Richard Kerr

Field Trip

Field Trip is a travel diary on the American social landscape. The images consist of visual research for future film projects and were accumulated during my many location scouting trips to the United States between 1980 and 1995. Over time, I have come to regard this photographic archive as a collection of works of historical and personal value. Over the years, I began to rework the photographs. The more I handled and touched them, the less I thought of them as photographs and the more I saw them as something that could be hand-shaped, altered, transformed and re-imagined. With three voices for Joan LaBarbara, composition by Morton Feldman.

Wholly Holy

Experimental film by Richard Kerr.

Drill Blue

Experimental film by Richard Kerr.

Morning ... Came a Day Early

Morning...came a day early is a poetic study of mortality, based on found footage from the archives of the Nuefield Foundation for the History of Ideas, 1964. Morning...came a day early is based on the principles of imagist poetry; the language of common speech towards clear expression without sentiment.

T/ Demi-Monde

35mm to digital video. 5:12:00 minute slide show of 160 digitized handmade 35mm slides.

snap, crack, pop…(less about meaning than being)

With his project, snap,crack,pop...(less about meaning than being), for the FOFA Gallery vitrines, experimental filmmaker and Concordia University faculty member Richard Kerr will present several of his signature works from the series motion picture weavings as well as a new body of projections coupled with paint-based objects. This material iteration of the "spinning camera" technique Kerr created to present hypnotic and deeply formal concerns evoke Marcel Duchamp's rotary reliefs and early machinist modernists like Jean Tinguely and his metamechanics.

House Arrest

House Arrest is at once literal, metaphorical, and phenomenological. It is a work that Kerr wants read as an open visual text. Being under house arrest provided the content, (home) and structure for the “daily practice” of recording. His intention was to design a camera and apparatus that would break from the conventions of everyday videography; a visual system that would evoke a physical and perceptual impact; an accelerated and experiential cinema.

Action: Study

Shot in 1987 in high contrast 16mm, action : study marks the genesis of Kerr’s forays into a process he now refers to as ‘digital sketching’. Action: Study depicts Kerr’s daughter playing on the shores of Georgian Bay, but could easily be mistaken as a work of abstract animation. Kerr combines innovative hand-held techniques with the ultra-sensitivity of the film stock to create a startling wash of jagged, erratic, and constantly dynamic compositions of black and white. Indeed, at times reality seems to melt in front of us.

Action: Study

Shot in 1987 in high contrast 16mm, action : study marks the genesis of Kerr’s forays into a process he now refers to as ‘digital sketching’. Action: Study depicts Kerr’s daughter playing on the shores of Georgian Bay, but could easily be mistaken as a work of abstract animation. Kerr combines innovative hand-held techniques with the ultra-sensitivity of the film stock to create a startling wash of jagged, erratic, and constantly dynamic compositions of black and white. Indeed, at times reality seems to melt in front of us.

De Mouvement

As an extension of his INDUSTRIE/INDUSTRY project, Richard Kerr furthers his appropriation of feature film trailers, formally reconstructing their cinematic language. Monochromatic French film trailers from a bygone era provide the source material, and here the actions of the actors are secondary to the physical movement of celluloid. A brilliant formalist montage of wipes creates an awareness of film motion and rhythm.

Universe of Broken Parts

Inspired by Beat Poet Ed Dorn's assertion that a poem is a 'document,' "Universe of Broken Parts" reflects Richard Kerr's interest in the poetics of image and sound. Transitioning from a balletic dance of shadows playing basketball, to pure abstraction of shape and colour, and cresting with images of police in riot gear, UNIVERSE amalgamates Kerr's painterly and documentarian impulses into a contrapuntal, yet fluid whole.

Collage d’Hollywood

An eight-minute work filmed on 35mm film, Collage d’Hollywood explores the materiality of the film medium in a literal way. Collage is assembled from movie trailers found at a deserted drive-in cinema, and explores onscreen sex and violence

i was a strong man until i left home

A travelogue as catharsis, "i was a strong man until i left home" blends footage from several trips across North America, by plane, train and car. Informed by principles of Imagist Poetry, Kerr turns his camera on familiar imagery of the American travel experience, yet renders the quotidian as abstract, the continuity of perception as fragments. Employing a method he refers to as 'Digital Sketching,' "i was a strong man until i left home" possesses the intimacy of a flip through an artist's sketchbook.

human tragedy on a grand scale

"human tragedy on a grand scale" is a response to "never confuse movement with action" and the struggle of dealing with the Hemingway family. What results is a piece very different from its predecessor - a visual poem, episodic in nature, made up of travel diaries compiled while working with Patrick. The issue now is the reconciliation and cathartic transformation from a Hemingway biography to a re-consideration of autobiography. The biographer takes us on a journey away from Patrick Hemingway - the cool, controlled persona - to East Vancouver, documenting lives stripped bare of pretension. The scope is broadened. Patrick Hemingway and all things Hemingway become insignificant.

never confuse movement with action

In September 1998, Kerr released "never confuse movement with action," a post-modern biography of Patrick Hemingway (a grandson of Ernest Hemingway). July 1999 was the centenary of Ernest Hemingway. There would be the publication of yet another posthumous novel. The Hemingway family hired a merchandising agent - Ernest Hemingway was now a brand name. The trust fund was secured for future generations.1999 was Ernest Hemingway's year. But when Patrick Hemingway saw "never confuse movement with action," he was less than pleased. Worried about his father's reaction, a lawyer was hired and injunction threatened against the work. In negotiations with the Hemingway lawyer, director Richard Kerr agreed to produce an alternative version, with no promises to cut the objectionable material.

