Stephen Broomer

Fat Chance (2021)

Hollywood noir icon Laird Cregar's inner turmoil as a black-on-grey delirium of shadows and spectres. An avant-garde film-historical essay. ...

Scales of Being - Ed Emshwiller's Relativity (2021)

Ed Emshwiller's Relativity (1966) is a reflection of the ceaseless possibilities of nature to produce distinctive forms acting in concert with one another. It is a myth, enacted through the avatar of a universal man, who samples this world from the cave to ...

Arrival of the Train (2020)

The howl of an infant, a tinsel pastoral. ""And the trains still go through the station at La Ciotat." For the 50th Anniversary of Anthology Film Archives, with debts to Jerome Hill. ...

Lulu Faustine (2020)

A miracle happened: summer came prematurely. Being in love with an image was worse than being in love with a ghost. (I feel like my eardrum is breaking). Almost everything, in fact, has an explanation. (The atmospheric pressure is increasing ...). The rema ...

Phantom Ride (2019)

In Phantom Ride, Stephen Broomer permutates the home films of Ellwood F. Hoffmann (1885 – 1966), a self-made hosiery mill owner from Philadelphia, into a road movie. ...

Resurrection of the Body (2019)

"In memoriam. Man in pieces. You have the lovers, remade by funhouse mirrors; you have the symmetries, undone, bent and curved; and you have the model, the bag on her head filling with carbon dioxide. Who owns your life? Testimonial and demonstration, a mo ...

Tondal's Vision (2018)

Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro's L'inferno (1911), a Doré-inspired visualisation of the eponymous first canticle in Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia (1320), is commonly considered to be Italy's first feature-length film – a ...

Fountains of Paris (2018)

Jacques Madvo's street photography of Paris in 1961 is a launching point for a reflection on water forms and their distortion of optics. ...

Residence Inn (2017)

Day and night in a hotel window in Ottawa. The window frame vibrates and multiplies. An embarrassment of lampshades. ...

Potamkin (2017)

In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyph ...

Mills (2016)

The ruins of a nineteenth century farm in the brush off Moatfield Drive in Toronto - a stone shack without a roof and, not much further, a well, long since abandoned as a sewer. We made a quick inventory: splintering branches; stars and asterisks; coded ta ...

Carousel Study (2016)

The Bow and the Cloud (2016)

A waterfall cuts through the land along the Bruce Trail; birdsongs and a distant cloud; I stand in the shadow of an electric cross; a bow set in the cloud, a token of the covenant between god and man. ...

Variations on a Theme by Michael Snow (2015)

Just / faintly / a corner / was / seen there / trying / to look / like an edge. .--- ..- ... - / -..-. / ..-. .- .. -. - .-.. -.-- / -..-. / .- / -.-. --- .-. -. . .-. / -..-. / .-- .- ... / -..-. / ... . . -. / - .... . .-. . / -..-. / - .-. -.-- .. -. - ...

Wild Currents (2015)

A tragic mistake jolts Teddy and Joanne into limbo. Their spirits bear witness to their past usage of household appliances, as if by electric charge they might uncoil their spectral presences from home and garden. A myth and a ghost story for Christine Luc ...

Bridge 1A (2015)

An interstice ...

Bridge 1B (2015)

An interstice. ...

Bridge 1C (2015)

An interstice. ...

Gulls at Gibraltar (2015)

Seagulls hover and dip on the rocky coastline of Gibraltar Point. Tilting and multiple horizons camouflage the birds, splintering and gathering the lone gull to the flock. ...

Landform 1 (2015)

Studies in motion, made red, black and blue by tone and tint. To be present in a landscape is to turn from vision to a menacing rhythm. ...

Dominion (2014)

The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined, a vision in the longhouse, a dream in the wilderness. ...

Wastewater (2014)

The North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant lies in thick brush downhill from a hydroelectric corridor. The eye bounces, guided by the vertical forms coming up out of the valley, and a low flame bridges these movements. ...

