This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
Canada: 
Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
Momentary Arrest
Programmed by Karina Irvine
On the surface there is no distinction between our experiencessome are vivid, others opaque; some are pleasant, others cause agony upon recollectionbut there is no way of knowing which are dreams and which are reality. Silvia Ocampo
Momentary Arrest presents a range of short films that speculate contradictions in perception, materiality and manufacture. How do we grasp objects through design? What is the aesthetic and material reality we find ourselves in as it relates to our experiences of the world? Multiple forms, both physical and those suggested through language, are playfully absorptive just as much as they enact both absence and deferral. Alain Resnais presents an industrial documentary revealing the processes of manufacturing polystyrene, treating it as both subject and object, shifting between culture and commerce. Jan Svankmajers imagery alternates between a suspended, playful dance of stones and the weighty reality of matter and time. An animated cluster of spheres is again seen in Norman McLarens short animation where they hover in tune through the rhythms of Bachs music. Nancy Holts words are similarly suspended between time and space as she describes her experience of listening to her delayed speech where, words become like things. In the final film, Patrick Keiller makes parallels between a personal past and natural history, in a film poem that considers geologic time in contrast to the quicker pace of transportation and industry. Momentary Arrest is concerned with looking and questioning a synthetic reality: one that is both calculated and strangely organic.
Be the first to comment