Ley Lines
Writer, Director, Editor: Documentary 74 min. Shot in Texas, Germany, Tuktoyaktuk. Premiered at Festival of Festivals, Toronto 1994; Vancouver International Film Festival; Northwest Film Festival, Portland (Special Jury Prize); Montréal festival du nouveau cinéma et de la video; Canadian Film Institute: Spotlight Film, New Frontiers Film Festival, Ottawa; Film Studies Association of Canada annual conference, Pacific Cinémathéque.
Taking her own last name as her primary organizing principle in approaching the past, Patricia Gruben has constructed one of the most inventive personal archeologies and family histories ever filmed. Over six years in the making, Ley Lines eschews conventional narrative storytelling in favour of associative and cumulative revelation...Gruben criss-crosses the globe as she traces the Gruben family back to Texas and then to Germany, only to end up in the present in Tuktoyaktuk. Her magical and unpredictable exploration makes innumerable stops along the way to consider such matters as satellites, DNA, geomancy, dowsing, Jimmy Dean, Hitler, the Thule Society and a tycoon who willed $2 million to a lump of dirt….A carefully shaped and resonant work of great imaginative power, Ley Lines is guaranteed to fire neurons you didn't even realize you had.
--David McIntosh, Toronto Festival of Festivals
A tour de force return to experimental methods which pursues the idea of family across the ages, according to an associative logic all its own.
-- Take One's Distinctly Canadian 100: The Sequel.
In lesser hands, this would be a mess. In hers, it's an inspiration. A major talent at the top of her form.
-- B. Ruby Rich, Northwest Film Festival, Portland
An extended essay about identity within family and memory…. Ley Lines is a working model of Patricia Gruben's mind, and it's a place that seems haunted by the shadows of those she has left behind or, more accurately, of those who have left her behind....a geographical tour through an imagined history that leads, inexorably, to the only person who can release Gruben from her phantoms. Ley Lines is unlike any other film I've seen….It is an act of preparation and, perhaps, prevarication, destiny unknown.
– Colin Browne in Take One magazine
Reviews & Notices
° Browne, Colin, "Letter from Vancouver: Selected Documentary Films from Vancouver International Film Festival," Take One: Film & Television in Canada, 1994 - takeone.athabascau.ca
° Elliot, Rob, "A Ley Lines to the Past," Burnaby News October 6 1993 p. 15
° Wilson, Suzanne, "Ley Lines Diary: Festival of Festivals." Playback September 13, 1993 F19.
° Rowley, Allison, "Women of the World," Vancouver Sun October 6, 1993 p. D8
° Rich, B. Ruby, Ley Lines. Northwest Film Festival program.
