Saturday April 14, 01, 03 & 05 pm
OTHER CINEMAS:
A SYMPOSIUM ON FILM IN THE AGE OF ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION
Co-presented by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto
Admission Free for LIFT & Images members; all others by donation
"The cinema . . . no longer a leading technological medium, becomes again a sub-genre of painting." - Lev Manovich
As video and digital image-making come to dominate commercial production and exhibition of "moving pictures," many have predicted the demise of film as a medium. It may be, however, that amid this technological shift, film is actually being liberated from some of its more mundane industrial applications, and will be left more free to "be itself," in a sense analogous to the position of painting following the introduction of photography.
For some, this notion raises the spectre of a modernist essentialism, or a fetishization of the medium, but it is supported by the recent practice of working filmmakers, who have increasingly turned to an exploration of the specific nature of the film image. As part of a reexamination of those possibilities in film that have been neglected or suppressed by the dominance of narrative and documentary concerns in cinema, some artists have focused particularly on its chemical composition. Others contest the conception of a film as a mass-produced industrial object rather than a unique artisanal creation or performative event. Hand-processing, cameraless filmmaking, refined or crude chemical treatments, live "film performances," and related practices have exploded over the course of a decade that has seen a proliferation of new image-making technologies.
Today's speakers, filmmakers and scholars, discuss the contemporary position of film in relation to other media arts, and trace the hidden histories of these "other cinemas."
01 pm Panel: TECHNOLOGY AND RISK
Moderator: Janine Marchessault
Laura U. Marks: Tremors in the Material Ground
Marks considers two generations of shifts in film's consideration of its own materiality. Analog video, whose materiality is constituted from an electronic signal, caused some filmmakers to reconsider their medium as a physical, photochemical object. With the advent of digital video, whose materiality consists in the "dematerialization" of analog signal into digital information, the status of film as an index of the material world has been both reinforced and challenged.
Laura U. Marks is a theorist and programmer of independent media. She has published widely in international journals and books, and is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Marks is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University.
Philip Hoffman: In Process
Collecting images and sounds, reflecting on them over days and years, revising their order, slowly... allowing time to work on them. Hoffman speaks about this process and how it relates to his filmmaking and teaching. In taking film processing away from "the men in the white lab coats" one embarks on a chaotic journey of chance, loss, discovery.
Philip Hoffman is one of Canada's best-known experimental filmmakers. His works have been featured at festivals, cinematheques, and galleries worldwide. Images will present a two-program selected retrospective of Hoffman's films at the 2001 Festival (see p. 22 & 27), and launch Landscape With Shipwreck, a book on Hoffman's films.
Laiwan: The Apparatus of Identity
Laiwan will discuss and illustrate aspects of her investigation into "open architecture," "anthropomorphic technologies" and "mimetic encounters" as explored in her film installations. Using the material structures of film as metaphor, these works raise issues concerning our epistemological shift from analog to digital, and, the presence/absence of "identity" along with the erasure of the "body" of race, class, gender and sexuality within our technological trajectory."
Laiwan was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, of Chinese origin, and immigrated to Canada in 1977. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited across Canada, and she teaches at Goddard College and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Excerpts from her project "Machinate: a projection in two movements" will be on exhibition at YYZ, Toronto, from May 9 to June 9.
Brenda Longfellow: Experimental Documentary and the Nostalgia for Film
Why film? Why now? Digital technologies of production and reception have in the last decade facilitated a tremendous proliferation of documentary à la Discovery Channel. Digital has obviously enhanced certain forms of access but it has inextricably bound most documentary to an industrial model where aesthetic form takes a backseat to information.
Brenda Longfellow is a documentary filmmaker who teaches film at York University. She recently completed shooting (on film!) a documentary about Tina Modotti, a key modernist photographer who was known for her radical political engagements.
Mike Hoolboom: Not the slut of the Normandy coast
Film versus video, cain and abel.
