Water Sark by Joyce Wieland (13.30 mins1966 )
I decided to make a film at my kitchen table, there is nothing like knowing my table. The high art of the housewife. You take prisms, glass, lights and myself to it. “The Housewife is High.” “Water Sark” is a film sculpture, being made while you wait. (JW)
Joyce Wieland (1931-1998) is regarded as Canada’s foremost woman artist. She produced an acclaimed body of work in a great variety of media, from drawing and painting to quilts and film. She gained a unique respect for incorporating strong personal statements in her work about issues of feminism, nationalism and ecology long before it had become fashionable to do so. Her retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario was the first-ever afforded a living Canadian woman artist.
On the Pond by Phil Hoffman (9 mins 1976)
"Hoffman's film is in the experimental film tradition of the personal diary, although in this case a beautifully paced mixture of family photographs and dramatic reconstruction interwoven into a narrative creates an objective distance. ‘On the Pond’ reveals skills of editing, sound and story telling which evoke in ten minutes a complex and emotional study of a family, its past and present, its young dreams and its affections...” - Michael O’Pray, Independent Means, Canadian Experimental Films at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op
“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: 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.
Anamnesis, Scott Berry (3:15 minutes 2009)
“Anamnesis” is a handmade diary film exploring home, memory, and history through heavily processed painterly sequences. The film was shot at the Independent Imaging Retreat (the Film Farm) in Mount Forest, Ontario. |
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A private patch of blue by Tracy German (13 mins 1998)
"An auto-portrait of maternity, ‘private patch’ shows Toronto filmer Tracy German quietly expectant, keening through winterludes of surprise before the birth of her first child. Episodically structured and materially assured, German's exacting observational sense re-creates her domestic surround from the point of view of her boy-to-be, lurking over woodpiles and rock with eyes wide in wonder, turning the surrounding bush into a softly focused pastel glaze. Deftly intercutting interiors and exteriors, ‘private’ opens on a wintry porch, a liminal architectural space which is both inside and out, metaphor here for the maternal body which has become the first home of her child (inside), growing quickly towards their moment of separation (outside). A dazzle of crimson flares ensue, miming the boy's closed-eye womb visions, before the filmmaker's face appears, softly turning in a patina of grain, reaching for a closed door. An eye unused to outside receives impressions of winter, closing with a snow forest divided by a path leading to the unknown.
Tracy German is a Toronto-based independent filmmaker, artist, and mother, who recently completed an MFA degree in Film Production at York University. Over the past ten years Tracy has completed a variety of media works such as a 16mm film loop installation entitled “Impeded Streams and Stains,” which was part of the Images Festival 2005 as well as the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film at the Durham Art Gallery, and has recently finished a 37-minute documentary called Restless Spirits about her step mother’s participation as a rural Ontario rodeo calf roper.
Boy Francisca Duran (5 mins 2005)
The filmmaker reflects on the cities she has lived in, motherhood and the birth of her first son. The optically printed images are cityscapes of Vancouver.
Francisca Duran was born in Santiago Chile in 1967. Since the coup in 1973, she has lived primarily in Toronto, and also in Kingston where she received a B.A.H. in Film Studies from Queens University. She currently works as a graphic designer and recently received a Master of Fine Arts in Film from York University. The Finite (8)
Across (3)
Pretending We Were Indians (3)
Still/Move (11)
Nocturno (6.14)
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