painted backdrops are on permanent display in Toronto at the Rivoli and Queen Mother restaurants. Other, temporary exhibits at the Funnel Gallery and the ChromaLiving Show have been favorably reviewed by the Toronto Globe & Mail and by Vanguard magazine.
In her films, Ms. Baird uses painted, coloured backdrops, fast editing, and hand-held camera work in a manner which evokes the immediacy and high energy of her environmental constructions. Travel and romance are key themes in Baird's work. Her visual imagination seems particularly attuned to the topography of the American South-West. As Baird is part native North American in ancestry, this iconographical concern is not only visually, but also personally, intrinsic to her work. Baird's films tend to be autobiographical, but it is personal history as transmuted by an artist. The films, though intense, have a dream-like quality to them that reflects Baird's desires to transform private concerns into a more generalized public display.
YEA YEA (1981, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 13 minutes)
Romanticism for the '80s. An exploration of a relationship as it unfolds
(or has unfolded). Combustion is created by merging five separate anecdotes
into a single piece. Our couple, in a bunker, gas masks on, in black
and white, making love on a trampoline. They travel to the American
South-West, a land of cowboys and lost Indian princesses. They explore
each other, using the interview format. She sees no one else but him.
He talks of others. "I can't help myself". Girls plant great
crimson kisses on his body. One girl sings, "I hate you".
Two others chorus, "Yea Yea" to him—including his film-maker/lover.
STAND BY YOUR PLANT
(1981, Colour, Sound, 18fps switches to 24fps, Super 8, 7 minutes)
Lynda is an aspiring country and western chanteuse who dusts her flat
and stands by her man. But when she wants a little loving, George would
rather do their income tax. Her dusting creates desires in George for
(a) more bathing, (b) David Bowie and (c) Lynda's brother.
A demented Japanese tea party infuses the narrative with an absurd element: Perrier water is drunk instead of tea or sake.
Lynda and George are stuck on their musical archetypes. George wants to be James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. Lynda imagines herself to be Tammy Wynette, the Country Dream Queen. There is no common ground for the two. They must stand by their own fantastical plants.
WHITE-OUT (1981, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 3 minutes)
Abstract cinema keyed by montage and decor. Shots of U. S. bombers are
intercut with sequences of a body being trapped by plasticity. A bunny
is caught amidst the fearful imagery. A voice on the soundtrack speaks
of emotions. The poetic monologue is gradually overwhelmed by a military
man intoning a countdown. The mood of this film is threateningly ambiguous.
Will the rabbit find herself snared by cellophane, closeted by constricting
physical forms? Is White-Out about sexual politics or about the
Ultimate-Armageddon?
RAPHAEL BENDAHAN
Born: Morocco, 1949
Although best known as an experimental filmmaker, Raphael Bendahan is also a photographer, choreographer, art administrator, writer and teacher of film production at Concordia University in Montreal, where in 1980 he received his MFA in photography. Bendahan immigrated to Canada from Casablanca at age 7. He has produced 9 films, and co-founded and co-edited Impressions, a Toronto photomagazine.
On his work, he has said "The photographs and films I've done have dealt with the marginal person or point of view. Le Jardin, for example, uses an immigrant's story as the voice-over narrative and images of insular immigrant views of life - their gardens and their views. At the same time, it is my story too."
In 1974, Bendahan's film L'Ennui was chosen as one of the two Canadian entries for the 5th International Experimental Film Festival in Knokke Heist, Belgium. Le Jardin (du Paradis) the Garden was awarded the 2nd prize in the International Competition of the 4th International Super 8 Film Festival of Quebec, special Mention in National Competition in 1983, and Best Experimental Film Award at the Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, Summer 1983.
LE JARDIN (DU PARADIS) THE GARDEN
(1982, Colour, 20 minutes, 16mm, Optical sound)
Le Jardin deals less with visual experimentation than it does
with the modes in which ideas are verbally transmitted. It touches upon
the structures of memory as it can be presented in film terms. It tells
a story in a mixture of intertextual and linguistic techniques, in French
and English, referring to the past and the present moment. This circularity
of structure and thought is similar to the operations of the mind under
particular states of stress or crisis. This type of narrative is by
all definitions new in its approach and execution of its given theme.
Although Le Jardin was originally shot in Super 8, Bendahan completed the film in 16mm, colour. "I chose to work in Super 8 for a number of reasons related to the idea I wanted to express ... the intimacy of subject, the play on memory suggested by the often grainy, fuzzy-bright colour Super 8 could provide, especially in terms of the subject and typical 'home movies'."
"Le Jardin (du Paradis) The Garden is a narrative of displacement between cultures, between cities, between times. The narrative folds back on and exposes itself as the narrator alternates between languages (French and English) and cities (Montreal and Toronto). A sense of cathartic inquiry is underlined by the slow weaving movements of the camera as it explores the confines of a walled garden / jardin." Michaelle McLean / Canadian Images Festival 1983
DAVID BENNELL
Born: Australia, 1950
David Bennell moved to Canada in 1968. While studying physics at the University of Toronto he became interested in making films. He is a self taught filmmaker and considers the personal control of the various processes in filmmaking as an important element in his work. This attitude extends into every aspect of film and even into questioning the 'industry standards': that quasi scientific assemblage of data which dictates what is acceptable in terms of image quality. This has led recently into an examination of the uses of colour using dye toning systems and chromogenic development in order to find his own personal colour standards.
