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SHORT FILMS SCREENING AND DISCUSSION MARCH
2006
Antimatter Underground Film Festival (session 2)
at Minikino's monthly screening and discussion, March2006
(please check schedule
for 2 different programme)
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The Foreign Matter touring programs are organized and curated by
Deborah de Boer (Curator, Antimatter) and Todd Eacrett (Festival
Director, Antimatter)
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Rogue Art / Antimatter Underground Film Festival
1322 Broad Street, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 2A9
Tel/Fax: 250-385-3327
Web Site: www.antimatter.ws
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(scheduled for March
2006: minikino in Denpasar)
NOCTURNES
Nocturnes has been assembled to create a kind of visual and emotional
vertigo in the audience. Through a paucity of natural light, the
repetitive movement common to trance states and mental dissolution,
and the manipulation of our human scale as a frame of reference,
these works disorient and confound. Human beings-or the objects
which stand in for our humanity-inhabit a shadowy landscape littered
with the detritus of technology, rife with voids and unseen things
which menace nonetheless, and seemingly without access to the redemptive
powers of nature. Nocturnes is a series of dystopias: emotional,
economical, spiritual and physical. The malaise of Nocturnes is
a contemporary first-world malaise; a dysfunctional neurosis borne
of privilege and consumption. The safety and clarity lost to us
in these filmic netherworlds we have let slip away voluntarily,
or at least without putting up much of a fight. We have chosen instead
a dark and fertile terrain of desire, obsession, compulsion and
possession set against the backdrop of a looming industrial complex,
where all paths lead to alienation and madness.
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Boogyman
(Brian Joseph Davis/video/2002/Can/4:30)
Two children communicate with Satan using their Lite Brite. Boogyman
skewers superstitious fears by using adult actors to mime the everyday
behaviour of normal children to recreate the visual conventions
and effects of horror films like The Exorcist.
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Argent Liquide (Cash Flow)
(Shaun Andrews/16mm/2002/Canada/11:08)
Argent Liquide is a darkly comic, expressionistic journey into the
inner psychological workings of you and your local automated teller.
Through deft use of irony and metaphor, the film raises timely questions
about money, technology and surveillance within a highly commercialized
society while exploring the sadomasochistic and narcoticizing relationship
we form with money and the system it represents.
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Nocturne
(Jay Johnson/video/2001/Can/7:15)
Inspired by "The Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel" by Rilke,
Nocturne recounts a melancholic tale of magic and metaphor as seen
through the eyes of a small androgynous doll.
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Resolving Power
(François Miron/35mm on video/2001/Can/18:00)
"A dreamy and beautifully shot film that entrances the audience
with its atmospheric sound design (by Helios Creed, Peter Namlook,
Jason Martz) and stream of consciousness images. Starring Montreal
comic Rick Trembles, who also provides animated vignettes, and marking
a more live-action turn for experimental film staple François
Miron, Resolving Power is a film about obsession, and the love for
electricity and celluloid." - Karim Hussain, Fantasia Film
Festival
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Angor
(Jason Arsenault/video/2002/Canada/3:40)
Set in the abandoned shower rooms of an old Montreal pool, Angor
conveys a powerful sense of alienation, anxiety and incipient menace.
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Lüstmord
(Gwynne Fulton/16mm/2002/Can/10:50)
An experimental psycho-horror film about a deranged hospital chambermaid's
nightmarish vision of her repressed fantasies. Shot in black and
white and optically printed on colour stock, Lüstmord is a
carnival of the perverse where sexual paranoia triggers fears of
infection and sickness as punishment for moral and sexual transgression.
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Le Viaduc d'Or
(Clark Nikolai/video/2002/Can/3:42)
By day, a dumpster diver finds a mannequin to love, a harassed woman
puts on a male disguise and a drug-addicted hustler scores. By night,
their diurnal lives are forgotten when they become whoever they
want to be, online.
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House
(Brian Joseph Davis/video/2003/Can/18:00)
An extraordinary filmic implosion of Poe's "Fall of the House
of Usher," set in a Canadian suburban nowhere.
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(scheduled for March
2006: minikino in Jakarta)
LIGHTSTRUCK
Lightstruck comprises 12 experimental pieces that concern themselves
with the material and historical processes of filmmaking. Through
a variety of formal techniques-hand-processing/manipulation/toning,
direct animation, optical printing and recontextualizing found footage-they
reference and reinvent the inherent photochemical and mechanical
nature of the medium. The conscious use of film's physical properties
also furthers a shared investigation of, and commentary on, the
styles and conceits of classic cinema. The inversion of existing
narratives and construction of new ones from found and archival
source materials collude with the often autobiographical qualities
of personal filmmaking to rewrite cinematic history.
