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The
Funnel
Catalogue Supplement 1987
• (digitized for CineZine by Fringe
Online, 2007) •
44 Pages! 30 Filmmakers! 120 Films & Related Work!
Index;
Artists L-Y;
Introduction;
Film
Listing; Funnel
Publications;
Appendix
(Filmography / Bibliography / Screenings).
Below: ARTISTS A-J, Pages 8-18
Jo Ahlers, Ric Amis, Dave Anderson, Jim Anderson, David
Bennell,
Amy Bodman, Bruce LaBruce, Mike Cartmell, Ian Cochrane,
Sharon Cook, Fenway Crane, Martha Davis, Ron Edding,
Munro Ferguson, Michaeline Fontana, Adele Friedman, Su Friedrich,
Eldon Garnet, Cindy Gawel, Michael Hoolboom, Jack Jeffrey, G.B. Jones.
THE FUNNEL: FILM AND RELATED WORK
JO AHLERS
Jo Ahlers is from Hamburg, Germany, where he began acting in his childhood. After moving to Toronto in 1966 he acted professionally. In 1967 he attended Cinecity's 'Cinethon' Festival and was inspired to make his only film to date - a one hour trilogy of which Praeterea Post Futurtum is the first part. Labs refused to print another part containing erotic imagery so the project was never completed. Ahlers has been painting since that time. His work has been exhibited in Toronto in 1985 and 1986.
PRAETEREA POST FUTURUM (1968)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 12 minutes
The construction of P.P.F., adhering closely to the Brechtian
theory of the theatre, is held together by its inner disturbance over
being a film, complete with people, music, narrative, continuity, etc.
P.P.F. is a film about appearances, specifically those produced
in filmmaking; and so it comments, ironically but gently, on what is
transpiring: "Hold back the Distance, This is the Film, You're
right There, and it's all coming together... on film". My doubts,
rebounding from their own objectivations included. (The German word
for lens is 'Objektiv', Latin enough for you to understand the title
of this film as an objection to its proper function.) - J. A.
RIC AMIS
Ric Amis began photography at age nine in Hamilton, Ontario. He worked for fourteen years in construction and used that subject for his professional freelance photography and photo exhibitions. He lived in Vancouver for eight years, then moved to Toronto in 1978, and began shooting a lot of Super 8 film, then video. He frequented the Funnel and joined Trinity Video, doing both administrative and construction work for three years. He continues to work in video and photography and is the Managing Director of the Association of National Non-Profit Artists' Centres (ANNPAC). - John Porter, Cache du Cinema Notes
FLOW (1980)
Colour, Sound, (I8 fps), Super 8, 5 minutes
By the use of fragmented images of trees on a windy day, an impression
of flow and movement is created. The soundtrack was created by Peggy
Sampson through the use of electronics and the viola da gamba.
FILMS BY DAVE ANDERSON AND JIM ANDERSON
(Please refer to THE FUNNEL COLLECTION CATALOGUE
1984 for biographical information)
QUETICO (1985)
Colour, Sound, (18 fps), Super 8, 45 minutes
Quetico is the name of a provincial park just west of Lake Superior.
In 1981 we, along with another fellow embarked on a seven day canoe
trip in this park. As well as the experience of canoeing and camping
we wished to discover the Indian pictographs said to exist on the shore
rocks of some of the isolated lakes. The film is a document of our trip
and discoveries, but as we worked on the project we found that the film
was becoming more than this. We became interested in how something is
remembered and reconstructed and in questions of memory, story telling,
history and our concepts of beauty. This led to the shooting of reconstructed
and simulated scenes that were then edited into the documentary footage.
As well, the soundtrack presents a mix of location sounds and simulated
sounds. At one point in the film we hear a voice attempting to imitate
the dialect of a local fisherman. The film is not so concerned with
passing information along as it is with leaving gaps and providing disinformation.
Like the Indian pictographs, the film acts as a symbol that represents
an event and evokes a mood. - J. A.
JIM ANDERSON
(Please refer to THE FUNNEL COLLECTION CATALOGUE
1984 for biographical information)
STAND OFF (1983)
B & W, Sound , 16mm film loop, 6 minutes
A film loop made from an old Mexican western produces a continual stand
off between two cowboy factions. Meanwhile, the sound rescues the factions
from their eternal dilemma and provides a twist to an old story.
