John Greyson
14.3 Seconds | 2008 | 9:25mins | BetaSP | Canada
John Greyson was born 1960 in Nelson, B.C.. He is a prolific video artist, filmmaker and writer whose work has been screened in numerous international festivals and venues. He studied visual art in London, ON and in 1991 attended the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto. He has organized numerous video screenings and written extensively about contemporary media issues. He was the coordinating producer of AIDS Angry Initiatives/Defiant Strategies for Deep Dish Television Satellite, California and a co-organizer of Video Against AIDS produced by the Video Data Bank, Chicago. Greyson has recently edited an anthology of writings on AIDS and is currently working on his second feature film.
Videography includes No Way Charlie Brown (1990), The World is Sick (1989), The Pink Pimpernel (1989), The Ads Epidemic, Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers (1988), You Taste American (1988), The Jungle Boy (1985), Kipling Meets the Cowboys (1985), To Pick is Not to Choose (1985), The Perils of Pedagogy (1984). Greyson won the National Film Board’s award in 1991 at the Festival of Festivals, Toronto for his short film titled Making of Monsters. His 1993 film, Zero Patience, received Honourable Mention at the Toronto International Film Festival. His works also include Lilies (1996), Uncut (1997) and most recently Herr produced at Banff for BRAVO. He co-edited the critical anthology Queer Looks (Routledge 1993) and is an Advisory Board member of Inside Out, Toronto’s gay and lesbian film and video festival.
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When US bombs destroyed the Iraq Film Archives during the 2003 war, a journalist rescued eight scraps of celluloid from the wreckage, totalling 14.3 seconds. In 2004, ICARP (Iraq Coalition Archives Restoration Project) announced that it intended to use these scraps to painstakingly reconstruct what was once considered the greatest collection of Arab cinema in the world. Here are the first six restorations, including Al Mas’ Ala Al-Kubra (Dir. Mohamed Shukri Jameel, 1983, an epic about the 1920s uprising against British colonial rule, starring Yousef al-Any and Oliver Reed) and Al Ayyam Al-Tawila (Dir. Tewfik Saleh, 1980, based on an autobiographical novel by Saddam Hussein).
Featured in: The Pit of Babel: A Speculative Archive