Part of Winter 1990
This premiere of Carl Brown’s newest film Re:Entry represents both the completion of his third feature-length production and ironically one of the few screenings of his work in his own hometown. Brown’s work is unusual within current Canadian film art for the large scale with which he has tackled abstract and formalistic experimentation on celluloid. Brown looks to the cinema of Brakhage and abstract expressionist painters such as Rothko as his principle historical grounding (the title of his last film, Condensation of Sensation is taken from Rothko’s theoretical writings), and in fact Brakhage is one of Brown’s strongest artistic supporters.
Re:Entry is a strikingly dense handcrafted film. The imagery has been dyed, processed, reworked again and again to produce a range of texture and colour from deep saturation to ethereal subtlety. An accompanying soundtrack by Kaiser Nietzsche (John Kamevaar and Thomas Sanders) is orchestrated to counterpoint the film’s structural-metaphorical development, which Brown has articulated in the following:
“We as an audience move through this film on the waves of the swimmer and all he encounters on the way through time endless; my life/your eyes. You see; I convey; through emulsion, composed of light, colour, movement, arranged for those who visit upon the experience. The experience is the only true indicator of the relationship of sensation between myself and the viewer. “