CHARLES (1983)
35mm slides with sound cassette, 4 minutes (artist normally required
to be present)
Every once in awhile, maybe as he walks from one room to another, Charles
has a desire. This provokes Charles to make some modest reflections
on the nature of desire. - J. A.
CHARLES AND THE ANGEL (1983)
35mm slides with sound cassette, 6 minutes
Charles awakes one morning to find two knobs on his shoulders which
soon become wings. This change confronts Charles with some dilemmas
pertaining to sanity, free will and denial. - J. A.
...through the use of painted, scratched and photographic images, the
slide piece locates and dislocates representation as a disjuncture between
the 'expressionism' of painting and the cinematic 'truth' of photographic
realism. - Dot Tuer
Jim Anderson has a number of film performances and installation pieces available for presentation. These include such pieces as: PREHISTORIC EXPANDED CINEMA, POST HYSTERIC EAR, THE MEANING MACHINE, THE PIECE OF TURF, A FILM AT THE BOTTOM OF MY FOOT, MY TRIP TO HOLLAND, and SAILING AROUND THE WORLD. Most do not require elaborate set-ups. Please inquire for further information.
FILMS BY DAVID BENNELL and MICHAELINE
FONTANA
(Please refer to THE FUNNEL COLLECTION CATALOGUE
1984 for biographical information)
DON'T LET ME GO AWAY (1985)
Colour, Sound, (24fps), Super 8, 13 minutes
A satiric send-up of soap opera romance and materialism. Manipulated
Italian comic book with subtitled lines voiced by Sophie Vitkovitsky,
Pascal Sharp, and the filmmakers for maximum hilarity and irony. When
the heroine says "Ron, we're afraid of the emptiness" while
standing in an outrageously overdecorated apartment, we know just what
she means. - M. F.
AMY BODMAN
Born: Detroit, Michigan, 1962
Amy Bodman has spent much time travelling, keeping up a worldwide network of friends and relatives, and gathering artifacts and impressions which enrich her artistic view. She studied film at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto.
TREE TALE (1986)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 12 minutes
Tree Tale is a film about how space can change once it has been
occupied for a long time. A girl climbs a tree, stays a while, then
finally comes down again. - A. B.
FILMS BY BRUCE LABRUCE and ANNE MACLEAN
BRUCE LABRUCE
Born: Tiverton, Ontario, 1960
Bruce graduated from the York University Fine Arts Department in 1983, and has done graduate work in interdisciplinary studies at York from 1983-86. He has won many scholarships and awards, including Famous Players Maple Leaf Award as best Film Studies Student, 1982-83. Bruce has written film reviews for Our Times, Cine Action, and Museum magazines and is a member of the Cine Action Editorial Collective. He has also written reports on the 1984 and 1985 Toronto Festival of Festivals, and has contributed recent works of fiction to Hide, Dr. Smith, and the upcoming softcorezine, JD.'s, of which he is Co-editor with G.B. Jones. No Guff, Egri is his first film.
ANNE MACLEAN
Born: Sarnia, Ontario, 1963
Anne MacLean a graduate of the Theatre Department at York University, Toronto, is a member along with Bruce LaBruce of the Zuzu's Petals collective, and is a new member of the band Fifth Column.
NO GUFF, EGRI (1985)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), Super 8, 10 minutes
"A light-hearted death romp" - Bruce LaBruce
"Art" - Tab Magazine
The film traces the hero, Egri Bikaver, in his foray to Bruce Lee's
funeral at the Wing On Funeral Home. Meanwhile, across town, a woman
with long red hair and a child wait for a bus in front of the Gay Cinema.
Bodies fly, Egri dances, and the film climaxes in Blue Jays mania. -
B. B.
Featuring: Nick and Ailsa, Lenny and Lucy Goldstein, Gloria Berlin,
Bruce LaBruce, Anne MacLean, Bruce Lee.
