The Cinematheque

“Payne attempts to counter the ordinary attraction that exists between art and its audience. Complex though that attraction may be, it is dominated by the spectator’s interest in affirmative content and soothing surfaces.”

Bill Jeffries, Gordon Payne’s Painting: 1986–1990

A quiet pulse moves beneath the flicker as dots dissolve in hypnotic cascades, opening a liminal space where perception sways and shifts. Gordon Payne’s three short films, made in the late 1960s and early ​’70s, unfold as tactile meditations on vision, ritual, and the restless politics of seeing. Formally rigorous yet sensuous, these 16mm works ripple with otherworldly energy—a subtle resistance lodged in light, shadow, and rhythm. Payne moved to Hornby Island and returned to painting shortly after these films were made, carrying forward the spectral rhythms of these celluloid fragments, where memory, myth, and consciousness quietly intertwine. Screening from prints held in The Cinematheque’s West Coast Film Archive, with Negotiating a New Canadian Constitution generously loaned by the Belkin Gallery, this rare program offers a glimpse into a little-seen yet resonant thread of Canadian experimental film. —Nisha Platzer, Iris Film Collective

The screening will be followed by a poetry reading by collaborator Lionel Kearns and a virtual Q&A with Payne.

Tantra I
Canada 1969
Gordon Payne
8 min. 16mm

Negotiating a New Canadian Constitution
Canada 1973
Gordon Payne
3 min. 16mm

Birth of God Mandala
Canada 1973
Gordon Payne
4 min. 16mm

Art Island: Gordon Payne
Canada 2024
Zsofin Sheehy
15 min. Digital