David Rimmer
Birth : 1942-01-20, Vancouver, Canada
History
Internationally celebrated filmmaker David Rimmer has over 25 experimental and documentary film and video productions to his credit. Throughout his prolific career, he has worked primarily in film, video and photography with his expertise extending to a variety of other media. His multi-faceted background includes working in performance, sound, sculpture, holography and dance. His experience as a performer with Yvonne Rainer's company in New York city left Rimmer uniquely qualified to produce such work as "Roadshow" and "Sisyphus," which feature dance as a medium of expression.
Widely considered to be a key contributor to the emergence of film as an art form, Rimmer's innovation has led to much acclaim. born in Vancouver in 1942, David Rimmer has spent most of his life in his native city with brief periods in New York (1970-72) and Europe (1973). In addition to his provocative work as an artist, he is an instructor in the film and video program at Emily Carr College of Art and Design.
Director
One of Rimmer's early 2000s video works which he made by hand-painting 35mm film, running it on a flatbed viewer, and shooting it off the screen with a video camera to then subject it to further manipulation.
Editor
A hauntingly beautiful film about the world's flight into chaos. Rimmer has taken McLaren's camera-less technique to new heights. He paints directly on clear 35mm leader, using odd materials such as household cleaners, varnish, inks and sometimes fish scales and ferns. He feeds the loops through a film editing machine, overlays them with music and records the result with a mini DV camera. A production of the National Film Board of Canada.
Director
A hauntingly beautiful film about the world's flight into chaos. Rimmer has taken McLaren's camera-less technique to new heights. He paints directly on clear 35mm leader, using odd materials such as household cleaners, varnish, inks and sometimes fish scales and ferns. He feeds the loops through a film editing machine, overlays them with music and records the result with a mini DV camera. A production of the National Film Board of Canada.
Editor
An experimental film by David Rimmer (2003) which was influenced by or done to be performed at 'Rave' concerts which Rimmer was fond of attending in the 2000's. The relationship / resemblance of this film to 'light shows' (live projections) of the 1960's is unmistakable as an influence." -Al Razutis
Director
An experimental film by David Rimmer (2003) which was influenced by or done to be performed at 'Rave' concerts which Rimmer was fond of attending in the 2000's. The relationship / resemblance of this film to 'light shows' (live projections) of the 1960's is unmistakable as an influence." -Al Razutis
Director
«CODES OF CONDUCT playfully upends the moral order by which man has historically seen fit to measure so called correct behaviour - by ironically re-positioning the rules, Rimmer uncovers their arbitrariness.»
Osnabrück Media Arts Festival 1997
Director
"David Rimmer's film is at once a somber and celebratory meditation on time and place. Its title, 'Local Knowledge', is marine terminology for what a skipper must know when navigating dangerous waters. Rimmer is an experienced sailor and the film's spiritual and geographical center is aptly named Storm Bay, where he spends his summers. But it's a troubled site. The camera, moving with tide and swell, seems to strain anxiously at its anchor and it becomes clear from here on in nothing will ever be at rest. Local Knowledge won't save anyone anymore.
Director
Shot entirely using a Steadicam. A video version of a dance piece by the Karen Jamieson Dance Company.
Director
"The lateral movement of the title "Along the Road to Altamira" signals that we are about to embark on a journey through Spain. Our final destination is Altamira, where the first forms of representation by Paleolithic man still remain. These images, a narrator tells us in German, would have remained undiscovered if not for the childish curiosity and unconditioned vision of the young girl who noticed the ancient paintings of bison on the cave ceiling.
Director
The structure of the film alternates between looped, processed stock TV imagery and a blank, static blue screen. This formal motif - a blank frame or screen onto which the artist projects imagery which expresses inner emotions and anxieties - is a motif which recurs throughout Rimmer's filmic oeuvre. As Seen on TV is a moving film which conveys a deep-seated human experience.
Director
A video of a dance performance by the Karen Jamieson Dance Company.
Director
Producer
Documentary about a collaboration between avant garde filmmaker David Rimmer and choreographer Paulo Ross.
Director
Documentary about a collaboration between avant garde filmmaker David Rimmer and choreographer Paulo Ross.
Director
Starting with a boat swaying on its anchor at the head of an inlet, a landscape of pilings, shore, and forest is slowly revealed by time-lapse photography as the morning fog lifts. While the deep space of the landscape evolves out of the fog-enshrouded flatness of early morning, the camera skips from fixed point to fixed point - suggesting the motion of the human eye while reading.
