Programmed by Isabelle Lynch and Sophie Lynch
Olivia Boudreau’s videos, films, and performance works inspire reflections on the experience of time and the act of perception. The Montreal-based artist carefully choreographs precise shots of long duration in works such as L’étuve (2011), where a group of women appear and disappear as dense vaporous clouds slowly fill a steam room. Her more recent works, including Femme allongée (2014), make use of narrative structure and editing. A woman draped in a white sheet lies immobile on a table. Like a body prepared for dissection in an anatomical theatre, she becomes the focal point for a sequence of activities. Through exchanged glances and small gestures, Boudreau’s works invite us to rest in the intervals between stillness and movement.
L’étuve | 2011. 20 min.
Les petits | 2010. 13 min.
La Brèche | 2012, 3 min.
Le Bain | 2010, 23 min.
Femme allongée | 2014. 14 min.
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Olivia Boudreau’s practice combines video and performance in works that explore perception, temporality, and the visible through the long take and, more recently, narrative structure and editing. Her work has been exhibited across North America and Europe, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, and Le Fresnoy in France, and in 2014 was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal. She is a three-time long-list nominee for the Sobey Art Award and received Montreal’s Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2011.
Image: Still from L’étuve, 2011, copyright Olivia Boudreau
Programmed by Michèle Smith
DIM Cinema pays tribute to Peter Hutton, the influential American filmmaker and educator (Ken Burns and Kelly Reichardt were among his students) who died last June. Cahiers du cinéma described his body of work as radical and singular: “A sort of primitive documentary, silent, which celebrates the beauty of the world without forgetting to observe people, the conditions they live and work under.”
Screening format: 16mm, silent.
APRIL 5: "Near"
“Hutton's black-and-white haikus are an exquisite distillation of the cinematic eye. The limitations imposed — no colour, no sound, no movement (except from a vehicle not directly propelled by the filmmaker), no direct cuts since the images are born and die in black — ironically entail an ultimate freedom of the imagination ... If pleasure can disturb, Hutton’s ploys emerge in full focus. These materializing then evaporating images don’t ignite, but conjure strains of fleeting panoramas of detached bemusement. More than mere photography, Hutton’s contained-with-in-the-fram
Boston Fire | 1979. 8 min.
New York Near Sleep for Saskia | 1972. 10 min.
New York Portrait, Chapter II | 1981. 16 min.
New York Portrait, Chapter III | 1990. 16 min.
Landscape (for Manon) | 1987. 12 min.
APRIL 26: “Far”
“Hit with a heavy case of wanderlust” as a young man, Hutton spent 15 years as a merchant marine, and from then on was rarely without his 16mm camera. His gorgeously textured depictions of cities and landscapes are, in his words, “diaristic without being autobiographical,” using long takes and silence to encourage the mind to roam. Whether near to home or far away, “Hutton handled his camera like a curious outsider, lingering on the flow of water or the movement of clouds, taking in people in brief, penetrating but oddly distant portraits, not staying in any one place too long” (Max Nelson, Film Comment).
Florence | 1975. 7 min.
Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life) 1973-74 | 1974. 10 min.
Lødz Symphony | 1993. 20 min.
Skagafjordur | 2004. 33 min.
Image: still from New York Portrait, Chapter II, 1981
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Programmed by Tobin Gibson and Kara Hansen
“Marie it was who first of all of us discovered that hypnagogic envisioning need not only be done at night.” STAN BRAKHAGE
Programmed by Melanie O’Brian and Michèle Smith
Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk and Arvo Leo
Programmed by Michèle Smith