eKsperim[E]nto Film & Video Festival 2004 - Special Program > Foreign Matter Tour 2004

LIGHTSTRUCK
curated by TODD EACRETT & DEBORAH DE BOER
A 'Foreign Matter' touring program presented by Antimatter Festival of Underground Short Films & Videos [ Victoria, Canada ]

This program presents twelve experimental, primarily process-based pieces. Through a range of formal techniques � hand-processing, cameraless animation, found footage, digital manipulation �these films and videos investigate both personal and cinematic histories at the intersection of old and new technologies.

Shooting Star
Jason Britski (Canada)
4.35 min. 16mm, 2002
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.

Without Leave
Gary Evans & Karl Fodor (Canada)
3.28 min. S8 on video, 2002
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.

Final: (Toxic 6)
Gerald Saul (Canada)
5 min, 16mm, 2002
Time races ahead of us and we will never win. Cinema decays while progress disrupts internal orders. We do not inherit the earth.

Great Leap Forward
Jeff Carter (Canada)
3.25 min. 16mm, 2001
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.

Absolutely
Aleesa Cohene (Canada)
8.3 min. video, 2003
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.

Cooper/Bridges Fight
Christina Battle (Canada)
3 min. 16mm, 2002
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..."

Erotography for the Fastidious Connoisseur
Etienne Desrosiers (Canada)
4.2 min. video, 2002
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.

Saraban
Emmanuel Lefrant (Canada)
6 min. 16mm, 2002
A one-man flamenco in the form of a cameraless animation.

Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road + 97th Street
Christina Battle (Canada)
3 min. 16mm, 2002
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.

Chiasmus
Daichi Saito (Canada)
8 min. 16mm, 2003
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.

Self-Portrait Post Mortem
Louise Bourque (Canada)
2.3 min. 16mm, 2002
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.

18,000 Dead in Gordon Head
Clive Holden (Canada)
13 min. video, 2001
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.