images

Thursday was the opening night of the Images Festival, with a stack of films at the Bloor Cinema. Only one film out of six or seven shown enraged me, which was far below expectations. Has the avant-garde lost its pretension? Is the Images Fest no longer avant-garde? Was it ever? Has MTV made this stuff easier to watch? I can’t really say; alls I know is, the evening was surprisingly pleasant.

The Tscherkassky film (Dreamwork) was my fave. The technique is contact printing: he took found footage (a Barbara Hershey horror film from 1981, I’m assuming it’s this), cut it up and exposed new film with it. Multiple exposures are the name of the game:

Through this, I am able, in a literal sense, to realize the central mechanism by which dreams produce meaning, the “dream work,” as Sigmund Freud described it: displacement [Verschiebung] and condensation [Verdichtung].

Cool beans. And then I went and nearly put myself into a beef coma with a BBQ-at-your-table beef overload at Korea House. That’s livin’.