Stephen Broomer
1984 (42 года)Christ Church – Saint James
Stephen Broomer
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.
Christ Church – Saint James
Pepper's Ghost
Stephen Broomer
Stephen Broomer, Eva Kolcze
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
Conservatory
Stephen Broomer
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.
Conservatory
The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit
Stephen Broomer
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.
The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit
Brébeuf
Stephen Broomer
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.
Brébeuf
Variations on a Theme by Michael Snow
Stephen Broomer
Just / faintly / a corner / was / seen there / trying / to look / like an edge. .--- ..- ... - / -..-. / ..-. .- .. -. - .-.. -.-- / -..-. / .- / -.-. --- .-. -. . .-. / -..-. / .-- .- ... / -..-. / ... . . -. / - .... . .-. . / -..-. / - .-. -.-- .. -. --. / -..-. / - --- / .-.. --- --- -.- / -..-. / .-.. .. -.- . / .- -. / . -.. --. . .-.-.-
Variations on a Theme by Michael Snow
Championship
Stephen Broomer
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.
Championship
Lulu Faustine
Stephen Broomer
A miracle happened: summer came prematurely. Being in love with an image was worse than being in love with a ghost. (I feel like my eardrum is breaking). Almost everything, in fact, has an explanation. (The atmospheric pressure is increasing ...). The remaining chapters will have no surprises (... and I feel like my eardrum is breaking). Being on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most excruciating nightmare. (12.30 sharp, breathing is extraordinarily difficult.) I have given you a pleasant eternity! Only me for you and you only for me. (I am intoxicated with gasoline.) It will be an act of pity.
Lulu Faustine
