Stephen Broomer

Hollywood noir icon Laird Cregar's inner turmoil as a black-on-grey delirium of shadows and spectres. An avant-garde film-historical essay.

Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity (1966) is a reflection of the ceaseless possibilities of nature to produce distinctive forms acting in concert with one another. It is a myth, enacted through the avatar of a universal man, who samples this world from the cave to the beach to the parking lot to the supermarket, from birth to death, in navigation with other bodies, a figure of bounded perception whose actions are guided by impulse, invention, and perhaps, the stars. It is an embrace of life in its broadest definition, a catalogue of earthly phenomena. In this video, Relativity is discussed in relation to Emshwiller’s trajectory through the course of the 1950s and 60s, his interests in the body and abstraction, the correspondence between his work in science-fiction illustration and his work in experimental cinema, and the film’s mythopoeic constitution.

The howl of an infant, a tinsel pastoral. ""And the trains still go through the station at La Ciotat." For the 50th Anniversary of Anthology Film Archives, with debts to Jerome Hill.

A miracle happened: summer came prematurely. Being in love with an image was worse than being in love with a ghost. (I feel like my eardrum is breaking). Almost everything, in fact, has an explanation. (The atmospheric pressure is increasing ...). The remaining chapters will have no surprises (... and I feel like my eardrum is breaking). Being on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most excruciating nightmare. (12.30 sharp, breathing is extraordinarily difficult.) I have given you a pleasant eternity! Only me for you and you only for me. (I am intoxicated with gasoline.) It will be an act of pity.

In Phantom Ride, Stephen Broomer permutates the home films of Ellwood F. Hoffmann (1885 – 1966), a self-made hosiery mill owner from Philadelphia, into a road movie.

"In memoriam. Man in pieces. You have the lovers, remade by funhouse mirrors; you have the symmetries, undone, bent and curved; and you have the model, the bag on her head filling with carbon dioxide. Who owns your life? Testimonial and demonstration, a most ominous trade show. An experiment in therapeutic cinema. A speculative sequel and conclusion to John Hofsess's Palace of Pleasure (1967)." — S.B.

Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro’s L’inferno (1911), a Doré-inspired visualisation of the eponymous first canticle in Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (1320), is commonly considered to be Italy’s first feature-length film – and also the first local attempt at making something that, in the eyes of a bourgeois audience, would be accepted as having artistic value. Stephen Broomer, now takes the complete film and re-works it by all means, analogue and digital, available to the modern filmmaker. But who is Tondal? A knight errant who appears in the Divina Commedia, but also an older literary character (from the 1100s) whose story was re-told till deep into the 15th century. Expect a grand, exceptional audio-visual spectacle!

Jacques Madvo’s street photography of Paris in 1961 is a launching point for a reflection on water forms and their distortion of optics.

In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness.

Day and night in a hotel window in Ottawa. The window frame vibrates and multiplies. An embarrassment of lampshades.

The ruins of a nineteenth century farm in the brush off Moatfield Drive in Toronto - a stone shack without a roof and, not much further, a well, long since abandoned as a sewer. We made a quick inventory: splintering branches; stars and asterisks; coded tags.

A waterfall cuts through the land along the Bruce Trail; birdsongs and a distant cloud; I stand in the shadow of an electric cross; a bow set in the cloud, a token of the covenant between god and man.

Just / faintly / a corner / was / seen there / trying / to look / like an edge. .--- ..- ... - / -..-. / ..-. .- .. -. - .-.. -.-- / -..-. / .- / -.-. --- .-. -. . .-. / -..-. / .-- .- ... / -..-. / ... . . -. / - .... . .-. . / -..-. / - .-. -.-- .. -. --. / -..-. / - --- / .-.. --- --- -.- / -..-. / .-.. .. -.- . / .- -. / . -.. --. . .-.-.-

An interstice.

An interstice.

An interstice

A tragic mistake jolts Teddy and Joanne into limbo. Their spirits bear witness to their past usage of household appliances, as if by electric charge they might uncoil their spectral presences from home and garden. A myth and a ghost story for Christine Lucy Latimer, on her birthday, 2015.

Studies in motion, made red, black and blue by tone and tint. To be present in a landscape is to turn from vision to a menacing rhythm.

Seagulls hover and dip on the rocky coastline of Gibraltar Point. Tilting and multiple horizons camouflage the birds, splintering and gathering the lone gull to the flock.

The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined, a vision in the longhouse, a dream in the wilderness.

The North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant lies in thick brush downhill from a hydroelectric corridor. The eye bounces, guided by the vertical forms coming up out of the valley, and a low flame bridges these movements.

