Carl Brown presented by Pleasure Dome at Cinecycle (129 Spadina, down the lane), Friday (December 5), 8 pm. $5. 416-656-5577. Rating: NNNN Rating: NNNN
And now a gift for your mind. Carl Brown ‘s new film work will burn colours so deeply into your brain, you’ll be watching a light show inside your eyelids for hours. Titled Neige Noir (Black Snow in English), a name that conjures Toronto winters but actually refers to the trenches of the first world war, the piece is a visual feast more exhausting than a turkey dinner. Clocking in at about 60 minutes, it opens with a calming sequence of manipulated representations of a swimmer and the sea set to a lulling jazz tune, then crashes into a steady techno and white noise assault with pulsating images.
Brown radically alters the celluloid itself, experimenting like a mad scientist to create gorgeous colour patterns. He sometime refilms an image up to eight times to bring its dance of distortion to a climax. Any single still from this film could bring you to a stop in an art gallery, and Brown gives us some 86,000 of them.
After Neige Noir, the jostling holiday shopping experience will seem far less intense.
thmoas@sympatico.ca
