Now in Stock: Three New Blu-rays from Black Zero
Posted March 16th, 2023 in New Acquisitions, New DVDs, News / Events
Founded by Canyon artist member Stephen Broomer, Black Zero is a new multimedia publisher specializing in Canadian experimental cinema from the 1960s to the present.
Black Zero’s first three releases – Palace of Pleasure by John Hofsess, Everything Everywhere Again Alive by Keith Lock, and Strange Codes by Arthur Lipsett – are now available for individual-use purchase on our online store. See below for more information about each title.
To learn more about Black Zero, check out David Spittle’s interview with Stephen Broomer for Tangible Territory journal here: https://tangibleterritory.art/journal/issue-5-content/black-zero-into-the-underground-of-home-viewing/
A long-neglected classic of Canadian experimental cinema, a triumph of erotic art, a film about which Gene Youngblood once wrote, “See it and you’ll see a window on the future: a Joyce-Burroughs assemblage of bold, poetic surreal visions of physical love in every conceivable form.
In 1967, John Hofsess released The Palace of Pleasure, a dual-screen therapeutic exploration of the erotic imagination. Intended as a trilogy, only the first two sequences were completed.
The first part, Redpath 25, is a fantasy meeting between a young woman and her dream lover; the second part, Black Zero, is a macabre, ritual vision of sexual freedom and domestic life that haunts the mind long after the screen has darkened.
1967 / 38 minutes / color / stereo / 2.66:1AR
SPECIAL FEATURES
• Newly restored 4K digital master from the film’s surviving elements, approved by director John Hofsess
• Commentary by film preservationist Stephen Broomer
• The Columbus of Sex: a speculative reconstruction, an exploration of Hofsess’s lost feature film
• The Looking Cure, a video essay by Broomer on Hofsess’s concept of ‘cinematherapy’
• Resurrection of the Body, a speculative sequel to Hofsess’s film
• Liner notes by Hofsess and Broomer
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Everything Everywhere Again Alive is a landmark work of Canadian underground cinema, a film diary with mystic and symbolic overtones. In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living. Lock filmed the achievements and daily rituals of his fellow communards, his camera bearing witness as a community assembled and dispersed. The resulting film uses poetic strategies, including logograms and other graphic disruptions, to extend its themes of renewal and rebirth, and to mark the encounter between reason and imagination, the concrete and the abstract.
1975 / 72 minutes / color / stereo / 1.37:1AR
SPECIAL FEATURES
• Newly restored 2K digital transfer from the film’s original elements, approved by director Keith Lock
• Audio commentary by Keith Lock Return to Buck Lake, a new documentary featuring Lock and Buck Lake founder Tom Brouillette
• Going, a short film by Keith Lock
• A Circle in the Wilderness, a new interview with Keith Lock about the film and his time at Buck Lake
• Changing Seasons: The Canadian Pastoral in Keith Lock’s Everything Everywhere Again Alive, a video essay by Stephen Broomer
• Liner notes by Buck Lake member and filmmaker Anna Gronau
Arthur Lipsett’s Strange Codes is the legendary found-footage filmmaker’s first and only independent film, made after his departure from the National Film Board of Canada. In a rented house in Toronto, Lipsett stages a series of mysterious rituals, appearing onscreen in the guise of various characters, among them, an archeologist, a soldier, a scientist, a magician, and the Monkey King of the Peking opera. Dense with enigmatic gestures and private allusions, Strange Codes operates, in Lipsett’s words, “at the midway points between the primitive, ritualized world and the world of logic and science.”
1975 / 23 minutes / black and white / stereo / 1.37:1AR
SPECIAL FEATURES
• Newly restored 5K digital master from the film’s surviving elements
• Audio commentary and liner notes by media artist and writer Brett Kashmere
• 38 minutes of out-takes from the film
• Strange Codes: A Breakdown, a shot analysis of the film by film preservationist Stephen Broomer
• Readings from the Instruction Box: Arthur Lipsett on the Secret Museum, a visit with Arthur Lipsett, who reflects on the natural collage of the universe
