Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof

Biography

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof is a Toronto based filmmaker. She is a graduate of the Media Arts Programme at Ryerson University (BAA) and of the Communication and Culture Programme at York University (MA). Her film and video projects have screened at numerous international film festivals, cinematheques, galleries and art centres, including: the Toronto International Film Festival; the New York International Film Festival; the Rotterdam International Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; Cinematheque Ontario; San Francisco Cinematheque; the Museum of Civilization, Ottawa; the New York Kunsthalle; and filmwerkplaats, Rotterdam. Several of her projects have been awarded by various festivals and arts organizations. In 1996 during her studies at Ryerson University, she co-founded the successful interdisciplinary film collective the Loop Collective, which she is continually trying to expand by organizing innovative contexts to present experimental cinema.
She has also contributed in various capacities to the Toronto arts community: as a filmmaker, as an administrator, as a programmer and as a member of numerous local arts organizations. She is currently working towards her Doctoral degree in the Communication and Culture Programme at York University in Toronto while teaching part-time in the Image Arts department at Ryerson University and the Film Department at York University.

Conference

" The Proliferation of Screens in Experimental Cinema "

This programme of works illustrates the long standing tradition in experimental cinema of artists imaginatively exploring the moving image and investigating the plastic possibilities of a frame while introducing the poly-visual and poly-perspectival composition in cinema.
Works selected for this programme provide a tiny sample of various approaches that have been explored over the last eighty years by artists who pushed the plastic possibilities of cinema while creating complex visual compositions. For example, some artists' interests concentrated on fragmenting the cinematic frame by: optically or physically cutting it and multiplying it; playing with its rectangular shape; by expanding and exploding it beyond the confines of a projector and a screen; by focussing on the film particle or the digital pixel that makes up the frame; while still others used combinations of these approaches. While
this programme does not nearly include all the approaches in this tradition nor its filmmakers, it aims to stimulate interest and open it up to future investigations of artists and scholars.

Programme: list of works
Ballet Mécanique
10 min. 1924
Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, George Antheil

c: won eye jail
5 min. 2005
Kelly Egan

The Meaning of Walking in a Park
2.5 min. 2005
Wieslaw Michalak

Foregrounds
13 min. 1973
Pat O'Neill

A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy
100 min. 1997 (excerpt)
R. Bruce Elder