“Peggy Anne Berton did something I have never seen before at a film fest, and that is narrate her entire film as it was being screened - she was very charming and funny.”
• Bobby Nijjar,
L.I.F.T. Newsletter,
summer 1999

“Peggy Anne is a veteran filmmaker (I saw her work at The Funnel Experimental Film Theatre in the 1980’s) and has developed here a distinctive, low-tech film/performance which is a part of exciting new directions in recent Toronto film art. She has 200 of these films and enough stories to use each film more than once.”
• John Porter,
CineZine #1, Fall 1999

“Peggy Anne’s beat digs deeply into a seemingly infinite vault of documentary/autobiographic b&w Super 8 reels shot over a lifetime. She projects them in hypnotic slow-motion over sensitive selections of vinyl spun by DJ Richard Vermeulen ,and gives the whole mass of imagery shape with her pensive, amusing, poignant, sometimes wandering and sometimes very gripping narrated commentary. Like Peggy Anne herself, it is funny, but fairly intense.”
• Egon von Bark
Shotgun reviews
Lola #8
Winter 2000-2001

A special not-something occurred at the Saturday night performance by Toronto’s Peggy Anne Berton and her old style DJ (no mixing or turntable-twisting) Richard Vermeulen. As Peggy Anne projected her unedited super 8 reels and told stories about them, I noticed something missing. There was no hype. None. And no attitude - and NO ‘irony’. How could that be? Art without smug humour - impossible! But Berton was in fact just showing her super 8 movies and telling about them as songs played in the background. And the disarmingly simple result of it all was radical - as in radix, roots - moving the audience back to a sense of basic human be-ing and connectedness. Berton pushes the sentimental home-movie quality of the medium with her technique of slowing down the projector and her homey, honest
narration. That’s the ‘beat’ of Peggy Anne’s soliloquies - the ‘sad and beautiful world’ she takes her audience to.

•Dmidtrui Otis
The Nerve, Vancouver
March/April Edition
4th Annual Vancouver Underground Film Festival
Nov 22-25, 2002

“When Peggy Anne Berton’s film / performance, Tin Ashtrays concluded I sat amazed by her ability to present publicly such intimate views of seemingly private life, vulnerability as context for living behind the camera and in front of the projector in live narration. Disarmed, she was the veritable Bride stripped bare at her own hands. I said: you’re so brave.”
•Susan MacKay,
Subclip #6 Fall 2000 Charles Street Video Newsletter

Back