SMALL CHANGE

Small Change, the Philadelphia group which hosted "How To Be A Canadian," just put up their website, including a nice page with photos from the show. It's under the "November 2004" tab at: http://www.smallchangescreenings.com

"On November 3rd we were practically in tears. It was impossible to think that George Bush was still going to be the president of the United States. We were depressed and knew that many of our friends were. There was a lot of talk of moving to Canada. Our good friend Astria Suparak had just officially moved to Montreal and mentioned to us that she had just put together a show that would help US folks better understand and acclimate to Canada. We told her to come down and whipped together the event in less than two weeks. The show was held at Vox Populi and featured the "End of the World" dance party with DJ's Julia Factorial and Miss Meow. We also had an exhibit by local artist Charlie Cottone who displayed a series of spray painted stencils about opposition to the war. Astria brought Canadian flags and American to Candian dictionaries to help folks learn how to escape up north."

Photo: Ted Passon

TELLING TIME: ESSAYS OF A VISIONARY FILMMAKER

The following book review was published in A Sense of Sight: A Special Issue Devoted to Stan Brakhage, ed. William C. Wees, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 14, Number 1 (Spring 2005).

When Stan Brakhage passed away in February 2003, not only did the international avant-garde lose a groundbreaking artist, magisterial teller of tales, and esteemed public presence; it also lost an original, audacious and insightful theoretician. The twenty-six pieces collected in Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker, first printed in the Toronto quarterly, Musicworks between 1989 and 1999, establish Brakhage's place among the most elastic minds of his generation. Similarly at ease discussing Russian poetry, romantic love, visual perception, child psychology, human cognition and religious belief as he is debating aesthetic or cinematic issues, Brakhage's essays spark from stream-of-consciousness synapses, sudden insights culled from a lifetime of voracious reading, attentive reflection and piercing observation. The entries in Telling Time comprise Brakhage's most mature writing, but they continue to maintain the playful slips of language and leaps of faith that distinguish earlier books such as Metaphors on Vision (1963), Film Biographies (1977), and Film at Wit's End (1989). Devoid of footnotes and academic jargon, but replete with puns, intentional misspellings, humorous asides, conceptual enjambments, run on sentences and non-sequiturs, his speculative criticism is akin to a psycho-geographical derive. Suggesting thought-in-motion (unselfconscious, deliberate thinking), these freshly buoyant essays express the organic, uneven "now-ness" of his more intuitive film compositions.
Read complete review.

A LINE OF SIGHT

There's a short review of Paul Arthur's book A Line of Sight posted on Michael Betancourt's avant-garde film blog at: http://www.cinegraphic.net

Excerpt: "What is especially good about this book is the mixture of approaches that gives the book a shifting view of the work covered, and allows a degree of internal dialogue between different essays. Of particular interest are the later chapters covering more recent developments, a critical look at the present that is common in other arts, but too often lacking with movies."

A SENSE OF SIGHT

The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 14, Number 1 (Spring 2005) is a special issue devoted to Stan Brakhage. It includes the following articles:

+ "Rhythms of Vision in Stan Brakhage's City Streaming," by Marilyn Brakhage
+ "Late and Somewhere Firm: Notes on Brakhage's Vancouver Island Films," by Bart Testa
+ "The Aesthetics of Menace: Stan Brakhage, Tom Thomson, and the Group of Seven," by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof
+ "Goethe's Faust, Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, and Stan Brakhages Faust Series," by R. Bruce Elder
+ "Brakhage's Tarkovsky and Tarkovsky's Brakhage: Collectivity, Subjectivity, and the Dream of Cinema," by Jerry White

It also includes a previously unpublished lecture by Brakhage on Canadian art and film (specifically on paintings by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, and films by Arthur Lipsett, Jack Chambers, David Rimmer, Ellie Epp, and Bruce Elder); a review of Brakhage's last book, Telling Time, by Brett Kashmere; and eight pages of full-colour images.

The single issue price is $15 (CND) if your address is in Canada or $15 (US) if your address is outside Canada. That price includes postage. To order a copy, send a cheque made out to Canadian Journal of Film Studies to: Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Film Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada K7L 3N6.

You can take a look at the cover and abstracts of the articles on the journal's website: http://www.filmstudies.ca/cjfs.html