The films of Amy Halpern are devoted to the pleasures of light, of perception and of film as a medium. Their intellectual interplay, along with the aesthetics of pleasure and the resulting synesthetic associations, give rise to intimate, melodic, sensual experiences. 

As a child, Amy Halpern made compositions using light and movement, like all children. She was interested in looking at volumes, both spatial and temporal, positive and negative spaces, and their representation and/or suggestion on screen.  

Storm de Hirsch—poet, painter, a woman pioneer among pioneers of the cinema—invented some of the basic forms of Super 8. However, few of her films have been screened since her death. This session combines her songs and sonnets in Super 8 with her Hudson River diaries, filmed in 16 mm.

A great deal of the films by filmmakers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill are based on the study of landscape, relating filmic shapes with the shapes of places. Not only does it provide a close-up of the rugged harshness of the Australian landscape, the films in this session - Bouddi, Island Fuse and Ocean Point Lookout – look into the materiality of the actual image and perception, posing us with questions about the nature of cinema and its capacity to create other worlds. 

The best known camera-less productions of Steven Woloshen share the verve and pace of the freer works of Norman McLaren and the joie de vivre of Robert Breer’s films. Colour, graphics and music take the lead in films that regale the eyes and the ears. But there is another interesting facet to the Canadian filmmaker, less known and more mature and, if possible, even more original, using found footage and formalistic mechanisms reminiscent of structural and materialist cinema, such as his latest film, The Dead Sea Scrolls.