The Evolution of the Pacific Cinemathèque

This post is, in part, a celebration of the Pacific Cinémathèque, but it's also a glimpse of a film community as it was still taking shape. When the Australian filmmakers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill spoke with programmer Tony Reif in 1974, the Cinémathèque was only a few years old. Its community was one of filmmakers, programmers, teachers, and their activities continually crossed over, with Intermedia, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the CBC, the NFB, Simon Fraser and UBC providing different kinds of space, equipment, employment and occasion.

The discussion between Reif and the Cantrills captures the Vancouver experimental film community before its history had hardened into an account of movements and major figures, when the films and the conditions for their exhibition, circulation and preservation were still being made together. Pacific Cinémathèque became one of the places where those activities could press on in new directions.

Many thanks to Mark Loeser for loan of Cantrill Filmnotes 20.

S.B., September 1, 2026

 

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PACIFIC CINÉMATHÈQUE

by Stephen Broomer

In 1969, an audience of six-hundred crowded into the Vancouver Art Gallery for four hours of independent and student films. Two adjoining galleries were used at once, so that a spectator dissatisfied with one film could wander into another, arriving midway, then return to find the first one tapering down. Tony Reif, a young Vancouver critic who had begun to chronicle the filmmakers, screenings and institutions gathering around Vancouver arts organization Intermedia, described the arrangement in Take One as “great for pattern recognition but hard on details and continuity.” Admission was a dollar, although nobody was turned away for lack of money, and the evening raised $450 for the new Intermedia Film Co-op, enough to help filmmakers afford prints to place their work in distribution. Reif named Al Sens, Gary Lee-Nova, Al Razutis, Gordon Fidler and Arnold Saba, along with films coming from Simon Fraser University and the Vancouver School of Art. He reserved his greatest enthusiasm for David Rimmer’s Square Inch Field and Migration, two films by a filmmaker who, he noted, had at that time only been working seriously in 16mm for about a year and a half.¹ 

Five years later the Intermedia Film Co-op was gone. Pacific Cinémathèque had taken up some of its work, with regular exhibitions, preservation initiatives, and a circulating Film Study Collection. The Cinémathèque had started in 1971–72 with Werner Aellen, previously executive director of Intermedia, as its first president. Kirk Tougas became its first manager, with support coming from figures around the Vancouver Art Gallery, the NFB and the local film industry, among them Tony Emery, Doris Shadbolt, Bruce Pilgrim and Mike Collier.²  By the time that Arthur and Corinne Cantrill interviewed Reif in 1974, the Cinémathèque was showing films four times a week, buying prints for an archive, distributing British Columbia films and trying to arrange a circuit through smaller communities in the province. It still had no theatre of its own, but had use of one through the National Film Board. Reif remembers Tougas spending his first year and a half “doing everything himself.” 

Reif’s “Letter from Vancouver” had appeared in Take One in October 1969. By 1974 he was program director at Pacific Cinémathèque. In 1980, his essay, “West Coast Filmmaking: History,” appeared in Pierre Véronneau and Piers Handling’s collection Self Portrait, and in 1983 he and Razutis wrote “Critical Perspectives on Vancouver Avant-Garde Cinema 1970–83” for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Vancouver: Art and Artists, 1931–1983.³  The later essays ordered the decade into tendencies and periods.

The CBC’s Vancouver office had begun commissioning experimental work for Enterprise, a late-night series produced by Stan Fox. Artists could sometimes obtain stock and equipment through the CBC and the Film Board. Intermedia offered equipment, working space and screenings. Workshops developed at UBC and Simon Fraser. Fox used Enterprise and its successor, New World, to commission and broadcast films by Sylvia Spring, David Rimmer, Tom Shandel and other young Vancouver filmmakers. Fox himself made What Happened Last Summer (1967), on the hippie community around Kitsilano’s Fourth Avenue. Shandel’s Generations (1969) documented Jerry Rubin’s appearance at Simon Fraser University.⁴ 