MIKE CARTMELL
Mike Cartmell, from Hamilton, Ontario, began making Super 8 films in 1973 with his own equipment. He studied philosophy and politics at the University of Toronto 1971 - 1976, and cultural studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo, 1976-1979. In 1979 he began shooting and exhibiting photography, and became more serious about his filmmaking. He programmed Zone Cinema in Hamilton from 1981 to 1984, then moved to Toronto and joined the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and The Funnel. – John Porter, Cache du Cinema Notes
PROLOGUE: INFINITE OBSCURE (1985)
B+W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 19 minutes
The first section of a multi-sectioned work tentatively entitled EGYPT.
Prologue: Infinite Obscure began with the idea of doing a ‘remake’
of Moby Dick using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted
from his verson. A number of other issues began to take precedence however:
the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic
writing; the possible intersections of (auto)biography and fiction;
the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo)sexuality. - M. C.
IAN COCHRANE
(Please refer to THE FUNNEL COLLECTION CATALOGUE
1984 for biographical information)
LOOKING FOR MY GRANDFATHER
(1984 - 86)
Colour, Sound, (18 fps), Super 8, 9 minutes
Looking for My Grandfather is a letter sent to my dead grandfather
which arrived by an error of the mailing system at the address of a
dead state. Manipulated found footage with story added, which takes
a boy outward from his memories to the awareness of death (absence)
and towards an observation of that epistemological, immutable hole at
the centre of the universe. - I. C.
SHARON COOK
Born: Toronto, Ontario 1958
Sharon Cook is a visual artist, musician, and filmmaker whose work is concerned with the relationships of animals, sounds and the human form derived from primitive sources. She often invents and constructs her own film/installation equipment.
EVINRUDE OUTBOARD (1982)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps). Super 8, 2 minutes
The film uses 35mm negative footage of an outboard motor, hand registered
and reshot, framed with a background of trees and sky. A vocalized imitation
of a motor boat follows the films alternation between real time recording
and frame by frame recording.
FOREVER YOURS (1983/85)
Colour, Cassette Sound, (24 fps), Super 8, 6 minutes
Forever. Yours is composed of a number of 3-D greeting cards
of cats overlaid with a choral composition of voices which recite the
banal poems that accompany these cards. As the voices join in unison
to mark the occasions of death, birth, marriage and illness which prompt
the use of these absurd images, the film suggests the relationship of
representation to a consumer society's obsession with both social convention
and euphemism. - Dot Tuer, Canada House Programme Notes
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NATURAL DEFECTS (1986)
Colour, Sound (24 fps), Super 8, 35 minutes
From a sea cave in Labrador a six-armed oracle 'hosts' a variety of
vignettes. Deer imaging is explored by a woman entertaining an antler,
famous paintings are re-enacted, while most of the spoken dialogue is
piglatin. In this quasi-musical, the sound track is an original score
with songs ranging from "The Ballad of The Encyclopedia of Natural
Defects" to "Ya Ya Mmm, Ya Ya uh huh". - S. C.
Y4JZ AND THE MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN BATTLE OF THE INTROVOLUTIONS
(SUBTITLE VERSION) (1986)
B+W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 13 minutes
A subtitled science fiction thriller-the Introvolutions land in an abandoned
field and begin experiments. Scientists discover the aliens and simultaneously
conduct their analysis. When a conflict is discovered, the final transmogrification
is imminent.
FENWAY CRANE
Born: Kamloops, 1929 (?)
Filmmaker Fenway Crane met his untimely end when a passing Air India flight, engaged in a demonstration for the Timex watch corporation, dropped a digital time clock over three thousand metres into the skylight of his penthouse apartment. Cultural anthropologists have recently unearthed miles of emulsion from his house in Southam Davies which collapsed under an arson's fire nearly a year ago; and they are presently at work reconstructing his oeuvre from Crane's personal notebooks. Doctors Templeton and Shapiro estimate Crane's canon may include up to seventy films produced between 1959 and 1981. Included below is a partial selection from the restored work to date. More titles will be forthcoming as work proceeds. The accompanying notes are taken from Crane's journal.
THE ORPHANAGE (1980/Ongoing)
Colour , and B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 49 minutes
If corpses have sometimes seemed to us to be silent, perhaps it is because
we are ignorant of the art of questioning them. The Orphanage
is an ongoing episodic film cycle relating the changing space of empirical
medicine. It moves from an eye that has simply to exercise its right
of origin over truth (seeing is believing), from a botanical gaze of
analogy and succession, to a look learned in language, promoting the
visible to the legible.
