Ann Pearson

A vignette based on the story of John McIntosh, the Ontario developer of the McIntosh apple.

Barbara Hammer’s Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking. Today, Audience serves as an invaluable historical archive, providing quick but complex portraits of lesbian scenes in different cities and countries: the San Francisco women are bold and raucous, treating Hammer like a celebrity; the London crowd more reserved and tentative; the Canadians politely critical after initial hesitation. It also functions as a testament to the power of Hammer herself as a figure of lesbian culture, showing how fully she engages audiences to incite new forms of discourse about representation.

This film, made especially for television in 1956, embodies the conventional myth that women indirectly exercise power through their ability to manipulate men through sex and marriage.

This short film from the Canada Vignettes series profiles a unique French-Canadian family, the Fourniers, 12 of whom work as stunt men and women for films.