Al Sens, a cartoonist as well as an animator, he had been making films since the late 1950s, building his own animation equipment and working by methods that allowed a fairly complete command of the image under the camera. David Orcutt’s experiments at UBC led to Hut 87, where film and slide projection, words, graphics and sound were brought into multichannel presentations. Sam Perry’s loops and projections accompanied performances by the Al Neil Trio before expanding in scale with the Trips Festival of 1966, where dozens of projectors were distributed through a large performance space. Al Razutis’s later history of the period follows these activities through animation, performance, television and multimedia, placing the emergence of Rimmer, Shandel, Spring and others around 1967 within an experimental media ecosystem that was already developing.⁵ 

Intermedia opened in a warehouse at 575 Beatty Street. Filmmakers shared the building with poets, painters, sculptors, musicians and performance artists. Razutis established an underground screening program there and, with other filmmakers, organized the Intermedia Film Co-op, modelled after the open distribution systems of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York and Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. Its first catalogue was put together by Razutis, Gerry Gilbert and Ed Varney, and its titles included independent, animated and dramatic work as well as student films from Simon Fraser and the Vancouver School of Art. Werner Aellen, trained as an architect and working at the NFB before becoming Intermedia’s executive director, helped consolidate grants, space, equipment and staff. By 1972, Intermedia was disintegrating.⁶  According to Reif, the bookings fell away and nobody was managing it full time.

Kirk Tougas had already been writing about film. His own “Vancouver Letter” appeared in Take One in 1970.⁷ At the Cinémathèque, the archive was built by purchasing prints from Vancouver filmmakers at print cost and paying an additional honorarium. The Film Study Collection likewise acquired prints, grouped shorter films onto reels and prepared stills and written information around them. Reif was openly selective about the process. He hoped the films would be better served by such programs than by catalogues offering supposedly “objective” descriptions. Programs of British Columbia films had already gone to the Cinémathèque québécoise, the National Film Theatre in Ottawa, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. For towns within British Columbia, several engagements could be arranged around the same print so that rental and shipping became manageable for an audience of thirty or forty people.

In The Politics of Perception (1973), Tougas begins with the fifty-second trailer for Michael Winner’s The Mechanic, with Charles Bronson introduced as its brutally efficient killer, and copies it repeatedly for thirty-three minutes, each new generation made from the previous one. Definition falls away; gradations of colour contract toward dark and light; grain spreads through the frame; the soundtrack roughens until the trailer reaches white noise. The original advertisement has already reduced an entire commercial feature to Bronson, guns, cars, motion, violence. Reif calls it “an incredibly concise visual statement of what Hollywood films are all about,” especially its use of motion to produce a kinaesthetic response before the spectator has much time to consider how that response has been produced. Tougas keeps returning until the source can no longer perform as it wishes with its original efficiency. 

When Reif returned to the film in “West Coast Filmmaking: History,” he placed its method beside Rimmer’s Fracture: the Charles Bronson trailer subjected to “continuous optical and sound degradation to the point of white noise and white light.”⁸  By 1983, Reif and Razutis grouped Tougas with Tom Braidwood and Razutis among filmmakers pursuing media critique and deconstruction, alongside structural-minimal work by Rimmer and Chris Gallagher, poetic and synaesthetic films, and personal and diaristic work. They described “many avant-gardes” operating in Vancouver during the decade.⁹

By 1974 Rimmer was already the local filmmaker most readily identified outside Vancouver. Surfacing on the Thames, Watching for the Queen, Fracture and the newly completed Canadian Pacific had established a group of methods—found footage, optical printing, repeated images, fixed viewpoints, severe alterations of duration—that recur elsewhere in the local work without amounting to a common style. In 1980, Reif wrote of Rimmer’s increasingly still frames, in which camera movement gave way to the movement of the optical printer, and of films that hold an image until its potential meanings begin to multiply. He connects Fracture, with its repeated fragments of a woman, a child and a man, directly to Tougas’s treatment of The Mechanic.¹⁰ Razutis, writing about Surfacing on the Thames, concentrates instead upon the enlargement of a few feet of anonymous footage, a barge passing through mist extended by long dissolves until movement is dispersed through the succession of photographic frames.¹¹

Reif remembers the “chaotic super-saturated overlayed imagery” of Razutis’s Aaeon, followed by films in which extreme tonal contrast and optical printing had become more measured while remaining elusive and complex. In The Moon at Evernight... he saw soft explosions of grain, white and red-white centres, eventually a woman’s face and the form of another woman seated with her legs stretched out.

