Stephen Broomer

On Zerah Colburn, the early-nineteenth-century human calculator, made into a sideshow attraction by his father. This film is a record of the countryside that he grew up in and to which he later returned and died at age 35.

In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness.

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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.

Hollywood noir icon Laird Cregar's inner turmoil as a black-on-grey delirium of shadows and spectres. An avant-garde film-historical essay.

Trains travel to and from a fixed point in space beneath a variable colored horizon.

Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity (1966) is a reflection of the ceaseless possibilities of nature to produce distinctive forms acting in concert with one another. It is a myth, enacted through the avatar of a universal man, who samples this world from the cave to the beach to the parking lot to the supermarket, from birth to death, in navigation with other bodies, a figure of bounded perception whose actions are guided by impulse, invention, and perhaps, the stars. It is an embrace of life in its broadest definition, a catalogue of earthly phenomena. In this video, Relativity is discussed in relation to Emshwiller’s trajectory through the course of the 1950s and 60s, his interests in the body and abstraction, the correspondence between his work in science-fiction illustration and his work in experimental cinema, and the film’s mythopoeic constitution.

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.

In early 2020, MUTA - International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation and Cine Íntimo rescued and digitised a Peruvian archive of orphaned 8mm and Super 8 home movies. With the aim of restoring these lost memories, we sent the images around the world. This omnibus film is the result of the intervention of this material, by 14 experimental filmmakers. Fourteen perspectives and ways of experiencing appropriation. Fourteen variations on the intimate.

Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro’s L’inferno (1911), a Doré-inspired visualisation of the eponymous first canticle in Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (1320), is commonly considered to be Italy’s first feature-length film – and also the first local attempt at making something that, in the eyes of a bourgeois audience, would be accepted as having artistic value. Stephen Broomer, now takes the complete film and re-works it by all means, analogue and digital, available to the modern filmmaker. But who is Tondal? A knight errant who appears in the Divina Commedia, but also an older literary character (from the 1100s) whose story was re-told till deep into the 15th century. Expect a grand, exceptional audio-visual spectacle!

An interstice.

Snake grass lines a forest path. The camera passes toward the entrance to the woods. It staggers and repeats as the scene is saturated in colour.

The howl of an infant, a tinsel pastoral. ""And the trains still go through the station at La Ciotat." For the 50th Anniversary of Anthology Film Archives, with debts to Jerome Hill.

An interstice.

A mirror in the filmmaker's backyard reflects his childhood home. The black frame of the watermarked mirror becomes a mysterious portal, distorting brick, branch, and flesh into an amorphous hodgepodge. A self-portrait.

A tragic mistake jolts Teddy and Joanne into limbo. Their spirits bear witness to their past usage of household appliances, as if by electric charge they might uncoil their spectral presences from home and garden. A myth and a ghost story for Christine Lucy Latimer, on her birthday, 2015.

Encores live yet Slice every note, each notice sincere in secret Lovers covet eyeliner to recite in vein or vesicle Clever noise, silence or else

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.

The North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant lies in thick brush downhill from a hydroelectric corridor. The eye bounces, guided by the vertical forms coming up out of the valley, and a low flame bridges these movements.

Serena Gundy Park, in Toronto, so named for the late wife of Toronto businessman James Henry Gundy, who influenced the financial character of early twentieth-century Canada. Gundy had owned the parkland as a family estate, and upon his death in 1951, donated the land to the city in memory of his wife. In early spring, the trees remain bare from winter, on cusp of renewal. The film takes her name for its homophonic relation to the nursery rhyme Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday...), which cycles through the days of the week that chart Grundy's life from birth to death, inevitably repeating, birth and death enclosed in a loop.