Are you ready to spend three years of your life for something that will not bring you too much money and a lot of pain?
Rene Rozon, FIFA's Founding Director
The pared-down functionality of the filmmaking allows for [Georg] Baselitz's work to seem all the more vibrant and dramatic.
Adam Nayman
Recurring themes of order and anarchy did emerge. In Zone B both were presented with shifting contextual values and meanings that constitute the nature of politics, power relations, the creative spirit and sex on a day-to-day basis.
Wayne Baerwaldt
It's hard to imagine a spectacle more awesome and strangely dead than what Chaos Computer Club achieved at City Hall. Entitled Stereoscope or Blinkenlights, the CCC turned the curvileniear City Hall windows into a huge Pong game board.
Wayne Baerwaldt
Video is really about sound whereas still photography- if it doesn’t have movement, it’s a dead picture. Still photography is about freezing time. Photographs that I like have a lot of movement, emotion and drama. It captures the decisive moment in time, the 1/100th of a second.
Larry Towell
As the lone Canadian at the esteemed photography agency Magnum, Towell used a small camcorder that Sony gave to some of the company’s shooters as a proposed experiment. “I wouldn’t have made a film unless someone gave me a camera.”
Allan Tong
[The Making of Monsters] was a zany, subversive, occasionally screwball and constantly thought-provoking short, about the clash of artistic practices and mass media realities. And its central casting was genius: [Bertolt] Brecht was played by a talking fish.
Matthew Hays
I think the suburban dream has turned out to be a nightmare.
Christopher Hume
I don’t want people to like [the film]. I want them to be angry, and I want them to be provoked into taking some kind of stance and demanding more and insisting on more than what we’ve got so far.
Christopher Hume
Stories can be resolved, films can be resolved, but mine aren’t resolved. I’m making conditions that are not final.
Stan Douglas
[Stan] Douglas’ visually complex works aren’t just mechanically and stylistically clever, they offer constellations of carefully researched historical references, and poetic and rigorous intellectualism.
Nancy Lanthier
The big question in making a film biography of an artist is finding the balance between the man and the work. Where is that balance?
John Walker
I started seeing that in my own life, I moved from photography to cinematography, in order to escape that isolation of the camera. You know, my girlfriends all complained when I was a teenager: “You’re spending all your time in the darkroom. What’s wrong?” I could see parallels there between [Paul] Strand and me.
John Walker
The longer you hold a shot, the more intensity a scene has because you’re there. You’re present. And that’s the scene that both makes and breaks the film.
John Walker
Some people that there is some kind of narrative element in my films, even though it's largely inadvertent. So I thought, well I never have tried telling a story in my films, maybe I should try.
Michael Snow

One thing is certain: we can't keep looking at cable companies to be the saviour of broadcast assets. The CRTC know they've got to come up with a less monopolistic map of our broadcast and new media world and create conditions for new players to enter the field.

Barri Cohen

2009 Spring

POV's editor and director/cinematographer/writer John Walker discuss his extraordinary works in the world of art, including Strand, Chambers, Tracks and Gestures, A Winter Tan and the current innovative feature Passage in part two of a career-ranging interview.

Plus, we profile artists Larry Towell, Michael Snow and Stan Douglas and examine Toronto's Reel Artists film festival and Montréal's Festival International du Film sur L'Art.