Vidéographe

Luc Bourdon, Marc Paradis and Simon B. Robert are curators for a selection of Canadian video to be presented within the context of the 13th Montréal International Festival of New Cinema and Video. This tape relates their experiences and research which occurs during their journey across Canada. This document is less a documentation of the trip than a logical suite to the questions raised in a previous work, Scheme vidéo. Focusing on the displacement of the three curators, the tape reflects their perceptions through the random capture of images. With Paul Wong, Grant Poier, Nida Home Doherty, Jerry Kissel, John Greyson and Collin Campbell.

A torrent of words, of tenderness, of violence, of sense, and nonsense. Exasperation in speech as it butts up against things and repeats in a million ways its submission to nature and life. Red night. Collapse of night as dreams topple to their own destruction. Ruin, as an inescapable as the impediments we place before ourselves, destiny which sweeps us away, and on which we have so little hold.

Two worlds are involved. The internal world, closed, virtually isolated, with just one tenuous, uncertain link with the other world - the telephone. The other, external world exists only to pass from one sealed-off place to another. Call each other? - you lose your voice before you get an answer: your head spins with non-existent voices. Telephone and answering machines are scheming devices. Just waiting in vain.

Guillaume Vallée explores and interrogates the partially erased sensory memory of his adolescent years in this cameraless animated short created using a 35mm trailer for Céline Sciamma’s feature film WATER LILIES (NAISSANCE DES PEIUVRES, 2007). This process of resuscitating long-buried experiences and forgotten remembrances derives from the materiality of the 35mm stock, the nature of the filmed images and Vallée’s painted and scratched interventions directly on the film emulsion.

An experimental documentary about aging and decaying memory at the turn of the new millennium, featuring the filmmaker's grandmother.

"Lost In Her Hair (Monday)" starts with an excited young Iranian girl getting ready for her first day of school. As her mother is brushing her hair and dressing her, she has varied conversations with off-frame family members that reflect cultural specificities.

The passive-spectator, without device, becomes his / her own interpreter and listener. In this video-montage made for a group experience of sound, the sound of an oscilating fan becomes increasingly high-pitched. Instructions then appear on the screen inviting us to listen to our own breathing, the sounds of our body, and to silence. This video concludes with the sound of the oscillator ending the experience.

Richard Martin has captured the choreography of a dancer, shooting the performance nine times as a way of accentuating contrasts and producing an abstract composition of form and movement. In the video, contrasts gradually increase until the dancer’s gestures are but abstract black and white movements. The music remains while the commentary disappears.