You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different

Last updated

You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different
YouAreInaMazeofTwistyLittlePassages.jpeg
Directed by Daniel Cockburn
Written byDaniel Cockburn
Starring
Cinematography
  • Daniel Cockburn
  • Chris MacLean
Edited by
  • Daniel Cockburn
  • Hilda Rasula
Music byAlexander Glenfield [1]
Animation byDaniel Cockburn
Production
company
ZeroFunction Productions
Distributed by Vtape
Release date
Running time
55 minutes [2]
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different: Films and Videos by Daniel Cockburn is a 2009 Canadian experimental film anthology consisting of a curated programme of eleven short films by video artist Daniel Cockburn. [3]

Contents

Synopsis

AUDIT

An attempt to graph the shape of a human life through animation, with all its coincidences and repetitions.

Faith No More in 2009 Faith No More 2009.jpg
Faith No More in 2009
Texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein appear in IdeaL and Metronome. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1910.jpg
Texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein appear in IdeaL and Metronome.

IdeaL

Texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein are set against lyrics by the cock rock band Faith No More in a "1-to-1 syllable-to-syllable ratio."

  • 2003, 3 minutes, video

Rocket Man

A karaoke muzak video version of Elton John / Bernie Taupin's Rocket Man set to clips of fifty years' worth of American space films like Forbidden Planet and Lost in Space . [4]

  • 2001, 5 minutes, video

Metronome

An artist goes through his day keeping to a steady rhythm. All the while, his voice-over speaks rapidly, discussing mental patterns in life, language, rhythm, as well as determinacy and free will. He talks about Hollywood films that have inspired him, and appropriated clips flow along with the artist's own footage. He wonders how many of his daily thoughts are his own, as opposed to ideas coming from films or indeed the rest of his life experience.

Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004 Arnold Schwarzenegger 2004-01-30.jpg
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004

WEAKEND

The 6th day.svg
Video and audio of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson from The 6th Day is reworked by a videomaker. The manipulation stops with the arrival of the Sabbath, when the videomaker rests, and the Schwarzenegger of his creation speaks angrily for himself, and the videomaker answers.

  • 2003, 7 minutes, video
    • Tranz Tech Media Art Biennial • FAMEFAME Jury Prize [6]

The Impostor (hello goodbye)

In a split screen, a man dressed in a black suit and tie speaks directly to the audience, while a black and white home movie is being projected next to him, on the left. He describes a dream in which he was asked to read a eulogy for his father. The man wonders if his words killed his father.

  • 2003, 9 minutes, video; commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell
Expanding Universe.jpg

Nocturnal Doubling

As a metred beat thumps, and a metred line is pulled across the screen, a narrator asserts with certainty that the entire universe expanded to twice its size overnight.

Figure Vs. Ground

Emily supplied him with a clip of her singing on a boat, which he promptly layered up into a dizzying multi-screen display that buried her "figure" beneath his "ground." Emily dubbed his aggressive material assertions "like being gang raped by video."

Mike Hoolboom [7]

A journey from cacophony to harmony.

  • 2004, 7 minutes, video; a collaboration with fellow video artist Emily Vey Duke, commissioned by the 640 480 video collective for the VS. programme [8]

Stupid Coalescing Becomers

A "backwards time fantasy" [9] in which a narrator lashes out at the "little opposite rebellions" he sees in which everything is reversed: "paper uncuts itself, cigarettes unsmoke, broken lightbulbs re-form, pills re-gather and in the final image, the artist himself flies out of the frame." [10]

  • 2004, 2 minutes, video

This Thing Is Bigger Than the Both of Us: These Are Facts

A shadowy figure speaks in a modulated whisper attempting to guess what sort of video artist Matthew C. Brown made for the One Minute Film & Video Festival (This Thing Is Bigger Than the Both of Us: The Secret of String). [5]

  • 2007, 1 minute, video

AUDIT (version 2)

Another, different attempt to graph the shape of a human life through animation.

  • 2005, 3 minutes, Super 8 with audio CD
Daniel Cockburn Director Daniel Cockburn leads a post-show Q&A (cropped).jpg
Daniel Cockburn

Genre and themes

The guide for the 2011 Impakt Festival suggests Daniel Cockburn's films are found at the intersection of avant-garde and narrative cinema, combining innovative storytelling strategies and structuralist experimentation, breaking open "day-to-day reality to reveal the strange codes beneath."