FAT CORNER (1980)
B & W, (24 fps), 16mm, 5 minutes
Capital punishment comprises many kinds of death: some prisoners may
be condemned to hang, others to having their hands cut off or their
tongues cut out or pierced and then to be hanged; others, for more serious
crimes, to be broken alive and to die on the wheel, after having their
limbs broken; others to be broken until they die a natural death; others
to be strangled and then broken; others to be burnt after first being
strangled; others to be drawn by four
horses; others to have their heads cut off; and others to have their
heads broken.
LIFE DRAWING ONE (1982)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 12 minutes
I spent the whole of a year past gathering images that would bring me
to a place where I could look without having to understand, using the
camera as a ranger might a noose and a snare. The events described are
all of a daily compact: the birthday of a cast bound boy nearly eight,
a drive through the country, a shared bath. But every image and place
is made to move, each in its own turn, from the normative fictions of
Eastman Kodak (presented here as a driving test for the terminally newlywed)
to a mauled and broken surface impressed with the hands of its own construction.
A young woman moves into the tortured emulsion to find a coat, while
the solarized streetcars make their way from the frame. Blue haloes
speak together in a Parliament Street tavern before giving way to a
backwards glance, turning to find the fantasy that allows generations
already past to live in the newly born, in their image.
LIFE DRAWING TWO (1983)
B & W, Silent, (24 fps), 16mm, 12 minutes
1. Caroline says that I'm too good for her, that she hides behind her
face like me with mine. They came over the other night, Tuesday or Thursday,
after the reading. She said to me, "I like this one", Caroline
gave her a book of drawings and she pointed after a time to a photograph
of a woman dressed all in black saying, "The portrait is a self-portrait."
It was the picture she'd been expected to choose. 2. She leaned against
a whitewashed wall - lips quivering - nostrils dilating - eyes heavy
with the gloom of unspent rainclouds - I drew closer - I whispered something
and kissed her - a tear rolled down her check - and then I captured
forever the moment - let me see f8 = 1/10 second Kl filter - panchromatic
film - how brutally mechanical and calculated it sounds - yet really
how spontaneous and genuine. (Edward Weston, Daybooks)
SELF PORTRAIT WITH PIPE AND BANDAGED EAR (1986)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 2 minutes
Black and white abstracts lifted from the looking glass (inside the
hole where memory comes from).
REQUIEM (1986)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 6 minutes
Set to the strains of Mozart, this eccentric utopiate passes from the
ideality of light to a level glance inside the tree line, to a darkening
that recalls a waking in the light of exodus (going down into and coming
up out of).
PHONOGRAPH (1986)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 12 minutes
He told me before he made the trip from Amsterdam, and when we met that
summer we both knew it was for the last time. I needed to find a way
to imagine him, to express something of the dignity he'd borne in the
weeks before his death. John asked me for the loan of a Bolex that summer,
and he shipped it back in August with '2000 feet of high contrast printer
stock in 'need of processing. He'd shot the works: in a notorious whore
house in the red light district of the city. On his thirty-first birthday.
jp (1951-1982)
MARTHA DAVIS
(Please refer to THE FUNNEL COLLECTION CATALOGUE
1984 for biographical information.)
PATH (1982/85)
Colour, Sound, (18 fps), Super 8, 111 minutes, will be available in
16mm in the spring of 1987 (Video preview tape available in 3/4"
and 1/2")
Employing a simple repeated three part structure, PATH is about
personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both
humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration of perception.
- M. D. The repeated three-part structure of PATH is as follows:
first, Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks
the distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she is filmed
making drawings and models of what she has seen along the way. PATH
has an original soundtrack composed in collaboration with Toronto musician
Bill Grove.
A PERFORMANCE TRILOGY (1982/84)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), Super 8, 12 minutes (Also available in 3/4
inch and 1/2 inch VHS Videotape)
While in the throes of making PATH, I completed three very short,
loosely orchestrated street happenings which I call my 'performance
trilogy'. They are a bit like sketches for the larger pieces, tiny gems
which share some of the same concerns but of course don't have their
breadth and scope. A Performance Trilogy is a good accompaniment
to either of the features, and is best shown at the end of 'an evening,
after the post-screening discussion and .questions. - M. D.
