Uploaded March 2016 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
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Mark Lewis is a 2016 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
Directed by Ross Turnbull
Co-production of the Canada Council for the Arts and Zonial Pictures Inc.
Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm's-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts."
For more information, visit: ggavma.canadacouncil.ca
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Transcript:
We’ve had the cinematic experience really since the beginning of time. When Narcissus looks in the pond and sees himself moving, he's watching a movie. There is no original cinematic moment.
I was a gallery artist to begin with. I didn't start as a filmmaker.
It was very difficult as a younger artist to kind of stake out one's own territory and to feel that what you were doing was your own.
It was really important that I left Vancouver. It's allowed me to develop my own work in a way that I didn't realize at the time but...moving to London was probably the best thing I could have done.
The word Canada is the unconscious, what semioticians call a floating signifier. Or rather it is a signifier on to which any kind of fantasy can be attached. That's what makes it so interesting.
All my films are now...some are single shot, some are multiple shots combined to look like a single shot, and some are just multiple shots. The longer the take goes on, the more the camera seems to have a will of its own.
The long take postpones the end, in material terms. The paradox of it is that at a certain point it makes that end feel even more phenomenal, it gives it even more materiality, makes it palpable. The more it's determined by its materiality, whether it's the material of the film, the ability of the camera to do something; all of these things speak to a kind of uncanniness, that the shot, the composition might be determined by something which is not – shall we say – not human; determined by a force that does not operate according to the laws of consciousness.
The camera has been looking, has been trying to gauge or to make a kind of calculation of what is appropriate...it's been trying to find a good composition.
I like my films without sound because it abstracts the visual experience and takes it out of its fullness and asks us to imagine the missing elements through the visual.
You know, I've made 80 or 90 films but I've also not made at least as many, probably a lot more that got to the stage of almost being shot and then realized that there was nothing there.
Retrospectively I can say that the experience of standing in those apex windows, much like you see in the film, is that the movement across the architectural forms of the windows gives you this impression of a kind of cinema-within-cinema, a kind of window-within-a-window, but it obviously registered in my mind as something interesting.
It's slightly more complicated now with the digital situation, where parts of the image are stills and parts are moving.
You know, I'm not sure if I know the truth, if I can say with any confidence what is the actual condition of the moving image today, I suspect nobody can. It's a big soup, basically, of interesting possibilities.
Please subscribe to support the arts in Canada.
Mark Lewis is a 2016 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
Directed by Ross Turnbull
Co-production of the Canada Council for the Arts and Zonial Pictures Inc.
Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm's-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts."
For more information, visit: ggavma.canadacouncil.ca
***********
Transcript:
We’ve had the cinematic experience really since the beginning of time. When Narcissus looks in the pond and sees himself moving, he's watching a movie. There is no original cinematic moment.
I was a gallery artist to begin with. I didn't start as a filmmaker.
It was very difficult as a younger artist to kind of stake out one's own territory and to feel that what you were doing was your own.
It was really important that I left Vancouver. It's allowed me to develop my own work in a way that I didn't realize at the time but...moving to London was probably the best thing I could have done.
The word Canada is the unconscious, what semioticians call a floating signifier. Or rather it is a signifier on to which any kind of fantasy can be attached. That's what makes it so interesting.
All my films are now...some are single shot, some are multiple shots combined to look like a single shot, and some are just multiple shots. The longer the take goes on, the more the camera seems to have a will of its own.
The long take postpones the end, in material terms. The paradox of it is that at a certain point it makes that end feel even more phenomenal, it gives it even more materiality, makes it palpable. The more it's determined by its materiality, whether it's the material of the film, the ability of the camera to do something; all of these things speak to a kind of uncanniness, that the shot, the composition might be determined by something which is not – shall we say – not human; determined by a force that does not operate according to the laws of consciousness.
The camera has been looking, has been trying to gauge or to make a kind of calculation of what is appropriate...it's been trying to find a good composition.
I like my films without sound because it abstracts the visual experience and takes it out of its fullness and asks us to imagine the missing elements through the visual.
You know, I've made 80 or 90 films but I've also not made at least as many, probably a lot more that got to the stage of almost being shot and then realized that there was nothing there.
Retrospectively I can say that the experience of standing in those apex windows, much like you see in the film, is that the movement across the architectural forms of the windows gives you this impression of a kind of cinema-within-cinema, a kind of window-within-a-window, but it obviously registered in my mind as something interesting.
It's slightly more complicated now with the digital situation, where parts of the image are stills and parts are moving.
You know, I'm not sure if I know the truth, if I can say with any confidence what is the actual condition of the moving image today, I suspect nobody can. It's a big soup, basically, of interesting possibilities.
