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De Montréal presents the work of several emerging video artists currently based in Montreal.  The pieces, in production, challenge the constraint of time and place set up by the nature of creation.  And the finished work, viewed, documents a place saturated in a rich culture influenced by theatrics, politics, and comedy. Here video is used as a tool for provocation and play as a means to describe the situational and observational influences that shape the history of video in Montreal.

1975, 16mm, color/so, 53m

Barnett’s magnum opus turns cinema inside out. This is a philosopher’s film that puts the materials on display, and stretches the meaning across fragments of Wittgensteinian investigations of certainty and doubt. Poet Robert Kocik observed that the “white” of the title is not the blanched, fearful heart of doubt, but the full-spectrum white of the projection beam, the illumination that cannot lie (because it cannot tell the truth).

This is a painter’s film: through the shimmering and saturated tones of the now defunct Kodachrome, this print prismatically refracts and mangles that light into series of gestures, which form an essay, but also a meandering path that keeps putting off the question, how will it end?

This is a musician’s film, where the images function as motifs which recur and build into phrases and movements. The instruments upon which the film was composed, the camera, the editing bench, the contact printer, all are orchestrated into a fugue of visual questions, parries, answers and cinematic marvels.

P.S. not for the narratively biased.

 Media ecologist Gerry Fialka’s interactive workshop probes the cultural and historical context of advertising as art and Marshall McLuhan’s axiom “Advertising is the cave art of the 20th century.” Both ads and art eschew rational argument. Fialka analyzes how symbols, magic and imagery play directly to our emotions. Much like art, ads have a profound influence, based on deep knowledge of personal and collective impulses. Join this media yoga session that interconnects Maxfield Parrish, James Thurber, Ansel Adams, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Absolut Vodka and myriads more. Word artists Charles Dickens, Henry James, James Joyce (continuing with Kurt Von negut, David Mamet) were the first literary start-ups in the advertising industry. Explore our intuitive perceptions and find the similarity in dissimilars. This lively discussion reveals who we are and how we think. Does advertising have the same aesthetic purpose as art?”A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection – not an invitation for hypnosis.” – Umberto Eco.

ALL ADVERTISING ADVERTISES ADVERTISING – Farina & Fialka’s new 14 minute film uncovers the hidden effects of advertisers as psychoanalysts and prophets in the science of the imaginary. Rube Goldbergian filmmakers Farina & Fialka satirize the adman’s credo “create the disease and offer the cure.” They look through ads like portals (port holes) into a universe of media mindscapes and nuance. They question the simultaneity of great ads as myth. Fialka & Farina fuse an interpretive parable about the Wizard of Oz (Us)=20 and the percepts of Marshall McLuhan to transform the very subject they are examining. Journey into defamiliarizing the ordinary. How are we immune to ads? Why?
What are the critical connections between the rise of consumerism and our blind commitment to economic growth ? “You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. ” -Norman Douglas.