Mike Hoolboom is a prolific film and video maker, writer, and advocate for artists' film and video. Hoolboom's work was featured in a retrospective at the Images Festival in 1995. He is the author of Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada and Plague Years: A Life in Underground Movies. His video Imitation of Life appears in the Charles Street Video program "Lo-fi/Sci-fi."
03 pm Panel: UNKNOWN HISTORIES
Moderator: Richard Fung
David Gatten: That Taking What is Mine, with Me I Take You
Working Notes on Painting, Film and Cellophane Tape. Containing explanations of works completed and intimations of works to come . . . . To which is prefix't a short discourse on technological change in the 15th, 19th, and 21st centuries. Illustrated with 16mm film projections.
David Gatten is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College. Gatten's films explore questions of language, history, authorship, inscription, and the development of cinematic texts through the use of cameraless image-making and non-standard sound generation processes. His latest film, Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, Or, The Doctrine Of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999) receives its Canadian premiere at this year's Images Festival.
R. Bruce Elder: Films: High-tech or Hand-made
In the last few years, a new practice has emerged in the avant-garde - one that (characteristically) has gone almost without notice. A movement around "hand-made" films has sprung up. It is a tactile cinema pitched against the rise of the less immediate, less direct, less tactile technologies that corporate interests are celebrating. Elder situates this movement within the larger context of works concerned with the body, and what possibilities the technology of digital cinema offer for answering it.
R. Bruce Elder is a filmmaker, critic, and teacher of film at Ryerson Polytechnic University. He is the author of three books on film, including the influential Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. His epic film cycle The Book of All the Dead was featured in its entirety at the 1997 Images Festival.
Janie Geiser: Picture Performance
Geiser will discuss her work in film, theatre, and painting as a natural extension of cantistoria, or "picture performance," a genre found in many cultures and time periods. Picture perfomance includes forms such as panoramas, magic lantern shows, scrolls, and the Italian cantistoria, where a live performer works with an oversized book of painted images to tell a story.
Janie Geiser is an internationally recognized filmmaker and theatre artist. She began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performance work, and then as a separate form. Since that time, Geiser's films have been shown at many international festivals, museums, and cinematheques.
Pierre Hébert: Scratching the Surface
"I grew up artistically in an environment of film, even before video appeared. Of course, this has changed radically, but I believe that the fact that from the start my relation to cinema was structured by the marginal practice of scratching directly on film both prepared me to apprehend an expanded vision of cinema' beyond its dependence on 'film' and nevertheless allowed me to perpetuate in a radically anachronical manner a direct and material relationship with 'film.'" - Pierre Hébert
Pierre Hébert is a filmmaker, film performer, and author of L'ange et l'automate. Hébert directed many experimental animated films for the NFB, and has also produced films for other artists. His "live scratch animation" performances are notorious.
05 pm: SCOTT MACDONALD: "IT'S A SERVICE OCCUPATION, REALLY"
"I seem to have committed myself, or at least a substantial portion of my working life, to one of the more marginalized cultural projects of our era. 'Avant-garde' or 'experimental' film/video - after all these years we can't even agree on what to call this project - seems not only peripheral to mainstream cultural developments, but now more than ever, is vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Truly, is there any progressive political efficacy to this field? Why would we continue to involve ourselves in this mechanical/chemical technology, now that the digital revolution threatens to render cinema entirely out of date? After all, even without the onslaught of the digital, the film gauges avant-garde filmmakers have depended on seem to be on their way out: 16mm is increasingly threatened, Super-8mm is seen in only a handful of venues, and is video secure? Even in the academy, avant-garde film/video is largely ignored. Isn't it time to move on?
