Canadian Underground (Program Two)

This presentation of Canadian underground films is drawn from the collection of experimental film distributor Black Zero, and all historical films presented here were restored by Canadian filmmaker and film historian Stephen Broomer. These films, spanning 1966 to 2015, reflect a broad range of engagements with the experimental tradition by filmmakers whose work merges material self-consciousness, environmental and historical studies, and personal exploration. 

In the second program, two films demonstrate the early evolution of a Canadian film that was and remained fiercely underground, having been rediscovered and restored in recent decades. John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure (1967) is the filmmaker’s effort to develop a therapeutic method in experimental filmmaking, a dual-screen confrontation with the vacuum of post-Freudian thought, composed of dramatic stagings of poems by Leonard Cohen and sequences influenced by the thought of Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Strange Codes, the final film of legendary Canadian…