REMASTERED AND RESTORED

Letters from Vancouver comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in "the medium is the message" (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, the politics of perception and the framing of perception form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.

the politics of perception (1973) 33 minutes

Why representation? From cave drawings, to Plato's shadows, to the melding of photo-chemistry and optics with the maltese-cross movement, humans are always projecting. Cinema (originally cinematographe,"motion writing") is a mechanical transport that projects an artificial sun through a sequence of celluloid shadows. Into shadows we project meaning using a medium on the precarious edge of entropy. In the movies, curiously, there is no motion in the projected still frames.

All movement is the viewer's illusion. Enter the gangster film, mechanically produced, reproduced, distributed, exhibited, and consumed. What to make of mechanized cultural productions? What meaning, and illusions, in these images, words, sounds, and rhythms, methodical as a machine, as precise as a computer?

the framing of perception (1973) 33 minutes

"I saw the light..."Sun, light, darkness, shadow--from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its colour, its radiation, its nature-is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for mass consumption. What is the message?