A photographer steadies a Polaroid camera and composes a shot of the sky, flanked by tree branches. Later, a woman wakes from a nightmare. Jenny Haniver takes its title from a cryptid totem sold for centuries at the docks of Antwerp: a Jenny Haniver or jeune d’anvers (young girl of Antwerp) is a disfigured ray or skate carcass, carved to resemble an angel, a devil, a dragon. A series of ten filmed portraits are subject to all manner of alteration. By this they compose the hull of a ship wrecked on rocks sung by sirens. To mirror its namesake, the film’s plastic properties have been carved, lacerated, bleached, otherwise stressed, reshaped to transform reality into the fantastic and unknowable.

Still but twisting eye From fall’s wither to first snow Where lives my wonder

Serena Gundy Park, in Toronto, so named for the late wife of Toronto businessman James Henry Gundy, who influenced the financial character of early twentieth-century Canada. Gundy had owned the parkland as a family estate, and upon his death in 1951, donated the land to the city in memory of his wife. In early spring, the trees remain bare from winter, on cusp of renewal. The film takes her name for its homophonic relation to the nursery rhyme Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday...), which cycles through the days of the week that chart Grundy's life from birth to death, inevitably repeating, birth and death enclosed in a loop.

Encores live yet Slice every note, each notice sincere in secret Lovers covet eyeliner to recite in vein or vesicle Clever noise, silence or else

On Zerah Colburn, the early-nineteenth-century human calculator, made into a sideshow attraction by his father. This film is a record of the countryside that he grew up in and to which he later returned and died at age 35.

Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

Stamens and pistils are lit in rapid succession behind the dome of the Palm House at Allan Gardens in Toronto. The plants trade colour, making alien scenes in the conservatory. Solid forms, too near to the eye, become muddied and indistinct, in constant passage, but the dome and the grid are fixed.

Pepper's Ghost, by Torontonian Stephen Broomer, transforms an office formerly used for observation studies into a tunnel of performative, transfixing illusionism, creating surprising images using filters, fabric and a combination of sunlight and fluorescents. Recalling Slidelength (1969-71), Michael Snow's slideshow of plastic gels and hand gestures, Pepper's Ghost is a prolonged expression of demystified mystification, whose startling results are bolstered by a bold soundtrack.

Pepper's Ghost, by Torontonian Stephen Broomer, transforms an office formerly used for observation studies into a tunnel of performative, transfixing illusionism, creating surprising images using filters, fabric and a combination of sunlight and fluorescents. Recalling Slidelength (1969-71), Michael Snow's slideshow of plastic gels and hand gestures, Pepper's Ghost is a prolonged expression of demystified mystification, whose startling results are bolstered by a bold soundtrack.

Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions.

Apis the bull of Memphis, earthly representation of the god Ptah. At the temple, Apis the oracle, his movements interpreted as prophecies, his breath as medicine. He had a window in the temple through which he could be seen and out which he saw. On holidays Apis was led through the streets of Memphis, adorned in jewelry and flowers. His sacrifice signaled the rebirth of a king as a god.

Shapes in a dollhouse betray the fatal competition of earthly things.

At a wrestling tournament, a young competitor faces match upon match. Referees converge on the scene. The crowd’s attention wanes and focuses with the intensity of the bout. Sounds drift in: a psychic piano enters over fast and short breaths. This is a contest of past and future. It will be decided in the ring.

In Toronto's Nordheimer Ravine, an environment of thick brush and dead wood flattens into fields of colour. Its paths lead to Winston Churchill Park, where the entrance to a city reservoir overlooks a green vale.

Snake grass lines a forest path. The camera passes toward the entrance to the woods. It staggers and repeats as the scene is saturated in colour.

On the paths that cut through Toronto's Tommy Thompson Park, at the foot of Leslie Street, an assortment of terrains collide: thicket, pebbled shorelines, muddy vistas, and fertile earth with beds of wildflowers. A giant duck crosses the horizon. A radio transmission of Shooby Taylor, the human horn, travels with us.

Red, green, blue, and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours collide and mix.

Brébeuf is a study of St. Ignace II, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649. The images in this film arise from a reading of that story - the joining of the sumac and the cross, the blessing gestures, struggles in the field, elliptical scans of stones, and the shimmering of water to summon a glimpse of the flesh boiled from the skin, in fables of the killing. Brébeuf draws from the dark and storied history of early Western conquest, rediscovering in the harsh, untamed landscape of the North resonances of the violent conflicts between the Jesuits, the Huron, and the Iroquois.

In the spring of 1998, Christ Church - Saint James, an historic black church in Toronto's Little Italy, was destroyed by arson. All that remained were walls and a pit, and over subsequent years, the site was overtaken with graffiti. This film has taken on the layered form of the site itself: the space and its surfaces becoming tangled and multiple, the grid of a stone-filled window giving geometric form to simultaneously occurring images of concrete, nature, waste, paint, and sky.

A mirror in the filmmaker's backyard reflects his childhood home. The black frame of the watermarked mirror becomes a mysterious portal, distorting brick, branch, and flesh into an amorphous hodgepodge. A self-portrait.

Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. Rebar at a construction site seems to snake through sunlit puddles

Trains travel to and from a fixed point in space beneath a variable colored horizon.