Sens reappears near the end of this survey, now in his forties, still drawing simple figures and making what Reif calls absurdist moral statements about violence and corrupt social relations. The Film Board work was less personal, Sens felt, and he continued looking for money to make films on his own terms. 

Pacific Cinémathèque built its archive and Film Study Collection at the same time. A print bought from a filmmaker could be preserved, shown in group screenings, sent to a university or film society. Experimental film relied on these exchanges among galleries, campuses, co-ops, distributors and cinematheques, and its audience was assembled gradually, from one screening to the next. Circulation also produced its own records: catalogues, stills, program notes, correspondence, and prints acquired for the archive. Reif describes this in the plainest terms: fees, freight, thirty-person audiences and borrowed theatres. Its archive was built through circulation, as films moved among makers, institutions and audiences.

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Notes

1. Tony Reif, “Letter from Vancouver,” Take One 2:2 (October 1969): 26; reprinted in Mike Hoolboom and Brett Kashmere, eds., Reading David Rimmer (Toronto: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, 2014).
2. Michael Zryd, “A Short Institutional History of Canadian Experimental Film,” in Stephen Broomer and Michael Zryd, Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2021); see the account of Intermedia and the founding of the Cinémathèque.
3. Tony Reif, “West Coast Filmmaking: History,” in Pierre Véronneau and Piers Handling, eds., Self Portrait: Essays on the Canadian and Quebec Cinemas (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1980), 122–38; Al Razutis and Tony Reif, “Critical Perspectives on Vancouver Avant-Garde Cinema 1970–83,” in Vancouver: Art and Artists, 1931–1983 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983), 286–99.
4. Zryd, “A Short Institutional History.”
5. Al Razutis, “Recovering Lost History: Vancouver Avant-Garde Cinema 1960–1969,” in Vancouver: Art and Artists, 1931–1983 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983), 160–73.
6. Ibid.; Zryd, “A Short Institutional History.”
7. Kirk Tougas, “Vancouver Letter,” Take One 2:11 (May–June 1970): 29. 
8. Reif, “West Coast Filmmaking: History.”
9. Razutis and Reif, “Critical Perspectives on Vancouver Avant-Garde Cinema 1970–83.”
10. Reif, “West Coast Filmmaking: History.”
11. Al Razutis, “David Rimmer: A Critical Analysis,” in David Rimmer Film (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1980).

PACIFIC CINEMATHEQUE PACIFIQUE VANCOUVER

Originally published in Cantrills Filmnotes, no. 20 (December 1974), 26–30. Arthur and Corinne Cantrill conducted the interview during Pacific Cinematheque’s exhibition Personal Film—Content and Context, organized in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Tony Reif was then program director of Pacific Cinematheque.

THE CINEMATHEQUE RECENTLY ORGANIZED AN EXHIBITION OF ‘PERSONAL FILM—CONTENT AND CONTEXT’ IN COLLABORATION WITH THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY. FILMMAKERS WHO PERSONALLY PARTICIPATED INCLUDED PAT O’NEILL, LENNY LIPTON, JAMES BROUGHTON, WARREN SONBERT, MICHAEL MIDEKE, JAN LENICA, BYRON BLACK, CORINNE CANTRILL, AND CANADIAN FILMMAKERS MENTIONED BELOW. WE ASKED PROGRAM DIRECTOR TONY REIF TO TELL US, FIRST, SOMETHING ABOUT THE CINEMATHEQUE......

