Notes
Notes on
Based in Toronto, the Association for Film Art (AfFA) is a coalition of filmmakers, educators, curators, and critics who have come together to promote film art and encourage conditions favorable to its continued flourishing. They share a common commitment to the medium of film (photochemical emulsion, projected on film) as an art form. AfFA advocates on behalf of film art to funders, cultural institutions, educational institutions, the media, and others.
L'ATELIER NATIONAL DU MANITOBA IS AN ART CLUB AND FILMMAKING COLLECTIVE BASED IN WINNIPEG.
Born in Oakland, California, Craig Baldwin attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, University of California at Davis, and San Francisco State University (Masters, 1986). In the Department of Cinema there, he studied under Bruce Conner and became increasingly drawn to collage film form. His interest in the re-contextualization of “found” imagery led him to the theories of the Situationist International and to various practices of mail art, ‘zines, altered billboards, and other creative initiatives beyond the fringe of the traditional fine-arts curriculum. His current project, Mock Up on Mu satirizes the impending militarization of space.
Born in Detroit and currently living in Toronto, Scott Berry has been involved in artist-organized collectives and organizations for 15+ years. He is an arts administrator at the Images Festival by day and a reference library lover by night. An intermittent filmmaker and programmer, he has shown most recently at the 2008 Berlin and Rotterdam Film Festivals. Miller is currently on the Boards of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, the Eight Fest Small Gauge Film Festival, and the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival. He co-founded Dumba and Brooklyn Babylon Cinema in 1996 while living in Brooklyn and is a Pisces with Cancer rising.
Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist, museum curator, and multi-disciplinary artist. He has exhibited his movies, site-specific installations, and non-traditional art forms in unseen, unusual, or public spaces since 1992. His blog is located at www.cinegraphic.net
Carl Brown, a graduate of Sheridan College's film school, has developed a distinctive style of working in film. Hand-processing and then toning and tinting hi-con stock creates movement, colour and texture within the emulsion that is stunning to the eye. Brown’s films have been shown widely internationally. His film Re: Entry was screened at the Louvre, Paris in the Fall of 1995 to launch the book, Constraste Simultane La Couleur Une Histoire De Cinema Experimental Anthologie. Brown also works as a photographer, holographer, and writer.
Gerda Cammaer is a film scholar, curator, and filmmaker. As a scholar and a maker she specializes in experimental and documentary film. She is currently working on a major film/video project that builds upon her passion for collage film, documentary and new narrative as part of her PhD thesis. Cammaer is also a free-lance programmer of Canadian experimental film and video. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson University in Toronto.
Chris Chong Chan Fui is a Malaysian-born filmmaker focused on unconventional stories and experimentation. He has written and directed eight short and medium length films in the past nine years, including the provocative 2006 multi-award winning film Tuesday Be My Friend. His recent short documentary, Kolam (Pool) was awarded the Best Canadian Short Film at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival and voted one of Canada's Top 10 Short Films for 2007. Chris diverged into independent cinema through creating hand-processed films and has screened his work in over 50 international festivals (Asia-Europe-North America). He was awarded Best Emerging Filmmaker in Toronto in 2001.
Jonathan Comeau is the Managing Editor of INCITE! and a Cinema Studies student at Oberlin College. His interests include reaction, spirituality, minimalism, performance, and technology.
Founded in 2004, the Double Negative Collective (le collectif Double négatif) is a Montreal-based group of film, video, and installation artists dedicated to creating, curating, and disseminating experimental film. Current members include: Christopher Becks, Lucia Fezzuoglio, Amber Goodwyn, Julien Idrac, Steven Ladouceur, Matt Law, Karl Lemieux, Lindsay McIntyre, Eduardo Menz, Christopher Payne, Mike Rollo, Daïchi Saïto, Ithamar Silver, and Malena Szlam.