Self-reflexive to the point of neurosis, Cockburn is fascinated with how moving images can illuminate the structures and rhythms of our lives; he is forever looking for hidden meaning in randomness and patterns in chaos. [11]

In 2009, Cockburn was invited to a six-month fellowship in Berlin (DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program), [12] where he began showing a curated programme of his films and videos. An anthology film tour was coordinated by curator Jon Davies (Pleasure Dome) with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. [13]

Cockburn returned to Toronto toward the end of the year with a revised programme which also saw the launch a publication about his work. [5] The catalogue, also titled You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages all Different, was edited by Daniel Cockburn and Jon Davies, and included five commissioned essays by video artists Steve Reinke and Emily Vey Duke, author Sheila Heti, filmmaker Spencer Parsons, and theoretical physicist Lee Smolin. [5] [13]

Release and reception

The final version of You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages all Different was screened in Toronto on 5 December 2009. In addition to the eleven shorts which form the core of the standard programme, the Pleasure Dome screening included The Chinese Room (a ten-minute work-in-progress excerpt from Cockburn's upcoming feature, You Are Here ) and Matthew C. Brown's This Thing Is Bigger Than The Both Of Us: The Secret Of String. [5] The 2011 Impakt Festival version switches The Chinese Room with Material (2011), the short Cockburn made for the National Parks Project. [11]

Home media

A 55-minute DVD (for exhibitions and educational institutions) of the definitive (Toronto) version of the anthology film was released in 2009. [13]

Critical response

Norman Wilner wrote a brief retrospective review of Cockburn's work in advance of the Pleasure Dome event in Toronto:

Cockburn's work is strange and recursive and curious and enthralling, and sometimes all at once. In works like Metronome and The Impostor (hello goodbye), he considers life, death and dreams - and dreams about death - with a childlike fascination and an adult's sense of gravity. He'll ponder the collective illusion of time in Stupid Coalescing Becomers, or investigate his suspicion that everything in the universe has doubled in size overnight in the aptly titled Nocturnal Doubling. Calmly offering philosophical and metaphysical insights on the audio track, while evidence of his thesis plays out on the screen, he's both prankster and serious inquisitor; there's no way anything he's talking about is even plausible, let alone probable, but he's going to explore the possibilities as if it were. [4]

Related Research Articles

Colin Campbell (1942–2001) was a Canadian video artist.

Phillip Barker is a Canadian production designer, filmmaker and visual artist based in Toronto, Ontario.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impakt Festival</span>

The Impakt Festival is a yearly manifestation on media art, founded in 1988 in the city of Utrecht, Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Hoolboom</span> Canadian filmmaker (born 1959)

Michael Hoolboom is a Canadian independent, experimental filmmaker. Having begun filmmaking at an early age, Hoolboom released his first major work, a "film that's not quite a film" entitled White Museum, in 1986. Although he continued to produce films, his rate of production improved drastically after he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 or 1989; this gave a "new urgency" to his works. Since then he has made dozens of films, two of which have won Best Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. His films have also featured in more than 200 film festivals worldwide.

<i>Franks Cock</i> 1993 short film by Mike Hoolboom

Frank's Cock is a 1993 Canadian short film written and directed by Mike Hoolboom. The eight-minute production stars Callum Keith Rennie as an unnamed narrator who discusses his relationship with his partner, Frank. The two met while the narrator was a teenager and spent nearly ten years together. Frank has since been diagnosed with AIDS, and the narrator fears his death. The story was based on the experience of one of Hoolboom's friends at People With AIDS, which Hoolboom adapted after receiving a commission to create a short film about breaking up.

Steve Reinke is a Canadian video artist and filmmaker.

<i>You Are Here</i> (2010 film) Film

You Are Here is a 2010 Canadian philosophical speculative fiction film written and directed by video artist Daniel Cockburn, which he also co-produced with Daniel Bekerman. Cockburn's first feature film is "hyper-inventive and categorically hard-to-describe", initially billed as a "Borgesian fantasy" or a "meta-detective story", and later as "part experimental gallery film and part philosophical sketch comedy." In You Are Here, Cockburn makes use of the techniques and concepts he had honed over the previous decade as an experimental video artist with "a narrative bent", and "works them into a complex and unique cinematic structure." The film mainly follows a woman searching for the meaning behind a series of audiovisual documents from other universes, seemingly left purposefully for her to find, some of which are shown as vignettes concerning figures such as the Lecturer and the Experimenter interspersed throughout the film. She finds so many of them that they fill a space which she calls the Archive, and herself its Archivist. In time, the Archive appears to resist her attempts at cataloguing and organizing it, and she receives a cell phone instead of the usual document, leading to a fateful encounter with others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Cockburn</span> Canadian filmmaker and performance artist

Daniel Ernest Cockburn is a Canadian performance artist, film director and video artist. Cockburn won the Jay Scott Prize in 2010 and the European Media Art Festival's principal award in 2011 for his debut feature film You Are Here.