TONY REIF: Pacific Cinematheque was formed about three years ago after the Vancouver Film Co-op fell apart. The Co-op was inspired by the model of the New York Co-op, Canyon Cinema, and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in Toronto. This all happened in the late ’60’s. But eventually the bookings fell away and there was no-one managing it full time.

[Was the Co-op giving weekly film screenings?] No, it wasn’t. But there was another group in Vancouver called Intermedia who, among other things, had screenings of underground films. But they were into more than film: it was an attempt to have artists from various media working together and individually in a common space.

A few people got together and decided that an alternative to commercial theatres should be established in Vancouver which could also be an archive and a distribution organization. So the Cinematheque was born. It’s a non-profit society which has funding from the Canada Council, from the B.C. Cultural Fund—that’s the Provincial government, and from certain local foundations. It depends for the rest of its income from its film screenings, notably, and to a lesser extent from the distribution.

[How did you all get together?] Tony Emery was very much behind it; he’s the ex-director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Art Gallery has always been a very important ally in our work and has helped us in many ways—making space and facilities available: business facilities such as secretarial assistance, and several members of our board have been art gallery staff. So Tony and Doris Shadbolt were major movers, and Werner Aellen who was a Vancouver producer. The directors are mostly filmmakers or people in the CBC or the National Film Board.

Kirk Tougas became the manager of the Cinematheque and for the first year and a half he was doing everything himself. In fact during that time the archive was established and regular screenings three times a week—different each night—were established through the assistance of the Film Board who loaned us their theatre.

[Are you still doing screenings three times a week?] No, we’re doing four a week now, and apart from the archive we have distribution. The archive is for Vancouver filmmaking; that’s simply a matter of buying prints from filmmakers at one time print cost. In other words, you pay for the film and we pay an honorarium which is the commercial value of the print, and then just keep the print preserved. And of course we hope to preserve original master materials as well. And for feature films as well as independent filmmaking, but only in the British Columbia area, and the distribution organization—what we call the Film Study Collection—similarly is only for local independent filmmaking, and is an attempt to distribute these films in a way which would be more successful than a co-operative.

We do select the films that we distribute, and we buy the prints from the filmmakers. We negotiate for a simple overall fee or price for the non-exclusive distribution of the film, and put the films into programs of approximately half an hour each, or however long the film may be. Several short films will go on to one reel, being either an anthology or a reel of one filmmaker’s work, and the whole thing will be as well documented as we can with stills and information and so on, which we’ll do both for publicity and film study purposes. And we hope that films will be better described in this way than if they were listed in catalogues with no attempt at selection and “objective” descriptions.

There are other areas the cinematheque is getting into: notably an extension of the distribution idea to include film classics and Canadian feature films, all still from the west coast area, not nationally; although the Film Study Collection is available nationally, and in fact internationally. And we’re into the idea of a touring film society throughout British Columbia, making the films available—at the moment on a semi-monthly basis to small towns which are otherwise cut off.

[How have you made contacts in these towns?] We’ve had contacts through the Art Gallery which has an extension program. We just write to school boards or community arts councils or whoever we hear of who we think may be interested, and if there is a response we try to organise it. By negotiating to have a film available for several weeks for a specified number of showings, we can get the rental down lower than if an individual group booked the film; the shipping charges are absorbed by many people, so it becomes more financially possible for groups of only 30 or 40 people to have these films.

[Do you send programs out of British Columbia very often?] Yes, from the Film Study Collection. We’ve organised programs of British Columbian filmmaking at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal, at the National Film Theatre in Ottawa, one program at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. But it’s pretty slow, so far.

[Are you hoping some programs will go out to Australia?] Yes, that may happen.

[Can you tell us about the programming at the Cinematheque?] It’s very broad. We try to include everything that anyone of us feels is of interest that isn’t available commercially or through educational programs of one kind or another, so this includes notably revivals of classic films; modern art films that are not commercially available; experimental films of all kinds; documentary, ethnographic films; films about music.