David Bennell is currently The Funnel darkroom coordinator and has taught filmmaking and processing workshops at The Funnel, the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE (1979, B& W, Sound, 16mm,
18 minutes)
The film records two passages - one across the Brooklyn Bridge, the
other through the Lincoln Tunnel. Both set up a particular sense of
the relationship of filmic architecture to psychological space. Bennell
has written: "While walking over the Brooklyn Bridge I was inspired
by a sense of my own fragility amongst these stone cathedral arches
and large spun steel cables. I could see the world around me but could
not affect it from the confines and constraints of the bridge. It appeared
as if the bridge belonged to some higher order which inspired awe as
well as danger."
METAMORPHOSE (1981, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 12
minutes)
The film is dye-toned footage of ordinary events: friends conversing,
laughing, dancing. This is the artist's first experiment in a series
of three films using this colouring technique. The film's content becomes
secondary to the washes of colour and shape created by these processes.
Soundtrack: Original score by Bill Grove, saxophone
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Double projection version of this film available with filmmaker present.
HADRIAN'S VILLA (1982, Colour, Sound, Super 8,
12 minutes)
This is the second in Bennell's series of dye-toned films. Scenes of
the Villa d'Este, the Palatino, and Hadrian's Villa were shot in black
and white, then dye-toned using "obsolete" colour processes.
"Colour is used here as a veil that both shrouds and enunciates
the distance between the filmmaker/audience and the ruins of a civilization
past. The final image is of the gargoyle—the past—silenced."
Michaelle McLean/1983
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Sound on cassette
CIRCLE LINE (1983, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 20
minutes)
The film is a 20 minute pan around the island of Manhattan from the
waterfront. The images are dye-toned, reduced and intensified in an
attempt to remove them from their familiarity and move them into some
idealized form so that the viewer sees images and colours flowing from
one to another as if in a trance. The sound-track by Eberhard Shoener
pushes the film along and intensifies the trance state. The final image
of the American flag, through time and colour treatment, becomes drained
of all its significance and connotations and finally decomposes into
clear white light. D. B.
BERQUIST / SUJIR
Douglas Berquist
Born: Calgary, Alberta, 1956
Douglas Berquist studied film at York University and Sheridan College in the Toronto area and now lives and works in Calgary. He is an active member of the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers and has designed and taught filmmaking workshops there for a number of years. He has acted as technical director for a number of performance works including some with Marcella Bien-venue, as well as being involved with his own filmmaking.
Berquist brings to his films a technical polish and visual sophistication. His experiences as president of his own film and music production company have no doubt been invaluable in providing a facility with and understanding of the conventions of the cinematic image.
Leila Sujir
Born: Hyderabad, India, 1951
Leila Sujir's work as a writer, critic, filmmaker and organizer has been of central importance to the development of an alternative film culture in Calgary Alberta. Sujir was a founding member of the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers and was instrumental in shaping the organization's mandate.
She received a degree in English Literature from the University of Alberta and has continued her studies in film and art history, creative writing and criticism. Her writing and filmmaking are concerned with the processes and structures of language—as a force that the user both controls and is controlled by.
TECHNOLOGICALLY NATIVE (1983, Colour, Sound, 16mm,
12 minutes)
The film, structured as a narrative document, investigates and documents
narrative itself; how do we "tell" the story of the world
around us: the act of/active perception. This documentation of narrative
foregrounds language - our mode of describing how we perceive and what
we perceive. The two principal figures in the film, a writer Pol Perception,
and a scientist Marie Cure-you-us, are technologically native; they
use technology - an amplification of the senses, the mind and the body
- to investigate the structure of language, our means of translating
perception. The politics of perception arises in the film when the two
figures confront each other's stories, the nature of story here being,
"what I see, how I see, or the way I see it." This tangle
of story/stories and the language of the telling involves the viewer
of the film, as he or she begins to become wrapped up in the film.
The film uses a number of forms of narrative to tell the story and to document narrative. At times, the narrative turns in on itself, convoluting the viewer's perception of the film, as well as Pol's and Marie's perceptions of the story they move through. In many places the figures in the film become tangled in language and attempt to discover how they and we structure our world. Technologically Native is a CSIF Workshop Production. Marcella Bienvenue and Murdoch Burnett play the two principal roles.
DEBORAH CLARKIN
Born: Barrie, Ontario, 1956
Deborah Clarkin studied drawing, printmaking and film at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. In her final year of studies she attended the school's New York City campus and has since continued to live and work in New York. Her work to date is produced in Super 8, employing techniques such as superimposed titles of re-photographed imagery to take the medium far beyond its customary "home movie" gauge.
Clarkin's films frequently tackle their subjects in a manner appropriate to a feminist reading. Housework, sexual interaction, and family relations are taken apart, reassembled, revealed and exposed, frequently with a twist of ironic humour.
WALKING ITALIANS (1980, Colour, Silent, Super
8, 4 minutes)
This short film is actually a film within a film. Footage of Italian
families leaving a church is projected in slow motion forwards and backwards
on a projection screen. The screen resembles a sail on a boat—a
comment on insular communities.
SIDES (1980, Colour, Silent; Super 8, 5 minutes)
Sides is a humourous film that lectures, through superimposed
text, on the virtues of cleanliness. The images are filmed "on
their sides" in response to the film's directive that things should
be kept on their side to best clean them. A paranoid response to instructions.
DISCO PORNO (1982, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 10
minutes)
A naughty bit of found footage from a porno film is refilmed with segments
broken up visually to correspond to a standard disco beat. The repetitive
image and marching soundtrack de-fuse any shock value the content might
have.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Not available for sale or rental.