U R LUCKY (1982, 3 minutes) involves placing a medallion on the
sidewalk and filming whoever happens along to pick it up.
SNOW SEARCH (1983, 2..5 minutes) finds four performers searching
for each other, each carrying one quarter of a photographic portrait
of Michael Snow.
MAKING A SCENE (1984, 5..5 minutes) offers passersby the opportunity
to don a mask and become either an elephant or a mosquito.
RON EDDING
Ron Edding, from Montreal, has always painted. He and a friend made Super 8 films with their own equipment at age fourteen. He studied fine art and film at junior colleges for two and a half years, and then at Concordia University (1975 - 78) including John Locke's avant-garde Film Theory class. In 1979 he moved to Toronto, rented a painting studio, bought a Super 8 camera and began sharing resources with painter/filmmaker Joseph Tabah. He has made many films. "The strength of Super 8 filmmaking is that one person using a single camera can produce an extremely expressive and immediate piece of work. Despite its simplicity, Super 8 films can achieve a level of sophistication more often associated with larger formats." - R. E.
AT THE END OF THE LINE (1985)
Colour, Cassette Sound, (18 fps), Super 8, 13 minutes
The construction of seemingly disjointed images is fused with the fantasies
of a woman talking to another woman which she has contacted by random
probability through the telephone book. Sexual encounters, anonymous
yet intimately connected bureaucracies, paranoic delusions, and mathematical
probabilities collude in this metaphor for personal relationships in
a modern city. Written by Terri Favro. – Dot Tuer, Canada House
Programme Notes
FILMS BY MUNRO FERGUSON AND PASCAL SHARP
Munro Ferguson and Pascal Sharp began making films together at the age of four. They met while on the editorial staff of the Cahiers du Cinema and moved to Toronto to become apologists for bourgeois aestheticism. - M. F. & P. S.
GREEK CIVILIZATION (1985)
Colour, Sound, (18 fps), Super 8, 30 minutes (also available on 3/4"
Videotape)
A thirty minute epic which retells the Greek classical plays (Oedipus
Rex etc.) using household objects and miniature dolls and animals.
LOBLAW'S CHECK OUT GAME (1983)
(WITH EO SHARP) Colour, Sound, (18 fps), Super 8, 6 minutes
In Loblaw's Check Out Game simulation is encapsulated in cardboard
ladies traversing a board of miniature supermarket items while plastic
shopping carts pass across the frame full of tiny replicas of consumer
products. This is a 'teeny-vision' of the cinema, characteristic of
these filmmakers' humorous obsession with the diminutive dimensions
of a reality that accompanies a consumer-oriented society. In all their
works, models supplant a cinema verité, and narrative becomes
a function of a reconstructed representation that operates in a closed
system of toys and studio settings. - Dot Tuer, Canada House Programme
Notes
ADELE FRIEDMAN
Adele Friedman is a Chicago based filmmaker who began making films in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1975. Coming to filmmaking from a background of still photography and an exhaustive study of early silent films, Friedman's early work traces the relationship of the camera/filmmaker to the world through portraiture. This work conjures the notion of Victorian 'Cartes de Visites'. Personality as well as the physical attributes are extracted by her camera through connection of the subjects with their spaces. Her later work is closer to dramatic narrative, employing certain traditional narrative devices - sets, actors, flashback - to move toward an imaginary world of people and objects which is sensual and affectionate, and where theatricality reveals unspoken psychodramas. Friedman pays special attention to capturing special qualities of light,. creating dreamlike atmospherics. Most of her work is silent and in black and white.
UNTITLED 1981 (1981)
B & W, Silent, (24 fps), 16mm, 10 minutes
Untitled 1981 is a film of a woman's dreams; of being alone,
with a man, with another woman. It is a film about the layering imagery
of disjointed thought processes that occur in dreams.
