The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto presents
The Strategies of the Medium series

Strategies of the Medium IV
IN 27 SECONDS
Saturday November 21, 2009
Starts at 7:00 PM

*** LOCATION CHANGE ***
Trash Palace
89b Niagara Street (just W of Bathurst Street)
Suggested donation: Members $5 / Non-Members $8

** Filmmakers Robert Todd Barbara Sternberg and in person

This fourth installment of the Strategies of the Medium series will focus on international works that use the limitations and flexibility of the spring wound Bolex camera as a structural element of composition. The Bolex cameras are perhaps the most accessible and flexible 16mm and Super 16 production tools. Both locally and internationally there is a strong tradition of filmmakers experimenting with these elements and this program will seek to demonstrate the variety of results possible. The program will conclude with a discussion with some of the filmmakers who have integrated the rhythms of the Bolex camera into their working practice.

This program will be supplemented by 16mm Filmmaking with the Bolex, a special production course focused on 16mm films offered as part of LIFT's fall 2009 workshop season. A catalogue with an accompanying essay by Chris Kennedy will be available at the screening.

FEATURED FILMS:

RECAMARA
(Rosario Sotelo, USA, 2007, 6 min. 16mm, silent, 18fps)
“Camera obscura: A darkened chamber with a tiny aperture affording a view from an outside space. Through this opening, light enters, bringing with it, observatory-like, an inverted image of the external world. Unique to what one sees in this film are exterior images not projected on blank surfaces as one might expect; rather, seen superimposed on the intimate space of the artist's apartment. Her bedroom is itself transformed into a camera obscura in which outside images and interior space with its artifacts become one. Recámara is simultaneously time-lapse documentation of a site-specific installation and unique work of filmic invention." – Charles Boone, 2008

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN JALOSTOTITLAN & ENCARNACION
(Philip Hoffman, Canada, 1984, 6 min. 16mm)
The bus stopped on the Mexican highway, placing us in full view of a young boy, motionless, on the hot pavement. In this film, the incident is revealed through a poetic text, derived from my written journals. The poetry mixes primarily with Mexican streetscapes, which compliment the text in a tonal sense. Most images are 28 seconds long, the “breath” of the 16mm Bolex camera. A lone saxophone (Mike Callich) weaves its way through the narrative, blending to make stronger the tones and accentuations of the images. – Philip Hoffman
Music by Mike Callich.

A & B IN ONTARIO
(Joyce Wieland & Hollis Frampton, 1984, 16 min. 16mm)
“Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of '67. We were staying at a friend's house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to make a film about each other - and we did.” – Joyce Wieland

“A & B in Ontario” was completed eighteen years after the original material was shot. After Frampton's death, Wieland assembled the film into a cinematic dialogue in which the collaborators (in the spirit of the sixties) shoot each other with cameras.

BOUQUETS 21-30
(Rose Lowder, France, 2001 – 2005, 14 min. 16mm silent)
BOUQUETS 21-30 is a part of the ecological BOUQUETS series, consisting of one-minute films composed in the camera by weaving the characteristics of different environments with the activities there at the time. The filming basically entails using the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed. Thus each bouquet of flowers is also a unique bouquet of film frames.

JANUARY 15, 1991: GULF WAR DIARY
(Susan Oxtoby, Canada, 1992, 6 min. 16mm silent)
"A personal register of the passing deadline, fashioned entirely in camera. Toward midnight, a trip to a demonstration at the U.S. consulate in Toronto vies for frame with the swirling super-impositions of clocks and newscasts." – Pleasure Dome, “War and Cinema” program notes, January 15, 1991

INCANTATION
(Cara Morton, Canada, 1997, 5 min. 16mm)
"Originating in the lens of a discreet hand-crank Bolex camera, 'Incantation' is a delirious hand-processed weave of urban protest and contact dance that evokes the powerful spirit of personal and political resistance." - Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto, 1997

“‘Incantation’ combines images from last autumn’s anti-Harris protest in Toronto with a dancer, creating a brilliant combination that illuminates the spirit and energy evident in the marches.” – Take One Magazine, Fall 1997

BURNING
(Barbara Sternberg, Canada, 2002, 7 min. 16mm silent)
A multiplicity of diverse images - cut together rhythmically flicker with energy fire, light, life.

"Your life is like a candle. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is burning." – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

CLOUD FRAGMENTS
(Chris Welsby, UK/Canada, 1978, 10 min. 16mm silent)
The camera position remained the same throughout the shooting. The frame is comprised entirely of sky. Four one hundred foot rolls of colour film were run through the camera twelve times each, one twelfth of the frame was exposed at every run. Each run was divided into four-second takes. Each of these was punctuated by four-second intervals, which are represented by flash frames. The four second takes are synchronised in each run so that the flash frames at the end of each take occur on the screen at about the same time.

The order in which each separate area of film was exposed was dependent upon the overall distribution of clouds within the frame. The time taken to expose each of the four rolls of film depended on the weather conditions at the time, and varied between one and fourteen days per hundred feet.

STABLE
(Robert Todd, USA, 2003, 7 min. 16mm)
Portrait of a New England farm: back and there again.
The family-run farm is a staple of romantic Americana. Industrialization's reformation of our material and ideological makeup brought with it an idealized notion of the Farm as a point of origin and innocence, and in so doing created a cultural rift between agriculturists and bourgeois. Film's entry onto the cultural stage coincided with the high watermark of industrial hegemony in the Western world, and as a product of Industry, provided a new representational language for bourgeois culture. As such, the character of the lens through which the filmmaker posits the Farm has been either romantic or ethnographic. – Robert Todd
(All layering effects in this film were shot in-camera)

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The Strategies of the Medium series is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and runs through the spring of 2010.

Since 1981 LIFT has been Canada's foremost artist-run-centre for independent filmmakers. www.LIFT.on.ca