Pictures of Sound

An ecstatic, kinetic formal study of light, colour, and movement shot in the region of the Montreal River which so inspired members of the Group of Seven.

Shot in Hi8 video using a high-speed shutter and a spinning turret camera mount, "Machine in the Garden" is inspired by, and an homage to, apparatus-oriented work such as D. Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" and Michael Snow's "La Region Centrale."

House Arrest is at once literal, metaphorical, and phenomenological. It is a work that Kerr wants read as an open visual text. Being under house arrest provided the content, (home) and structure for the “daily practice” of recording. His intention was to design a camera and apparatus that would break from the conventions of everyday videography; a visual system that would evoke a physical and perceptual impact; an accelerated and experiential cinema.

The imagery of "Canal" captures the activity of freighters, ship's crews, dock workers and the historical masonry that the original Welland Canal was constructed from... The film is about going into my "own world of youth" and spontaneously documenting the canal environment as an adult.

This abstract travelogue flies just over the surface of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario. "Plein Air" is an engrossing sonic and visual trip and a continuation of Kerr's fascination with landscape cinema.

Field Trip is a travel diary on the American social landscape. The images consist of visual research for future film projects and were accumulated during my many location scouting trips to the United States between 1980 and 1995. Over time, I have come to regard this photographic archive as a collection of works of historical and personal value. Over the years, I began to rework the photographs. The more I handled and touched them, the less I thought of them as photographs and the more I saw them as something that could be hand-shaped, altered, transformed and re-imagined. With three voices for Joan LaBarbara, composition by Morton Feldman.

A travelogue as catharsis, "i was a strong man until i left home" blends footage from several trips across North America, by plane, train and car. Informed by principles of Imagist Poetry, Kerr turns his camera on familiar imagery of the American travel experience, yet renders the quotidian as abstract, the continuity of perception as fragments. Employing a method he refers to as 'Digital Sketching,' "i was a strong man until i left home" possesses the intimacy of a flip through an artist's sketchbook.

Shot in 1987 in high contrast 16mm, action : study marks the genesis of Kerr’s forays into a process he now refers to as ‘digital sketching’. Action: Study depicts Kerr’s daughter playing on the shores of Georgian Bay, but could easily be mistaken as a work of abstract animation. Kerr combines innovative hand-held techniques with the ultra-sensitivity of the film stock to create a startling wash of jagged, erratic, and constantly dynamic compositions of black and white. Indeed, at times reality seems to melt in front of us.

Experimental film by Richard Kerr.

"human tragedy on a grand scale" is a response to "never confuse movement with action" and the struggle of dealing with the Hemingway family. What results is a piece very different from its predecessor - a visual poem, episodic in nature, made up of travel diaries compiled while working with Patrick. The issue now is the reconciliation and cathartic transformation from a Hemingway biography to a re-consideration of autobiography. The biographer takes us on a journey away from Patrick Hemingway - the cool, controlled persona - to East Vancouver, documenting lives stripped bare of pretension. The scope is broadened. Patrick Hemingway and all things Hemingway become insignificant.

In September 1998, Kerr released "never confuse movement with action," a post-modern biography of Patrick Hemingway (a grandson of Ernest Hemingway). July 1999 was the centenary of Ernest Hemingway. There would be the publication of yet another posthumous novel. The Hemingway family hired a merchandising agent - Ernest Hemingway was now a brand name. The trust fund was secured for future generations.1999 was Ernest Hemingway's year. But when Patrick Hemingway saw "never confuse movement with action," he was less than pleased. Worried about his father's reaction, a lawyer was hired and injunction threatened against the work. In negotiations with the Hemingway lawyer, director Richard Kerr agreed to produce an alternative version, with no promises to cut the objectionable material.

An eight-minute work filmed on 35mm film, Collage d’Hollywood explores the materiality of the film medium in a literal way. Collage is assembled from movie trailers found at a deserted drive-in cinema, and explores onscreen sex and violence

As an extension of his INDUSTRIE/INDUSTRY project, Richard Kerr furthers his appropriation of feature film trailers, formally reconstructing their cinematic language. Monochromatic French film trailers from a bygone era provide the source material, and here the actions of the actors are secondary to the physical movement of celluloid. A brilliant formalist montage of wipes creates an awareness of film motion and rhythm.

Inspired by Beat Poet Ed Dorn's assertion that a poem is a 'document,' "Universe of Broken Parts" reflects Richard Kerr's interest in the poetics of image and sound. Transitioning from a balletic dance of shadows playing basketball, to pure abstraction of shape and colour, and cresting with images of police in riot gear, UNIVERSE amalgamates Kerr's painterly and documentarian impulses into a contrapuntal, yet fluid whole.

Morning...came a day early is a poetic study of mortality, based on found footage from the archives of the Nuefield Foundation for the History of Ideas, 1964. Morning...came a day early is based on the principles of imagist poetry; the language of common speech towards clear expression without sentiment.

35mm to digital video. 5:12:00 minute slide show of 160 digitized handmade 35mm slides.