Bio
John Price is an independent filmmaker who has produced experimental documentaries, dance and diary films since 1986. His love of photography led naturally to extensive alchemical experimentation with a wide range of motion picture film emulsions and formats. By shooting on cheap, out-dated stock or with printing films not designed for cinematography, and processing all of it by hand, he achieves textures which would not be possible through the commercial laboratories. In that sense, the specificity of the hand-processed material is a distinct, very human element that becomes as important as the subject in communicating the subtext of the films.
John’s work has been produced with support from the National Film Board of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, and has been exhibited at festivals and galleries internationally. He has also produced film projections for opera and dance and is presently working on a feature-length series of hand-processed, hand-printed 35mm films. He lives in Toronto.
“John Price makes small, delicious movies that are deeply rooted in his everyday life. He's a journal keeper, both as a scribbler and collector of pictures, and often labours for years with small moments of footage to reconnect with the past's distant shoreline. His work is lyric and precious and wounded, often partial and incomplete, offering shards not stories, tugging at the convulsive memoires of footage, the bursts of raw feeling that emerge from a moment, which each movie attempts to spin into reasonable forms, sometimes hopelessly. Impossibly.
“Years past I was asked to sit on a university panel that would award John his master's degree. He showed a long beautiful reel, much better than much of what was lamping up the screens in the name of the avant. Of course he passed, but what amazed me was his disinterest in making prints or circulating these pictures. It was a private practice, though slowly, and with the encouragement of friends (most notably Alex MacKenzie who ran his own micro-cinema in Vancouver) he finished them, though I suspect that nothing is ever quite finished in John's mind.” - Mike Hoolboom
For more information: www.filmdiary.org