We organize our screenings usually around a director, a country, or a period, or a style of filmmaking or something of that nature; or around the information itself, if it were a documentary program.

[Have you had other festivals in the past?] Yes, we had a week of Quebec filmmaking, for example, and there have been special events. For example, Godard presented Tout va bien a couple of years ago. If we can tie into a filmmaker who is touring, we will do that; however, without 35mm facilities at our disposal this is sometimes very difficult and expensive. We hope this situation will be remedied in a couple of years, but at the moment there is no community theatre in Vancouver with 35mm.

This is really the first festival or exhibition of its kind we have organised, though we have had programs of underground and experimental films before. And it’s thanks to the Art Gallery having the budget set aside for a film exhibition that we were able to do this. It’d be hard to stretch the Cinematheque budget to this extent.

We wanted to expose Vancouver to a very broad range of independent and experimental filmmaking. The previous exhibition that the gallery put on two years ago was called Form and Structure in Recent Film, and it was extremely well documented with a beautiful program that was in itself a serious piece of research and documentation. But it only covered the American structural film, really, people like Gehr, Sharits, Frampton, Landow and so on. It was good that it happened, but we didn’t want to repeat it, rather we wanted to set it off with a program that encompassed many many more different approaches to film, uses of the medium, concerns of filmmakers who are working with various film structures. So then we simply looked around to see who was interesting who could come, and it was decided quite soon that as much as possible, we would have filmmakers come from all over with their films—that we would make it into a people event, and try a little bit to break down the cold formality of having films projected in the theatre and people coming for the films and then going home.

[Did the filmmakers attend for the structural program?] No, it was simply the films, and Annette Michelson came and lectured about that particular kind of film.

[It’s a great benefit for the people here to be able to speak informally with the filmmakers.] Especially informally. And we did arrange some workshops where people could spend time in small groups with the filmmakers in a more relaxed situation. For example, Pat O’Neill showed some slides he’d prepared of his current techniques of optical printing and ran a couple of films and discussed his work. And the kind of questions that are asked and the exchange that goes on is less like a screening situation, and more like a workshop.

The range of the exhibition has encompassed documentary filmmaking, animated filmmaking, as well as various different kinds of films which could be called “structural” in another context, but certainly not structural as it’s normally understood. For example, Pat O’Neill’s are obviously highly structured, very concentrated filmic statements, but they do not have the cache of structuralism at all, and they don’t have the same effect either. I think it’s the effect, sometimes a very deadening effect, which is difficult for the specialised audience that has an interest in film, but is not attuned to the highly abstracted use of film form, and the self-referential use of film form which the structural filmmakers use.

We’ve explored other concerns during the exhibition, like the home movie, with Byron Black’s event this afternoon. That provocation of Byron’s, to me, is very important. It brings humour, and it brings the filmmaker as a living person into the exhibition of his films, and it subverts the whole nature of the medium. [Even to the extent of having live musical accompaniment in the theatre.] With an accordion of all things!

[Can you tell us about Vancouver filmmaking. How long would you say there has been interesting filmmaking going on?]

Since about 1967, really. This is the year that people like David Rimmer and Tom Shandel and Sylvia Spring and Al Razutis, and Gary Lee-Nova and others all started round this time to make films. Some had come from travel or studies at the university. Others from the graphic arts and other places. And there was a certain amount of encouragement at that time for film. There was the whole impact of underground filmmaking and the New American Cinema and so on. There was a sympathetic response, and to a large extent, initiation of filmmaking at that time by the CBC. The people there encouraged many of the young filmmakers by commissioning films which they showed on the late night open-ended show called Enterprise. This was around ’68. It was possible to get film stock and equipment from the CBC and from the Film Board here. And Intermedia was an encouragement with regular showings of underground films and a space for people to work in.

