AD HOC #89: Art of Vision I – Film As Play

When and Where

Monday, November 09, 2026 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

IN-222E
Innis College
2 Sussex Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
Speakers
Stephen Broomer (University of Toronto)
Description
AD HOC 98: Art of Vision I: Film as Play

Experimental cinema has often returned to play: to toys and games, slapstick and make-believe, objects given temporary lives, and the pixilation of live bodies. These films need not distinguish very firmly between playing with cinema and investigating it. Ray and Charles Eames build Toccata for Toy Trains (1957) from antique trains, dolls and miniature landscapes, allowing the materials of the toys to remain plainly visible even as the camera makes a world from them. Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra’s A Chairy Tale (1957) turns a chair into an unwilling performer, an elaborate duet between man and object. Freude Bartlett’s My Life in Art (1974) is an autobiographical compilation of all of Freude’s films, films that find comedy and liberation in everyday domestic experience.