Arts
A selection of films on art that shakes up preconceived ideas. It extends the pleasure of contemplation or enhances the experience of a piece. By juxtaposing mythical films and recent ones, we offer the sharpest views on the world of art … in all its forms.
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Il n’est pas innocent que le bonheur soit heureux
Il n’est pas innocent que le bonheur soit heureux
New product!Subscription access
Happiness is a tautological state. Why is one happy? Because he or she is happy. It’s very simple. And it smells good. Still happy than one can be happy. This video was produced for Manif d’art 2003 in Québec focussing on happiness and its representation.
Bonbons bijoux
Subscription access
Sylvie Laliberté’s work centers on self-representation and narrative, and is often delivered in a humorously faux-naïve and playful aesthetic. In her first video, _Bonbons bijoux_, the artist speaks directly to the camera about simple, trivial things, delivered in a whimsical and spirited manner. In a succession of brief vignettes, the artist, like a candid half-woman, half-child, tells stories...
Her Scream
Subscription access
Audrey, a woman in her mid-fifties, has never been able to make peace with her tumultuous family history. She now decides to confront her demons. Supported by her son, the director of the documentary, she revisits a striking scene from her past: the moment when she told her parents that her grandfather had sexually assaulted her. Together, through a year-long production process, they transform ...
My Memory Walls
Subscription access
Rose G. Lévesque, an almost nonagenarian painter and poet, painted the story of her life on her house's walls to transform it into a museum.
People's Park
Subscription access
A mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind window into modern China, _People's Park_ is an exhilarating single shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The film explores the dozens of moods, rhythms, and performances coexisting in tight proximity within the park's prismatic social space. A sensory meditation on cinematic time and ...
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections
Duration: 37 minutesSubscription access
Jonas Mekas, a pioneer of the film diary, portrays his friend Andy Warhol and his inner circle from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, offering an intimate behind-the-scenes look at the artist’s life and career.
Jazz of Lights
Subscription access
A pulsating city symphony of light, movement, and electronic music, transforming Times Square in the 1950s into what Hugo’s wife, the writer Anaïs Nin, called "an ephemeral flow of sensations.”
A Sound Of My Own
Subscription access
After the death of her father, Marja Burchard followed in his footsteps and became the leader of the legendary krautrock collective Embryo. While carrying on his musical legacy, she also strives to forge her own path in a male-dominated industry. _A Sound of My Own_ immerses viewers in Marja's sonic world, where images and sounds from the past and present merge into a composition of her life—un...
Upstairs With David Amram
Subscription access
Before her illustrious career as one of Canada’s foremost documentary filmmakers, Alanis Obomsawin was an acclaimed singer and musician at the forefront of the Indigenous rights movement in North America. During this unprecedented time, she befriended fellow musician and activist David Amram, often described as the “Renaissance man of American music.” A legendary talent and multi-instrumentalis...
Le roi du drum
Subscription access
_Le roi du drum_ tells the story of a beloved folk hero from Montreal's East End: Guy Nadon, a gifted self-taught jazz musician whose only misfortune was being born in Quebec in the 1930s. A marginalized artist—often misunderstood and seldom supported—Nadon never stopped nurturing his boundless imagination as a percussionist and performer, all while remaining deeply rooted in his neighbourhood....
Sol
Solomon Tapatsiaq Uyarasuk was a charismatic young Inuk – an amateur acrobat, musician and poet. A beautiful soul, tormented by his people’s lot, who died far too young. This film is a stirring tribute to the young man. Starting with a celebration of Sol’s life, which ended suddenly in a holding cell under suspicious circumstances, the filmmakers shift into an investigative mode, seeking to unc...
Garden City Beautiful
One sunny afternoon in the Middle West, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream about a life lived otherwise.
Parade
_Parade_ is made of three parts, with each part using a different film language. The first segment uses narrative film language to tell a mysterious story. The second part uses expressionist visual language. The third sequence is composed of events all happening simultaneously which, in film, can only be shown as a sequence. The title _Parade_ refers to the fact that film is composed of individ...
Too Early/Too Late
Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Enge...
Alfred DesRochers, poète
Subscription access
A portrait of the great poet Alfred DesRochers, who was also a journalist for _La Tribune_ in Sherbrooke and enjoyed his moment of fame before the Second World War. Here, he shares his reflections on the difficult conditions of literary life in French Canada.
The Blind Owl
An immigrant movie projectionist drifts into an oneiric and fantastical spiral after falling in love with a dancer who appears on his screen. With this singular film, Raoul Ruiz crafts a highly free and hybrid adaptation of two major literary works: _The Blind Owl_ by Sadegh Hedayat and _Damned by Despair_ by Tirso de Molina.
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
Duration: 1h01_Whose Language You Don’t Understand_, named after a novel by the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007) is a video cycle exploring the limits of language. Fritz spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of dense and complex novels she called _The Fortress_, consisting of over 10,000 pages and still unfinished at the time of her death. Her project is an unusual and asto...
The Shape of Things
Subscription access
A spectacular film shot during the first sculpture symposium held in North America, in Montreal in the summer of 1964, _The Shape of Things_ follows eleven sculptors from nine countries as they hammer, carve, and shape stone.
Slet 1988
Subscription access
In _Slet 1988_, dancer Sonja Vukićević, aged 74, moves through socialist-modernist spaces; her body is an archive of the last mass performance in Yugoslavia. Her gestures echo past rhythms and present realities, intertwining with a 1988 teenage girl’s diary to reveal the shift from socialist collectivism to rising individualism, while a new national collective body is creeping in and will soon ...