MONSTER (1982, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 15 minutes)
A figure in an overcoat and gloves is seen from behind, lurching toward
a door, as if to open it, only to be stopped by a splice in mid-lurch,
followed by a repetition of the same action, again and again. Superimposed
titles tell the story of "Monster" coming to the door and
interrupting a quiet domestic scene. We notice that the characters'
names are: Mother, Father, Baby, Brother and Monster. This implies the
Monster is a member of the family. A chain of bizarre events result
in the curtains catching fire and Father fleeing out the window. At
one point Monster turns its head slightly - it is a young woman. Monster
is a quietly forceful statement of alienation.
IAN COCHRANE
Born: Carleton Place, Ontario, 1958
Ian Cochrane was educated at the University of Toronto, Art's Sake, and the Ontario College of Art where he completed his studies in 1982. Through his course of studies to the present, he has worked in various media, including film, video, performance, painting and xerography. Ian's work often involves the manipulation, collage and editing of found footage and imagery. He has exhibited performance, music and video works in Montreal and London, England, and is currently reworking found footage to a slide show format.
AGE OLD AND INSTANTANEOUS HOURS (1982, Colour,
Silent, Super 8, 6 minutes)
Sitting on the back porch, scotch in hand: the floor aquamarine ...
cobalt ... large fish appear, flashing briefly in the depths beneath
our feet. From around the corner a large leopard appears, swings silently
the entire length of the porch, past us, our drinks, and disappears.
MARTHA DAVIS
Born: London, Ontario, 1959
"I started out as a still photographer, and my biggest photographic project, Scarecrow, involved 22 people dressing up in the same clothes, one item at a time: pants, jacket, gloves, scarf and hat. I photographed each person in his or her own home at each stage of the process of becoming clothed. Among other things, Scarecrow was about gesture in costume, and the photographs in each person's sequence bore a resemblance to the still frames of a film.
Springing from my work in still photography, all my films have combined the strong still image with the choreography of everyday movement and gesture. People on the street are my most frequent subjects and I have always found their chance activity fascinating. I am also very interested in the juxtaposition of personal and public space, as my first feature-length film, In the Alcove, At the Place demonstrates. I am currently working on Path, also to be a feature-length, which is a much looser, more exploratory film than the earlier one. Path is comprised of three steps in a process repeated over and over: I am filmed connecting two dots on a street map of Toronto; next I go out and walk the distance between the two dots, filming as I go (architecture I like, details I pick up, people I meet); then I am filmed making drawings and models of where I've been and what I've seen. So essentially the film is about experience and the analysis of experience. It's a cross-town trip leaving from my house in the west end and finishing at The Funnel in the east end, and it's been shot over a year's time." Martha Davis, August 1983
SUBWAY (1979, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 20 minutes)
Three-minute, unedited takes at each of five subway station entrances
in Toronto, filming whoever happened to ascend or descend the stairs.
Concentration on vertical movement. Separating each take at the stations
are pans along strong horizontal lines: a bridge railing, line in the
road, etc. This kinetic film juxtaposes the rhythms of human with mechanical
movement. For me the subway station entrance is a set on which occurs
the drama of everyday life and I am fascinated by its choreography.
M. D.
INTRODUCING ELWY (1979, Colour, Silent, Super
8, 5 minutes)
A silent 'talking heads' film. Elwy Yost (the garrulous host of TV Ontario's
Saturday Night at the Movies) as a purely physical presence,
sometimes in extreme close-up, as he talks to the camera. M. D.
APPLYING AND REMOVING (1979, Colour, Silent, Super
8, 20 minutes)
Applying: A nude woman is painted completely black. Painting activity
performed unemotionally; camera work likewise. Attention concentrated
on the mechanics of the process of going from white to black. Removing:
She washes herself off in the bathtub. A more exploratory camera discovers
and lingers on moments that are quite painterly. She goes from black
to grey to white. Among other things, this film is about witnessing
transformations as they occur. My most austere film to date. M. D.
A BALL IN CALIFORNIA (1980, Colour, Sound, Super
8, 17 minutes)
When I visited California I took along a beach ball, and everywhere
I went (Santa Barbara, Venice and Hollywood Blvd., L. A.) I filmed the
ball in action in the landscape. During the course of the film the ball
is bounced, rolled, tossed, thrown, kicked, held and carried by a motley
collection of complete strangers who express a great range of attitudes
towards the camera, the ball, and me. The film also incorporates an
unusual improvised soundtrack for solo bassoon. M. D.
IN THE ALCOVE, AT THE PLACE (1980-81, Colour,
Sound, Super 8, 94 minutes)
For In The Alcove, At The Place I went back to the alcove (a
private place in my room) and the place (the four corners of an intersection
in Toronto, consisting of a house, two grocery stores and a coin wash)
every couple of weeks for nine months. In the alcove I filmed myself
sitting in a chair; at the place I filmed aspects of its everyday life,
exploring it and becoming friendly with some of its inhabitants. In
both alcove and place, there is change but also repetition. Among other
things the film concerns my growing familiarity with the people at the
place, and my discoveries about how to make the film. M. D.
Second Prize Art/Experimental Category, Toronto International Super 8 Festival 1982.
JUDITH DOYLE
Born: Toronto, 1957
Judith Doyle studied both writing and visual arts at York University in Toronto. Since that time, as well as producing her own art, she has been active in Toronto's artist-operated centres and in publication. Along with Fred Gaysek, she founded Rumour Publications, producing books by artists, poetry and fiction. Presently, she is a co-editor of Impulse, an art and culture magazine published in Toronto, and is a member of The Funnel.
