Kirk Tougas is a noted experimental film artist, director of photography, producer, director, curator, and founder of the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada.
With over 250 professional credits, he is recognized as one of Canada’s preeminent feature documentary cinematographers. Representing many cultural, anthropological, social, and political themes, these films have been broadcast on every major network and have garnered more than 80 festival awards, including Emmy and Peabody awards, and 13 awards and nominations from the Canadian Academy of Cinema.
Creator of numerous experimental films, he has been variously described as a structural or conceptual artist. His experimental and personal films have broadly pursued three themes: the inherent nature of the film medium (and later the digital video medium) and its message; portraiture and self-imaging as a human phenomenon from cave walls to the Selfie; and the poetics of a medium composed of image, sound and time.. He is best known for the politics of perception and the framing of perception which along with his other works have been distinguished with screenings and installations in many countries. in museums, universities, art schools, art galleries and film festivals.
Programme:
Letters from Vancouver:
The Politics of Perception (1973), 16mm, color, sound, 33 min. The Framing of Perception (1973), 16mm, color + b&w, sound, 33 min.
LETTERS FROM VANCOUVER (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself.
Together, THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION and THE FRAMING OF PERCEPTION form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.
Screening format: HD (courtesy of Light Cone)
Special thanks to Kirk Tougas.
