The Other Shoe (film): Difference between revisions
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| The Other Shoe | |
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| Directed by | Daniel Cockburn |
| Written by | Daniel Cockburn |
| Produced by | Daniel Cockburn |
| Edited by | Daniel Cockburn |
Production companies | ZeroFunction Productions, LIFT[1] |
Release date |
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Running time | 5 minutes[1] |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
The Other Shoe is a 2001 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, which, along with Metronome (2002), won the Homebrew Award when shown at the Images Festival and thereby broadened his reputation beyond Toronto.
Themes
The main theme of The Other Shoe is the cinematic perception of time, which is compressed or elongated into a singular experience, for which insight Cockburn acknowledges Tarkovsky.[3] Cockburn remarks that the contemporary trend in cinema is speed and diversion, except in advertising where one finds many static shots: "We have learned that slowness can be appreciated, but only briefly; slownesses thus follow one another with great rapidity, as refreshing as ice cubes shooting out of a volcano."[3] Cockburn is convinced that "longer attention span means greater capability of complex thought, means greater empowerment", adding that he is not fixated on "slowness" and that there are other means of foregrounding time, which he does with rhythm in Metronome and Stupid Coalescing Becomers, a "backwards time fantasy".[3]
Cockburn was surprised to find that the finished film was as much about hypertext and multitasking as it was about his original contemplations.[4]
Production
Commission
The Other Shoe was a commission for LIFT's 20th Anniversary in 2001. Cockburn was one of fifteen film and video artists given cash and equipment to create short works "that would be personal responses" to the theme Self & Celluloid: The Future.[4] Cockburn has long had technophobic tendencies, in particular of digital video as a medium,[3] and has claimed to have created The Other Shoe "solely in dismayed response" to his discovery that the commissioned works of which The Other Shoe was a part would be streamed online: "That may be fine for some people, I thought — without (much) prejudice — but not for those of us who still relish the surrender of darkened-theatre viewing."[4]
Filming and editing
The director's solution to the anxieties created for him by the live-streaming aspect of the project was to make a double projection of both 16 mm film and video, with the video portion designed to be streamed on the internet, while the film portion could only be seen by the audience who attended the screening, a practice which Cockburn later called "simplistic film fetishism" on his part.[4]
Cockburn's method for achieving "slowness" in The Other Shoe is to place single takes in a mutli-frame context, something he did again in The Impostor (hello goodbye).[3]
Release and reception
Released in 2001, response to The Other Shoe suprised Cockburn, who derived a "humbling joy" from knowing that a work made with his "simple-minded" intentions could, in "failing to fully make its point," nevertheless be "engagingly conflicted and complex".[4]
Cockburn received an honorable mention jointly for The Other Shoe and Metronome at the 2002 Images Festival (Homebrew Award - Best Local Emerging Artist).[5]
Related works
Cockburn made use of outtakes make the short music video monopedal Joy, a 16mm projection captured and edited in camera on Mini DV and subsequently mastered to Betacam.[6]
References
- ^ a b "Daniel Cockburn: The Other Shoe". ccca.concordia.ca. Retrieved 11 July 2020.
- ^ "Daniel Cockburn". Vtape. Retrieved 10 July 2020.
- ^ a b c d e Hoolboom, Mike (ed. and interviewer) (2008). "Daniel Cockburn: Smartbomb". Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists (1st ed.). Toronto: Coach House Books. pp. 7–20. Retrieved 25 September 2019.
{{cite book}}:|first1=has generic name (help) - ^ a b c d e Cockburn, Daniel. "Screensplitting". ZeroFunction. Retrieved 11 July 2020.
- ^ "Who/What June 2002" (PDF). LIFT: The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. 22 (3): 19. May–June 2002. Retrieved 25 September 2019.
- ^ "monopedal Joy". Vtape. Retrieved 11 July 2020.