Postal Disruption

Dear valued customers, please note that at the present time there is a national strike affecting Canada Post service, which we use for all shipments, both national and international. Until such a time as it is resolved our shipments are on hold, and we cannot guarantee packages for holiday delivery. Local Toronto customers are encouraged to reach out to us at info@blackzero.ca for in-person pick-up options. Thank you for your patience.

BLACK ZERO is a multimedia publisher specializing in Canadian experimental cinema from the 1960s to the present.

We are named for the second sequence in John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure. What does Black Zero mean to us? It is the solid black frame that marks the zero-point of a film’s countdown leader; it is the dark acetate of a film reel as seen in profile; it is a void and an absolute fill, nothing and everything, the darkness of the movie house magnified to infinity. It is the circle at the centre of each of our discs.

In 1968, Jonas Mekas wrote that the Canadian underground film had “a finer vibration, a finer density, a finer matter.” It was bursting with an extraordinary diversity of forms, and its evolution in years since has prized photographic self-reflexivity, the landscape, the diary. Black Zero seeks to celebrate this cinema in both its dominant forms and its strange detours.