1857 (Fool’s Gold)

Four types of visual forms appear in this film: photographed scenes, written texts, mathematical symbols and numerals. The course of the film is charted by the transformations which these images undergo. The film has a narrative form, but… one that is developed purely in terms of the manipulation of the colour characteristics of the images. The texts included in the film are drawn from Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” They serve, in the first place, to involve the spectator in the process of reading. Furthermore, Pound’s text is ideal for exploring fairly completely the range of relations that can exist between image and text. The soundtrack of the film is constituted by both musical and non-musical sounds. The non-musical sounds that occur in the early portion of the film are “natural sounds” that might occur in nature along with the depicted events. As the images undergo transformations so do the sounds. The primary objective I kept in mind while making this film was to elicit a form of response that would be a complex amalgam of disparate elements. The idea is, after all, a venerable one. What was Aristotle’s enumeration of the aspects of dramatic poetry? Melos, opsis, lexis: music, image text. “A brilliant assemblage of cinema’s simplest elements, but by no means a simple film. Its mix of image, text and music has the emotional complexity of many narrative films eight times its length… an astounding work that vividly demonstrates what film might have been had it not been thought of as an extension of the theatre.” – Richard Huntington, The Buffalo Courier Express. “1857 demonstrates quite forcefully his talents for advancing new approaches to capturing complex issues within the art of film.” – Bruce Jenkins, Cinema Canada