Doyle's work includes performance, filmmaking and writing. Often her projects appear in discrete, but complimentary forms - for example, Rate of Descent was presented as a performance, then re-worked for publication as a text. Her origins as a writer are apparent in much of her work. Often, she records and transcribes conversations with ordinary people - an artist who broke his back, a rural woman photographer, shipbuilders, a Maryknoll monk practising "theology of liberation" in Guatemala. The transcripts form the basis for a script or text. The relation between what is called "fiction" or "history", and the struggle, through language and recording technology to match inward experience with external equivalents, are her broader themes at this time. Currently, Doyle is working on a film based on her experiences in Nicaragua, which examines the role of culture in the revolutionary process of rewriting history.
LAUNCH (1982, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 19 minutes)
Launch is concerned with the changes in the shipbuilding industry
in Collingwood, Ontario. The visuals are a sequence of stills of ship
launches over the past one hundred years there. These stills were found
in a box at the back of the Collingwood Museum. The voice-over is based
on recorded conversations with residents and shipbuilders, tracing the
effects of technocracy and the breakdown of the apprentice system, through
personal experiences.
PRIVATE PROPERTY / PUBLIC HISTORY
(1982, Black and White, Sound, Super 8, 16 minutes)
"I was given a collection of photographs sold at an auction near
Collingwood, Ontario. It became apparent that the photographer was a
woman, as she cast her shadow in several frames. It was also obvious
the family had come to an end. Based on these traces, I returned to
the area, found her friends and neighbours and eventually found her
in a nursing home. I recorded and transcribed these conversations, which
form an incomplete, associative history, and discourse on photography.
Family photographs carry the ideology of the family; when the family
dies, the photographs and the speech surrounding them undergo a change
of state. This film traces that moment of change." J. D.
RATE OF DESCENT
(1983, Performance incorporating pre-recorded sound and 35mm slide
projection, 45 minutes)
Rate of Descent is a performance chronicling a personal history
and an art history - of the Fourteenth Century Flemish painter, Rogier
van der Weyden. Details from van der Weyden's paintings and text are
projected onto semi-transparent scrims so that the images bleed backward
into the space. The performance is a reading, recorded and live, with
some modest music, to which the slides are cued. "In claiming history,
a tentative relation is established between myself and van der Weyden,
on formal, temporal, subjective and theoretical levels." J. D.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Equipment required: three Carousel slide projectors, one reel-to-reel tape recorder, two remote control slide changer extension cords.
Costs of presenting the performance will vary based on equipment available, travel costs, and so on.
BRUCE ELDER
Born: Hawkesbury, Ontario, 1947
Bruce Elder's undergraduate and graduate studies were done in science and philosophy. He also attended a Canadian technical university for film training. Mr. Elder operates an optical and audio studio/laboratory where he engages in production and research in colour printing and microcomputer applications in audio synthesis. He has written many articles on Canadian film and Canadian art, and on electronic music theory. His films have received showings in England, France, United States, Canada and Australia, including a one-man show in 1981 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has received a number of grants and awards, including a Canadian Film Award in 1976 for Barbara is A Vision of Loveliness, and a special Los Angeles Film Critics award in 1981. He has been an executive member of several Canadian film organizations, including The Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, a distribution agency for independent film, including experimental films. His current project is a feature-length film autobiography. He has curated programmes for OKanada, Canadian Images and the Bourges experimental music and film festival. Mr. Elder recently completed a three-hour-long film on history, entitled Illuminated Texts and is presently working on a new feature-length film. He is presently employed by Ryerson Polytechnical Institute where he teaches film aesthetics and photographing the nude. B. E.
SHE IS AWAY (1975, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 13.5 minutes)
The film's projected time is the basic material of this film and is
wrought into a simple form which, by its radically reductionist structure,
transforms the material of the dramatic form into a tone poem of waiting
and anticipation. B. E.
PERMUTATIONS AND COMBINATIONS (1976, Colour, Sound,
16mm, 8 minutes)
Aleatory procedures are used to create movement at the points of fusion
of the still images of which the film is constituted. For this reason,
all movements within the film are completely reversible. This reversibility
is extended into the film's overall structure, as the film is formed
into a loop - a closed container for the film's chance elements. Such
a structure, I believe, results in the complete elimination of all vestiges
of drama from the film. Hence, this film is a companion piece to She
Is Away. The sounds of the film, though determined in their occurrence
by specific features of the image line, appear to form their own internal
patterns which phenomenally exist in counterpoint with the patternings
of the images. B. E.
FAST WURMS
`Fast Wurms' is the corporate name used by collaborators Kim Kozzi, Napo B. and Dai Skuse. These artists have worked together since 1972 in a variety of media which can be roughly categorized as painting, sculpture, installation, performance and film. There are constant overlaps, however, and films produced by this duo are usually the outgrowth or a part of installations, paintings or performances. Instead of making 'ready-mades' (the transformation of a common object to art by movement to the gallery), the Wurms 'remake' - friends, food and commodities by painting, lighting, editing and up-ending them from their standard place in the world. Fast Wurms productions tend to be loosely-cut Super 8 extravaganzas that turn consumer culture into art, and art into consumer culture. They are anarchic and irreverent and owe a certain amount of their aesthetic to a kind of post-punk fetishism about mass-production. A degree of nihilism is balanced by a developed satirical wit. Although Kim Kozzi and Napo B. worked together on the films listed, authorship is assigned on the basis of the majority of creative control in each piece.
