Works in the Field
MovieReleased

Works in the Field

DirectorBill Brand

1978
37 min

Mountain landscapes, Manhattan cityscapes and images from magazine covers and television news are fragmented through optical printing with computer generated mattes. Intercut with a found documentary about family life in Malaysia, the film becomes an essay on reading. Watching the film is like an accelerated game of Concentration with glimpses of the image appearing inside swirling grids. The juxtaposition of the gridded sequences to the conventionally assembled Malaysian footage formulates an inquiry into the nature and meaning of the "document" in cinema.

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