"The fact is that I cannot 'move on,' and do not want to. Indeed, I see the current moment as offering remarkable opportunities to those of us who remain engaged with this field, especially if we can move past counterproductive habits." - Scott MacDonald
Scott MacDonald is a Professor of Film Studies and American Literature at Utica College. He has been awarded numerous academic and teaching honours, including a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and was named an Anthology Film Archives Preservation Honoree. MacDonald has programmed events and film series for the Robert Flaherty Seminar, Anthology Film Archives, the Centre Georges-Pompidou, and many other organizations. As a scholar of, and advocate for, a wide range of independent and experimental film and video practices, MacDonald has made important contributions to journals such as Artforum, Film Quarterly, and Wide Angle, and to books and anthologies such as A History of American Film, Lovers of Cinema and The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts. MacDonald is the author of several books, including A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, volumes 1-3 (1988, 1992 & 1998) and Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (1993). His forthcoming book The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Films about Place is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2001.
Saturday April 14, 07 pm
Innis Town Hall
Landscape With Shipwreck: The Films Of Philip Hoffman, Program 1
Philip Hoffman in attendance
Co-presented by the Pleasure Dome and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre
Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada's preeminent diary filmmaker. For over twenty years he has been straining history through personal fictions, using the material of his life to deconstruct the Griersonian legacy of documentary practice. As an artist working directly upon the material of film, Hoffman is keenly attuned to the shape of seeing, foregrounding the image and its creation as well as the manufacture of point-of-view. Hoffman's films are deeply troubled in their remembrances; beginning with On the Pond (1978), he dusts off the family archive to examine how estrangement fuels a fascination with the familiar surroundings of home.
Mortality forms the absent centre of Philip Hoffman's oeuvre, a body of films that seems to foreshadow a penultimate loss that will take the maker to the outer and inner reaches of grief. Through the repeating figure of death - whether a boy lying on a Mexican roadside, the death of an elephant at the Rotterdam Zoo, or his uncle's legacy of insanity and death in passing through/torn formations - Hoffman approaches the limits of representation and the ethical burdens of vision and reproduction. - Karyn Sandlos
This retrospective coincides with the publication of Landscape With Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman, a book on Hoffman's work, edited by Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom. The book is published by the Images Festival and Insomniac Press; see page 14 for book launch information.
On the Pond
Philip Hoffman, Canada
16mm 9 minutes 1978
Hoffman's first completed film already bears the traits of his future works: an interest in family history and the reconstruction of memory; a complex temporal scheme that also calls into question the "truth value" of documentary material; a deep feeling for the Canadian landscape; and a certain clarity and honesty about his own position as filmmaker. On the Pond can appear at first viewing as a fairly simple familial reminiscence about a former family home, a dog who has since passed away, and the rituals of childhood play: hockey for the boys, figure skating for the girls. Close attention to the film's form, however, discloses a surprising complexity and richness in its structuring of time, its ambiguity regarding the "documentary" character of much of the material, and its sound-image relations.
World Premiere!
What these ashes wanted
Philip Hoffman, Canada
16mm 58 minutes 2001
The world premiere of What these ashes wanted places flesh on the poet Ann Carson's words, "Death lines every moment of ordinary time." With this new work Hoffman resides in an acutely intimate time, a daily practice of loss lived precariously between the terror of psychic disintegration and the provisional solace taken through public rituals of mourning. What these ashes wanted is not a story of surviving death, but rather, of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of everyday experience.
Saturday April 14, 09 pm
Innis Town Hall
International Program 2: Home, Heart, Hand, Tongue
Our bodies are the homes we carry with us, but they often yearn for another home, a connection across space to another person, another place. These works locate bodies in relation other bodies, other spaces, to what is absent and desired.
Going Back Home
Louise Bourque, Canada
35mm 20 seconds 2000
The disasters of life can make it hard to go home. Bourque's brief, beautiful, and affecting film goes by so quickly it's printed twice on the reel, so you can get a second look.
The Mission
Johanna Householder & b.h. Yael, Canada
Video 4.5 minutes 2000
A contribution to the emerging genre of artists' film and video "remakes": Householder plays the Martin Sheen part in this shot-for-shot recreation of the opening scene from Apocalypse Now. Simply by substituting a woman in place of the original male actor, and video for 35mm film, the artists perform a critical, and very funny, act of interrogation on Coppola's film.