NAPO B
ZIGZAG (1980, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 7 minutes)
. . . about being an artist in his studio and an art guard at the Art
Gallery of Ontario. Outside - traffic, smoke stacks, trains, 'the story
has nothing to do with acid rain'. Inside - the story is about 'yawning
into infinity' and the artist/actor plays his sax trying `to configurate
where he was about to depart to.'" Jennifer Oille, Vanguard, October/November
1982
TRIGGERS AND SCANNERS (1981, Colour, Sound, Super
8, 17 minutes)
A collage-style tale of people waiting for Hayley's Comet. Meanwhile,
back on earth, gravity slips, speechmakers make speeches, a shirt becomes
a map - and so on.
KIM KOZZI
UNIVERSAL COLOUR SYSTEMS (1980, Colour, Sound,
Super 8, 18 minutes)
Life becomes art becomes performance becomes life in this film. Cancer
and colour become equal players in this drama/musical. "... terror
strikes in the livingrooms of America as culture is on the run once
again." K. K.
SUICIDE RE-ENTRY (1980, Colour, Sound, Super 8,
18 minutes)
Suicide Re-Entry shows several tableaux of a woman 'tiling' first
a bathroom, then a kitchen with slices of baloney (is this a comment
on bourgeois art-making a la Serra and Andre?). In the other half of
the frame we see a female "corpse" with telephone dangling,
first in a bathtub, then with head in oven. The soundtrack consists
of scratchy radio transmissions - one from the Apollo 8 astronauts,
and one a radio phone-in show about suicide. One male voice is talking
about being far from Earth, while the other discusses his desire to
leave - via suicide.
GONE FISHING and BRIOCHE DU CAREME (1980, Colour,
Sound, Super 8, 10 minutes)
"Sins of lent. The rules and committments on religious symbols
are broken to the sound of the samba and important fish data. A clutch
purse is made from a trout." K. K.
MICHAELINE FONTANA
Born: Carbondale, Pennsylvania, 1946
Mickey's involvement with The Funnel began with photography but recently she has been making films, parodies of various movie "genres" - The Monster Movie and The Western. Currently, however, she is working on a night movie: an evocation of the elusive character of Chinatown. In 1978 she co-produced a videotape of part of Roger Zelazny's book Courts of Chaos. Painted constructions were animated and then manipulated by the Paik-Abe colour video synthesizer to enhance the magical tone of the narrative. Work in other media has included a great deal of children's art and similar fantastical paper sculpture environments which will eventually be incorporated in future animated film.
GODZILLA VERSUS THE C. N. TOWER (1981, Colour,
Sound, Super 8, 9 minutes)
Fontana's first film: a Japanese wind-up toy monster shakes up the North
American continent, vanquishes the combined military might of NATO and
the Vatican, tramples cinematic convention and walks blissfully triumphant
into the Canadian sunset. Music by David Bowie, PIL, Guy Lombardo and
the Royal Canadians, etc.
MY OWN WESTERN (1983, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 9 minutes)
Found footage has been hand tinted and hand-scratched. "At age
four when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I'd say
'a cowgirl', having already been affected by the power of the all pervasive
Western imagery of America. This film then is part of my revenge on
the stock plot, grade 'D', Hollywood Westerns we watched on TV in the
fifties. Colour is used to highlight the hilarity evoked by the subliminal
sex/property connections among the woman cattletrailboss/owner stereotypes
as they ride oblivious across the beautiful land." M. F.
ELDON GARNET
Born: Toronto, 1946
Eldon Garnet is known in Toronto as something of a Renaissance man. He was writing and publishing poetry in the late 1960s and has gone from there to performance, photography, and publishing. He is best known as the 8-year publisher of Impulse Magazine, a glossy international magazine of art and culture. Garnet has produced a number of films and videotapes, most of which are fairly witty and reflect his association with a variety of disciplines, either in the fact that they 'star' members of the art community, or that they were made in collaboration with various other artists (Duncan Johnson in Einstein's Joke, and Ross McLaren in Winning).
Recently, Garnet has used the structure of fables or parables to illustrate contemporary psychological conflicts and dilemmas. He has produced a series of photographs with text derived from performance tableau on this theme. He is currently working on a film to be entitled The Political Error that uses a baseball game as a metaphor for life.
EINSTEIN'S JOKE (1978, Colour, Sound, Super 8,
20 minutes)
The film enacts a joke which the filmmaker claims was a favourite of
Einstein. Apparently he was fond of relating it at formal dinner parties,
insisting on its profound philosophic meaning. In 'German' with English
subtitles.
With Duncan Johnson
PORTRAITS (1977-1983, Colour, Sound, Super 8,
60 minutes)
Portraits is a compilation of single-cartridge, uncut Super 8 rolls,
each featuring a single artist, talking, mugging, acting or being him/herself.
Individuals portrayed include Michael Snow, Graham Coughtry, Ann Milne,
Joe Hall, Judith Doyle, Sylvon Britnell, Les Levine, Dennis Oppenheim,
Arnaud Maggs, etc....
RICK GREENWALD
Born: Toledo, Ohio, 1954
Rick Greenwald has been making films since the early 1970s. For several years he has produced very short films—from thirty seconds to four minutes in length. Frequently working with an optical printer, Greenwald favoured fairly simple procedures such as the repetition or slowing down of an image, to make each work an unambiguous, specific visual statement. He has said of his films, "No metaphors are needed. I want my films to be direct experience." His most recent work Tabula Rasa departs from earlier films in that it is much longer, yet it too has an elegant simplicity.
In addition to producing his own films, Rick Greenwald has been on staff at Millennium Film Workshop in New York City and at the State University of New York in Binghampton, contributing much to the experimental film community in New York State in recent years. At Rick Greenwald's request the following statement is included: "Every March, Mr. Greenwald predicts the Tigers will win the pennant."
