Re: Vision
curated by Blake Williams with 3D films by
Louis Lumière Hy Hirsh Ken Jacobs Lillian Schwartz
Kerry Laitala Darren Domenique Heroux Rainer Kohlberger
Saturday, June 6 | 8:30 PM
Medium specificity goes by the wayside in this presentation of 3D remakes, resurrections, and revisionism, where we conjure some of stereo-cinema’s most Frankensteinian impulses. A programme promising fulfillments of the total desires (Lumière’s return to Arrival, forty years later), revitalizations of lost views—depth appended by new means (Hirsch’s multi-planar opus, re-vitalized with Pulfrich glasses)—and myriad glimpses of flat worlds becoming voluminous years-if-not-decades after conception simply because we can, authorial intent be damned!
Blake Williams is an american artist and filmmaker (Houston, Texas, 1985) based in Toronto, where he also writes film criticism publications such as Cinema Scope and Filmmaker magazines. His 3D films have screened internationally, including venues such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Locarno Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is the co-founder of the production company BlueMagenta Films.
This program is rated PG
Arrival of a Train 3D, dir. Louis Lumière
1935 | France | 1 | 35mm on video | Polarized 3D
Four decades after pioneering the birth of cinema, Louis Lumière reimagined his most iconic short using early stereoscopic technology. A steam locomotive pulls into La Ciotat station as passengers step onto the platform, their movements amplified by a historic 3D process that bridges early silent actualities with modern immersive film.
Come Closer, dir. Hy Hirsh
1953 | USA | 7 | 16mm | Pulfrich glasses
One of (if not) the first 3-D computer abstract films ever made. Using complex oscilloscope patterns moving whimsically to Caribbean swing music, often with five to six different sets of images appearing simultaneously in an early use of split screen techniques.
Globe, dir. Ken Jacobs
1969 | USA | 22 | 16mm | Pulfrich glasses
Flat image (of a snowbound suburban housing tract) blossoms into 3D only when viewer places Eye Opener before the right eye. (Keeping both eyes open, of course. As with all stereo experiences, center seats are best. Space will deepen as one views further from the screen.) The found-sound is X-ratable (not for children or Nancy Reagan) but is important to the film's perfect balance (GLOBE is symmetrical) of divine and profane.
Apotheosis, dir. Lillian Schwartz
1972 | USA | 4 | 16mm on video | Chromadepth glasses
Apotheosis consists primarily of electronic medical images, extensively manipulated and transformed at Schwartz’s hand using optical cinema techniques. These images were the output of a positron emission tomography scanner—a PET scan—that imaged the interior biological functions of the human body by electronic detection of the decay products of radionucleotide tracers given to the patient.
Orbit, dir. Kerry Laitala
2006 | USA | 10 | 16mm | Chromadepth glasses
Candy apple light emissions filmed at a Topsham, ME fair create a series of photic stimulating events that tickle the retinas.
Au hasard, dir. Darren Dominique Heroux
2026 | Canada | 9 | video | Duel-vision glasses
You are given coloured glasses, red or blue, but not to render images 3D, but to subtract all dimensions. Whatever colour you get will decide the film you see, just as the proverbial tint of our glasses might set in motion our personal, social and political beliefs. Do you dare take the glasses off?
not even nothing can be free of ghosts, dir. Rainer Kohlberger
2016 | Austria / Germany | 11 | video | Diffraction glasses
Made without a camera, using algorithms programmed to respond to the rhythm of light, this film explores the topology of dark space and tests the senses through vibrating light compositions whose rhythm of appearing and disappearing leaves a trace in the viewers’ minds even after they have left the darkness of the cinema.