SU FRIEDRICH
Su attended the University of Chicago and Oberlin College. Since that time she has worked as a freelance photographer and has taught photography and filmmaking. She has also written numerous articles and has been involved in publishing and was a co-editor of Heresies. She has published a book entitled Gently Down The Stream. She currently lives in New York and her films have been shown throughout North America and Europe.
GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM (1981)
B & W, Silent, (18 fps), 16mm, 14 minutes
Gently Down The Stream involves text that is actually scratched
into the emulsion of the film and tells of her dreams, coupled with
images expressing her desires and uncertainties. - S. F.
"It has a creepy power... its scratched texts seemed to quiver
anxiety." - Scott Macdonald, After Image, March 1986.
THE TIES THAT BIND (1984)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 55 minutes
The Ties that Bind tells the story of a woman who lived in Germany
during the Second World War, and like most Germans has had to pay the
price ever since for letting Hitler's actions continue unchallenged.
This woman is the narrator of the film as well as the filmmaker's mother.-
S. F. "The film is an original: a moving and courageous tribute
from a child to a mother's beleaguered memory." - David Edelstein,
The Village Voice, April 1985.
ELDON GARNET
(Please refer to THE FUNNEL COLLECTION CATALOGUE
1984 for biographical information.)
POLITICAL ERROR (1984)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 7 minutes
Political Error is a cultural political parody of didactic analysis
of group dynamics employing a 1950's dirt lot baseball game as a central
metaphor.
CINDY GAWEL
Born: New Jersey, 1959
Cindy Gawel studied engineering at McGill University and film at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto. She is currently working for independent/experimental filmmakers in all areas of production, specializing in optical printing and effects (picture and sound), and has two of her own films in production.
ACCIDENT/INTERRUPTION (1984/85)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 8 minutes
Superimpositions, false starts, repetitions, printed texts, physical
laws, co-ops, and voice-over narration - an attempt to break through
the physical and social barriers to communication and find a voice.
MICHAEL HOOLBOOM
Michael Hoolboom, from Burlington, Ontario for two years
studied writing at the University of Windsor and played music. Then
he created street performances in Toronto for two years (1981 - 82).
He studied Media at Sheridan College 1980 - 83, making eight 16mm films,
and becoming a member of the Funnel in 1984. - John Porter, Cache
du Cinema Notes
NOTE: There is no fixed or determined order for the following films which are simply listed here chronologically. They may be rented singly or in combination. The filmmaker would be happy to make suggestions. - M. H.
EULOGY FOR TOM SAWYER (1980)
B & W, Silent, (24 fps), 16mm, 5 minutes
The nineteenth century homosexual became a case history and a childhood,
in addition to being a type of life, a class and category with an indiscreet
anatomy and a mysterious chemistry. Nothing that went into his composition
was unaffected by his sexuality; the homosexual was now a species.
LOUISIANA PURCHASE (1982)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 10 minutes
Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life
comes to an end - unfolding the views of himself under which he has
encountered himself without being aware of it - suddenly in his expressions
and looks the unforgettable emerges, and imparts to everything that
concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying
possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source
of the story.
SONG FOR MIXED CHOIR (1983)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 7 minutes
The head is made round so thought may change direction. The Song
is laid over two picture rolls, printed together. The first magnifies
the grain of the film, filling the screen with the circling constituents
of its material base. The second roll draws a succession of figures
from a dimly-lit nightlife. There is a dance, a house party and a subway
turnstile moving toward the most domestic kind of horror, a horror of
the commonplace and mundane, the horrors of toothbrush and comb and
electric lamp.
THE BIG SHOW (1984)
B & W, Silent, (24 fps), 16mm, 10 minutes
The Big Show is a light reading letter for its audience, offering
up a succession of printed intertitles, language as the event that 'takes
place'. Processed by hand in the filmmakers bathtub, the titles struggle
to speak beyond a surface hopelessly disfigured in its development.
BAR GOOD FOOD DESERT IN (1984)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 30 minutes
A film for the agoraphobic or simply sedentary. This film is made up
of four eight-by-ten inch display trans which may be affixed by the
viewer to any light bearing surface. The order and arrangement of the
images is completely at the viewer's discretion. Two cassette sound
tracks are available, one mixed for walkman headphones, the other for
regular stereo playback, so please specify preference when ordering.