Dumba was a queer community space, performance room, and live/work warehouse in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn that hosted 200+ events between 1996 and 2007. Founded by a group of folks committed to returning 90% of the door funds to the musicians, filmmakers, and presenters in the space, Dumba was politically active in the anti-Giuliani “Quality of Life” years, hosting fundraisers for direct actions, tenant/housing groups, the annual “Gay Shame,” feminist and environmental activism, microradio as well as numerous art and/or political collectives in addition to the monthly microcinema Brooklyn Babylon Cinema. Perhaps best known as the inspiration for the lusty parties in the film Shortbus (which was partially filmed there), Dumba was evicted in the winter of 2007 and her herstory lives on the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumba
Clint Enns resides in Winnipeg and is currently a Masters student in mathematics at the University of Manitoba. His interests include cinema, model theory of rings and modules, natural language as a biological phenomenon, and the logical vocabulary of natural language. Enns has been an avid cinephile for many years, and has only recently started making films. He is currently a member of the Winnipeg Film Group and Video Pool.
David Gatten – filmmaker, Henry James fan, recent Guggenheim fellow, and aspiring audio book producer – makes bookish films about letters and libraries and lovers and ghosts that are filled with words, some of which you can read. His work has shown around the popular planet Earth in museums, festivals, biennials, galleries, archives, access centers, elementary schools, storefronts, on sides of buildings and once on a barge that was floating down river. Five times his films have played in the New York Film Festival, four times at the Pacific Film Archive, three times at the London Film Festival, twice in the Whitney Biennial and once upon a time, for reasons still unclear to everyone involved, at the Kiel International Festival of Archeological Film. He lives and works by the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn and on Seabrook Island, South Carolina and teaches 16mm filmmaking/Wallace Stevens appreciation as a Visiting Artist at The Cooper Union in New York City.
Rick Hancox teaches film in the Communications Department of Concordia University in Montreal, and studied film and photography at NYU and Ohio University, where he earned his MFA. He is known as an artistic innovator of experimental and personal documentary films, including Moose Jaw (There’s a Future in Our Past), LANDFALL, and Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories), which are in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He taught for twelve years at Sheridan College near Toronto, where he influenced some of Canada’s foremost experimental filmmakers, including Mike Hoolboom, Richard Kerr, and Philip Hoffman.
Brett Kashmere is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College and the founding editor of INCITE!
Richard Kerr is a practitioner/teacher who works out of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal. In Fall of 2008, he will be Professor of Distinction at Ryerson University, School of Image Arts, in Toronto.
Active within Toronto’s experimental film community from 2000 thru 2003, The League was a group of four emerging artists (Christina Battle, Sara MacLean, Julie Saragosa, and Michèle Stanley) dedicated to working with traditional, handmade filmmaking techniques. The League’s main goal was to create collaborative new works in an environment that was both open and supportive. By rejecting formal screening rooms, they strove to broaden their audience by presenting films in unique and non-conventional venues. Geographically separated since 2003, the League is currently on hiatus with hopes to rekindle collaborations at some point in the near future.
Karl Lemieux studied cinema at Concordia University and has created several short films including The Bridge, KI, Motion of Light, Western Sunburn, Trash and No Star! and Passage. He is a co-founder of Double Negative, a film collective based in Montreal focused on the production and screening of experimental film. Lemieux has also worked on several music and performance-based live projections.
Deirdre Logue’s film, video and installation work focuses on self-presentational discourse, the body as material, autobiography and the passage of ‘real’ time. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at the 2006 Images Festival – where she won both Best Installation and Best of the Festival – the Berlin International Film Festival, Beyond/In Western New York, Art Star in Ottawa, articule in Montreal and Oakville Galleries. She was a founding member of Media City in Windsor, the Executive Director of the Images Festival, the Executive Director of the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre, is currently the Development Director at Vtape and lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Scott MacKenzie is cross-appointed to the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of French at the University of Toronto. He is co-editor of Cinema and Nation (Routledge, 2000) and Purity and Provocation: Dogma '95 (BFI, 2003) and author of Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester UP, 2004). He is currently completing Films into Uniform: Film Manifestos and Cinema Culture.
Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. He currently lives and works in New York. For over half a century, Mekas has been one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the “New American Cinema,” as he dubbed it in the late 50s, playing various roles: in 1954, he became editor and chief of Film Culture; in 1958 he began writing his “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice; in 1962 he co-founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. His own output ranges from narrative films (Guns of the Trees) to documentaries (The Brig) and to “diaries” such as Walden; Lost, Lost, Lost; Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania; and As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, which have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world. The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center was established in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2007.
