Collections CQ/Panorama XP
"Filming, performing", it is under this simple formulation that we are presenting our third edition of the symposium dedicated to experimental cinema. This form is indeed very regularly linked to performance, even if it is produced before the screening of the films. We propose live performances in which the film medium is reworked, triturated, and returned to its lively expressiveness. Some more general interventions (experimental cinema in Quebec, video experimentation in the feminine, panorama of the current Canadian experimental cinema) complete the program.
Double program exploring some lesser-known proposals from our collections (Letarte; Cholakian) as well as the recent production of experimental films in Quebec and Canada.
In the company of the filmmakers
An experimental film conceived following the plan of a poem by Lucile Durand, from which it is inseparable.
While waiting in vain for a call from a producer, a young screenwriter falls into a kind of paranoid delirium.
The automatic gestures of life in a strangely empty industrial suburb.
Fingers pluck fallen evidence of flight; placed and traced to make avian light.
Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, Events in the Tunnel presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.
In that place, memory means something more than just something one looks back on, or something one feels from the past, it means something real for now that has made you.
[Être] was a thrift shop and eventually underground screening space in Montreal’s Mile End district. The space featured as its main attraction objects picked-up on garbage nights and accrued over many years by proprietor-curators Alek Gruszczynski et Ewa Zbroch. To be inside [Être] was like being hermetically sealed-off with a proliferation of objects, and objects containing objects, an accumulation of things and surfaces and scents that invariably activate all the senses. Shot in the basement and on the main floor of [Être] just before it closed its doors forever, this film gives a sense of what it was like to be inside a space that functioned like one of the many suitcases that covered an entire wall. Like [Être] itself, this film is a celebration of the madness of objects.
![[Être]](/workspace/uploads/films/capture-d-ecran-2023-05-24-082858-fr-1684931594.png)
In 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature officially declared the Kauai ʻōʻō extinct. All that remains of this endemic bird of the Hawaiian island of the same name is the recording of its singing by ornithologist David Boynton. Between territories and treetops, I'm still looking for a trace of the vanished birds.
We look, we touch, we make connections sometimes, and sometimes we proceed by groping blindly forward.
