Cinema Expo 67 engages in fundamental research and contextualization of the most important films to have disappeared from the Canadian film canon. These seven multi-screen productions challenged both the cinema production technology of the day, modes of screening, audience reception as well as the received wisdom as to what cinema was or could be. Roman Kroitor, Colin Low and Tom Daly’s Labyrinth Pavilion – a five story building designed around two multi-screen productions – has been described as the “last, and most complete, statement of the collective humanist ethos of the NFB’s Unit B” (Morris). Michel Brault’s Settlement and Conflict and Charles Gagnon’s The Eighth Day were major works by two of the most gifted Canadian filmmakers of the day. Graeme Ferguson’s Polar Life and Christopher Chapman’s A Place to Stand demonstrated the potential for large screen cinema exposition that Ferguson and Kroitor would shortly thereafter develop as IMAX. Two other multi-screen productions – Canada 67 and Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid’s We Are Young – contributed to a growing body of alternative cinema widely seen as the future of the medium (Youngblood).
Category: Research
Visible City Project
The Visible City Project seeks to understand the different roles that artists play in imagining and helping to design 21st century cities. The project investigates how art practices function in specific contemporary urban contexts as a tool for enhancing communication and renovating democratic citizenship, and how they might be used to educate and transform the experience of urban dwelling in light of the changing technological, economic and cultural experiences of globalization.
LOT: Experiments in Urban Research
LOT is a new collective that was formed in the summer of 2007 with a group of seven artists and urban researchers—it has now almost doubled in size. The group, located in Toronto, shares a commitment to develop research tools that employ art to create new epistemologies. We are also committed to experimenting with new forms of exhibition that construct different situations, new interdisciplinary and intermedial frameworks. LOT (League of Tangents) produces small urban interventions (probes) to discern the phenomenologies of everyday life—such experiments are often mixed with theorizing, the process of thinking with and through theory to understand the present moment.
Janine Marchessault 