Film UbuWebDavid Rimmer (b. 1942)
Migration (1969)
Surfacing the Thames (1970)
Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970)
Real Italian Pizza (1972)
Watching for the Queen (1973)
David Rimmer is recognised as one of the most important experimental filmmakers working in Canada today. Twice nominated for the Canadian Govenor General’s Award in media arts, Rimmer has produced over 40 films from experimental to documentary, to dance, to music, to portraits of artists . His work has been screened at many prestigious festivals around the world, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada and many more.
“Surfacing on the Thames is the ultimate metaphysical movie, the ultimate post-minimal movies, one of the really great constructivist films since Wavelength. It confronts empirically the illusions of space and time in the cinema and is, in my estimation, at least as important as Wavelength as a statement on the illusionistic nature of cinematic motion.” Gene Youngblood, Arts Canada.
“Variations of a Cellophane Wrapper is the most exciting non-narrative film I have ever seen....The film resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction.” Kristina Nordstrom, The Village Voice.
“Local Knowledge shatters the comforting dualities of nature/culture, public/private, home/away, time/space. Yet in place of easy reference to apocalypse, the film suggests a simultaneously wondrous and dangerous world in flux. This is a mature work pulling all of history through a moment linking one’s own sacred ground with distant fields of blood and joy.” Colin Brown.
“Al Neil/A Portrait is more than a documentary profile of a man engaged in a life and death struggle with his genius and his obsessions. While the narrative thread is centred around pathos, the film represents a coming to terms with what these generalizations really mean....The many personas of Al Neil: the private, intoxicated and poetic man, the public performer and musician, and the family outcast. Rimmer’s integration of these levels is masterful.”
“For more than thirty years, David Rimmer has been making some of the most exquisite work in the fringe microverse. He has the uncanny ability to take small moments - the view from a window, the tiniest scrap of discarded footage - and rework them into panoramas of attention. From the very small he is able to extract the very large. He is led in his choices not by calculation but by intuition; given his luminous body of work, he may be regarded as either the luckiest filmer alive or else someone who has become a student of chance, working at it, cultivating it the way others reshape their bodies through exercise or tend small gardens.” Mike Hoolboom. “Inside the Pleasure Dome”. Fringe Film in Canada.