AMERIKA

MOTEL ROW (Part 2)

12 min. color 1980

It's a drive-by journey through Vegas style landscapes where sexual recreation and libidinal flow frozen into electronic signs and signals, voyeurism and commodity, image consumption, and sounds from the mediascape.

Featuring a long tracking shot of the 'motel row' of Reno, Nevada, interspersed with 'adult tv' (pornography clips), this voyage of alienation culminates in a electronic burlesque sequence ('Runway Queen') which teases the viewer with synaesthetics and noise.

REFRAIN(S)

Various durations - various subjects - 1982-3

REFRAIN(S) is a moment, or a series of moments, on 'theoretically informed reflection' - lampooning the conceits of Film Theory and Film Analysis (dominated in the 80's by something termed 'psychoanalysis of the cinema' - Mulvey, Penley, et al.), as well as the 'ideological disconnects' resulting from switching reference and source.

Each REFRAIN(S) combines a disconnected - reconnected soundtrack from Vaudeville radio shows with images from the film (as ground) and an on-screen 'bozo' (as figure) as contextual ventrilloquist dummy. The sign of things to come in the future hives of web meanings where cause and effect can become interchangeable or manipulated.

Who is the voyeur, who is the object of the 'gaze'?

MOTEL ROW (Part 3)

5 min. sepia color 1981

Flash-forward to abandonment, desolation. Empty amusement park(s) of childhood's (and AMERIKA's) 'past'.

WILDWEST SHOW

12 min. color 1980

1 min. excerpt video on YouTube:

WILDWEST SHOW re-tells a "day in the life" of "Television City" - an urban landscape that features the most exaggerated moments of Western history iconically portrayed in large billboards.

The main vehicle for the narrative is the game show format, where players attempt to surmise whether the question posed is true or false. We witness a visual panorama that includes footage of stunts, science fiction, war, atrocity, natural disasters, news, and commercial interruptions. This is a society in which meanings are lost, truths are indistinguishable from lies. The society itself, one could say, has lost it, lost a sense of meaning, proportion, authenticity. The film poses the ultimate question: "Did Amerika really look like this?"

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

9 min. color 1979

1 min. excerpt video on YouTube:

A Message from Our Sponsor   deals with television and its mythologies - the fetishization of violence through competition (seen as a dominant historical process in American culture), and the fetishization of sexuality through consumption. The film uses only 'appropriated footage' (unlicensed, copied, etc.)

The claustrophobia of media "reality" - compartmentalized into game shows, movies, news reports, commercials - is presented as continuous interchangeable spectacle. This film looks at the ideology of misrepresentation, the turning of facts into icons, history into myth. It analyzes the media's metalanguage, especially the image of woman as spectacle and commodity; and the psychology and economics of male voyeurism.

This film was banned ( due to some brief hard-core sequences) in Ontario, and Alberta in the 1980's, and resulted in court actions, arrests of Canadian Images Film Festival organizers, and a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in favor of the film - a rulling that effectively dismantled the powers of the Ontario Board of Censors.

Individually featured in international exhibitions, retrospectives.

Historical - critical essay on censorship of this film: Regina vs... (Opsis, 1984)

In the collection of the National Gallery of Canada

PHOTO SPOT

10 min. color 1983

1 min. excerpt video on YouTube:

The filmmaker, as reluctant host, confronts his audience (art historian, film critic, psychoanalyst) taking calls and responding to off-screen callers.

The direct, personal intrusion of the filmmaker's voice is set against scientific charts about visual perception and film chemistry, and optically constructed scenes linked by the concepts of the photogenic and the pervasiveness of perceptual/technical "error."

'You talkin' to me? Who's talkin' to whom?'

 

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EXILES

10 min. color 1983

1 min. excerpt video on YouTube:

Urban 'deconstruction' and graffiti is presented as a form of guerilla warfare against current "industry standards" for society, political organization, and cinema; as a form of resistance to the ideologies of naturalism and biologism, and 'film narrative'.

Soundrack of soundscapes by Tony Giacinti and appropriated 'Black Angel's Death Song' (Velvet Underground - Lou Reed vocal) accompanies the shots of urban decay, graffiti, and light flaring of images and transitions.

THE LONESOME DEATH OF LEROY BROWN

25 min. color 1983

1 min. excerpt video on YouTube:

A two-part voyage: the first through the ruins of Amerika, culminating in a voyeuristic stalking of a 'victim'. The second, a meditation on television violence, evangelism and the viewing subject. This film is a culmination of social and personal disintegration, desolation, decay and entropy - the end of western history as male narcissistic fixation on the self.

The absent viewer/subject of Reels One and Two emerges as "the last man on earth," and as either a 'victim', or 'with a captive victim'.

In Part One, shot from a car window, the camera tracks back and forth ('the structural avant-garde') until it has located it's 'subject', a blonde female (appearing throughout the film) who suddenly turns on the voyeur-camera and fires her gun, and not killing 'him' flees.

1 min. excerpt video on YouTube:

In Part Two , we see a similar female sprawled unconsciously on the background bed as the 'drunken pervert' watches a repeating scene of a black man being shot by police on TV. As the 'real' Jimmy Swaggart spews 'fire and brimstone' on the radio, the protagonist is getting 'his nerve up'...and then slowly he turns and blows the observing (tv) screen away.

'AMERIKA': a culture of  voyeurism and violence taken to the extreme...beyond what academics can 'ponder' and theorize with all of their own 'subjectivities, this is the stage where pathology becomes Nixon-era 'entertainment'...'tell me it ain't so'.

(FIN)*

10 min. color 1983

1 min. (silent) excerpt video on YouTube: