John Kamevaar

A dual-projection film where each director made 30 minutes of film without knowledge of what the other was making. Snow's side is a visual encyclopedia of natural and man-made objects. Brown's side transforms footage of a San Francisco cable car.

"Carl Brown makes celluloid dance. [His] new film work will burn colours so deeply into your brain, you'll be watching a light show inside your eyelids for hours. Titled Neige Noir ('Black Snow'), a name that conjures up Toronto winters but actually refers to the trenches of the First World War, the piece is a visual feast. It opens with a calming sequence of manipulated representations of a swimmer and the sea set to a lulling jazz tune, and then crashes into a steady techno and white noise assault with pulsating images. Brown radically alters the celluloid itself, experimenting like a mad scientist to create gorgeous colour patterns. He sometimes refilms an image up to eight times to bring its dance of distortion to a climax. Any single still from this film could bring you to a stop in an art gallery, and Brown gives us some 86,000 of them." (Thomas Hirschmann)

"This two-screen dual projector film extends Brown's use of chemically tortured celluloid to the breaking point. A collaboration with his long-time sound colleague John Kamevaar, 'Fine Pain' is an extended dialogue between image and sound - like a prolonged riff of free jazz between two masters. The discordant tensions of this film will keep you on the very edge of your seat, astonish you with the mesmerizing range of colour and abstraction and the over-modulated sound vibrations." (Pleasure Dome program notes, Toronto, March 2000)

"'Brownsnow' presents a fascinating combination of two artistic visions: Carl Brown's and Michael Snow's. The form of this expressionistic documentary on Michael Snow's artwork is a complete melding of Carl Brown's rich manipulation of the photographic image with the fundamental concepts of Michael Snow's aesthetic vision. Brown's strengths as a portrait photographer are also well-translated to the filmic medium as he situates key commentators on Snow's artwork (Dennis Reid, R. Bruce Elder, Jonas Mekas, Peggy Gale and Regina Cornwell) in various dramatic Canadian landscapes. Like an abstract expressionist painting in motion, Brown's brilliant work as a colourist deftly employs photographic chemistry to create textures and rhythms that vary across each scene and, in actuality, from frame to frame." (Susan Oxtoby)

As the wheel turns, the religion of the body moves to and through the physical into the psychological. We see the feared, all is moved. There is a hint of seclusion, an idea from the past re-worked and still dangerous. The participants unsure choose a convent and are still revealed. Through a window there appears a tree, and then a forest. Too many options. The monastic life, safe and sure. We cluster for the cloister.