All That Rises

The expansive mountainscapes of the Andes are the basis for this new, 35mm film by Daïchi Saïto. Once again propelled by the free, pulsating improvisation of saxophonist Jason Sharp, in which his heartbeat and breathing play a prominent role, the series of images slowly becomes more abstract. The end result is a hypnotic, sensory meditation on ‘our’ earth.

Due to the SOMA secret society, Tokyo is under a chaotic order of destruction. People who have a high amount of MTE in them are kidnapped and brainwashed by the SOMA.

Accompanied by an extraordinary improvisational score by Montreal-based musician Jason Sharp, Daïchi Saïto’s Engram of Returning is an epic 35mm CinemaScope metaphysical travelogue that reveals a supernal world which pulses and flickers with formal patterns and deep hues.

The film explores familiar landscape imagery Saïto and Goldstein share in their neighbourhood at the foot of Mount-Royal Park in Montréal, Canada. Using the images of maple trees in the park as main visual motif, Saïto creates a film in which the formations of the trees and their subtle interrelation with the space around them act as an agent to transform viewer’s sensorial perception of the space portrayed

A re-photography in video of material that was originally used in a performance during which Karl Lemieux, painted, scratched and burned film loops from an old western 16mm film. Traces of an impossible past and future collide in a trajectory where the present unravels.

Writer and poet Gaston Miron comes back to life through archival documents from a variety of sources. His prose features landscapes of human beings and snow, dances with no future, and endless mines. His impassioned speeches on Quebec culture and identity are superimposed on images of demonstrations and political meetings about the future of Quebec. Between his recollections and fragments of memory, a man stands, passionate, convinced, reciting or dancing, to upset the established order and change things before it is too late.

A vegetal portrait in which the shape of trees becomes pure color, light and shadow, an organic form in a permanent dialogue with abstraction.


Short film by Daïchi Saïto to celebrate Anthology Film Archives’ 50th Anniversary

A visual metaphor for creative process as a sustained state of flux, whereby the deconstruction and reconfiguration of source material manifest themselves as a series of rapid abstract movements. Alluding to the cosmic dance of Shiva, the film is an expression of primal rhythmic energy, moving dialectically but without sublimation. Regeneration ignites destruction, and transformation invites mutation, through clashes of opposing modes such as video/film, surface/depth, and light/darkness.

An exploration into perceptual processes in the act of seeing and listening, Chiasmus takes film as a metaphor for the breathing body, through the intercrossing of the medium and the fragmented images of the body in movement. The rhythm and tension created by the interplay between sound and image, and their disjunction and conjunction, aspire to an organic and sensual moment where inside becomes outside, and outside inside.

Appropriating a brief fragment from a 35mm print of an old Kung Fu movie, Never a Foot Too Far, Even is an action movie without action. Presented in double-projection, with images from two separate rolls overlaid to form a single image, this film focuses on an obscure figure finding himself in a forest path, caught between perpetual motion and stasis. The painterly images fluctuate in the complex shifting of color and texture, phasing in and out through a polymetric structure. It is a perceptual journey without destination in the turning sphere of ever-changing image and sound, whose beginning and end move in parallel towards a fleeting point of convergence. The palindrome of the title alludes to the structure of the film based on various combinations of a series of recurring sequences that move forward and in reverse simultaneously, defying the usual sense of progression. With original sound composition by Malcolm Goldstein.

A direct record with on-screen edition in which beings, objects, light, shadow, and color are portrayed in a program, as if they were part of an ecosystem.