Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis, the memory of a guest that passeth by. Milton Moses Ginsberg's Coming Apart, a film made at an early height of tension between dramatic storytelling and documental, cinema-verité style, purports to be the voyeuristic diary of Joe Glassman, a diary that at first glance appears to be about secretly recording the encounters he has with women a rented Manhattan apartment, but which on closer examination reveals a more desperate and despairing project, aimed inward.

In this episode, Stephen Broomer unpacks the narrative and visual maze of Coming Apart and its myriad interpretations of the notion of reflection, a film that aspires to self-destruct.

This old world may never change the way it’s been. An awareness of environmental degradation grew in the mid-twentieth-century. With the damning evidence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the conservation movement began to gain momentum in the United States. What was once the cause of social welfare organizations like the Sierra Club became the mission of government, through the Environmental Protection Agency and the invocation of policies and acts that aimed to protect the American wilderness. If humanity was incapable of leaving only footprints, then the purpose of these acts was to soften those footfalls, in order to preserve the beautiful and strange creatures of the earth, and in doing so, to expand the quality of life for humanity, and to luxuriate in the compassion and reason of humankind. An American culture of roadside gator-wrestling and sport hunting was not immune from this culture shift: what had been a brutish and cruel way of life for many came to be recognized and condemned as such by an evolving society. The cause of animal welfare and the cause of environmental protection became inextricable, for there was an immense callousness in the human impact on beasts and badlands. That callousness demanded to be legislated out of human behaviour, lest nature avenge itself by other means.

In 1972, a small commune formed at Buck Lake, an isolated patch of wilderness. Founded by two skilled tradesmen who had met on a construction job, those who came to Buck Lake participated in the development of a homestead, whether that meant digging a well or building a barn or sharing in the daily rituals of cooking and cleaning. When Lock came to Buck Lake, he brought his camera, documenting the community over the course of 1973 and 1974, returning to Toronto intermittently to get his film developed. In the time that he documented them, the Buck Lake residents were involved in farming practices from the birthing of calfs to the slaughter of pigs, sharing their days between an idyllic, meditative splendour, the hard labour of farming, the necessary rituals of rural living, and the building of infrastructure. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses the Back-to-the-Land movement that foregrounded the Buck Lake experiment, and engages in a formal analysis of Lock's film, which serves as a template of many of the themes that had a profound influence on the Canadian experimental film movement through the years that followed it.

Movie magic is a dream of transformation. It transforms day into night, paupers into princes, dreamers into actors on a fantastical stage. And it’s as if by magic that circumstances can come together, where a setting, a passion, an opportunity, can make for a strangely effective aberration of form. The fantasy-cliché of the film director is of a person possessed, making films that are just an exteriorization of the inner life of the dreamer. In this episode, Stephen Broomer discusses the brief filmmaking career of Michael Krueger, who directed two films back-to-back in the late 1980s for the international home video market.

Christina Battle’s first films engaged with the politics and imagination of the West; with landscapes marked by industry, commerce, and trauma; and with material strategies that bear a furious momentum, dense with action, objects bursting from the frame. Battle embraced video and installation early in her practice, but this direction became increasingly total in the 2010s. Her approach to video is distinct in its patient, clinical rhythms; in attending to the medium’s inherent ability to communicate information; and in her manipulation of its plasticity. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer surveys the evolution of Battle's filmmaking.

The split screen and its close relative, the multiple screen image, have existed since the wild and restless early years of commercial cinema. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer examines the ways in which multiple screens subvert storytelling through the exhaustion of narrative information, through a central case study: Richard L. Bare's Wicked, Wicked, a bizarre attempt on the part of Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to exploit the inherent dynamism of this polyrhythmic form.

In 1970, Standish Lawder shot, candidly and at a distance, a crowded escalator in evening rush hour, at the Pan Am building at Park Avenue and 45th Street in New York City. At the time, the Pan Am building was the world’s largest commercial office space, right next to Grand Central Station. In one continuous shot, just shy of eight minutes, Lawder filmed hundreds of employees as they began their journeys home, descending from the skyscraper and into the lower world of commuter trains. Once the film was processed, Lawder turned the shot around, printed it in reverse, such that the employees, face to the camera, are carried upwards as if ascending to heaven. He called the film Necrology—a list of the dead, as in an obituary notice, an index to a necropolis, or the lists of dead and missing servicemen in Viet Nam. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer explores Lawder's absurdist humour, the film as an allegory for film projection, and its sardonic defiance of American individuality.

Beyond the 7th Door is a parable. It bears a simple lesson for living justly, as one would find in folklore’s dusty tomes. Boris is a flawed hero, a newly released convict who seeks the mysterious treasure of Lord Breston, a wealthy man living in seclusion. In order to gain this treasure, Boris must pass a gauntlet of fiendish traps, all while being taunted by a recording that challenges him to reflect on his own morality.

Jean-Claude Labrecque’s Essai à la mille, or, Test to the Thousand, deliberates upon the various ways in which an extreme telephoto distortion can impact perception, the aberrations of vision and abstractions of form that it can provoke, the hallucinatory process of charting and collapsing great distances.

Andrew Getty's The Evil Within was made between 2002 and 2017, and was completed only after the filmmaker's death. It was the work of a person at once tormented and narcissistic, and its haunting narrative broadcasts a clear identification between Getty and his outsider protagonist.

N.Y., N.Y., was a work of passion and deliberation that Francis Thompson would spend eight years completing. Beyond all of its dazzling imagery—formed by prisms, special lenses, and distorting mirrored surfaces—New York New York was a declaration of urban vision truer to the soul than to the eyes.

All the world’s a stage. Or is all the world a ring? In Pushed Too Far, a former professional wrestler lurks in the woods near Greenfield, Indiana, stalking and killing the townsfolk by putting them in his trademark bone-crushing holds.

Inspired by the writings of Ernest Hemingway, and by compositional and reportage traditions of photography, Richard Kerr took images of home, of landscapes, and, as a tourist, of the territories and politics of America; later, he would pursue self-consciously machined images and found footage.