Civilization, The Shape of Things and This Transition Will Never End #6

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2008

Civilization
Marco Brambilla
2008
3-minute loop
Colour, Sound

The Shape of Things
Oliver Pietsch
2008
18 minutes

This Transition Will Never End #6
Jeremy Shaw
2009
22 minutes
Video

Curated by Noah Cowan
Presented by Future Projections at Metro Square/Bell Lightbox

These three feverish, urgent films find a new twist on the history and culture. In turns surreal, menacing and hilarious, they delight in the inexhaustible treasure trove of discoveries to be found in the medium’s past. For this group, moviedom is a vast dreamscape, an over-packed cortex of memory with seemingly random bits of the twentieth century’s subconscious spilling out in sometimes disturbing, sometimes wacky ways.

Each night of the Festival, the three films will be projected in large format on a continuous loop onto the corner panels of Bell Lightbox, our new home set to open in late 2010 at the corner of King and John Streets. We hope this presentation acts as a kind of baptism for the building, an inculcation of radical values from the intersection of art and film.

Civilization is a stunning single-channel installation first created for the Standard Hotel in New York City. A CGI pastiche of cinematic, historical and pop culture moments, it takes us on a journey from hell to heaven in a single tracking shot. Rendered to look like something between Hieronymous Bosch and a video game, Marco Brambilla’s dense imagery rewards the same repeated viewings and trance-like states as his wonderful Cathedral from last year’s Future Projections programme.

German artist Oliver Pietsch’s The Shape of Things is a thematic montage exploring the nature of dreams in cinema. Pietsch presents the cinematic dream sequence in all its guises, from nightmare and psychological torment to erotic fantasy, Nosferatu to Aliens. Elegiac and entertaining, it touches on Freud and nuclear war as part of the visual landscape that shaped contemporary consciousness.

Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw presents This Transition Will Never End, a mashed-up devotional to the various spinning vortices that play such a significant role in cinema’s most surreal moments. His collage suggests that art itself feels discomfort when pegged to a given era and that the vortex of cinema provides a pleasurable but terrifying release from this bondage. The work also attests to Shaw’s ongoing interest in psychedelic art, rock videos and drug culture.
—Noah Cowan