The Cinematheque

Free Admission

“His indelible films transformed our visual landscapes into subtle and meditative moving image poems.”

Canyon Cinema

In January 2023, David Rimmer, one of Canada’s most distinguished experimental cineastes, passed away at the age of 81. He was an artist of innovative vision and formal clarity, whose body of distinctive, rigorous work earned widespread acclaim and exhibition for advancing the strategies of a structuralist/​materialist cinema—loops, overlays, time-lapse, collage—without betraying the poetic or metaphorical capacities of the medium. Born and based in Vancouver (save for a productive stint in early-’70s New York, lodging in Michael Snow’s Wavelength loft), his legacy is inextricably bound up with the countercultural, cross-pollinating art scene that flourished here at the turn of the 1970s, from which he emerged as the preeminent figure in a uniquely West Coast wave of avant-garde filmmaking. (The Cinematheque also blossomed out of this famously fertile period, with Rimmer’s work among the first to line the shelves of our archive.) His stature as a Canadian artist of international repute is plain: his films are housed in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Academy Film Archive (Los Angeles), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and represented by respected experimental-film distributors worldwide. In 2011, he was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Together with Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society, The Cinematheque honours the late David Rimmer with a free National Canadian Film Day program devoted to his singular experimental film practice. Friends and collaborators will be in attendance, with remembrances shared throughout the evening.

Head/​End (2 min. 1967)
Landscape (8 min. 1969) 
Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (8 min. 1970)
Fracture (10 min. 1973)
Bricolage (11 min. 1984) 
Narrows Inlet (10 min. 1980)
Migration (11 min. 1969)
Canadian Pacific I & Canadian Pacific II (9 min. 1974–75)

—intermission—

Local Knowledge (30 min, 1992) 
Head/​End (2 min, 1967)

This program will include both digital and analogue formats.

“One of the most influential Canadian filmmakers of the 20th century.” Ann Marie Fleming

“[Rimmer’s films] should interest anyone who cares about what movies look like and who wonders where they may be going.” Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

“I can say with some authority that Rimmer is making movies of much greater merit than many filmmakers who have reputations only because they happen to work in cultural centres like New York, Toronto, and San Francisco.” Gene Youngblood, artscanada

“The Vancouver filmmaker lets the medium direct the action, then he sifts through the frames, layering texture, sound, and colour. The result: a poem—an impression of a person, place, or moment in time; an ode to the qualities of film.” Canada Council for the Arts