Sea Horses and Flying Fish

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.

Deadpan

Described as "the jauntiest meat-is-murder movie ever made" and "irrational," "Deadpan" deals with dinner-table angst from the fifties. Laughter is forbidden. Anxiety reigns. Cow tongue is served. What to do?

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.

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.

Haunted House

The re-animation via rotoscope of parts of Bud Fischers SLICK SLEUTHS (1928) into a loopform.

Jaffa-Gate

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

15 Soldiers, 11 Machines, 8 Cows

This video is a collage of images that takes the viewer down a path between their own virtue and cosmic morality. A quiet anxiety emerges as the strip explores the non-mathematical possibilities of the violent destruction of matter, as well as the habits into which people seem to push their fellows.

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.

Flagman's Nightmare

Made during a love-affair (short) with bridges, road-crew workmen and their day-glow coloured vests, flags and markers, Flagman's Nightmare is part of a loose trilogy. Grey's Lullaby and Pure Mutation being the other two pieces.