Regina Muff writes, “I am white and documented as a legitimate human being, bipedal and socialized as member of the privileged species, do radical politics, love the unoccupied environment, demand my pleasure, deconstruct logocentrism, wear cameras, am turned on by defiance, defend solitude, subvert authority, oppose eurocentrism, await redemption, invite sacrilege, prefer outcasts, and have no regrets.”
Solomon Nagler is a Canadian filmmaker originating from Winnipeg. His films and curated programs have played across Canada, in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Retrospectives of his work have been featured in Paris (Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris), Montreal (Ex-Centris), and Winnipeg (Cinematheque). Nagler is currently a full-time professor of Film Production at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.
Georgette Nicolaides is a writer, visual artist, naturalized Texan, and not-so-gracefully aging punk rocker. She has contributed violin sounds to the ambient improvisational project Atlantic Drone (Noiseville Records). She currently resides in upstate New York and teaches managerial statistics at Syracuse University.
Peter Nowogrodzki is the Art Director of INCITE! A recent graduate of Oberlin College, Nowogrodzki is currently living in Ohio, working as a field research assistant in an ongoing study of American Goldfinches. www.ppeternnowogrodzki.com
Steve Polta is a filmmaker, sound artist, occasional writer, and occasional historian living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the Archivist and Artistic Director of San Francisco Cinematheque and a once-in-a-while radio DJ on KALX Berkeley. He holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute, and will soon receive a Masters of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University. He makes his living as a taxi driver in San Francisco.
Jennifer Reeves is a New York-based filmmaker. Her films have shown extensively, from the Berlin, New York, Vancouver, London, Sundance, and Seoul Film Festivals to many microcinemas in the US and Canada, the Robert Flaherty Seminar, Princeton University, and the Museum of Modern Art. Reeves has made films since 1990 (or since 1986 if you consider high-school video-making). Reeves teaches film courses part-time at Cooper Union, the Bard College MFA Program, and Millennium Film Workshop.
Ken Paul Rosenthal’s films are poetic meditations on urban space, the natural world, and human gesture. His early body of experimental films employs organic, photochemical, and direct manipulation techniques. Rosenthal’s recent projects weave personal and political narratives into landscape imagery.
Originally from Japan, Daïchi Saïto currently lives in Montreal. After studying philosophy in the US and Hindi and Sanskrit in India, he turned to filmmaking in Montreal. He is a co-founder of the Double Negative Collective, a Montreal-based artist filmmaking group dedicated to experimental cinema. His films are distributed by Light Cone in Paris.
Leslie Supnet is a self-taught visual artist based in Winnipeg. She deals with various subject matter and themes, such as identity, isolation, and nostalgia, all with a touch of whimsy and the surreal. Her illustrations capture recognizable sentiment, making them accessible without sacrificing poetic eloquence. Recently, Supnet has delved into the world of animation. In 2008, she received a New Artist in New Media Fund from Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg. www.sundaestories.com
Formed in 2006 by local filmmakers Kyle Corea, Brett Kashmere, Sebastien Park, and Ryan Tebo, Syracuse Experimental (Film & Media Workshop) was a not-for-profit, grassroots cooperative dedicated to the growth and preservation of alternative, first person cinema and media. The group dissolved in 2007 but its spirit lives on in these pages.
Ryan Tebo was born in Buffalo, New York in 1974. He is currently beginning a one-year Assistant Professor position teaching filmmaking at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Tebo is an artist working with film, video, and photography, as well as being a free-improvising musician. Provisional utopic visions along with skeptical awareness to counter cynical power structures seemingly absolute. Cooperation before competition.
Leslie Topness is a letterpress printer and sometimes book-maker, sometimes teacher, sometimes cat-adopter. She made the covers for first print issue of this journal on the tabletop Golding No. 5 in her bedroom. Her previous letterpress and book making ventures may be found hidden in various public and private collections across North America (mostly in the garage, under her desk, or at the bottom of a well).
Kenneth White is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and programmer. He is a founding member of the Portland Film + Video Artists Collective in Portland, Maine. White received his BFA from Syracuse University in 2005. In fall 2008, White begins doctoral studies in art history at Stanford University. www.kennethwhiteprojects.com
