Arthur Lipsett’s first film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1962, marking the arrival of an influential new voice. The film’s dark humour and dancing rhythms had captured the spirit of his times. When Lipsett died by suicide in 1986, the humour and joy of his work was eclipsed by that sardonic darkness. It all came to feel like an omen.

Film is the art form of our times. It has formed the background of our lives, informed visual arts practices, and formed our culture’s stories, its memory.

Moments of Perception is a landmark book. The first history of twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Canadian experimental filmmaking, it maps avant-garde films from the 1950s to the present day, including their contradictions and complexities.

Codes for North is a study of the early evolution of the Canadian avant-garde film and its roots in an aesthetic of difficulty. Stephen Broomer traces the evolution of this cinema through the work of three artists—Jack Chambers, Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland—from their early development as painters in the 1950s to the creation of their epic films: Reason Over Passion (1969), The Hart of London (1970), and La Region Centrale (1971). Their work formed in response to a strain of Neo-Dada that took root in southern Ontario in the late 1950s.