Hang Twelve (2014)

Encores live yet Slice every note, each notice sincere in secret Lovers covet eyeliner to recite in vein or vesicle Clever noise, silence or else ...

Serena Gundy (2014)

Serena Gundy Park, in Toronto, so named for the late wife of Toronto businessman James Henry Gundy, who influenced the financial character of early twentieth-century Canada. Gundy had owned the parkland as a family estate, and upon his death in 1951, donat ...

The Season Word (2014)

Still but twisting eye From fall's wither to first snow Where lives my wonder ...

Jenny Haniver (2014)

A photographer steadies a Polaroid camera and composes a shot of the sky, flanked by tree branches. Later, a woman wakes from a nightmare. Jenny Haniver takes its title from a cryptid totem sold for centuries at the docks of Antwerp: a Jenny Haniver or jeu ...

Zerah’s Gift (2013)

On Zerah Colburn, the early-nineteenth-century human calculator, made into a sideshow attraction by his father. This film is a record of the countryside that he grew up in and to which he later returned and died at age 35. ...

Conservatory (2013)

Stamens and pistils are lit in rapid succession behind the dome of the Palm House at Allan Gardens in Toronto. The plants trade colour, making alien scenes in the conservatory. Solid forms, too near to the eye, become muddied and indistinct, in constant pa ...

Blue Guitar (2013)

Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar. ...

Pepper's Ghost (2013)

Pepper's Ghost, by Torontonian Stephen Broomer, transforms an office formerly used for observation studies into a tunnel of performative, transfixing illusionism, creating surprising images using filters, fabric and a combination of sunlight and fluorescen ...

Spirits in Season (2013)

Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. ...

Apis in Memphis (2013)

Apis the bull of Memphis, earthly representation of the god Ptah. At the temple, Apis the oracle, his movements interpreted as prophecies, his breath as medicine. He had a window in the temple through which he could be seen and out which he saw. On holiday ...

Ravine (2013)

In Toronto's Nordheimer Ravine, an environment of thick brush and dead wood flattens into fields of colour. Its paths lead to Winston Churchill Park, where the entrance to a city reservoir overlooks a green vale. ...

Championship (2013)

At a wrestling tournament, a young competitor faces match upon match. Referees converge on the scene. The crowd's attention wanes and focuses with the intensity of the bout. Sounds drift in: a psychic piano enters over fast and short breaths. This is a con ...

The Shapes Book (2013)

Shapes in a dollhouse betray the fatal competition of earthly things. ...

Snakegrass (2012)

Snake grass lines a forest path. The camera passes toward the entrance to the woods. It staggers and repeats as the scene is saturated in colour. ...

The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit (2012)

On the paths that cut through Toronto's Tommy Thompson Park, at the foot of Leslie Street, an assortment of terrains collide: thicket, pebbled shorelines, muddy vistas, and fertile earth with beds of wildflowers. A giant duck crosses the horizon. A radio t ...

Queen’s Quay (2012)

Red, green, blue, and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours collide and mix. ...

Brébeuf (2012)

Brébeuf is a study of St. Ignace II, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649. The images in this film arise from a reading of that story - the joining of the sum ...

Christ Church – Saint James (2011)

In the spring of 1998, Christ Church - Saint James, an historic black church in Toronto's Little Italy, was destroyed by arson. All that remained were walls and a pit, and over subsequent years, the site was overtaken with graffiti. This film has taken on ...

Memory Worked By Mirrors (2011)

A mirror in the filmmaker's backyard reflects his childhood home. The black frame of the watermarked mirror becomes a mysterious portal, distorting brick, branch, and flesh into an amorphous hodgepodge. A self-portrait. ...

Balinese Rebar (2011)

Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. ...

Manor Road (2010)

Trains travel to and from a fixed point in space beneath a variable colored horizon. ...

Pepper's Ghost (2013)

Pepper's Ghost, by Torontonian Stephen Broomer, transforms an office formerly used for observation studies into a tunnel of performative, transfixing illusionism, creating surprising images using filters, fabric and a combination of sunlight and fluorescen ...