The video camera has been left running in the street, as if someone had forgotten to turn it off. An unmistakably homeless man is seen folding a blanket, packing stuff away, hesitating to accept a bag of food a woman offers him. Two pigeons are enjoying the warm air coming out of a subway ventilation shaft as men, women and cars go by, indifferent to the man seemingly wrapped in icy air. Then, end of the loop and the film restarts. With this anonymous, utterly everyday scene the artist builds in "Cold Morning’s" single shot a narrative as powerful as it is ordinary: what is this man doing in the street? How has he ended up before our eyes like this? Why is he refusing this helping hand? Mark Lewis explores the classical conventions of the cinema in works he describes as "cinema in bits": a filmic vocabulary – zooms, trackings, panoramics, static shots – whose elements he uses individually for self-contained works. Aiming his camera-eye at an acted or "found" scene that challenges our indifference to the world, Lewis adds with "Cold Morning" a new sequence to the meta-film we realise he has been working on for years.
With the support of Youcast / With the support of the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris.
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