This film is designed for home use and may be received alone or in the
company of famous friendships.
BOOK OF LIES (1985)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 7 minutes
Writing is here only a moratorium, as it is for someone who writes his
last will and testament just before he hangs himself. We were passing
over Loocan's Ridge when Jackson took the fall, a sheer drop of thirty
feet that left him a bloody pulp at the foot. He lay there for an hour
while I went to get help, and when I returned he motioned towards the
pack. Lying there between the coverlet and the glove warmers were five
rolls of Tri-X he'd managed to shoot nearly insensible with pain. He
told me, "It's hard to tell where you leave off and the camera
begins."
WHITE MUSEUM (1986)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 40 minutes
The story of sound in the beginning of writing, with guest appearances
by Ashley, Bach, Beatles, Barthes, Borges, Elvis, Cage, Costello, Derrida,
Oldfield and Warhol.
COCKSCROW OF THE INFINITE RECTANGLE (1986)
B & W, Sound, (24 fps), 16mm, 2. 5 minutes Here in the setting room
of France's lightest nursery, two brothers wean the dream of the infinite
rectangle from a homoerotic tryst of communion, sacrilege, incest, unveiling
and apocalypse. Because their gestures of introduction, their movements
of opening and closing are trained through the mute lamp of the machine,
this film is a kind of retelling of the story of film, a fable of time
as history, a sounding of possible fictions.
JACK JEFFREY
Born in Chatham, Ontario, Jack studied at the University of British Columbia and then the Banff school of Fine Arts. His sculptures and installations often utilize wrapped bundles of steel that are formed into desired shapes. His sculpture exhibitions include solo and group shows in Toronto, Vancouver, and Paris. Jack has recently been dividing his time between Toronto, Paris and Amsterdam.
HOLDING PATTERN (1985)
Colour, Sound (18 fps), Super 8, 8 minutes
This is a film Jack did of his installation piece at Artculture Resource
Centre, Toronto in 1983. As Dot Tuer says about the show in Kick
it Over magazine:" this piece is a culmination of Jeffrey's
attempt to fuse the media available to the artist with a political concern
to create an 'anti-war' statement. It is also an illustration of a political
art which successfully challenges the dominant visual perceptions of
war.... For the focus in Holding Pattern is not only to confront
the abstractness of war, but also to critique the way the media has
codified the images of mushroom clouds and high powered jets as aesthetic."
- Dot Tuer, Kick it Over #9, December 1983
G.B. JONES
Born: Toronto, Ontario.
G.B. Jones, from Thornhill, Ontario, studied film for two years while at the Ontario College of Art intermittently from 1975 to 1981. Besides making films, she played in several experimental bands and has been most active since 1981 with the band Fifth Column (who use films in their performances) and with co-publishing the 'tapezine' Hide. She also creates diverse visual art and co-organizes concerts and screenings.
UNIONVILLE (1985)
Colour, Sound, (24 fps), Super 8, 8 minutes
Based on the 'true' story of a murder committed by an acquaintance in
a small Ontario town, the film reconstructs the media's coverage of
the event while a voice-over recounts the context for the murder as
a dialogue between two local friends... The two friends talk endlessly
of the murderer's 'girls' and drugs and sex, while the simulated media
vignettes contain harried witnesses with no comment, and people rushing
into courtrooms with coats over their heads as the press hound them
for information. Evocative of the publicity which created a Charles
Manson story... - Dot Tuer, Cache du Cinema Catalogue.
Directed by G.B. Jones and featuring Caroline Azar, Jean Young, Anita
Smith, Scott Kerr, Candy Pauker, Eric Fitz, Denise Cooper, John Porter,
Micheal I., and Victor Benyes.
The Funnel Catalogue Supplement 1987
Introduction - Index - Alphabetical Film Listing
Appendix (Filmography / Bibliography / Screenings).
The
Funnel's
First Catalogue
1984
62 Pages! 50 Filmmakers! 200 Films
& Related Work!
Introduction w/ Alphabetical Film Listing,
Appendix (Filmography / Bibliography / Screenings).
The Funnel's First Pamphlet, 1982
CineZine - Histories - Toronto 8mm & Super 8 - The Funnel - Funnel Bios '82
