Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Editor, Cinematographer, Visual Artist, Sound

(b. April 28, 1946 Bamberg, Germany)

A confrontational iconoclast and cultural activist, Al Razutis is a Vancouver-based teacher, writer, critic, historian and experimental filmmaker. His internationally acclaimed structural films are created in a highly revolutionary spirit and challenge popular cultural and political ideology. His best known works are two major cycles of thematically linked experimental films: Amerika (1972-83), a decidedly dystopian, epic descent into the gloom of Western industrialized society; and Visual Essays: Origins of Film, described by Razutis as a “structural investigation of the primitive silent cinema.”

In these larger works and in more recent films, Razutis’s frequently ferocious interrogations of contemporary culture utilize a variety of optical and sonic techniques (collage, layering, optical printing, etc.) to penetrate and illuminate the cacophony of modernity. His films – which typically raise questions concerning gender roles, sexuality, film theory, class structure and censorship – are often characterized by phantasmagoric effects and tongue-in-cheek slogans and images.

Razutis graduated with a B.Sc. in physics and chemistry from California Western University before moving on to graduate studies in nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry at the University of California, Davis. He has worked in avant-garde film since 1967 and more recently in the fields of video art, holographic art, stereoscopic 3-D video, digital graphics/web media and web-based virtual reality. He has also written screenplays, prose and prose-poetry and has published two periodicals on film and holography. From 1978 to 1987, he taught film production and film studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he was also head of the Film-Video Programme.

He was instrumental in forming the West Coast film distributor Moving Images Distribution, as well as a short-lived union of Canadian film artists and the Vancouver production co-op, Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society. He has completed more than forty films and videos as well as performances, paintings, holograms and intermedia productions. He has worked over the years to secure an institutional base for fringe cinema, but is also somewhat notorious for his anti-institutional stance. His films have received a number of international awards – including a 1988 Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Amerika – and his media art has been exhibited around the world in museums and galleries as prestigious as the Louvre in Paris.

Film and video work includes

2 x 2, 1967 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Black Angel Flag...Eat, 1968 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Circus Show Fyre, 1968 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Inauguration, 1968 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Poem: Elegy for Rose, 1968 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
1967-1969, 1969 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
AAEON, 1970 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Software / Head Title, Amerika series, 1972 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Vortex, Amerika series, 1972 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
98.3 KHZ (Bridge at Electrical Storm), Amerika series, 1973 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Melies Catalog, Visual Essays: Origins of Film series, 1973 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
The Moon at Evernight..., 1973 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Visual Alchemy, 1973 (director; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Le Voyage, 1973 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Anthology 1974, 1974 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Videographics 1972-1974, 1974 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
The Cities of Eden, Amerika series, 1976, (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Sequels in Transfigured Time, Visual Essays: Origins of Film series, 1976 (director; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Synapse, 1976 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Waveform, 1976 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Egypte, 1977 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor)
Portrait, 1978 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
The Wasteland and Other Stories, Amerika series, 1979 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Ghost Image, Visual Essays: Origins of Film series, 1979 (director; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Lumiere's Train (Arriving at the Station), Visual Essays: Origins of Film series, 1979 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
A Message From Our Sponsor, Amerika series, 1979 (director; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Anthology 1980, 1980 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Motel Row - 2, Amerika series, 1980 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
The Wildwest Show, Amerika series, 1980 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Atomic Gardening, Amerika series, 1981 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Excerpt from MS: The Beast, 1981 (director; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Motel Row 3, Amerika series, 1981 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
For Artaud, Visual Essays: Origins of Film series, 1982 (director; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Motel Row, Amerika series, 1982 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
O Kanada, Amerika series, 1982 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Refrains 1 - 5, Amerika series, 1982 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Exiles, Amerika series, 1983 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
*(Fin), Amerika series, 1983 (director; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
The Lonesome Death of Leroy Brown, Amerika series, 1983 (director; writer; cinematographer - Part One; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Photo Spot, 1983 (director; writer; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Storming the Winter Palace, Visual Essays: Origins of Film series, 1984 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Visual Essays: Origins of Film series, 1973 - 1984 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in a Bourgeois Society Society, or SPLICE, 1986 (co-director with Scott Hayes, Doug Chomyn; writer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects; lab timer)
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1990 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; co-producer with Mike Hoolboom; visual effects)
Ghosts in the Machine, 1995 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Meditations, 1996 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Virtual Imaging, 1996 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
VR: A Movie, 1996 (director; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Why Don't You Just Leave, 1996 (co-director with Anne Popperwell; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; co-producer; visual effects)
Dean Fogal: Corporeal Art, 1997 (co-director with Dean Fogal; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Discovery of Loss, 1997 (co-director with Dean Fogal; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Shadows of Love, 1997 (co-director with Dean Fogal; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Virtual Flesh, 1997 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
France 1997, 1998 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Nagual, 1998 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
Statues, 1998 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)
1946-2003/Learning to Walk/Bamberg, Germany, 2003 (director; cinematographer; editor; sound editor; producer; visual effects)