Description
Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada
Author/Editor: Jim Shedden & Barbara Sternberg
CONTENTS
Film is the art form of our times. It has formed the background of our lives, informed visual arts practices, and formed our culture’s stories, its memory. Moments of Perception is a landmark book. The first history of twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Canadian experimental filmmaking, it maps avant-garde film across the country from the 1950s to the present day, including its contradictions and complexities.
Experimental film is political in its very existence, critical of the status quo by definition. In Canada, some of the country’s best-known artists took up the moving image as a form of artistic expression, allowing them to explore explicitly political themes. Mike Hoolboom’s exposure of the horror of AIDS, Josephine Massarella’s concern for the environment, and Joyce Wieland’s satiric look at US patriotism are just a few examples of work that contributed to social movements and provided a means to explore issues of race and gender and 2SLGBTQ+ and Indigenous identities.
Featuring a major essay on the history of the movement by Michael Zryd and profiles of key filmmakers by Stephen Broomer and editors Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Moments of Perception offers a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving history of Canada’s experimental film and moving image media arts.
Contents:
Introduction — Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg
A Short Institutional History of Canadian Experimental Film — Michael Zryd
Moments of Perception — Stephen Broomer
More Moments — Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg
Jim Shedden has directed documentaries and edited books on experimental filmmakers.
Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid 1970s. Her films have been screened around the world and her work is in the collection of the AGO and the NGC. Both Sternberg and Shedden have been involved in the artist-run experimental film scene in Toronto since the mid 1980s, programming and coordinating screenings, festivals and congresses; curating exhibitions and writing on film.
Michael Zryd is Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Arts at York University. He has published widely on experimental film, including articles on Hollis Frampton, Joyce Wieland and Canadian film studies. He is a contributor to the San Francisco Cinematheque/INCITE publication Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!
Stephen Broomer has made over forty films, in addition to publishing on, curating and preserving Canadian experimental film.
352 pages
Softcover | 8.75 x 6.5 in
Published 2021 by Goose Labe Editions
ISBN: 1773102036