AD HOC #89: The Body in Film Part 2
Innis College, room 222
March 3, 2026, 8PM
In this, our second screening dedicated to representations of the body in film, we gather four films spanning four decades that bring together a variety of abstract treatments of the body (the body as echo, the body as landscape, the body as canvas) and a temporal/durational/historical vision of the body (the body as resurrection).
In Lot in Sodom, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber explore the biblical tale of the fall of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, one of the great stories of the body transformed as in the figure of Lot’s wife ossified into a pillar of salt. The orgies of the city’s damned, full of mirth and joy, and the wrath of the angel, full of irony and reprisal, becomes an occasion for Watson & Webber to practice optical abstraction. In Geography of the Body, the poet-filmmaker Willard Maas collaborates with his wife, filmmaker Marie Menken (as cinematographer) and the poet George Barker (as author/narrator) on a film of simple deception, photographing the body in close-up as Barker speaks of travels in a distant land. Jim Davis, whose light-channeling mobiles were used to create a large corpus of essential abstract filmmaking, also made films that use the human figure, albeit in forms no less transformative, often only glimpsed in fragments. Death & Transfiguration, a late film, shows the interaction of his light refractions on the naked flesh of a human subject. Finally, Bruce Conner’s Marilyn Times Five employs a loop of Marilyn Monroe lookalike Arline Hunter, repeating the material to a point of clinical, forensic insight.
Program:
Lot in Sodom (1933, 28 mins., 16mm, b&w, sound)
Geography of the Body (1943, 7 mins., 16mm, b&w, sound)
Death and Transfiguration (1961, 10 mins., 16mm, colour, sound)
Marilyn Times Five (1973, 14 mins., digital file, b&w, sound)
Lot in Sodom (1933, 28 mins., 16mm, b&w, sound)
Geography of the Body (1943, 7 mins., 16mm, b&w, sound)
Death and Transfiguration (1961, 10 mins., 16mm, colour, sound)
Marilyn Times Five (1973, 14 mins., digital file, b&w, sound)
TRT: 59 minutes
AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.
AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.
AD HOC would like to thank Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, Eyan Logan, Rob Trevisan, Thom Chan, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.