LAND (1976-79, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 10 minutes)
Footage of singer Patti Smith in concert is re-worked to embody "the
spirit of rock and roll."
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Play sound loud.
WORLD WAR TWO - I WASN'T THERE (1980, B/W, Sound,
16mm, 1 minute)
Some film found in a garbage can has been re-worked into a humourous
anti-war film. The machine fun noise of double-sprocketed film running
past the sound-head of a projector is used to full advantage.
TABULA RASA (1980, Colour, Silent, 16mm, 28 minutes)
Greenwald's major film to date, Tabula Rasa silently surveys
a number of individuals and, through the use of intertitles, gradually
reveals the filmmaker's relation to each one. The work deals with the
painful realization of the immutable difference between subject and
object, self and other.
VINCENT GRENIER
Born: Quebec City, 1948
Vincent Grenier's films have been called minimalist, materialist, and reductionist. But generally reviewers have hastened to add that these films have a beauty that makes them quite unique. Jim Hoberman, for instance, writing in the Village Voice, says "The work of Vincent Grenier ... is extraordinarily subtle and elusive; even in the context of other reductionist filmmakers."
Grenier's films focus on perceptions which hover between recognition and non-recognition. The viewer attempts to consolidate visual cues into a larger 'picture' of what is really being represented, but is consistently confounded. The sheer visual materiality of the projected light reclaims precedence. In the films, delicate forms and movements are juxtaposed in a magical, almost humourous way.
Grenier was born in Quebec but in recent years has been living and working in the United States, initially in San Francisco where he was programmer of Canyon Cinematheque for a time, and now in New York City where he is an active member of the Collective for Living Cinema.
CLOSER OUTSIDE / PLUS PROCHE DEHORS (1979, Colour,
Silent, 16mm, 10 minutes)
"What moves is not necessarily what we look at. The opacity of
the surrounding space contains, potentially, discoveries which call
upon the eyes. The movements of one's eyes throughout this space measures
itself with the movements in the image. We are in a room where people
live and go about their business. The camera gazes on residues of their
gestures while foregrounds and backgrounds interchange as they might
if one is lost in looking." V. G.
ANNA GRONAU
Born: Montreal, 1951
Anna Gronau's films are inquiries into the nature of film and perception. Yet her method of selecting and manipulating film images is highly intuitive and subjective: magic, witchcraft and dream structures are references. While feminine and feminist concerns pervade much of the work, they are never presented didactically or distinct from the formal investigation at hand. Through optical printing, sound re-recording and personal, condensed imagery, she asks the question "What is it?" regarding the film experience and suggests some unique and uniquely feminine replies.
Between 1980 and 1982, Gronau was Director/Programmer of The Funnel, piloting the organization through crucial years, including extensive renovations, conflicts with the film censors and the expansion of activities into educational areas and film distribution. She has written and lectured on experimental film and engaged in related political and organizational actions. As a founding member of the Film and Video Against Censorship group, she has been a powerful adversary to the Ontario Censor Board in its bid to cut and ban films by artists.
MAPLE LEAF UNDERSTORY (1978, Colour, Silent, 16mm,
10 minutes)
A highly visual film, Maple Leaf Understory plays with planar
surfaces, the frame's rectangle, light and dark, and the difference
between interior and exterior spaces.
IN-CAMERA SESSIONS (1979, Colour, Sound, Super
8, 5 minutes)
"There's a phrase in this film - 'Whoever has their finger on the
trigger makes the decisions'. The trigger of the camera passed between
filmmaker (female) and filmmaker (male); the camera is unreliable and
distorts images. A power structure is indicated: camera over subject,
representational over non-representational, but this order is subverted
and called into question by the irrational and material conditions beneath."
Judith Doyle
WOUND CLOSE (1982, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 8 minutes)
This film is a form of elegy, dedicated to twin girls who died at an
early age. The soundtrack is a conversation between two women; one is
the mother of the babies; they discuss chaos and hope. The images of
the film are structured symmetrically and symbolize birth and death.
With Eleanor Cruise
ARADIA (1982, Colour, Sound, Super 8, 2 1/2 minutes)
Aradia was produced for The Funnel's Launch Five show in October
1982. Mythical female figures are seen, while the soundtrack consists
of rhythmical music and the reading of a piece of traditional Wiccan
poetry.
With Amber Bush. Music by Ross McLaren.
REGARDS
(1983, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 31 minutes)
In a series of episodes, separate but related, knowledge and perception
are examined. Translation, orientation and cultural bias are questioned
against the material presence of the words and images. Assumptions upon
which judgements, categorization and communication are based are shown
to be flexible or arbitrary. The human figures in the film (all female)
are no more free of these contradictions than are real people, except
that they become instruments in discrediting a few presumptions. This
process is an attempt to penetrate to a deeper vision (regard), and
the esteem (regard) that it implies.
With Amber Bush, Jeanne Minhinnick. Sound and technical advice: Ross McLaren. Music: Ross McLaren.
ROBERT GUTTERIDGE
Born: Point Edward, Ontario, 1939
Robert Gutteridge is a teacher with a passion for cinematography. A degree in Visual Arts and Film from the University of Western Ontario provided formal education but it was through his informal education - travel and educational films and screenwriting attempts - that ultimately led him to experimental filmmaking by 1976. His early studies, Presto, Ambience, Cassation and Ephemeral Perpetuity, extended his brush to the camera in order to understand the techniques of the film medium. "It was the elements of Time and Space that frustrated me in my painting and film gave me the vehicle I was seeking", says Gutteridge. His film By-pass, screened at the 1980 Ann Arbor Film Festival, broke new ground, for it concerns "meaning" on various levels. This was immediately followed by Salzburg Sketches, a personal delving into time.