Il n’est pas innocent que le bonheur soit heureux
Il n’est pas innocent que le bonheur soit heureux
New product!Subscription access
Happiness is a tautological state. Why is one happy? Because he or she is happy. It’s very simple. And it smells good. Still happy than one can be happy. This video was produced for Manif d’art 2003 in Québec focussing on happiness and its representation.
Bonbons bijoux
Subscription access
Sylvie Laliberté’s work centers on self-representation and narrative, and is often delivered in a humorously faux-naïve and playful aesthetic. In her first video, _Bonbons bijoux_, the artist speaks directly to the camera about simple, trivial things, delivered in a whimsical and spirited manner. In a succession of brief vignettes, the artist, like a candid half-woman, half-child, tells stories...
Her Scream
Subscription access
Audrey, a woman in her mid-fifties, has never been able to make peace with her tumultuous family history. She now decides to confront her demons. Supported by her son, the director of the documentary, she revisits a striking scene from her past: the moment when she told her parents that her grandfather had sexually assaulted her. Together, through a year-long production process, they transform ...
My Memory Walls
Subscription access
Rose G. Lévesque, an almost nonagenarian painter and poet, painted the story of her life on her house's walls to transform it into a museum.
People's Park
Subscription access
A mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind window into modern China, _People's Park_ is an exhilarating single shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The film explores the dozens of moods, rhythms, and performances coexisting in tight proximity within the park's prismatic social space. A sensory meditation on cinematic time and ...
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections
Duration: 37 minutesSubscription access
Jonas Mekas, a pioneer of the film diary, portrays his friend Andy Warhol and his inner circle from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, offering an intimate behind-the-scenes look at the artist’s life and career.
Jazz of Lights
Subscription access
A pulsating city symphony of light, movement, and electronic music, transforming Times Square in the 1950s into what Hugo’s wife, the writer Anaïs Nin, called "an ephemeral flow of sensations.”
A Sound Of My Own
Subscription access
After the death of her father, Marja Burchard followed in his footsteps and became the leader of the legendary krautrock collective Embryo. While carrying on his musical legacy, she also strives to forge her own path in a male-dominated industry. _A Sound of My Own_ immerses viewers in Marja's sonic world, where images and sounds from the past and present merge into a composition of her life—un...
Upstairs With David Amram
Subscription access
Before her illustrious career as one of Canada’s foremost documentary filmmakers, Alanis Obomsawin was an acclaimed singer and musician at the forefront of the Indigenous rights movement in North America. During this unprecedented time, she befriended fellow musician and activist David Amram, often described as the “Renaissance man of American music.” A legendary talent and multi-instrumentalis...
Le roi du drum
Subscription access
_Le roi du drum_ tells the story of a beloved folk hero from Montreal's East End: Guy Nadon, a gifted self-taught jazz musician whose only misfortune was being born in Quebec in the 1930s. A marginalized artist—often misunderstood and seldom supported—Nadon never stopped nurturing his boundless imagination as a percussionist and performer, all while remaining deeply rooted in his neighbourhood....
Sol
Solomon Tapatsiaq Uyarasuk was a charismatic young Inuk – an amateur acrobat, musician and poet. A beautiful soul, tormented by his people’s lot, who died far too young. This film is a stirring tribute to the young man. Starting with a celebration of Sol’s life, which ended suddenly in a holding cell under suspicious circumstances, the filmmakers shift into an investigative mode, seeking to unc...
Garden City Beautiful
One sunny afternoon in the Middle West, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream about a life lived otherwise.
Parade
_Parade_ is made of three parts, with each part using a different film language. The first segment uses narrative film language to tell a mysterious story. The second part uses expressionist visual language. The third sequence is composed of events all happening simultaneously which, in film, can only be shown as a sequence. The title _Parade_ refers to the fact that film is composed of individ...
Too Early/Too Late
Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Enge...
Alfred DesRochers, poète
Subscription access
A portrait of the great poet Alfred DesRochers, who was also a journalist for _La Tribune_ in Sherbrooke and enjoyed his moment of fame before the Second World War. Here, he shares his reflections on the difficult conditions of literary life in French Canada.
The Blind Owl
An immigrant movie projectionist drifts into an oneiric and fantastical spiral after falling in love with a dancer who appears on his screen. With this singular film, Raoul Ruiz crafts a highly free and hybrid adaptation of two major literary works: _The Blind Owl_ by Sadegh Hedayat and _Damned by Despair_ by Tirso de Molina.
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
Duration: 1h01_Whose Language You Don’t Understand_, named after a novel by the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007) is a video cycle exploring the limits of language. Fritz spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of dense and complex novels she called _The Fortress_, consisting of over 10,000 pages and still unfinished at the time of her death. Her project is an unusual and asto...
The Shape of Things
Subscription access
A spectacular film shot during the first sculpture symposium held in North America, in Montreal in the summer of 1964, _The Shape of Things_ follows eleven sculptors from nine countries as they hammer, carve, and shape stone.
Slet 1988
Subscription access
In _Slet 1988_, dancer Sonja Vukićević, aged 74, moves through socialist-modernist spaces; her body is an archive of the last mass performance in Yugoslavia. Her gestures echo past rhythms and present realities, intertwining with a 1988 teenage girl’s diary to reveal the shift from socialist collectivism to rising individualism, while a new national collective body is creeping in and will soon ...
