Canadian filmmaker
Stephen Broomer (born 1984) is a Canadian experimental filmmaker, film scholar and video essayist.[1]
Son of jazz musician Stuart Broomer and influenced by Stan Brakhage when he began to make films,[3] the Toronto-based filmmaker received his PhD in 2015 from Ryerson University & York University's joint program in Communications and Culture.[4]
He is the founder of the home video label Black Zero offering restorations of rare and forgotten Canadian experimental films by Arthur Lipsett, Richard Kerr and John Hofsess[5][6][7][8][9][10][11] and a contributing writer for the Portland-based publication Split Tooth Media, mainly on the October Horror series of written essays.[12][13]
He is also the author of an upcoming critical biography on Lipsett (whom he called "a visionary force and holy fool") titled Secret Museums.[14]
His series of video essays entitled Art & Trash, focusing on underground, avant-garde and cult cinema, have been mentioned in Sight & Sound's annual polls of best video essays multiple times.[15][16][17]
Selected filmography
[edit]- Manor Road (2010)
- Christ Church St. James (2011)
- Queen's Quay (2012)
- Pepper's Ghost (2013)
- Jenny Haniver (2014)
- Variations of a Theme by Michael Snow (2015)
- The Bow and the Cloud (2016)
- Potamkin (2017) - His first feature work about the late pioneering film critic Harry Alan Potamkin (1900-1933), one of the first to proclaim cinema as an art form, composed of fragments from the many films he reviewed for newspapers and magazines during the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. Battleship Potemkin, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Metropolis)
- Tondal's Vision (2018) - Found footage restaging of the 1911 Italian adaptation of Dante's Inferno about the medieval Irish knight Tondal
- Phantom Ride (2019)
- Ressurrection of the Body (2019)
- Lula Faustine (2020)
- Fat Chance (2021)
- Josephine Massarella: One Woman Walking (2021)
- The Looking Cure: John Hofsess's The Palace of Pleasure (2021)
- Borrowed Dreams: Joseph Cornell and the Archive as Psychic Imprint (2022)
- Changing Seasons: The Canadian Pastoral in Keith Lock's Everything Everywhere Again Alive (2022)
- Closing Distance: The Cosmic View, the Terrestrial Horizon and Jean-Claude Labrecque's Essai a la mille (2022)
- Hanging Portraits: Obsession and Resurrection in Laura (2022)
- Richard Kerr: Field Trips (2022)
- The Stairwell: Memories and Mirages of Film Noir (2022)
- Rain: A Phenomenal Catalogue (2023)
- Simultaneous Tensions: The Duo-Vision of Wicked, Wicked (2023)
- Against Illustration: Poetics and Intuition in the Video Essay (2024)
- The Eyes of Hell: Depth and Death in The Mask (2024)
- Passions in the Labyrinth: The Decline of Classical Allegory in Johnny Minotaur (2024)
- Second Deaths: Metaphors for Tolerance in Mindwarp (2024)
- Paperback: Prisoners of the Printed Page and the Frayed Aesthetics of The Timekeepers of Eternity (2024)
Sources:[15][16][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][17][32][33][34][35]