Now Available: New Digital Files from Stephen Broomer

Posted November 9th, 2020 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events

New delivery from north of the border: Four stunning, multilayered experimental features by Toronto filmmaker Stephen Broomer! In addition to a digital file of Potamkin (previously available on 16mm), Canyon Cinema is now pleased to distribute Lulu Faustine, Phantom Ride, and Tondal’s Vision on digital formats.


Lulu Faustine (2020, 65 minutes, color, sound)

A miracle happened: summer came ahead of time. To be in love with an image was worse than being in love with a ghost. (I feel as if my tympanum were breaking.) Almost everything, in fact, does have an explanation. (Atmospheric pressure is increasing…). The remaining chapters will hold no surprises. (…and I feel as if my tympanum were breaking.) To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares. (12.30 o’clock, respiration is extraordinarily difficult.) I have given you a pleasant eternity! Just me for you and you for me alone. (I am intoxicated with gasoline.) It will be an act of piety.


Phantom Ride (2019, 69 minutes, color, sound)

A trip to the great beyond. From a War Bonds rally to a Florida resort beauty pageant, via Monument Valley, the Blue Star Memorial Highway, the Rocky Mountains, as above, so below, a twenty-year drive with a punchline in the heart of it. This land is your land, this land is my land, or, don’t you wanna go to heaven when the world’s on fire?


Tondal’s Vision (2018, 65 minutes, color, sound)

A fable and immram, sifted from the cloak and rubble of the Comedy, a vision before Dante. The soul of the knight Tondal, stricken by the excesses of his flesh, quits his body to tour the next world. He is guided by an angel through heaven, hell and limbo. What lessons await him here? To every pleasure there is a cost, for poetry is a kind of poison, and even your angels will get you lost. Angel, tell me, for how long was I dead? Be it true or be it false, it is as the copy was.


Potamkin (2017, 67 minutes, b&w, sound)

In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness.

At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their nothing, the unfired rounds of their rifles restored to their menacing potential. Feet tread backward up the steps as the steps themselves collapse in splintering emulsion. The carriage is set upright.