Canadian Pacific II

Canadian Pacific II is designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific I. Shot from a window two storeys higher and in the building adjacent to the artists’s studio of the previous year, one enters into a dream state… an involvement with a vocabulary of seeing and feeling by subtle transitions of the passage of time

Canadian Pacific I

Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.

On the Road to Kandahar

One of Rimmer's early 2000s video works which he made by hand-painting 35mm film, running it on a flatbed viewer, and shooting it off the screen with a video camera to then subject it to further manipulation.

Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper

David Rimmer's avant-garde classic takes a single film fragment of a factory worker unraveling a sheet of cellophane, and alters it through a mesmerizing series of spectral apparitions and alchemical and sonic permutations. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Gathering Storm

A hauntingly beautiful film about the world's flight into chaos. Rimmer has taken McLaren's camera-less technique to new heights. He paints directly on clear 35mm leader, using odd materials such as household cleaners, varnish, inks and sometimes fish scales and ferns. He feeds the loops through a film editing machine, overlays them with music and records the result with a mini DV camera. A production of the National Film Board of Canada.

Migration

"Whereas SQUARE INCH FIELD was composed largely in the camera, Rimmer's next film, MIGRATION, made full use of rear-projection rephotography, stop-framing, and slow motion. The migration of the title is interpreted as the flight of a ghost bird through aeons of space/time, through the micro-macro universe, through a myriad of complex realities. A seagull is seen flying gracefully in slow motion against a grainy green sky; suddenly the frame stops, warps and burns, as though caught in the gate of the projector. Now begins an alternation of fa...

Surfacing on the Thames

‘A beautiful, mysterious yet satisfying optical illusion…celebrates the early passing of a steam on the Thames. Using freeze-frame techniques, elaborate dissolves, and most of the resources on the optical table, this picture is, amongst other things, a Turner come to life. Rimmer’s concern with the surface nature of the film is most evident in this work which, in spite of its filmic complexity, is incredibly simple.’ — Donald Richie. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pacific Cinematheque in 2013.

Al Neil: A Portrait

An award winning 45-minute film portrait of Al Neil’s life, music and art. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Fracture

Variously relaxed, apprehensive, or relieved, the fractured gestures of a woman and a baby are played backward and forward, frame by frame, like a musical phrase. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.