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Daniel Cockburn

The Argument (with annotations)

Fiction expérimentale | hdv | couleur et n&b | 19:55 | Canada | 2017

"The Argument (with annotations)" is an appropriated-footage essay about metaphor. Its unseen narrator`s line of thought takes us on an unstraight path past the works of T.S. Eliot, Homer, Groucho Marx, John Carpenter, Terence Davies, and Carl Reiner, plus some lackadaisical astronomy and a 1960s television series with a very distinctive font. There is also a riddle about mirrors that`s either the best riddle about mirrors you`ve ever heard or the worst one. That`s what the film is for a while, anyway. Then something else happens. "The Argument (with annotations)" performs a riff on the genres of the essay-film and the more recent “video essay”... a riff that calls its own narrator’s authority into question.

Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian filmmaker and moving-image artist. His shorts have been the subject of an internationally touring retrospective, and his feature "You Are Here" (2010) played Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam, and 40+ other festivals. Called "a major discovery" by the director of the Locarno Film Festival, "You Are Here" won the Jay Scott Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association and the top prize at the European Media Art Festival, for "trend-setting media art". It has been compared to the work of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. It’s currently available on iTunes and in rotation on MUBI.com. Cockburn has been a resident of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin filmmaker residency, and Guest Professor at HBK Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany. He has been resident artist at IMPAKT (Utrecht) as part of the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange (EMARE), and has presented his live performances "All The Mistakes I`ve Made," parts 1 and 2, internationally. He is currently based in London, UK, where he was recently an Associate Artist in Residence at Acme Studios and is now the first Research Fellow in Film Practice at Queen Mary University of London.