Last night at the University of Toronto's "Innis Town Hall" ran an Ad Hoc film screening program of shorts by Canadian filmmaker Gariné Torossian. And "Visions", it was!
Introduced by film scholar, preservationist, and experimental filmmaker Stephen Broomer, the presentation was a continuous stream — one reel of 16mm film — of several experimental films of varying lengths. As Ms Torossian joked after the house lights came back on, having the flicks playing back-to-back made for an intense screening experience.
Intense it was. But "good intense".
This former "optical camera/printer operator" liked these experimental film works as they brought back memories of working that highly-technical job. Layers of images building and flowing to other images building a story. The mind is allowed to race and flow, making what it will and can of nebulous non-constrained highly-kinetic pictures unbridled in both introspection and extrospection.
The degree of image manipulation on the film Shadowy Encounters (15 minutes, 2002) is probably why that was my favourite of the night. Girl from Moush (5 minutes, 1994) is perhaps the filmmaker's best-known work, and for me, that pic is up there.
An element I like about Torossian's work is the audio portion. She obviously values the aural side of experimental filmmaking. Many filmmakers in that motion picture form actually don't like having sound accompanying their imagery... their moving images are to be enjoyed sans audio. (I take that bit of film theory case-by-case.)
After the projection, Jim Shedden conducted the requisite interview, leading to a Q & A. Things were slow to start on that front as nobody seemed to want to ask a question, so I raised my hand and volunteered. That broke the ice and several thoughtful questions broke out from the attentive audience. (For those interested, I recommend Mike Hoolboom's insightful interview with Torossian in his excellent book, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada.)
Along with Midi Onodera, Gariné Torossian is one of the more interesting experimental filmmakers to have worked in Toronto, and beyond, in recent decades.
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It was nice meeting Stephen Broomer after the show as I admire his preservation work and appreciate his Black Zero label — valuable work as films made in the avant-garde or underground have a predilection for getting lost through the passage of time; not through emulsion decay as much as archival decay. (I ordered Zero's DVD, Josephine Massarella: Green Dreams.)
Toronto-based film writer Greg Woods and I chatted about our recent film-viewing adventures. I mentioned that I watched a program of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and The Angry Red Planet. Greg laughed when he realized what I had meant. He initially thought I went to a screening of those two pictures. I laughed and said that I would program such offbeat public film programs: "Pork Chop Hill and (I had to think of a perfect match)... Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice."