While teaching in Switzerland in 1981, Robert Gutteridge began work on three 16mm films: Album, a time film; Inferno, poetry and film and Passing Over, a multi-projection film postulating that film is only of the present. Two Super 8 films were prepared, one completed, the other yet to be eidted. He is now exploring narrative structure in a production titled Esse Est Percipi (To Be Is To Be Perceived) which, for the first time, employs an actor.
Having become aware of the marvelous machines that permit film art to exist, Gutteridge began collecting cine artifacts, many of which he has presented in lectures at both The Funnel and Hart House, University of Toronto. "I find these as experimental as the films we artists produce." Some day he plans to house his collection in a museum of cinematography.
EPHEMERAL PERPETUITY (1979, Colour, Sound, 16mm,
9 1/2 minutes)
Using a single animated movement - a cartwheel - as its structure, this
film plays with the properties of film; i.e.: time, space, colour, texture,
shape, etc. In like manner, the music track plays with sound which consists
of the synthesizer's pure sound waves only.
BY-PASS (1979-80, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 11 1/2
minutes)
Using the basic structure of a tracking shot, stressing barriers, this
film delves deeply into the meaning of the word "by-pass".
The spectator is encouraged to interpret each "by-pass" shot
according to his or her own experiences. The film is divided into twenty-five
shots; these in turn are sub-divided into five groups of five colours
which, for aesthetic reasons, do not always appear in the same order
as each group is revealed. The off-screen sound and the absence of human
forms passing in front of the camera add to the spectator's alienation.
Part of the last group exposes the presence of the camera and filmmaker.
BARBARA HAMMER
Born: Los Angeles, 1939
Barbara Hammer's films are a unique combination of feminist consciousness, lesbian and feminine imagery and visual experimentation. Her work has been compared with that of Maya Deren —"the creation of a vivid picture language: complicated cinematic metaphors that have the vertical dimensions of dreams rather than a linear, horizontal structure." (Woman's Media Festival)
Hammer has written "I continue to feel, believe and think that women have a unique source of form and content that relates from biology and social structure and that has just begun to emerge in the last ten years in our work. Art, the expression of the new, is to me the most innovative manner of changing politics. Without an audience that can see in the new way the art provokes, how can we change a politic?"
She sees the six films represented here as early work stemming from a time when feminism was budding and hopes and idealism were rampant. They were made with a youthful energy and spirit and belief in female power denied by the patriarchy. They still represent this belief which Barbara Hammer shares with female and male feminists all over the world. More recent films focus on abstract imagery still there is a consistent and conscious return to the female body and imagery that continues to pervade her work.
"X" (1974, 16mm, Colour, Sound, 8 minutes)
A profound and powerful experimental, personal film of one woman's despair,
rage and exhibitionism; a baroque fugue of identity, chanting growing
from women's pain to a holistic, self-healing, naming ritual.
PSYCHOSYNTHESIS (1975, 16mm, Colour, Sound, 8
minutes)
All of my films have their basis in personal experiences and are part
of my life's cycles. The images of my sub-personalities came from waking
fantasy work. I turned on the tape recorder, lay down and visualized
a door in my mind from which came me as a baby, an athlete, a witch
and an artist. The collage synthesis of the four aspects of myself in
the editing gave me the film. B. H.
MENSES (1974, 16mm, Colour, Sound, 4 minutes)
A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation where women
act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket,
in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. Menses combines both
the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a fine blend of comedy
and drama.
OUR TRIP (1980, 16mm, Colour, Sound, 4 minutes)
"Hammer's Our Trip, an animated film based on a hiking trip
in the Andes was for me an example of feminist artwork which illuminates
women's experience... Using bright-coloured magic markers and paints
on black and white snapshots, she turned banal and purely personal documents
into a whimsical, fast-paced, and very funny commentary on the joys
and aggravations of camping and group travel." Martha Greyer, New
Women's Times
Awards: 1982 Cable Car Award, S. F. Gay Film Festival; New York
Gay Film Festival; S. F. International Film Festival.
SAPPHO (1979, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 7 minutes)
Using the 6th century B. C. lyricist's poetry, a group of women unwrap
the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life: Sappho
lives! Made by a film class with Hammer at the Women's Building in Los
Angeles, California.
DYKETACTICS (1974, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 4 minutes)
Sensual, evocative montage of one hundred and ten images edited to images
of touch (women touching, hair brushing, water stroking, bathing, eating,
loving). An erotic 'lesbian commercial'. ". . . all of a sudden
I found myself holding my breath as I watched the image of lovemaking
sensually and artistically captured." Elizabeth Lay, Plexus
NOTE: There is a reduced rental rate when all six films are rented as a package.
FREIDER HOCCHEIM
Born: Winnipeg, 1953
Freider Hoccheim's films begin with a familiar cinematic image; characters face the camera and read statements. But neither plot nor character develop and the films collapse into absurdity. Hoccheim cites the influence of Dada on his work and points out that the films ask not "What will be the outcome of this situation?", rather, "What in fact is the situation?".
Hoccheim graduated from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in 1977 and currently works in the film industry in California.
PLURALITY OF VIBRATORY CIRCUMSTANCES
(1976, Black and White, Sound, 16mm, 10 minutes)
The film is an "anxiety play" after the work of Kurt Schwitters,
the Dada collage artist, employing chance operations in the manner of
John Cage. The dialogue was constructed from words and phrases chosen
at random from books. We see not only the play, but the making of it.
