January 30-February 1st at SPK Polish Combatants’ Hall, 206 Beverley Street, Toronto “The 8 fest is a unique Toronto-based film festival that presents all forms of small-gauge film: 8mm, Super 8 and 9.5mm, as well as works in installation, loops, and ‘proto-cinema devices’ like zoetropes. The 8 fest is a
These Girls On Film is quite excited to cover the 2014 Images Festival! We are dedicated to presenting the world to new perspectives on experimental, avant-gard, conceptual, and independent cinema. As a part of that, the Images Festival is a huge event, one that’s been a tradition for 27
by Jacqueline Valencia Lucifer Rising is perhaps the most elaborate of Kenneth Anger‘s films. With locations in Egypt, England, and Germany, Anger conned the Egyptian government into believing he was making a documentary about Egyptian peoples. In fact, he was making a film about Egyptian gods summoning the age of Lucifer. The
by Jacqueline Valencia The thing about this movie is how it keeps repeating. It gets copied, distorted, spliced, and re-analyzed through other people’s films ad nauseam, and with good reason. The genius in Last Year of Marienbad is in its reiteration of enigmatic patterns that obfuscate real meaning in life.
by Jacqueline Valencia It’s been an amazing week of watching short films. Sometimes I had the opportunity to screen some of these in the comfort of my home for review or interpretation. Occasionally I’d get a comment from a passerby wondering what the hell I was watching. I’d have to
by Jacqueline Valencia “What the hell did I just watch?” was a common utterance after an experimental film in cinema studies class. It’s also exhilarating to hear from fellow students who wanted to make or critique film, but had been exposed to Steven Spielberg or other filmmakers of the blockbuster
by Jacqueline Valencia I only got seriously into film until I started watching experimental film. It was out of the creative potboiler the audio-visual television freak outs of the 1980s. When MTV premiered (or rather in Canada, MuchMusic), the idea that a mini-music commercial could be artistic, gave everybody license
Critical Focus 