The Body in Film

Trailer: www.vimeo.com/923323883

This program features erotic and cine-dance films that reshape the actions the body on screen. In Hilary Harris’s 9 Variations on a Dance Theme (1966-67), Bettie de Jong performs a dance for the camera as it breaks down and reassembles her movements, reconciling a vast trove of compositions. Captured through twenty-five sessions over the course of a year and reduced to only 13 minutes, Harris’s film is a dynamic reconciliation of the body in time. James Broughton and Kermit Sheets made The Golden Positions (1970) is a meditation on the body in tableaux and the body in movement, forming a catalogue of subtle, tender, and gymnastic musculature more playful than those of Eadweard Muybridge, but doubtlessly descended from him. Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1964-67) was made as an homage to her relationship with composer James Tenney, an erotic film that searches for the resonant core of a shared experience, in this, it is a film of love in which, in Schneemann’s words, neither lover is “subject” or “object.”

Program:
9 Variations on a Dance Theme (13 minutes)
The Golden Positions (32 minutes)
Fuses (22 minutes)

TRT: 67 minutes

AD HOC is made possible thanks to the sponsorship of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.

AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Tess Takahashi, Bart Testa.

AD HOC would like to thank James Cahill, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.