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Shooting Star
(Jason Britski/16mm/2002/Can/4:35)
Shooting Star is a film about mortality. The film is a moving x-ray
of small and grand gestures alike, grounded in the detail of our
surroundings, and the beauty that resonates from these hidden places.
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Without Leave
(Gary Evans & Karl Fodor/S8 on video/2002/Can/3:28)
Evans and Fodor use toned and manipulated film stock and disjunctive
visual narrative to powerfully convey the sense of movement, urgency
and exhilaration in this story of servicemen going AWOL.
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Final: (Toxic 6)
(Gerald Saul/16mm/2002/Can/5:00)
Time races ahead of us and we will never win. Cinema decays while
progress disrupts internal orders. We do not inherit the earth.
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Great Leap Forward
(Jeff Carter 16mm/2001/Can/3:25)
Mao's China: a train station, dignitaries, speeches, thousands of
onlookers. Great Leap Forward is derived from found footage happened
upon in a Gastown warehouse. The source of the footage is unknown,
as is any information about the decades-old media event depicted.
Step-printed using an optical printer, the film situates the activities
in the displaced half-remembered realm of dreams.
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Absolutely
(Aleesa Cohene/video/2003/Can/8:30)
Absolutely is a pseudo-documentary about history, politics and the
body. Weaving through various sources and re-contextualized found
footage, Absolutely interviews four characters about democracy,
revolution and their internal manifestations.
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Cooper/Bridges Fight
(Christina Battle/16mm/2002/Can/3:00)
Cooper/Bridges Fight reconstructs an infamous scene from the highly
politicized western "High Noon." "They punish each
other mercilessly, nothing barred. The horses, becoming nervous,
rear and whine in their stalls."
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Erotography for the Fastidious Connoisseur
(Etienne Desrosiers/video/2002/Can/4:20)
A search for the erotic ghost in the porn universe. Six scraps of
8mm found footage from the sixties are stripped naked in search
of intimacy. Floating figures escape their sexual content in a saturated
media canvas, and electronic music is combined with erotic hot flashes
and spontaneous climaxes in this thriller-cum-blue movie.
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Saraban
(Emmanuel Lefrant/16mm/2002/Can/6:00)
A one-man flamenco in the form of a cameraless animation.
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Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road + 97th Street
(Christina Battle/16mm/2002/Can/3:00)
Focusing on the mesmeric and repetitive processes of oil wells in
northern Alberta, this film documents a sighting common to the Canadian
prairies that is both epic and mundane.
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Chiasmus
(Daichi Saito/16mm/2003/Can/8:00)
An exploration into the process of perception, the act of seeing
and listening, Chiasmus takes film as a metaphor for the breathing
body, the medium intercrossing the fragmented and abstract images
of the body in movement. The rhythm and tension created by the interplay
between sound and image, their disjunction and conjunction, aspire
to an organic and sensual moment where inside becomes outside, and
outside inside.
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Self-Portrait Post Mortem
(Louise Bourque/16mm/2002/Can/2:30)
An unearthed time-capsule-consisting of long buried footage of the
filmmaker's youthful self-reveals an exquisite corpse with nature
as collaborator. A metaphysical pas de deux in which decay undermines
the integrity of the image but in the process initiates a transmutation.
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18,000 Dead in Gordon Head
(Clive Holden/video/2001/Can/13:00)
Based on the filmmaker's eyewitness accounts of a shocking and random
act of violence which took place in Victoria in 1985, 18,000 Dead
in Gordon Head is a treatise on the omnipresence of violence in
contemporary culture. Composed as a poem, it's a hybrid of several
film stocks and video formats, digitally processed to create a violent,
yet lyrical, collage of textured loops, internal rhythms and visual
rhymes, finally completing the work's cycle back to film.
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ANTIMATTER
Dedicated to the exhibition and nurturing of film and video as
art, Antimatter has grown into the premier showcase of experimental
film in the west. Encompassing screenings, installations, performances
and hybrid media experiments, Antimatter provides a noncompetitive
festival setting in Victoria, British Columbia, free from commercial
and industry agendas.
The highest standards of curatorial practice are employed to build
thematic programs of innovative film and video selected from international
submissions. In addition, our annual Foreign Matter series has become
the incubator for hundreds of short films, all new to North American
audiences, compiled and contextualized by international curators.
Reciprocally, Antimatter delivers curated programs of new Canadian
work to international audiences through our Foreign Matter tours.
Since 1998, the quality and creativity of its programming, commitment
to audience development, and respect for filmmakers and their work
have made Antimatter one of the most important media arts events
in Canada, and the world.
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