Pictures of Sound

Depicting the coastal islands outside Vancouver, 'Pictures of Sound' is an enigmatic landscape portrait caught by a stationary camera. Reducing land and water into colour gradations on a flat plane, Kerr compresses and fragments temporality to focus on the gradual shifts and rhythms of light. Boats that penetrate the frame serve as reminders of the artificial world, and indeed, of the medium itself. In something akin to invading blips on a radar screen, they are rendered as computer glitches plotting their way systematically across the horizon.

the willing voyeur...

A photograph. Two blondes with a past on a train from Washington DC. Their destination is an abandoned train station, with body bags and kids running for their lives. At the station dead bodies are pulled from the basement and piled in the foyer for disposal. Mr. One, the consummate loner, waits. He feels bad about past deeds. He will even the score his way... At the station everyone is obsessed with a photograph titled "Gun Control" that defines the collective consciousness of the times. If everything is a clue, what's the mystery? When the two blondes arrive at the station questions will be asked. They may even get some answers. Certainly things will change.

McLuhan

In "McLuhan", Kerr recontextualizes a "question and answer period" for design students delivered by media theorist Marshall McLuhan at Sherdian College in 1975. Operating from McLuhan's own aphorism "the medium is the message," Kerr combines footage of the address with two scrolling texts in the borders, in one showing an asynchronous transcript that weaves around McLuhan's dialogue, and in another, reinforcing McLuhan's talking points like a ticker on cable news. It has the effect of sharply reconceptualizing the semantic and rhetorical values of the lecture in particular, yet also provides a fascinating perspective on McLuhan's own ideas and intellectual form of address.

Plein Air Etude

An ecstatic, kinetic formal study of light, colour, and movement shot in the region of the Montreal River which so inspired members of the Group of Seven.

Cruel Rhythm

Shot during the opening stages of the First Gulf War, Kerr's "Cruel Rhythm" revisits the American desert for a cinematic tone poem in the vein of 'The Last Days of Contrition' A canopy of sound bites of media coverage on the build-up toward the war is juxtaposed with the alienness of windmills in the desert, and a startling sequence of drifting faces of a crowd coming towards the camera in slow motion. A thought-provoking piece on media's construction of societal paranoia "Cruel Rhythm" is an attempt to make a public, shared feeling intimate, or conversely, to make a subjective feeling of floating anxiety and dread into a shared representation." Unsettlingly, its ambiance is as poignant today as ever.

Plein Air

This abstract travelogue flies just over the surface of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario. "Plein Air" is an engrossing sonic and visual trip and a continuation of Kerr's fascination with landscape cinema.

The Machine in the Garden

Shot in Hi8 video using a high-speed shutter and a spinning turret camera mount, "Machine in the Garden" is inspired by, and an homage to, apparatus-oriented work such as D. Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" and Michael Snow's "La Region Centrale."

The Last Days of Contrition

“The Last Days of Contrition (35 minutes black and white 1988) is an exploration of the Canadian and American landscapes, and the relationship between the two. The narrative deals with a journey through timeless, vacant American landscapes (baseball stadiums, Venice Beach, Mojave Desert, and a US Missile Base). The photographic strategy is influenced by a consciousness of light, a quintessential characteristic of American photography. I documented the American landscape in the tradition of the early formalist photographers (Walker Evans, Paul Strand, etc.) allowing there to be content in form. The Last Days of Contrition straddles two cultural forces while developing an understanding about our Canadian origins and muses. (RK)

On Land Over Water (Six Stories)

"In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought" (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of "On Land Over Water." "On Land Over Water..." was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, "On Land Over Water..." is the product of working out variations of that meditation. In story discourse, "On Land..."experiments with the possibilities of adopting the characteristics of the short story to the forms of cinema. (RK)

On Land Over Water (Six Stories)

"In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought" (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of "On Land Over Water." "On Land Over Water..." was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, "On Land Over Water..." is the product of working out variations of that meditation. In story discourse, "On Land..."experiments with the possibilities of adopting the characteristics of the short story to the forms of cinema. (RK)

Canal

The imagery of "Canal" captures the activity of freighters, ship's crews, dock workers and the historical masonry that the original Welland Canal was constructed from... The film is about going into my "own world of youth" and spontaneously documenting the canal environment as an adult.

Vesta Lunch (Cookin' at the Vesta)

A continuous-take, cinema-verité study of Toronto's famous all-night diner. A film that studies the pulse of the after-hours urban environment, in real time.

Hawkesville to Wallenstein

An impressionistic documentary about the Old Order Amish farmers in Waterloo County during the winter months.

Still Life

Experimental film by Richard Kerr.