Ahead of the Curve

Metropolis meets Necropolis, Gotham gets drawn and erased, and Glasgow plays host to a spectacle that nobody will ever see.

Several story threads about consciousness and perception intertwine in this film by video installation artist Daniel Cockburn.

In an increasingly urban nation, Canada’s national parks are a treasured escape into extraordinary beauty and rugged wilderness. If the Group of Seven were an introduction to the landscape’s majesty, National Parks Project is the next logical chapter. Fifty-two contemporary artists from across the country, whose talents are as diverse as the parks they set out to explore, used their surroundings as a source of inspiration to blend musical and cinematic skills into collaboratively crafted vignettes. Epic in its ambition to celebrate these locales during Parks Canada’s centennial year, this omnibus film resonates with the knowledge that our unprotected land is more vulnerable than ever. Including films by Zacharius Kunuk, Peter Lynch, Sturla Gunnarsson and John Walker, and music by Sarah Harmer, Sam Roberts, Cadence Weapon and The Besnard Lakes, among many others, National Parks Project is a one-of-a-kind documentary experience.

To celebrate the BFI's Thriller season, filmmaker Daniel Cockburn explores the power of sound to terrify and unsettle. Using sounds from Hollywood's best-known thriller and horror films, Cockburn makes familiar noises frightening and leaves us wondering... What's that sound? And why won't it stop?

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.

What begins as an enquiry on things that mean other things itself becomes a thing that means other things, too. And whatever exactly that thing is, the latest by one of Canada’s most ingenious auteurs is another astounding feat of cerebral and cinephilic dexterity.

A karaoke video which takes the lyrics and sentiment of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin pop classic at face value... and then puts a different face on them.

Sculpting Memory places Atom Egoyan in an audiovisual environment woven from the fabric of his own films―a conceptual move that references Egoyan’s adaptation of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape while evoking Egoyan’s own work as a moving-image installation artist and his concern with the recording and displaying of images.

Video and audio of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson from The 6th Day (2000) is loosened up and reworked and subjecting him to a cruel series of digital replications.

In the latest of his idiosyncratic blends of found-film hallucination and metaphysical comedy routine, director Daniel Cockburn imagines the thoughts that rattle through the Almighty’s head late at night, presuming that He has a head at all.

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 expressing the artist's anxiety in making the video itself.

Daniel Cockburn’s exuberantly cerebral, filmically deconstructionist work defies easy categorization, and this program of new work is no exception, from a short that interrogates “things that mean other things before becoming a thing that means other things in itself,” and a performance piece that juxtaposes two postmodern 1994 horror films, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare to explore both the redemptive and destructive powers of storytelling.

Doctor Virtuous can't sleep or stay awake and he's worried about radiation

Daniel Cockburn discusses that may or may not have seen the film After Hours before

A roving search across endless colour-fields gradually reveals a solitary singer, struggling to be heard over distortion and doppelgangers.

Over the course of a ten-year postal correspondence, a pair of movie-going pen-pals share their thoughts on some of 90s cinema’s key traits: the rise of video, the need for speed, and of course the cliff-edge sense of global dread. But do decades have ‘key traits’ at the time? Or do we assign them these characteristics retroactively, trying to make sense of things in hindsight? Only Leonard Nimoy knows for sure.