This was the beginning, and the filmmakers who emerged and who, to me, are important, are David Rimmer, Al Razutis; Gary Lee-Nova has made beautiful films, but has pretty much stopped filmmaking now. Later filmmakers have come to Vancouver, like Byron Black, who came from the States, or have gone through film schools here, such as the filmmaking workshop at Simon Fraser University, which is a non-credit workshop, which means you have to be devoted to start. People were doing it for love entirely, not even for university credits. Or from the University of British Columbia Theatre and Film Department. The ranks of filmmakers have swelled from these schools; from the Vancouver School of Art which has produced a number of very good animators and which is branching out into the teaching of various other kinds of filmmaking: live action filmmaking, special effects work, and so on.

We also have Sandy Wilson and Peter Bryant, who both went through the Simon Fraser University. Bryant has now made a feature film; low budget: $15,000. Sandy Wilson has made some very fine documentaries.

[Has she been absorbed by the Film Board?] She has made things for the Film Board and for the Provincial Educational Media Theatre. The opportunities to be employed and make money as a filmmaker aren’t so vast in Vancouver. There’s the CBC to some extent, and the Film Board to some extent, and apart from there, and the Provincial Centre I mentioned which is film and video production for the Provincial department of education, there’s not very much except commercials or sponsored films.

[What about some of the other Vancouver filmmakers we’ve seen here, such as Tom Braidwood?] Braidwood went through CBC, and so did Bill Roxborough and so did Kirk Tougas. And these people have emerged in the last three years.

[Many of these filmmakers are concerned with making lyrical, structural statements of one kind or another, investigating formal filmmaking. I think many of them have been influenced very profoundly by David Rimmer, who is, I guess, deservedly the most famous Vancouver filmmaker.]

Al Sens, of course, lives here. He’s an animator and cartoonist for various magazines such as Evergreen, he’s worked for the Film Board and for Simon Fraser University Audio Visual Department and as a filmmaker. But he’s been making cartoons here since the late ’50’s.

A lot of the independent work revolves around structuring film—using loops, repeating patterns—sometimes fairly complex live action material—not necessarily in Dave Rimmer’s style—but where shots are used for their evocative qualities and also as part of a structure that is revealed, maybe over a long period of time. There’s a film by Bill Roxborough called Imaged Dream/Dream Image in which various elements of the film are mirrored in the way the title implies. It’s a film that also uses words; incorporates language into the film as a structural element. But certain words on the soundtrack become significant. The film opens with a single word and closes with another word; one, I think, is ‘Peace’ and the other, ‘Death’.

[Spoken, or as a title?] Spoken, almost shouted. What is printed is the title in various permutations: ‘imaged—imagine’ and so on, and the material is intercut and correlated with the visual imagery.

The effect of the film is difficult to describe in words, but it’s somewhere between an abstract composition and a very concrete composition—each of the images has its own evocative qualities which are subsumed within a structure which in itself may be quite abstract and not necessarily related to the impact of the individual images. At least that’s the way I see the film—it’s an interesting experiment that I haven’t seen duplicated elsewhere.

Kirk Tougas’ films are a sort of exploration of the limits of the film medium through taking particular imagery and simplifying it until it becomes almost non-existent. For example, The Politics of Perception was exactly that. It takes a 50 second theatre trailer for a film The Mechanic that Charles Bronson stars in as a hard killer, and the trailer itself is an incredibly concise visual statement of what Hollywood films are all about—the kinds of manipulations—the ways of using motion to create a kinaesthetic impact in the viewer which hooks you into the particular story line and itself draws out the stereotyped emotional reactions that we’re all used to seeing in commercial filmmaking.

Not only is it revealing in itself, but when it’s looped over and over again some 40 or 50 times over 33 minutes, and each repetition is a generation further—in other words he dupes the previous loop—what you have is a progressive deterioration of image quality eventually into the very bare skeletons of its kinaesthetic quality.

And of course at the same time the gradations of colour reduce themselves finally to black and white, or to dark and light, at least. And the particular qualities of the grain are coarsened and the image becomes eventually white noise. But in the procedure of that happening, and seeing the same structure over and over again, but seeing it each time in a different way, because the surface qualities are somewhat different, by stripping the particularities of the image away, you see more and more of the underlying structure. The same thing happening with the sound.

