David Rimmer

A hauntingly beautiful film about the world's flight into chaos. Rimmer has taken McLaren's camera-less technique to new heights. He paints directly on clear 35mm leader, using odd materials such as household cleaners, varnish, inks and sometimes fish scales and ferns. He feeds the loops through a film editing machine, overlays them with music and records the result with a mini DV camera. A production of the National Film Board of Canada.

Blue Movie was made for the international Dome Show where it was projected down onto the muslin surface of David Rimmer's geodesic dome. The audience lay on the floor looking up at it, the inside of each eye finishing the globe. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Short documentary on the alternative, open education of 'Know Place', seemingly some kind of rural arts school retreat.

Animated music video featuring montage of various performers overlaid by psychedelic/trance visuals.

Using fixed frame timelapse, 15 hours of a day in the mountains, showing the changes in the sea and sky, is compressed into eight minutes. Designed originally to be rear-projected onto a plexiglass screen framed in a false wall by a traditional wooden picture frame.

"David Rimmer's film is at once a somber and celebratory meditation on time and place. Its title, 'Local Knowledge', is marine terminology for what a skipper must know when navigating dangerous waters. Rimmer is an experienced sailor and the film's spiritual and geographical center is aptly named Storm Bay, where he spends his summers. But it's a troubled site. The camera, moving with tide and swell, seems to strain anxiously at its anchor and it becomes clear from here on in nothing will ever be at rest. Local Knowledge won't save anyone anymore. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.

Starting with a boat swaying on its anchor at the head of an inlet, a landscape of pilings, shore, and forest is slowly revealed by time-lapse photography as the morning fog lifts. While the deep space of the landscape evolves out of the fog-enshrouded flatness of early morning, the camera skips from fixed point to fixed point - suggesting the motion of the human eye while reading.

Variously relaxed, apprehensive, or relieved, the fractured gestures of a woman and a baby are played backward and forward, frame by frame, like a musical phrase. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

"Treefall" was originally made for a dance performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, April, 1970. Structured in the form of two loops of high-contrast images of trees falling, reprinted and overlapped. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

"Whereas SQUARE INCH FIELD was composed largely in the camera, Rimmer's next film, MIGRATION, made full use of rear-projection rephotography, stop-framing, and slow motion. The migration of the title is interpreted as the flight of a ghost bird through aeons of space/time, through the micro-macro universe, through a myriad of complex realities. A seagull is seen flying gracefully in slow motion against a grainy green sky; suddenly the frame stops, warps and burns, as though caught in the gate of the projector. Now begins an alternation of fast and slow sequences in which the bird flies through time-lapse clouds and fog and, in a stroboscopic crescendo, hurtles into the sun's corona. Successive movements of the film develop rhythmic, organic counterpoints in which cosmic transformations send jelly fish into the sky and ocean waves into the sun." - Gene Youngblood. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

The basic image derives from a shot of women in (Edwardian era) dresses standing along the edge of the ocean. Within this eight-second loop, [Rimmer] cuts shorter ones. For example, the activity of a central group of three women is cut so that the figures repeat certain motions over and over and over again... Rimmer also chose to use the forms of surface imperfections, the scratches and dirt patterns, as bases for his loops... Although working in a disciplined style of re-structuring cinematic forms, his highly orchestrated creations have inspired great admiration both from cineastes and the more general public. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

A TV movie sequence is repeated in slow motion: the sound gradually gets out of sync with the image. The point moves on the soundtrack while the viewer anticipates the meeting of the image and sound.

With an irresistible humour, Rimmer speculates in The Dance on the nature of the film loop. We see a (1920s) couple whilring around a dance floor at a dizzying pace... Uncanny in its ability to evoke complexity of responses from a simplicity of means. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.

A video of a dance performance by the Karen Jamieson Dance Company.

Shot entirely using a Steadicam. A video version of a dance piece by the Karen Jamieson Dance Company.

An award winning 45-minute film portrait of Al Neil’s life, music and art. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

A film featuring sprocket holes and leader sections in montage.

Gary Lee-Nova's comedic, anarchic boxing short.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

The structure of the film alternates between looped, processed stock TV imagery and a blank, static blue screen. This formal motif - a blank frame or screen onto which the artist projects imagery which expresses inner emotions and anxieties - is a motif which recurs throughout Rimmer's filmic oeuvre. As Seen on TV is a moving film which conveys a deep-seated human experience.