Factory Media Centre Gallery Series presents
STEPHEN BROOMER: The Transformable Moment
Friday, January 9, 2015 — 7-11 pm
Artist Statement
My films deal in aesthetic strategies such as superimposition, anamorphosis, elliptical editing, and colour alteration. I have used these strategies in tandem with programmatic elements, drawing from history and myth in my choice of subjects, and then channeling those subjects through the difficult aesthetics of late modernism. The prime example of this approach is my “Spirits Trilogy”: Christ Church – Saint James (2011), in which I explored the ruins of an historic black church in Toronto that was destroyed by arson in 1998; Spirits in Season (2012), in which I explored Lily Dale Assembly, a nineteenth-century religious commune in upstate New York; and Brébeuf (2012), in which I explored two sites in Midland, Ontario that are central to the martyrdom of the Jesuit missionaries Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant. In all of these instances, the programme becomes secondary to the gestural, improvisatory aesthetic of the work, and yet that aesthetic is deeply entrenched in the sublime and mysterious enigmas of these narratives.
In many of my films, reality, if we may call it that, the reality of the recorded experience, of perception, is hammered down, wrecked, above all obscured, through processes – these happen to be digital processes, primarily, but they might be any processes that treat the recorded moment as something transformable. Sometimes this process arises from joy, sometimes from rage and grief. By the time that process begins, the original experience is already passed. Concealing it makes it new.
Bio
Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker and film historian. He is presently completing his doctorate, on difficult aesthetics and the origins of the Canadian avant-garde film, under the supervision of R. Bruce Elder. His films, which have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde (New York), and the Berlin Directors Lounge, are the subject of a forthcoming collection of essays edited by Scott Birdwise and Tom McSorley, The Transformable Moment: The Films of Stephen Broomer (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2014). His first book, on the McMaster Film Board of the 1960s, will be released by University of Toronto Press in 2015.
All films will be screened digitally.
Program 1: Ghostly Pastoralism, The Spirits Trilogy
Christ Church – Saint James
Brébeuf
Spirits in Season
Program 2: Surfaces, Films from 2012-2014
Memory Worked by Mirrors
Queens Quay
Wastewater
Conservatory
Balinese Rebar
Pepper’s Ghost
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