The Strange Blues of Cowboy Red

Running Time

This feature film is an exotic romp through the ’60s in song and dance. A fantasy that pokes fun not only at some hallowed institutions but at itself as well.

Earthware

This short, impressionistic film takes us to Nigeria, Japan, Mexico and India, where craftsmen work clay to produce ritual vessels and everyday objects.

Horses in Winter

Reflections of a man who as a young boy spent his summers in a small Canadian town.

Anger After Death

A film mingling documentary and dramatic elements to portray the effects of the threat of chemical and biological warfare on the contemporary mentality. The chemist who manufactures the secret weapons, the scientist who comments on them with complete detachment, the soldier of the First World War, killed by poison gas, who returns to life to discover the manner of his dying--all make their claims on the audience in an arresting, provocative way.

Slippage

In the dark winter of 1995, Linda Giles, a Victoria-based installation artist, had a show at the old XChanges Gallery on North Park Street, in Vancouver. Before the show came down, Suzy Raxlen donned her black tutu and inked her sensitive hands with the printers ink that she plied in her trade as a master printer. She moved through the gallery of white veils, acting out a minimalist dance of thwarted desire, repression and frustration...

Jaffa-Gate

1930's found-footage, slowed down with original music.

Pure Mutation

A biology lab circa 1920, becomes colourized as the camera engages in a number of pans past strange forms in bottles and under glass. This is the basis for a formalist exploration of shape, colour and tonal loops on the sound track.

Fish Don't Talk

"I am sent to camp as a nine year old. I cannot swim, and my parents have gone to Europe for six weeks! It is 1954, and I have not been away from home much…so I refuse to swim, and fish off the dock. My mother writes in her trip book. It is the only book she will write. I catch a big fish. The camp director takes my picture… They should have taken me to Europe with them. I would have behaved." –R.R.

Duck Talk

A short, sweet tape. Kind of painterly in its use of camera as it moves in a fluid way over a set that consists of a white picket fence, a plastic goose and hen, plastic, larger-than-life daisies, and some miscellaneous electronic gismos.

U - Champions

"Mutt and Jeff meet Felix in a battle for the letter "U". Using old black and white cartoons and contact-printed 35 mm film that I scratched on, I combined the three elements into a primordial soup." Rick Raxlen

Mirage

An intriguing inside-out view of moving figures and images, made by using a color negative print. Figures and faces appear in a shimmering haze. These are shades of people and of movements, appearing, retreating, as in a mirage.

Rocka-Lula-Hula

Hula dancing. Animation; mixed media.

Tongue Tied

Part of a trilogy that started with Grey's Lullaby, Tongue Tied was shot and processed at E.T.C. and set aside for three or four years. It deals with an artist on a voyage and is reflective without being too serious. It is in black and white, and uses a strobing grey pattern of digitized images.

The Polytechnic World

The Polytechnic World allows us to see images created by sounds, thanks to a Casio PT-30. We see the yellow and grey image of the small Casio melting down and then becoming whole again. The soundtrack fades, then rises; it's a theme with variations on a theme. This tape would interest those looking for video with an emphasis on special effects, or who like to watch things metamorphose before their very eyes. This is poetry in motion and we are drawn to it.

Grey's Lullaby

Using a program which "reads" sixteen shades of grey, the artist has produced a quiet, calming tape; a neutral panacea to help fight against the increasingly frenetic noise levels, both audio and visual.

Kanga vs Werewolf

"Done on cels almost entirely. I rotoscoped werewolves and cops and babies and animals and maidens-in-distress and put on a dub reggae track by my son Mossman so it bubbles along in a kind of nonsensical way…very colourful and frantic but not seizure-inducing as some of my earlier work was." –R.R.