A documentary in réalité style harkening back to the early years of cinema. Composed of scenes around Victoria, BC during February 2019.
A documentary in réalité style harkening back to the early years of cinema. Composed of scenes around Victoria, BC during February 2019.
2019-11-22
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A group of children is playing in the garden.
"After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena (1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in color, a celebration of generative humors and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard… and consecutive matters." - HF
Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope
Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.
“It’s not my memory of it” is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979 following the takeover of the U.S embassy. A CIA film—recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992—documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. A single photograph pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 is the source of a reflection on the role of images in the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.
Believe it or not, esoteric film sages, i.e., Phil Solomon, are open to the possibilities of working with video — and even video games. This is a film that takes images from the notorious wanton car-jacking shoot-em-up Grand Theft Auto video game.
Autumn, photographed during the last months of the drought year, 2015, is a stately, but intimate, seasonal tome, a celebration of the poignancy and mystery of our later years. – Nathaniel Dorsky
This year our mid-summer’s night was adorned with a glorious full moon. The weeks and days preceding the solstice were magically alive with crisp, cool breezes, bright, warm sunlight, and a general sense of heartbreaking clarity. The Dreamer is born out of this most poignant San Francisco spring.
After their success climbing the world’s hardest offwidth, the Wide Boyz, Pete Whittaker and Tom Randall, embark on their next crack climbing mission. This time their sights are set on the thinner end of the crack climbing spectrum. Their goal is the mighty Cobra Crack in Squamish BC, considered to be the hardest finger crack in the world. First climbed by Canadian ‘rock star’ Sonnie Trotter after battling it out with Didier Berthod, the route hit the media spotlight in the film First Ascent. With no local hard cracks to train on, the Wide Boyz refit their underground training dungeon and commit to a year of torturous finger training. With only a short trip to Canada planned, the Boyz face their biggest challenge yet against the sharp granite bite of the mighty Cobra Crack!
Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.
The Canadian Coast Range is a humbling place. The range dwarfs both exceptionally large human beings and egos with its foreboding size. Norseman Productions follows Dave Treadway and Henrik Windstedt as they push into the range on snowmobiles in pursuit of big lines the Coast Range is never short of.
The first collaboration between Matthew Barney & Elizabeth Peyton, Blood of Two is a unique, site-specific work that draws its references from Hydra itself – the surrounding environment, animals, humans, and local traditions are all part of the project in equal measure. Blood of Two centers on the former function of the Slaughterhouse and the customs of Hydra to establish connections between paganism and religion, ancient and modern, the ritualistic and familiar. As much as its conflicted terms strive for balance and fusion, it is Blood of Two’s greater resistance to these impulses, its failure to surrender unconditionally to them that ultimately counts, as a network of overlaps and crisscrosses.
A portrait of Chicagoland ICU nurse Jeanette Alvarez-Basem captured through the perspective of her son Ben Basem. Between her night shifts and Illinois Nurses Association union meetings, Jeanette navigates what it means to be a nurse and a human during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.
Secessionnist movements in Canada outside Quebec.
A group of musicians seem isolated from the world playing beautiful pieces. But in the darkness of the night, and from their minds, there are melancholies on earth, loves and families that they left behind. Their silences, their letters, these elements shape the poetic intention of this documentary.
A fantasia of post-indoctrination, immigration, and iconography. A pageant of wanderers and searchers: Mormon missionaries, a pioneer, polygamists, scouts, hunters, church-goers, and an aspiring prophet walk and walk and walk. A pilgrimage of memory, history, ancestry, and place.
A new insight into the Irish origins of Ice-hockey in Canada.
After the Ballot is a full-length documentary portraying the gruelling everyday life of two Members of Quebec's National Assembly who, although at opposite ends of the political spectrum, share the fact that their sole power lies in their convictions. One is Daniel Turp, the PQ Member for Mercier. The other is Charlotte L'Écuyer, Liberal MNA for Pontiac. The film aptly illustrates that ordinary MNAs have very little authority since the real power is held by ministers who are subject to the ups and downs of a globalized economy. Meanwhile, their fellow citizens keep asking for the impossible…
"This is taking a Super 8mm camera around with me wherever I go and I'm very interested in windows at this time of travel, and I'm trying to make a variety of different statements about the concept of window." - S.B.