<i>The Argument (With Annotations)</i> 2017 experimental short film

The Argument (With Annotations) is a 2017 Canadian-British short experimental drama film written, directed, and edited by video artist Daniel Cockburn. The short's first half attempts to deceive the audience into thinking it is a non-fictional video essay, revealing itself mid-way to be a work of fiction, the essay actually the work of the film's protagonist, an elderly professor (Clare Coulter). Submitted as Cockburn's thesis for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Film studies at York University, the film had its world premiere at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival, and has been warmly received by critics.

<i>Gods Nightmares</i> 2019 experimental short film

God's Nightmares is a 2019 Canadian-British short experimental black comedy film created by Daniel Cockburn that "mashes together" appropriated film clips, creating a visual collage that imagines the thoughts that plague God at night, his "interior monologue," in which he muses about a recurring nightmare of being an everyman.

<i>Metronome</i> (film) 2002 experimental short film

Metronome is a 2002 Canadian short experimental film which mixes appropriated film clips and video by video artist Daniel Cockburn to express ideas about rhythm and order, the self and other minds, and the digital age. Densely philosophical, the work is acknowledged as his international "breakout hit" after several locally successful short works, winning praise from critics, a mention, and an award.

<i>WEAKEND</i> 2003 experimental short film

WEAKEND is a 2003 Canadian short experimental film created by video artist Daniel Cockburn, made through a remix of audio and video from The 6th Day, a Hollywood feature film about cloning starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Commissioned by famefame for the third biennial Tranz Tech Media Art Festival, the work was awarded the Jury prize.

<i>Nocturnal Doubling</i> 2004 experimental short film

Nocturnal Doubling is a 2004 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn based on a thought experiment in Henri Poincaré's essay The Relativity of Space.

The Impostor (hello goodbye) is a 2003 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, one of several works commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell for the Tranz Tech festival. Cockburn's video draws formally on Campbell's style while at the same time metaphorically expresses the artist's anxiety in making the video itself.

<i>The Other Shoe</i> (film) 2001 experimental short film

The Other Shoe is a 2001 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, his third, which, along with Metronome (2002), earned a mention for the Homebrew Award when shown at the Images Festival and thereby broadened his reputation beyond Toronto.

<i>All the Mistakes Ive Made</i>

All The Mistakes I've Made is the common title of a pair of distinct performance/lecture pieces conceived and performed by Canadian video artist Daniel Cockburn.

The Bad Idea Reunion is a 2010 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, in which an infant muses in an internal monologue on the future and the forms its good and bad ideas will take.

Denominations is a 2003 Canadian short experimental documentary film created by video artist Daniel Cockburn about some time spent with American video artist Joe Gibbons.

Stupid Coalescing Becomers is a 2004 Canadian short darkly comic experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn about time running backwards as an act of rebellion.

Aleesa Cohene is a Canadian visual artist based in Los Angeles.

References

  1. ↑ "The Impostor (hello goodbye)". Vtape . Retrieved 15 October 2019.
  2. ↑ "You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different: Films and Videos by Daniel Cockburn". vtape.org. Retrieved 22 September 2019.
  3. ↑ Wilner, Norman (11 September 2010). "Tracy Wright's fine, final performance". Now . Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  4. 1 2 Wilner, Norman (4 December 2009). "Rocket man, space movies: Daniel Cockburn puts space movies in the universe of post-modern cultural collage". Now. Retrieved 26 September 2019.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different: Daniel Cockburn In Person Screening & Catalogue Launch". pdome.org. Pleasure Dome. Retrieved 23 September 2019.
  6. 1 2 3 "Daniel Cockburn". Vtape . Retrieved 22 September 2019.
  7. ↑ Hoolboom, Mike (July 2013). "All in the Family by Mike Hoolboom" . Retrieved 12 October 2019.
  8. ↑ "Figure vs. Ground (with Emily Vey Duke)". ZeroFunction. Retrieved 23 October 2019.
  9. ↑ Hoolboom, Mike (ed. and interviewer) (2008). "Daniel Cockburn: Smartbomb". Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists (1st ed.). Toronto: Coach House Books. pp. 7–20. ISBN   9781770561816 . Retrieved 25 September 2019.{{cite book}}: |first1= has generic name (help)
  10. ↑ Hoolboom, Mike (1 November 2005). "Experimental: Daniel Cockburn-Preliminary Notes". Point of View Magazine (60 [Winter 2005]). Retrieved 23 September 2019.
  11. 1 2 The Right to Know: Impakt Festival, 2-6 November 2011, Utrecht (PDF). Utrecht. 2011. p. 9. Retrieved 26 July 2020.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  12. ↑ Ortega de Mon, Marcos (28 September 2009). "Directors Lounge: Daniel Cockburn". Experimental Cinema. Retrieved 26 September 2019.
  13. 1 2 3 "You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different: Films and Videos by Daniel Cockburn". Vtape . Retrieved 22 September 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.