Stephen Broomer

Nascimento : 1984-01-01,

História

Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker and film preservationist. He holds a BFA in Film and Video Production, an MA in Film Studies, and a PhD in Communication & Culture, his dissertation a study of the origins of the Canadian avant-garde film. He has given public presentations of his film restoration work at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Canadian Film Institute, and his own films have screened at Views from the Avant-Garde, TIFF Wavelengths, and the Berlin Directors Lounge.

Filmes

Fat Chance
Director
Hollywood noir icon Laird Cregar's inner turmoil as a black-on-grey delirium of shadows and spectres. An avant-garde film-historical essay.
Scales of Being - Ed Emshwiller's Relativity
Director
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.
Arrival of the Train
Director
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.
Lulu Faustine
Director
Um milagre aconteceu: o verão chegou antes do tempo. Estar apaixonado por uma imagem era pior do que estar apaixonado por um fantasma. (Sinto como se meu tímpano estivesse quebrando.) Quase tudo, de fato, tem uma explicação. (A pressão atmosférica está aumentando ...). Os capítulos restantes não conterão surpresas. (... e sinto como se meu tímpano estivesse se partindo.) Estar em uma ilha habitada por fantasmas artificiais era o mais insuportável dos pesadelos. (12h30, a respiração é extraordinariamente difícil.) Eu lhe dei uma eternidade agradável! Apenas eu para você e você só para mim. (Estou intoxicado com gasolina.) Será um ato de piedade.
Phantom Ride
Director
Um filme de Stephen Broomer
Resurrection of the Body
Director
"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.
Tondal's Vision
Director
Um filme de Stephen Broomer
Fountains of Paris
Director
Jacques Madvo’s street photography of Paris in 1961 is a launching point for a reflection on water forms and their distortion of optics.
Potamkin
Director
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.
Residence Inn
Director
Day and night in a hotel window in Ottawa. The window frame vibrates and multiplies. An embarrassment of lampshades.
Mills
Director
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.
Carousel Study
Director
The Bow and the Cloud
Director
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.
Variations on a Theme by Michael Snow
Director
Just / faintly / a corner / was / seen there / trying / to look / like an edge. .--- ..- ... - / -..-. / ..-. .- .. -. - .-.. -.-- / -..-. / .- / -.-. --- .-. -. . .-. / -..-. / .-- .- ... / -..-. / ... . . -. / - .... . .-. . / -..-. / - .-. -.-- .. -. --. / -..-. / - --- / .-.. --- --- -.- / -..-. / .-.. .. -.- . / .- -. / . -.. --. . .-.-.-
Bridge 1C
Director
An interstice.
Bridge 1B
Director
An interstice.
Bridge 1A
Director
An interstice
Wild Currents
Director
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.
Landform 1
Director
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.
Gulls at Gibraltar
Director
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.
Dominion
Director
The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined, a vision in the longhouse, a dream in the wilderness.
Wastewater
Director
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.
Jenny Haniver
Director
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.
The Season Word
Director
Still but twisting eye From fall’s wither to first snow Where lives my wonder
Serena Gundy
Director
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.
Hang Twelve
Director
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
Zerah’s Gift
Director
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.
Blue Guitar
Director
Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.
Conservatory
Director
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
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
Director
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.
Spirits in Season
Director
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 in Memphis
Director
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.
The Shapes Book
Director
Shapes in a dollhouse betray the fatal competition of earthly things.
Championship
Director
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.
Ravine
Director
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.
Snakegrass
Director
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.
The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit
Director
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.
Queen’s Quay
Director
Red, green, blue, and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours collide and mix.
Brébeuf
Director
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.
Christ Church – Saint James
Director
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.
Memory Worked By Mirrors
Director
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.
Balinese Rebar
Director
Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. Rebar at a construction site seems to snake through sunlit puddles
Manor Road
Director
Trains travel to and from a fixed point in space beneath a variable colored horizon.