Moods of Modernity: film installations at the museum
These seven films were selected for the way they channel video’s past in cinema: as material projected with light onto acetate film, as a play with time, and as canvas for expression. As such they are haunted by modernist approaches and techniques.
Press Pound to Connect (d. Alexander Fingrutd)
Experimental – 2:31 minutes
Hand processed, shot on 16mm film, and created using a masking technique and appropriated images. The nine equal parts reference the Pound Symbol on a telephone keypad. Here, it is used as a symbol for connection. We are connected to more than what is immediately around ourselves: to each other, the planet, and the farthest galaxies. What distant things are having an effect on us and what are we non-visibly affecting? The similarities between these connections are represented through overlapping images. It shows a change in perspective, going from the individual singular self, to a view where there is no divide between self and other. It brings us to a cosmic, all-encompassing view, divided in space and tied together through telephone wire.
fulcrum (d. Timothy David Orme)
Animation – 8:35 minutes
Rowing through space, self, and consciousness, the math of the universe unfolds.
Ad Meliora (d. Kate Balsley)
Experimental – 3:27 minutes
Ad meliora, or “towards better things” combines hundreds of separate images. Flowers, plants and textures were photographed in places such as nature conservatories, cultivated gardens, vacant properties and parking lots. The familiar landscape appears molten, luminous and renewed. Ad meliora is suggestive of adaptation, resilience and transformation.
Some Mistakes I Have Made (d. Janis Crystal Lipzin)
Experimental – 19:32 minutes
In Some Mistakes I have Made, I ask the question, “How often do we get to see our mistakes in life graphically recorded? Do these recordings of past failure reveal any new meanings?” Using typewriter correction tapes that I saved over the years as the visual foundation, I construct densely hand-collaged images from my past films and details from difficult moments in my life.
In Search of Mount Analogue (d. Leonardo Pirondi)
Experimental – 03:40 minutes
In Search of Mount Analogue journeys through ocean and land, bringing life to the imagined, metaphorical, and mysterious island from the 1952 novel, “Mount Analogue,” by René Daumal. The film uses 16mm film to capture computer-generated images that create an immersive, but rather odd, landscape of Mount Analogue.
Avenuers (d. Roberto Santoguida)
Documentary – 27:27 minutes
Six avenues, in south-central Montreal, revisited.
The Builder (d. Kobi Vogman)
Experimental – 09:44 minutes
A ladder is coming to life in a dismantled world, walking into a journey between landscapes, structures, and movements.