You have a kind of object lesson on the one hand in the manipulation of responses through the film medium, and on the other hand, a structural kind of investigation into the nature of the visual and plastic qualities of the medium. But it’s an incredibly simple concept which has a number of interesting ramifications. You could say that anyone could do that, and of course anyone could, but to take the found object which is in itself a perfect statement of something and use it to reveal even more is an achievement.

Al Razutis is not so well known as Rimmer, perhaps. His films have been progressing from a kind of chaotic super-saturated overlayed imagery like you saw in AAEON, to a much more measured use of still basically the same kinds of imagery—extreme contrasts of tonal qualities and simplification of imagery achieved through optical printing. To the point sometimes that the original images are consumed sometimes by a fiery explosion of grain and that’s all you can see unless you look very closely, over many viewings.

There’s a film that he’s recently completed called The Moon at Evernight... To me it was simply various kinds of explosions; soft explosions of grain, various qualities of white and red-white centres burning out with red halos. Different forms of these explosions are repeated at different times and with different intervals between them and in different combinations, and so on, with one image that I could make out as a woman’s face, finally, and another that looked like the body of a seated woman with her legs stretched out seen from a three-quarter rear position, the arc of her back very strong, kind of like a backwards ‘L’. When I talked about it with him, he said: didn’t you see this?...didn’t you see that? and he talked about waterfalls and all kinds of narrative elements that I couldn’t see.

Anyway, his films have a quality of very strong visual impact and are becoming more and more organised, and his researches are going into laser holography-image making, eventually in filmmaking.

Al Sens has a very peculiar individual sense of humour. He’s been making films since the late ’50’s, so he’d be in his 40’s now, I guess. His films are very much absurdist moral statements about the nature of man, violence, the corrupt nature of social relations and so on. But it’s always leavened by an absurdist sense of humour.

[His Film Board work was characterised by this.] Yes, although he feels that his Film Board films are less personal than his own work, and as far as possible he tries to find funding for his own work. His techniques are usually very simple, his style of drawing figures is immediately apparent.

The scene here is more or less supported by the Canada Council.

[Is it fairly easy to get a grant, if your work is reasonable?] Not necessarily, because the grants are given nationally and the Expert Committees that judge applications may not be familiar with an applicant’s work.

[Is it centred in Ottawa or Toronto or are there regional committees?] It is shared out among the provinces, but the west coast filmmakers apply to the expert board in Ottawa, on which regional representatives sit.

[Is it a generous funding?] No-one makes a lot of money from the Canada Council; it’s in the area of between $1,000 and $10,000. So apart from that filmmakers have to support themselves through commercial gigs, one way or another.

[Or teaching?] There’s not that much around to do, really. There are three or four teaching positions. Rimmer, Sens and Razutis are all teaching this year.

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Tony Reif is a Vancouver critic, curator, programmer and record producer whose work in the 1960s and 1970s helped document and organize the city’s emerging experimental film culture. He wrote on Vancouver filmmaking for Take One, served as a programmer at Pacific Cinémathèque through much of the 1970s, and later contributed “West Coast Filmmaking: History” to Self Portrait (1980) and, with Al Razutis, “Critical Perspectives on Vancouver Avant-Garde Cinema 1970–83” (1983). His interests later shifted toward music: in 1992 he founded Songlines Recordings, an independent Vancouver label devoted to adventurous jazz, improvised music and contemporary composition.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill were central figures in Australian experimental cinema, working together from 1960 across 16mm film, sound composition, landscape study, expanded cinema and performance. After periods in Brisbane, London and Canberra, they settled in Melbourne, where their screenings and multi-projector events became important to Australian avant-garde film culture. In 1971 they founded Cantrills Filmnotes, which they edited and published for 100 issues through 2000, documenting experimental film and video internationally through interviews, artists’ writings and criticism. Their extensive filmography is marked by sustained experiments with colour, landscape, sound, projection and the material properties of film.