Experimental Films (G)
In this section, films are grouped under the name of the filmmaker. Titles are listed alphabetically under each filmmaker's name.
Atmosphere
10 min. b/w 1975
A real-time puzzle in which a coastal landscape at Downs Point, Hornby Island,is panned back and forth to a mysterious pattern or non-pattern. Drum accompaniment keeps the viewer questioning the film's structure and purpose. Like many of Gallagher's films, this is a meditation on cinematic representation.
Award: Honourable Mention, Bellevue Film Festival
Mirage
7 min. 1983
Ironic comments on fantasy and voyeurism are made using loop imagery and expressionistic overlays. The film features a repeating image of a Hawaiian woman disrobing and dancing for the camera. The image is accompanied by a sound loop (from Elvis Presley's "Blue Hawaii") that provides an ironic counter point
to this voyeur's dream. Superimposed on the central image are "snapshots" of Hawaii - palms, surfers, historical footage of Pearl Harbor, and "Welcome to Hawaii" performances for tourists. The film comments on the traditional breakdown of gender roles in cinema - female to be looked at, male as onlooker and authority.
The Nine O'Clock Gun
8 min. 1980
A famous Vancouver landmark, the nine o'clock gun is a cannon that fires each day at 9:00 p.m. from Stanley Park. In this film, a stationary camera plays a waiting game, shooting the "performing sculpture" that marks time, but also stands as an invention of destruction.
Subject(s): Vancouver
Plastic Surgery
19 min. 1975
This film draws an analogy between the cutting and suturing of the human body, and the reconstruction of the world on film. Rich in optically printed imagery,it connects diverse events in a dream like flow. A vision of the mind at play in the midst of society's collective anxieties, the film also "operates" on the image-producing industries, including cinema.
Santa
6 min. 1979
Santa gets his picture taken with a typically bizarre assortment of children of all ages, in this piece of amateur sociology practised from Pacific Centre Mall. Gallagher's deadpan treatment isolates the ritual moment of image-making. As each of the mandatory souvenir photographs is taken, the filmmaker's camera shoots a few feet of film. The sound track repeats Santa's own laugh track, "Ho ho ho!"
Seeing in the Rain
10 min. 1981
Though Gallagher's films are often real-time documents of an event, here he expands the representation of time. Shot through the windshield of a Vancouver city bus, the film transforms the linear narrative of an ordinary bus ride by inserting images from past and future to the rhythm of the bus's windshield wipers. As the time/space continuum fragments, reality seems to be chasing itself.
"His film embodies the essence of cinema: movement, rhythm, the poignance of ephemeral gestures." (Jim Hoberman)
Award: Honourable Mention, Northwest Film & Video Festival
Sideshow
5 min. b/w 1973
Sideshow is a bizarrely humorous aside on the relationship between child rearing and ventriloquism.
"Derived from vaudeville ... a juxtaposition of crass entertainment tradition with innocence." (C.G.)
Terminal City
8 min. 1982
The Devonshire Hotel in Vancouver was demolished by blasting. Gallagher filmed the event at 200 frames a second and manipulated the sounds recorded at the event to play back at the same speed as the images. The destruction of the landmark is rendered mysterious, transforming the building's transformation.
"Camera retards natural rhythms of entropy, as man-made rock implodes into astatic `heaven' of smoke and dust: city becomes cloudscape; cheering and whistling, spirit calls heralding the void." (Tony Reif)
Undivided Attention
110 min. 1986
An episodic experience of cinematic metaphor and structure, Undivided Attention contradicts, tickles, and soothes our desire to understand and make sense of what we see. A young couple driving in a sports car take the viewer through more than twenty intriguing sequences that stimulate the visual senses as the film explores the relationship between intellectual and sensual knowledge. Each section is like a little film in itself - a dog fetching a ball, a woman reading at Niagara Falls, dishes smashing and remaining frozen in space, a trip across Wyoming. The camera becomes one with a trombone player, a painter, and snow shoveler, while other sections take us directly into metaphor concerning time, memory, art, music, or pop culture. This rich and challenging film comments on conventions of narrative and documentary, and has some fun with film theory.
Subject(s): Feature length
Where is Memory
97 min.
Where is Memory is a mixture of fiction and documentary that traces the dream like journey of a man, dubbed the Sleepwalker (played by Vanouver actor Peter Loeffler) through Germany after a suitcase full of Third Reich memorabiliais mysteriously delivered to his door. He travels to historic sites of the Third Reich to explore the past using a period camera that had recorded images of Hitler's Germany. His trek leads him to Eva Adolphina Hitler, a woman who claims to be Hitler's grand-daughter. The past becomes mixed with his reality and the gradual realization of the regime's horror drives him to a desperate act.
The Central Character
15 min. b/w 1977
A woman's attempt to keep chaos at bay by naming, classifying, and ordering her domestic environment. This ultimately results in a total loss of ego and verbal capacity. Through the innovative juxtaposition of printed text, graphics, step printing, and disintegrating sound track, Gruben constructs a narrative breakdown that parallels the unconscious patterning of her character's mind.(Richard Stanford, National Gallery of Canada)
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