Hard Fat 23min, video, 2002
Director: Frédéric Moffet

A compelling and sometimes disturbing conversation with Rick, the web’s most celebrated “gainer” (someone who purposefully gains weight because they enjoy inhabiting a fatter body). This video explores the gainer’s fascinating bodily transformation in a unique, revamped documentary style in order to challenge our own preconceived notions of size, desire, beauty and masculinity.


Frédéric Moffet was born in Montreal. He graduated from Concordia University with a BFA in filmmaking. He received a full scholarship to complete a MFA in video at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he presently teaches digital video production. He has also worked as a coordinator and curator for Vidéographe, an artist run media center and video distribution house in Montréal. His work deals with transformation, desire and the “out of control body”. Recent projects includes: Hard Fat (2002), More is More (2002), 24xCaprices (2001), An Objective Measure of Arousal (2001), Five O’clock Shadow (1998). His videos and films have been shown in festivals and galleries internationally, including at VideoEx (Zurich), Para/Site and Microwave (Hong Kong), Art in General (New YorK), BBC Short Film Festival (Londres), Frameline (San Francisco), The New Festival (New York) et le Festival Nouveau Cinema Nouveau Media (Montréal).

Removed 8min, 16mm, 1999
Director: Naomi Uman

Naomi Uman physically erases the female body from old 16mm porn using nail polish remover and household bleach. This gorgeous attack of beauty and domestic product on celluloid results in a series of animated white 'holes' writhing orgasmically in the place of porn stars. The leering men are captured in various inadequate poses and the original dialogue tracks remain, complete with badly dubbed exchanges. The hole in the film becomes an erotic zone, a blank on which a fantasy body is projected. This brilliant work is unusually precise: it is politically subversive, pornography in its own right, sassy and extremely funny. ~Clare Stewart Senses of Cinema

Naomi Uman lives in Los Angeles and Mexico City where she makes films at a small table, accompanied by a small dog.

Geography of the Body 7min, 16mm, 1943
Director: Willard Maas & Marie Menken

An analogical pilgrimage evokes the terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious continent. Extreme magnification increases the ambiguity of the visuals, tongue-in-cheek commentary counteracts or reinforces their sexual implications. The method is that used by the imagist-symbolist poet.

The Birth of Aphrodite 12min, 16mm, 1971
Director: Leland Auslender

Electronic music by Jimmy Webb, Fred Katz and Tim Weisberg is blended with subliminal vocal sounds. Unique special effects and original imagery. "Dream is the myth of the individual," Jane Harrison once wrote. This film is both dream and myth. A personal version or vision of the archetypal Aphrodite legend, it depicts the birth of the Goddess of love and beauty from sky-God father and sea-Goddess mother. After a period of gestation in the ocean depths, Aphrodite is delivered from the womb of the wave, lingers briefly on the shore, then continues her ascent, becoming the planet Venus. The distortion technique developed by the filmmaker has received wide acclaim - a full color cover story appeared in the September, 1971 issue of the American Cinematographer. Awards: Silver Phoenix Trophy, Atlanta Int'l Film Festival; Best Experimental Film, Cannes Film Festival;Edinburgh Film Festival; CINE Golden Eagle.

The Birth of Aphrodite revives the forgotten aspect of magic in the cinema." - Todd McCarthy, San Francisco Chronicle

Leland Auslender has always had one foot planted firmly in the world of photography and the other in the world of science. His films have been honored at Venice, Bergamo, New York and San Francisco international exhibitions, receiving numerous awards including three CINE Golden Eagles and a "One of Ten Best," from the Photographic Society of America, International Cinema Competition. The Birth of Aphrodite, recognized for its multiple superimposed liquid images filmed with distorting mirrors, led to the development of Auslender's present passion, an exclusive optical process that transforms rectangular images into swirling prismatic visions floating inside a sphere. Called "celestial images," they suggest the divine nature of the universe, its mythology, fantasies and dreams, where everything is alive, and everyone is touched and transformed by everything and everybody else, forming an ever-changing, indivisible, harmonious whole. With engineering and business degrees from Cal Tech and Stanford Graduate School of Business, Auslender has worked as a film producer, director, writer and cinematographer for pioneering organizations, including Hughes Aircraft Company, US Navy, NBC-TV and ABC-TV. He owns patents to a theatrical film process, "Dynamic Frame," and served as a board member of SmarTire Systems, Inc. during the development of the company's hi-tech automotive tire monitoring systems. Today, Auslender's aim is to reveal, in photographic images, transcendental experiences of our oneness with the mystical universe, its divine beauty and infinite delight, experiences he calls "Momentary Forevers."

Outlet 4min, 16mm, 1999
Director: Robert Banks

What do women subject themselves to in order to maintain the image that society dictates they have? Outlet is an intense, skeptical look at cosmetic beauty and the potential havoc it can wreak on one's persona. Outlet premiered at the 1999 Cleveland International Film Festival.

Most people’s parents dream of the day when their child graduates from med school or is sworn into the Oval Office. Robert Banks’ father had an equally high, but definitely more rare, starry-eyed expectation for his son: he would be a filmmaker. In an effort to keep young Banks off Cleveland’s inner-city streets, he plied the six-year-old with the most rudimentary of equipment in hopes that he’d take to the medium. The elements and manipulations of image and sound embedded themselves within Banks as a second language as he learned on basic home-movie, animation and recording equipment. This school of limitations, as it were, taught him how to explore big ideas within the realm of more simplistic equipment, and disciplined an innovative, liberating approach to limiting factors for which he is now internationally known and lauded. He’s created award-winning shorts on shoestring budgets, funded by his day gigs as a janitor and art school figure model, and allowed for by his appreciation of guerilla filmmaking. Banks has racked up a number of influences such as experimental filmmakers from Stan Brakhage and Bruce Connor to Richard Kern and Marlon Riggs. Innovators Gordon Parks, Sr., Melvin Van Peebles and 1920 pioneer Oscar Micheaux provided him much inspiration, and he cites motivation from the study of more obscure Japanese, German and Eastern European filmmakers. - http://www.insound.com/cinema/directorstand/index.cfm?id=339

Your Name in Cellulite 6min, 16mm, 1995
Director: Gail Noonan

A wickedly funny satire about the disparity between a woman's natural beauty and the ideal promoted by the mega-billion dollar advertising industry, this animated film shows us how far we will go to change the shape of our bodies to meet the demands of an impossible image. But the picture-perfect exterior can be maintained by our heroine only if she restrains her body's natural spontaneity. Your Name in Cellulite visually ponders at what point the body will say "Enough is enough!" and take matters into its own hands.

"...six hilarious animated minutes...using outlandish wit and exhilarating images, Noonan has crafted a mini-masterpiece on the subject of letting go." John Cooper Northwest Film and Video Festival