Director
An award winning 45-minute film portrait of Al Neil’s life, music and art.
Director
Canadian Pacific II is designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific I. Shot from a window two storeys higher and in the building adjacent to the artists’s studio of the previous year, one enters into a dream state… an involvement with a vocabulary of seeing and feeling by subtle transitions of the passage of time
Director
Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.
Director
Variously relaxed, apprehensive, or relieved, the fractured gestures of a woman and a baby are played backward and forward, frame by frame, like a musical phrase.
Director
Watching for the Queen continued Rimmer's investigations of minimal narrative and the anonymous/autonomous shot. Pattern recognition, saccadic eye movement and feature rings are well known phenomena in the behavioral sciences. However, in Watching for the Queen, Rimmer has succeeded in employing these mechanisms in the telling of a story, by employing mathematical ordering in an aesthetic manner.
Camera Operator
Gary Lee-Nova's comedic, anarchic boxing short.
Director
"Taken between September 1970 and May 1971, with the unmoving camera apparently bolted to the window ledge, this film, a ten-minute eternity, chronicles what takes place within view of the lens. The backdrop is a typical New York pizza stand, the actors are selected New Yorkers who happened to be there during the half year, the plot is the somewhat sinister aimlessness of life itself." - Donald Ritchie, Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Director
The basic image derives from a shot of women in (Edwardian era) dresses standing along the edge of the ocean. Within this eight-second loop, [Rimmer] cuts shorter ones. For example, the activity of a central group of three women is cut so that the figures repeat certain motions over and over and over again... Rimmer also chose to use the forms of surface imperfections, the scratches and dirt patterns, as bases for his loops... Although working in a disciplined style of re-structuring cinematic forms, his highly orchestrated creations have inspired great admiration both from cineastes and the more general public.
Director
‘A beautiful, mysterious yet satisfying optical illusion…celebrates the early passing of a steam on the Thames. Using freeze-frame techniques, elaborate dissolves, and most of the resources on the optical table, this picture is, amongst other things, a Turner come to life. Rimmer’s concern with the surface nature of the film is most evident in this work which, in spite of its filmic complexity, is incredibly simple.’ — Donald Richie
Director
David Rimmer's avant-garde classic takes a single film fragment of a factory worker unraveling a sheet of cellophane, and alters it through a mesmerizing series of spectral apparitions and alchemical and sonic permutations.
Director
With an irresistible humour, Rimmer speculates in The Dance on the nature of the film loop. We see a (1920s) couple whilring around a dance floor at a dizzying pace... Uncanny in its ability to evoke complexity of responses from a simplicity of means.
Director
"Treefall" was originally made for a dance performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, April, 1970. Structured in the form of two loops of high-contrast images of trees falling, reprinted and overlapped.
Director
Blue Movie was made for the international Dome Show where it was projected down onto the muslin surface of David Rimmer's geodesic dome. The audience lay on the floor looking up at it, the inside of each eye finishing the globe.
Director
Using fixed frame timelapse, 15 hours of a day in the mountains, showing the changes in the sea and sky, is compressed into eight minutes. Designed originally to be rear-projected onto a plexiglass screen framed in a false wall by a traditional wooden picture frame.
Director
"Whereas SQUARE INCH FIELD was composed largely in the camera, Rimmer's next film, MIGRATION, made full use of rear-projection rephotography, stop-framing, and slow motion. The migration of the title is interpreted as the flight of a ghost bird through aeons of space/time, through the micro-macro universe, through a myriad of complex realities. A seagull is seen flying gracefully in slow motion against a grainy green sky; suddenly the frame stops, warps and burns, as though caught in the gate of the projector. Now begins an alternation of fast and slow sequences in which the bird flies through time-lapse clouds and fog and, in a stroboscopic crescendo, hurtles into the sun's corona. Successive movements of the film develop rhythmic, organic counterpoints in which cosmic transformations send jelly fish into the sky and ocean waves into the sun. It concludes with stop-frame slow-motion of the bird, transformed once again into flesh." - Gene Youngblood
Director
A rapid fire montage, a dynamic juxtaposition of the world’s vital and destructive forces, the title originating from a Chinese text which refers to the Third Eye. Close up shots of the various faces open and close the film, the very last shot holding on the innocent face of a young child.
