Concordia’s Video III Showcase Wrap-Up
Concordia’s Communication Studies Video III course celebrated their semester on Wednesday, April 29th, with an 80 minute vernissage showcasing twelve works by its graduating students. Ranging from self-portraits to documentaries, the student productions showed a sense of play and focus that is sure to mature as the creators go beyond the confines of the classroom. Congratulations to all Communication Studies students involved in the productions!
Notables include an experimental short with blown out brightness levels, Jean-Marc Seguin’s ABCm7 (2:30), in which a young boy discovers a love of music by rocking out on a couch with a tennis racket. In terms of playfulness, Seguin’s short lead the pack. Rather than contrast levels, Daniel Paradis’ Watching (2:30) played with editing techniques. Though the idea of a video of one’s life playing through an eye is surely one of those staple student production contrivances, Paradis’ focus kept the idea grounded: if a person were to see every image and action we performed through our eyes, would they really know the person? While the bulk of Naomi Mark’s self-portrait, No Fixed Address (3:30) was the usual self-reflection of one’s youth, the real star of this show were the opening and closing credits: animated child-like hand-drawn pictures moving from one place to the next.
Unwelcome (1:40), directed by Kerrie Bremner was a short and sweet personal indictment of the Catholic Church’s harsh treatment of a young devout girl. The hurt of rejection by an undeveloped juvenile may seem trivial to the adult narrator, but has certainly left a lasting impression.
Three of the productions in particular showed much promise for mainstream media. The Art of Being (9:55), a documentary on the life of a saxophone player, actually felt like something that could be aired on PBS – especially the open moments in which the viewer discovers the finer details of the saxophone before finally revealing its subject through a blur behind the instrument. Fine Line (12:50) was the most au courant of the bunch – a doc dealing with racial profiling in Montreal. The final and longest video of the night, Snake’s Poker (14:30), was a look at a gambling club in Kahnawake and how its native and non-native patrons mixed. Its owner proved the most interesting and human of the interviewees, though one of the other interviewees made the place seem like a microcosm of the colonisation project. The project was headed by Angie-Pepper O’Bomsawin, who in contrast to her relative (famed NFB director Alanis O’Bomsawin), seems to be focusing on contemporary native life and the future of native/non-native relations.
A personal favourite would be Ezequiel Gerszonowitz’ Cycle Theory (3:45), a humorous self-portrait in which the narrator claims to be obsessed with turning circular objects, ever since he first laid eyes on a washing machine. The director then turns the camera on his grandfather in order to reveal the origin of his circular obsession and is met with sass.
If any of the videos are ever uploaded online, let me know and I will post them here.
Screenings | 
May 3, 2009
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