Gariné Torossian

"'Platform' focuses on the meanderings of a hip prima donna (Kimberly Pike) who picks her platformed feet up from cords tangled on the floor of a studio filled with movie lights of all shapes and sizes. A tight, hard-edged and extremely self-reverential work of mixed media influences." - Donna Lypchuk, eye Magazine

A short film for System of a Down

"Pomegranate Tree" is an experimental film inspired by the lush and ceremonial paintings of the Qajar dynasty from Persia and Eli Langer's violent, aggressive sketches. The film is a subtle study of sensuality. Originally shot on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm, the film was made for the Splice This! Super 8 Festival in the summer of '98.

A film-within-a-film exploring the body in motion, frame by frame. Built with four frames within one, half of the screen in motion, the other still, this film makes the viewer feel that they are watching a "moving picture." The sensation one gets is of tension...expectation...shock. It freezes one in a frame. The glorious, trenchant music of R. Murray Schafer in the background further adds to the intense "high" of the film.

Shot on 16mm with a soundtrack by Sparklehorse. With "Sparklehorse", Gariné Torossian returns to the collage style of filmmaking explored in her earlier films, "Visions," "Girl From Moush," and "Drowning In Flames." "Sparklehorse" subtly conveys, with characteristic poetry, the ways in which people communicate with and value each other in a world of spiralling meditation. The film is divided into three distinct sections: "Happy Man," "Good Morning Spider" and "Hundreds of Sparrows."

The film "Shadowy Encounters" is an homage to the work of the Quay Brothers. The film is a synthesis of collaged moving and still images taken directly from the Quay Brothers' 35mm films and recontextualized in order to metaphorically and responsively capture and reframe the Quay's films' qualities. The resultant richly textured and layered imagery delves the labyrinthine and secret realms of the Quay Brothers' world.

"In a nod to Perec, Torossian’s An Inventory of Some Strictly Visible Things is a riveting account of the everyday in a small post-Soviet republic: a country obsessed with the catastrophic... It is a powerful celebration of the extraordinary in the ordinary; an essential respite from the white noise of the White House, and the tyranny of the headline." —Bomb (2017)

Girl From Moush is a poetic montage of the artist's journey through her subconscious Armenia. It is not an Armenia based in a reality but one, which appears, like the mythical city of Shangri-La, when ones eyes are closed. A mesh of traditional images 'engraved' in film, with haunting voice-over, and rich colors, music and rhythms that continues long after the film is over. The viewers are engaged and forced through unchartered landscapes of uncertainty and fascination.

Once again, this Armenian Canadian filmmaker proves that she is the world’s best alchemist of handmade abstract film, this time taking on the aesthetic of her contemporaries, Mike and Doug Starn. A natural homage and collabora­tion, in that Torossian's own darkroom tech­niques of decaying and obliterating the surface of film echo the Starns’ approach to photogra­phy in deterioration. Drowning In Flames is a spectacularly mesmerising non-stop express train of images from art history books mutilat­ed into submission. No computer could create the kind of organic textures that seem to peel off the screen, and the effect is akin to an ancient manuscript crumbling in your hands as you turn the page.

Stone, Time, Touch is a documentary made by Gariné Torossian about the relationship of three Armenian women from the diaspora with the land of Armenia. The young woman (played by Kamee Abrahamian) is visiting Armenia for the first time. The older woman, Arsinée Khanjian has a more conflicted and analytical perspective of her identity and her relationship with the fledgling democracy, one of the former Soviet Union republics. She has been to landlocked Armenia many times and comments on photos taken by French photographer Marc Baguelin. The third trajectory is more subtle and is represented by Gariné Torossian herself whose face is super imposed from time to time in this stylistically-layered documentary.

All of the album's songs were made into music videos by various filmmakers, such as the Quay Brothers, Garine Torossian, Grant Gee, and Guy Maddin.