The Transformable Moment: The Films of Stephen Broomer

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Toronto-based experimental filmmaker Stephen Broomer is one of contemporary Canadian cinema's most poetic voices. His layered, densely textured celluloid tone poems (sounding echoes of David Rimmer and Philip Hoffman) probe relationships between landscape and desire, architecture and nature, physicality and spirituality, while also exploring the tangible yet ghostly experience of memory. A filmmaker and film preservationist (often working in 8mm and 16mm formats), Broomer has a BFA in Film and Video Production, an MA in Film Studies, and is presently completing his doctoral dissertation on the origins of the Canadian avant-garde film.

Broomer will attend the screening to introduce and discuss his work. The evening will also feature the official launch of a new Canadian Film Institute publication on Broomer’s work, The Transformable Moment: The Films of Stephen Broomer (edited by Scott Birdwise and Tom McSorley). Guest curator and film scholar Scott Birdwise will also attend.

“We are honoured to have Stephen Broomer as a guest artist at Café Ex,” says CFI Executive Director, Tom McSorley. “His internationally acclaimed work expands the latitudes and longitudes of Canadian avant garde cinema. Forward looking, but also steeped in the filmmaking traditions of experimental masters like R. Bruce Elder, David Rimmer, and Philip Hoffman, Broomer’s often astonishing films investigate memory, identity and landscapes in daring new combinations and juxtapositions.”

The screening and book launch take place on Thursday, December 4. This Café EX event takes place in Club SAW, located at 67 Nicholas. The evening begins at 7:00PM. Admission is pay-as-you-can.

Programme:
- Queen’s Quay (2012)
Red, green, blue, and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours collide and mix. 1.5 min., colour, sound.

- Balinese Rebar (2011)
Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. Rebar at a construction site seems to snake through sunlit puddles. 3.5 min., colour, sound.

- Conservatory (2013)
Stamens and pistils are lit in rapid succession behind the dome of the Palm House at Allan Gardens in Toronto. The plants trade colour, making alien scenes in the conservatory. Solid forms, too near to the eye, become muddied and indistinct, in constant passage, but the dome and the grid are fixed. 3.5 min., colour, silent.

- Christ Church – Saint James (2011)
In the spring of 1998, Christ Church - Saint James, an historic black church in Toronto's Little Italy, was destroyed by arson. All that remained were walls and a pit, and over subsequent years, the site was overtaken with graffiti. This film has taken on the layered form of the site itself, the space and its surfaces becoming tangled and multiple, the grid of a stone-filled window giving geometric form to simultaneously occurring images of concrete, nature, waste, paint, and sky. Music by John Butcher. 7 min., colour, sound.

- Brébeuf (2012)
Brébeuf is a study of St. Ignace II, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649. The images in this film arise from a reading of that story - the joining of the sumac and the cross, the blessing gestures, struggles in the field, elliptical scans of stones, and the shimmering of water to summon a glimpse of the flesh boiled from the skin, in fables of the killing. Brébeuf draws from the dark and storied history of early Western conquest, rediscovering in the harsh, untamed landscape of the North resonances of the violent conflicts between the Jesuits, the Huron, and the Iroquois. 10.5 min., colour, sound.

- Spirits in Season (2013)
Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. This film explores the town's Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump, and Fairy Trail. Music by Nate Wooley. 12.5 min., colour, sound.

- Pepper’s Ghost (2013)
How we may see in a Chamber things that are not! Here, mutations of light, through fabric, glass, and colored gel, make bodies and objects transparent. Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes but by the door or window. Let pictures be set over against this window. For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the spectator's back, he will think to be in the middle of the room, as far from the glass inward as they stand from it outwardly. Clearly and certainly, he will think he sees nothing but truth. 18.5 min., colour, sound.

Local: 

Club SAW - Ottawa, Canadá

Fechas: 

De Jueves, Diciembre 4, 2014 - 19:00 hasta Viernes, Diciembre 5, 2014 - 18:55

Categoría: 

Fechas: 

De Jueves, Diciembre 4, 2014 - 19:00 hasta Viernes, Diciembre 5, 2014 - 18:55

Local: 

  • 67 Nicholas St,
    K1N 7B9   Ottawa, Ontario
    Canadá
    45° 25' 30.7488" N, 75° 41' 19.23" W