Weather Building

The first half of “Weather Building” shows an empty room. Through the window is seen the film’s central emblem, the lighted tower at the top of an office building. A series of lighting and camera manipulations causes the planes of light in the room to shift and dissolve into one another. This and the soundtrack of footsteps (of someone who never appears) open for consideration a range of conceptions of filmic space. Part two repeats the “script” of the first half of the film – using a video playback of part one in the “role” of the weather building. There is no window in this second room, and these variations, together with the repetition, simultaneously explicate and complicate the spatial assumptions established earlier. “McLaren began his career co-founding the Toronto Super 8 Film Festival, the first in Canada. His film Weather Building (1976) is emblematic of this period. Super 8, edited in camera, science fiction meets visual abstraction. It is a dissolving, collapsing, repeating visual. It is the antithesis of Warhol’s ponderous Empire State and a sly homage to Michael Snow’s incessant panning camera. With its off-screen sounds, footsteps, wind blowing, there is an uncomfortable energy in Weather Building, and simultaneously something very cerebral in its abstracted imagery. The film is an enunciation of the time.” (Eldon Garnet, Images Festival Catalogue, April 2010)