Being Fucked Up
Cooper Battersby & Emily Vey Duke, Canada
Video 11.5 minutes 2001
A sequel of sorts to Battersby's and Vey Duke's beloved Rapt and Happy. Our heroes once again find themselves fucked up in a fucked up world.
Le Chapeau (The Hat)
Michèle Cournoyer, Canada
Music: Jean Dérôme
35mm 7 minutes 2000
Long-time Montréal independent Michèle Cournoyer has been picking up awards all over the place with this forceful and disturbing film. A series of stark, simple brush drawings explores the painful sexual confusion resulting from abuse.
Two Women
Alix Pearlstein, USA
Video 2.5 minutes 2000
Two Women uses deep focus with a wit to turn Orson Welles green with envy. A brilliantly compact consideration of sex, size, and sound-image relations.
Spit
Jeremy Drummond, Canada
Video 2 minutes 2000
The latest and best in Drummond's continuing series of performance videos celebrating "distasteful" bodily secretions, Spit takes full advantage of the disquieting effect of the change of scale when an extreme close-up is projected on a theatrical screen.
Wood
Leighton Pierce, USA
Video 8 minutes 2000
Pierce's extraordinary works have the quality and quiet of a mirage. In Wood, Pierce draws the outline of a backyard situation, investing it with a special kind of grace: a boy sawing and burning wood, a girl filling bowls with water, glimpsed in moments, gestures and fragments.
Micromoth
Julie Murray, USA
16mm 6 minutes 2000
Julie Murray, best known for her combines of found and original footage, moves into the microworld with this exploration of the body of a moth. A hypnotic rhythm is established by the repeated shifting of focus along wing, leg, antenna, and abdomen.
Hong Kong (HKG)
Gerard Holthuis, Netherlands
35mm 13 minutes 1999
Using only the simple tools of precise framing and editing, Hong Kong (HKG) estranges Hong Kong city scenes by focusing on a steady stream of aerial intruders. A remarkable work of subdued surrealism and impeccable cinematography.
In Absentia
Brothers Quay, UK
Music: Karlheinz Stockhausen
35mm 20 minutes 2000
The latest animation by the Brothers Quay, their first new film in six years, is a collaboration with German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who composed and conducted original music for it. Through the film, we enter the mind of a woman confined to an asylum; the shifting lights and dramatic, commanding music forcefully convey the sense of a mind subject to the compulsion of forces and voices that impose their will directly, without recourse to words. Simultaneously delicate and harrowing.
Join us after the screening for a party at sPaHa (66 Harbord St. at Spadina), with a screening of Global Techno Video.
Saturday April 14, 11 pm
doors open 11 pm, screening 12 midnight
Venue: sPaHa (66 Harbord St. at Spadina)
Digital Interference: Global Techno Video
This program of experimental video from Japan, Taiwan, Scotland and Austria blurs the boundaries between fine art video and contemporary club culture, drawing on influences from both worlds, and moving comfortably between them. These artists take on abstraction, noise, digital animation, sonic pulses, and techno music tracks in the search for an ever-evolving hybrid aesthetic. These tapes will screen during our Saturday night reception; all are Toronto premieres.
IP
Kota Ezawa & Karla Milosevich, USA
Video loop 7 minutes 2000
Noise Drome
Fujui Wang, Taiwan
Video 5 minutes 2000
Aus
Skot, Austria
Video 4 minutes 1998
Unterwerk
Dariusz Krzeczek, Austria
Video 2 minutes 2000
Relifted
Tinhoko, Austria
Video 7 minutes 2000
Notdef./Version One
maia./notdef, Austria
Video 4 minutes 2000
<Rewind>
n:ja, Austria
Video 5 minutes 1999
Itch
Mary Morrison, Mark Haddon & Ewan Bush, Scotland
Video 4 minutes 1999
Mirror Line
Shin'ichi Yamamoto, Japan
Video 4 minutes 1998
IMAGES 2001
