neige noire (2003)

Overview

"Carl Brown makes celluloid dance. [His] new film work will burn colours so deeply into your brain, you'll be watching a light show inside your eyelids for hours. Titled Neige Noir ('Black Snow'), a name that conjures up Toronto winters but actually refers to the trenches of the First World War, the piece is a visual feast. It opens with a calming sequence of manipulated representations of a swimmer and the sea set to a lulling jazz tune, and then crashes into a steady techno and white noise assault with pulsating images. Brown radically alters the celluloid itself, experimenting like a mad scientist to create gorgeous colour patterns. He sometimes refilms an image up to eight times to bring its dance of distortion to a climax. Any single still from this film could bring you to a stop in an art gallery, and Brown gives us some 86,000 of them." (Thomas Hirschmann)