Bio

Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker and film historian. His restorations of Canadian student films of the 1960s have screened at the Canadian Film Institute, the Pleasure Dome, and Cinematheque Ontario, and his writings on cinema have appeared in Visual Anthropology Review, Film International, and CineAction.

Works

Balinese Rebar

  • 2015
  • Stephen Broomer

Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. Rebar at a construction site seems to snake through sunlit puddles.

Balinese Rebar

Conservatory

  • 2016
  • Stephen Broomer

Stamens and pistils are lit in rapid succession behind the dome of the Palm House at Allan Gardens in Toronto. The plants trade colour, making alien scenes in the conservatory. Solid forms, too near to the eye, become muddied and indistinct, in constant passage, but the dome and the grid are fixed.

Conservatory

Ravine

  • 2016
  • Stephen Broomer

In Toronto's Nordheimer Ravine, an environment of thick brush and dead wood flattens into fields of colour. Its paths lead to Winston Churchill Park, where the entrance to a city reservoir overlooks a green vale.

Ravine

Dominion

  • 2016
  • Stephen Broomer

The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined, a vision in the longhouse, a dream in the wilderness.

Dominion

Hang Twelve

  • 2016
  • Stephen Broomer

Encores live yet / Slice every note, each notice sincere in secret / Lovers covet eyeliner to recite in vein or vesicle / Clever noise, silence or else.

Hang Twelve

Blue Guitar

  • 2016
  • Stephen Broomer

Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

Blue Guitar

Brébeuf

  • 2015
  • Stephen Broomer

A study of St. Ignace, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649.

Brébeuf

Queen’s Quay

  • 2015
  • Stephen Broomer

Red, green, blue, and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours mix.

Queen’s Quay

Snakegrass

  • 2015
  • Stephen Broomer

Snake grass lines a forest path. The camera passes toward the entrance to the woods. It staggers and repeats as the scene is saturated in colour.

Snakegrass

Spirits In Season

  • 2015
  • Stephen Broomer

Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. This film explores the town's Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump, and Fairy Trail. Music by Nate Wooley.

Spirits In Season

The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit

  • 2015
  • Stephen Broomer

On the paths that cut through Toronto's Tommy Thompson Park, at the foot of Leslie Street, an assortment of terrains collide: thicket, pebbled shorelines, muddy vistas, and fertile earth with beds of wildflowers. A giant duck crosses the horizon. A radio transmission of Shooby Taylor, the human horn, travels with us.

The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit