A selection of films in which the film's skin is lacerated, torn, cut, peeled off, and glued back together to create cinematic works that evoke sensations of memory, resurfacing buried memories. This program offers critical perspectives on images through the materials whose intimacy these films explore.

Odds and Ends by Jane Conger Belson Shimane
1959 / 16mm / color / sound / 4'
This collage film combines painting, outtakes from travelogues, fragments of animated films, and live footage from television shows with a pedantic dissertation on jazz and poetry, creating a neo-Dada humor within New American Cinema.

Fil(m) by Frédérique Devaux
2001 / 16mm / color / silent / 4'
From 35mm to the rhythm of 16mm, producing shifts in focus, and the manual creation of multi-screens in each image by cutting and then splicing film.

Imprint by Louise Bourque
1997 / 16mm / color / sound / 14'
"In Imprint, Louise Bourque focuses obsessively on amateur images of her family home, which looks dark and stifling; she reuses the images, transforming them several times—tinted, discolored, partially scratched—as if to attack the place, so that darkness becomes light." » (Fred Camper, The Reader, Chicago, April 1999.)

Buffalo Lifts by Christina Battle
2004 / 16mm / color / silent / 3'
A herd of bison desperately tries to cling on by crossing the frame.

Fissures by Louise Bourque
1999 / 16mm / color / sound / 2' 30
A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave. Fissures distorts images of a family home appearing through contact prints. The copied shots appear distorted, the images fluctuate, creating a warped space of fleeting apparitions, like resurfacing memories.

Alamba by Cécile Fontaine
1988 / 16mm / color / silent / 4' 50
An abstract film constructed flat in strips. In the first step, film segments are peeled from their surface (celluloid) and vertically juxtaposed flat on Plexiglas, creating a square, which is then covered horizontally with strips of transparent tape. These horizontal strips of tape and the successive images from the first vertical strips of emulsion are then affixed to a new celluloid surface to reconstruct a 16mm film.

Cruises by Cécile Fontaine
1989 / 16mm / color / sound / 7' 50"
A three-part collage film, interweaving cinematic sources from various genres and eras: commercial films, silent family films from the 1940s, comedies from the 1920s, and historical reenactments from the 1940s and 1950s.
The yellow coloring comes from the scratching of the film, which results in the disappearance of the first two colored layers. The silent films, re-pasted onto these new yellow or neutral surfaces, were peeled off their celluloid tape by simply tearing it off.

Fuses by Carolee Schneemann
1964-1967 / 16mm / color / silent / 25'
As a painter, I never accepted that any part of the body should be subject to any visual or tactile taboo. I was free to examine the celluloid itself, burning it, baking it, cutting it, painting it, dipping my footage in acid, creating dense layers of collage for complex montages.