Dialoguing on Miniature Cinema as New Art: Midi Ondera and Sheena Wilson

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Wilson, Sheena

• MIDI ONODERA IS A WELL-RECOGNIZED Canadian filmmaker with more than thirty years of filmmaking experience. She has had screenings internationally at such prestigious venues as the Andy Warhol Museum, the International Festival of Documentary and Short Films, Bilbao, Spain, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her first film, a seven-minute short film entitled Reality-Illusion that she shot on Super Eight, appeared in 1979, while she was still in high school. She now has twenty-four films, two television writing credits, two commissioned artist profiles, two feature length works, two interactive DVDs, 434 short videos, and a total of 467 films and videos to her name. Starting in November 2006 and continuing for one year, Onodera worked on the A Movie a Day project, and an article on this project was featured in CineAction in 2008.1 2 As part of that project, she created one 30-45 second video per day for 365 days. These films explore a variety of issues and social situations from a variety of perspectives that are occasionally specific to Onodera’s own life and viewpoint but also include the perspective of fictional characters. In the article mentioned above, published as ―Mini-Camera: A Digital Diary for iPod,‖ Catherine Russell has argued the following: The 365 videos rigorously interrogate the nature of the ―image‖ as an object. The techniques Onodera uses include a play with framing in which the image size and shape is consistently varied, a dynamic use of saturated colours, and special effects that alter space and time. An extensive palette of designer colours are used to frame the videos, making interesting contrasts with the many striking images of nature. The rich colours contribute to the object-like nature of the image. (3-4) As an acknowledgement of Onodera’s long and productive career as a Canadian artist and filmmaker who has consistently demonstrated critical engagement with her subjects and her chosen media, we have invited Onodera to be the guest artist-filmmaker for the inaugural issue of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies.

• Date created

  2015-04-15

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Motion picture producers & directors
  • Motion pictures
  • Culture

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3W189

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International