David Rimmer Evening I

Film Descriptions excerpted from loop, print, fade + flicker: David Rimmer’s Moving Images

Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970. 8 mins.)
Or he might make a loop out of a woman throwing some cellophane on a table and then unravel every possible variation, in every colour and combination of colours (Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, 1970). The way he could measure time and rhyme it out second after second like a musician working off a riff, like old Bach sitting down at the clavier running out his variations. David could make the fragments sing.

Surfacing on the Thames (1970. Silent, 10 mins.)
He was a recycler, working with remnants until the audience could feel it right along with him, holding that bit of plastic in his hands. He might dissolve one frame into the next frame into the next, so you’d slowly watch a barge cross the River Thames, along with a storm of golden dust and scratches (Surfacing on the Thames, 1970).

Narrows Inlet (1980. Silent, 8 mins.)
He takes his camera out on a boat and click clicks a frame at a time even though he can’t glimpse a thing.He’s caught in the fog and there’s nothing there at all until a sliver of colour appears, and then slowly, oh so very slowly, the fog lifts and the tree line lives again, staring back at the camera with all of its colour and height resolved. Another small miracle of looking

Real Italian Pizza (1971. 12 mins.)
"And I was a little reluctant to take my camera out on the street because it’s a tough place, you know, and a lot of people would try and steal it from me, I guess. And I didn’t know the rhythmof the city enough to...So I thought, 'Why not just stick it out the window?' And fortunately, across the street, this is four floors up, there was a pizza parlour and there was a lot of activity going on in front of it: kids would hang out there, drug deals would go on, or ..."

As Seen on TV (1986. 14 mins.)
So he lays a snippet of epileptic seizure between day-glo-coloured TV bits until the seizure becomes a comment on televisual spasmwhich he names As Seen on TV.

Bricolage (1984. 11 mins.)
He runs a loop of sound and picture out of joint until the sound comes all the way back and accompanies the picture again in Bricolage (1984).

On the Road to Kandahar (2003. 5 mins.)

Tiger (1994. 5 mins.)

Divine Mannequin (1989. 7 mins.)

Padayatra (Walking Meditation) (2006. 12 mins.)

An Eye for an Eye (2003, 12 mins.)
An experimentalist even today, directly applying colour on 35mm film in films like An Eye for an Eye (2003), a review of many of Rimmer’s earlier films such as Migration (1969), Landscape (1968), Canadian Pacific I (1974) and Canadian Pacific II (1975) set his work in sharp relief against the common structuralist penchant for indoor scenarios and confined settings, and constantly return us to the cultural contexts and broad visual "scapes" of Vancouver and British Columbia (both urban and rural) repeatedly invoked throughout his work.

Local Knowledge (1992, 30 mins.) 
His second great "period" comes to an end with Local Knowledge (1992). It is a reckoning and last stand. Not a movie that could ever be made by a young man, its time-compressed skies and hunters and fishers and motorboat reveries narrate a home movie reading of the west coast.