Watching the Detectives

Watching the Detectives

Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people.

2017 · 36 min · Documentary

Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took the Internet chat rooms to try to find the culprits, looking for details in photographs uploaded to the sites that could point to the guilt of potential suspects.

Directed by Chris Kennedy

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Watching the Detectives

The North Sea

Both from Chris Kennedy.

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Tamalpais

Tamalpais · 2009

MovieDocumentary

Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing – to transfer vision to a sheet of paper – is used for an opposite effect – to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time.

The North Sea

The North Sea · 2022

“As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise of happiness encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development.” – Rosalind Krauss

Go Between

Go Between · 2024

MovieDocumentary

Elegant and rigorous, while surprisingly playful, Chris Kennedy’s Go Between observes the Brisbane River, passing boats, and cars on the William Jolly Bridge through an intoxicating play of masking and superimpositions.

Lombard

Lombard · 2007

A quick defamiliarization of a familiar San Francisco landmark.

Simultaneous Contrast

Simultaneous Contrast · 2008

Simultaneous Contrast

The striped pattern of the municipal bus shelters in San Francisco becomes a fixed foreground behind which the city passes. Spatial oscillations provide a constantly permutating play of figure, ground and space, imaging the possibility of being two places at once.

Brimstone Line

Brimstone Line · 2013

Three freestanding grids placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario (reminiscent of the Dürer Grid used by Renaissance draughtsmen to achieve accurate proportions) become devices through which the stationary camera frames the landscape and creates perspective.

4x8x3

8mm unsplit. Streetcars circle. The ferry leaves and returns in one gesture. Camera and character dance.

Late Spring

Late Spring · 2006

Not in distribution.

Colonnade

Colonnade · 2011

Not in distribution.

The Acrobat

The Acrobat · 2007

Inspired in part by a poem by Toronto poet Ryan Kamstra, the acrobat is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics – the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall. If the force of gravity is in relation to both mass and proximity, how does the force of politics resonate across space and time?

Trent-Severn

Trent-Severn · 2020

"Travelling the Trent-Severn Waterway by houseboat, from the Kirkfield Liftlock to Omemee." (the8fest)

Lines Drawn

Lines Drawn · 2023

MovieDocumentary

Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, LINES DRAWN looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other ?

Phantoms

Phantoms · 2012

A study of the incongruous and iconic suspended monorail in Wuppertal Germany. Shot on super 8 and finished on 35mm film, Phantoms expertly employs the exaggerated grainy texture of the emulsion to suggest a netherworld out of time, both science fiction and ancient history, while an accompanying text muses on the vanity and folly suggested by the mysterious structure.

Towards a Vanishing Point

Towards a Vanishing Point · 2012

Towards a Vanishing Point

Footage shot in Coba, Mexico and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt and a found film from California serve as inspiration for a series of sketches on the notion of the vanishing point.

Monte de San Pedro

Monte de San Pedro · 2016

Monte de San Pedro

Not in distribution.

349 (for Sol LeWitt)

349 (for Sol LeWitt) · 2011

349 (for Sol LeWitt)

“A digitally animated version of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #349, which was commissioned by Toronto’s Mercer Union gallery in 1981. Recreating LeWitt’s geometric vocabulary and primary colour palette, 349 careens through emblazoned emblems, lifted from walls and transported into dialogue with LeWitt’s exploration of spatial systems and human emotion.” – Andréa Picard

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102 Minutes That Changed America · 2008

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The morning of September 11, 2001 is shown through multiple video cameras in and around New York City, from the moment the first WTC tower is hit until after both towers collapse.

Loose Change

Loose Change · 2005

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2nd Edition of Loose Change documentary. What if...September 11th was not a surprise attack on America, but rather, a cold and calculated genocide by our own government?We were told that the twin towers were hit by commercial jetliners and subsequently brought down by jet fuel. We were told that the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757. We were told that flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We were told that nineteen Arabs from halfway across the globe, acting under orders from Osama Bin Laden, were responsible. What you will see here will prove without a shadow of a doubt that everything you know about 9/11 is a complete fabrication. Conspiracy theory? It's not a theory if you can prove it.Written and narrated by Dylan Avery, this film presents a rebuttal to the official version of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the 9/11 Commission Report.

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