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Muse of Cinema- 35mm, 20 Minutes, Stereo Sound collaboration: Kerry Laitala & Robert Fox- 2006
"Muse of Cinema" is a rowdy frolic through early moving picture technology and illuminates the atmosphere of the darkened theater. Magic lantern slides spring to life as they directly address the audience, highlighting many problems endemic of this time and communicating technical difficulties in the projection booth. In the "Muse of Cinema", the photochemical properties of the filmic medium have been cultivated over five years using a flashlight, not a camera, to expose the film. A solar eclipse gleams out from the screen, shimmering and crackling with rhythmical reverberations. The process of this detail in the Muse was demonstrated in a previous film "Torchlight Tango", which is in effect is a film that documents many parts of the production of the "Muse of Cinema". The magic lantern is the grandfather of motion pictures; the slides in Muse provide a cinematic reflection of this history. All slide images were shot on a slide duplicator using the apparatus in a way that diverges from its original function. The original hand processed film material was then mastered on a 35mm optical printer at a film co-op in Vancouver called Cineworks. The soundtrack was made through a collaboration with Robert Fox and we worked diligently to create various sound/image relationships that combine in a lyrical fashion from various sources that move anachronistically through time. The "Muse of Cinema" was also hand processed and toned to provide a meditation on this medium of alchemy and magic.
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