With: Ira Cohen, Bill Reeve. Sound: Bob Landy.
ACCUMULATIVE DISTINCTIONS EXTENDING A FALSE UTILITY
(1977, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 8 minutes)
Another anxiety play. A text from Klaus Wagn's Design of a General
Theory of Consciousness is read in German. Language is analyzed
on the basis of being not being. Language in the film loses its literal
application and degenerates to the level of an object related to in
terms of rhythms, intonations, etc. "It questions not what will
be the outcome of the situation, but rather, what in fact is the situation."
F. H.
NICOLAS JENKINS
Born: Lima, Peru, 1959
Born in Lima, Peru, the son of a writer and diplomat, Jenkins travelled extensively and lived in Italy, Pakistan, Nigeria and India before coming to Canada.
He studied film for two years at Toronto's York University and has recently graduated from the Ontario College of Art where he worked mainly in Super 8 film but also did some video and installations.
Jenkin's work as an artist is shaped by his interest in sexual politics. He has acted as curator and organizer of several lesbian and gay film and video events in Toronto, including "Doing It" and "invert Exposure" during the summer of 1982.
POMEGRANATE CHIC (1982, Colour, Sound, Super 8,
9.5 minutes)
The mass media, which has appropriated images of sex and violence to
entrench the status quo, is the subject of this film. By manipulating
this imagery and placing it in new contexts, Jenkins questions the inevitability
of film's alliance to dominant social and representational structures.
"My intentions were ... to show people a collage of imagery centred around issues that concern me. These issues being facism, feminism, apathy, homosexuality, masculinity, the mass media, art and entertainment." N. J.
PATRICK JENKINS
Born: Brantford, Ontario, 1955
Patrick Jenkins is a visual artist who makes drawings, sculpture and films. He has written, "I've always found films to be most exciting when they transcend their 'documenting' or recording role. That is I find films to be most exciting when the film is a vehicle that leads me on through experiences that I couldn't normally have." As a result his films play with the illusionistic aspects of film. Jenkins sees his films as akin in spirit to the early pioneers of the silent cinema rather than the recent developments of structuralist and new narrative cinema.
As a result he is interested in a human, populist cinema that is quite different from the rigorous aesthetics of most experimental film. His most successful films Wedding Before Me, Shadowplay, and Sign Language are as much about the rituals of everyday life and human interaction as they are about the nature of the film medium.
"To sum up I would say that I am interested in a cinema of humour and people. As much as I respect the rigor of most structuralist work I see no reason to adhere to such stringent guidelines in my own work. On the other hand my work is not narrative in the accepted sense. I am interested in a playful interaction of manipulated images and sketchy story lines to create a delightful cinema."
He has shown his films in art centres and theatres in Canada, U.S.A. and Europe and has received numerous awards and grants for his work including two Ontario Arts Council Film Grants and a Canada Council "B" Grant for Drawing. At present he is an Assistant Professor of Film at York University.
WEDDING BEFORE ME (1976, Colour, Sound, 16mm,
7 minutes)
"The original footage for Wedding Before Me was shot by
my Uncle John in 1953 as a record of my parents' wedding. When I first
saw this footage I immediately began to reflect on my feelings about
family rituals like baptisms, weddings and reunions. The original film
seemed to contain a lot of repressed tensions that family structures
do so much to contain and control. In order to emphasize these repressed
feelings I repeated the gestures and movements via optical printing."
P. J.
RUSE (1980, Colour, Sound, 16mm, 7 minutes)
Ruse is an intense, poetic film. It was shot over a period of
four months in the filmmaker's house in Toronto. The main image in the
film is light penetrating through glass windows, venetian blinds and
glancing off objects. However Ruse is not intended as a mere
documentation of light. It is also about Jenkins' reaction to his home
and illustrates his feelings that in some ways the world is an immensely
deceptive and illusory place to live.
SHADOWPLAY (1981, Black and White, Sound, 16mm,
13 minutes)
"Shadowplay is a black and white film made up entirely of
shadow and high contrast images. The aim was to explore representation
via a play of shadows.
Throughout the film there is a play on black and white, two dimension
and three dimension, and on a human being and a shadow of a human being.
The film is constructed in a playful manner with an actor manipulating various shadow images behind a screen. One shadow image is, in fact, a life-size silhouette of himself that he encounters. Throughout Shadowplay the action borders on becoming a narrative but never totally succeeds in becoming one." P. J.
Awards: Director's Chair Award, 1982 Toronto S-8 Film Festival.
SIGN LANGUAGE (1982, B W, Sound, 16mm, 10 minutes)
"When I made preliminary notes for Sign Language in August
of 1981 I wanted to explore the way symbols are used to represent activities
in life. I became particularly interested in the rather abstract stick
figures found on signs at highways and airports. It seemed to me that
these graphic stick figures suggested overtones of political control.
Using this basic imagery I constructed Sign Language to be both a funny and horrifying film. The film runs rampant through a world of sinister sign symbols (bombs, ski masks, faceless stick figures). These symbols are combined with actors performing highly stylized activities (rioting, making phone calls, arguing and eating). Nothing in the film is realistic. Everything in the film has a feeling of being contrived and set up. Even the actors appear behind a translucent screen as flat shadowy cameos. The sense of story is totally contrived by a juxtaposition of sound effects, actors and symbol signs.
Sign Language is designed as a visceral response to symbol signs rather than an analysis of symbol signs. It takes the idea of portraying life as a series of symbols to the extreme; to a world where everything exists only as a sign or representation." P. J.
Actors include Bettie Liota, Karen Kazmer and others.