DIM Cinema

Moving-image art in dialogue with cinema.

Curated by Michèle Smith

DIM Cinema is a monthly series that presents Canadian and international moving-image art in dialogue with cinema. The series was initiated in 2008 by local curator Amy Kazymerchyk to draw attention to artists and experimental filmmakers whose practices engage with cinema as a medium, social context, formal structure, or architectural space. The name of the series is inspired by the diffused Vancouver sky, the darkness of the cinema, and a quote from James Broughton’s Making Light of It (1992): “Movie images are dim reflections of the beauty and ferocity in mankind.” DIM Cinema has been curated by Michèle Smith since 2014.

July 12 (Wednesday) 7:00 pm

August 23 (Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Species of Spaces

Filmed in 15 hours with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Chantal Akerman’s structuralist masterpiece travels from foyer to rooftop, from night into day, in a succession of silent, beautifully framed shots that linger in the common areas, crowded elevators, dim corridors, and mostly vacant rooms of a run-down SRO hotel in New York’s Upper West Side. By contrast, Emily Richardson’s dayto-night sequence, composed of several months’ footage captured in and around a South London tower block, uses a combination of time-lapse, jump cuts, and long takes to create a viewing experience not unlike the “all-seeing-but-seeing-nothing” CCTV monitors in the building’s security office, which flick randomly from one view to another, missing pieces of the inhabitants’ actions. Similarly MIA is Elizabeth Price’s narrator, presented instead as on-screen script, luxuriating in administrative, curatorial, and commercial slogans. It guides us on a meandering tour, punctuated by percussion and song, through the preserved-inaspic home of an anonymous 1960s art collector.

Hotel Monterey

USA/Belgium 1972

Chantal Akerman

62 min. DCP

Silent

Block United Kingdom 2005

Emily Richardson

12 min. DCP

At the House of Mr X

United Kingdom 2007

Elizabeth Price

20 min. DCP

Everything Everywhere Again Alive

Canada 1975

Keith Lock 72 min. DCP

New Restoration

Selected by AGO film curator Jim Shedden as one of the “100 Best Canadian Films of All Time,” Keith Lock’s seminal underground film returns to The Cinematheque, in a brand-new restoration, nearly fifty years after first debuting here. “In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, near Orillia, Ontario, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living. Lock filmed the achievements and daily rituals of his fellow communards, his camera bearing witness as a community assembled and dispersed. The resulting film uses poetic strategies, including logograms and other graphic disruptions, to extend its themes of renewal and rebirth, and to mark the encounter between reason and imagination, the concrete and the abstract” (Stephen Broomer). In 2022, Lock received the inaugural Fire Horse Award, presented by Reel Asia to an Asian Canadian individual who has made an extraordinary contribution to the film and media-arts community.

“Through its formal experiments and homey depictions of life outside, Everything Everywhere Again Alive channels freedom— it gives you a taste of life through its gentle, alluring images, and leaves you wanting more.”

Joshua Minsoo Kim, Cinema Scope

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