''The Other Shoe'' is a 2001 Canadian

short Short may refer to: Places * Short (crater), a lunar impact crater on the near side of the Moon * Short, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Short, Oklahoma, a census-designated place People * Short (surname) * List of people known as ...

experimental film Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, parti ...

video artist Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. ...

Daniel Cockburn Daniel Ernest Cockburn is a Canadian performance artist, film director and video artist. Cockburn won the Jay Scott Prize in 2010 and the European Media Art Festival's principal award in 2011 for his debut feature film '' You Are Here.'' Educa ...

, his third, which, along with '' Metronome'' (2002), earned a mention for the Homebrew Award when shown at the

Images Festival The Images Festival is a yearly event devoted to independent and experimental film, video art, new media and media installation that takes place each spring in Toronto. History The Images festival was founded in 1987, originally conceived as ...

and thereby broadened his reputation beyond

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

Themes

Time in the cinema

The main theme of ''The Other Shoe'' is the cinematic perception of time, which is compressed or elongated into a singular experience, for which insight Cockburn acknowledges

Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky ( rus, Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ɐrˈsʲenʲjɪvʲɪtɕ tɐrˈkofskʲɪj; 4 April 1932 – 29 December 1986) was a Russian filmmaker. Widely considered one of the greates ...

. Cockburn remarks that the contemporary trend in cinema is speed and diversion, except in advertising where one finds many static shots: "We have learned that slowness can be appreciated, but only briefly; slownesses thus follow one another with great rapidity, as refreshing as ice cubes shooting out of a volcano." Cockburn is convinced that "longer attention span means greater capability of complex thought, means greater empowerment", adding that he is not fixated on "slowness" and that there are other means of foregrounding time, which he does with rhythm in '' Metronome'' and '' Stupid Coalescing Becomers'', a "backwards time fantasy".

Media and multitasking

Cockburn was surprised to find that the finished film was as much about

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and multitasking as it was about his original intentions. According to the LIFT programme, ''The Other Shoe'' "straddles the line between media, questioning its validity on either side." The short engages its viewers in "the conflict between contemplation and multitasking," while trying to avoid "shoot ngitself in the foot."

Production

The short film was Daniel Cockburn's third following ''Doctor Virtuous'' (1999) and ''Rocket Man'' (2000). It was also his first

widescreen Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratios (relationship of image width to height) used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than t ...

motion picture.

Commission

''The Other Shoe'' was a commission for the 20th anniversary of LIFT (The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto). Cockburn was one of fifteen film and video artists given cash and equipment to create short works "that would be personal responses" to the theme ''Self & Celluloid: The Future.'' Cockburn has long had

technophobic Technophobia (from Greek τέχνη ''technē'', "art, skill, craft" and φόβος ''phobos'', "fear"), also known as technofear, is the fear or dislike of advanced technology or complex devices, especially computers. Although there are numerou ...

tendencies, in particular of

digital video Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises ...

as a medium, and has claimed to have created ''The Other Shoe'' "solely in dismayed response" to his discovery that the commissioned works of which ''The Other Shoe'' was a part would be streamed online: "That may be fine for some people, I thought — without (much) prejudice — but not for those of us who still relish the surrender of darkened-theatre viewing."

Filming and editing

The director's solution to the anxieties created for him by the live-streaming aspect of the project was to make a double projection of both

16 mm film 16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film (about inch); other common film gauges include 8 and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical (e.g., industrial, educ ...

and video, with the video portion designed to be streamed on the Internet, while the film portion could only be seen by the audience who attended the screening, a practice which Cockburn later called "simplistic film fetishism" on his part. Cockburn's method for achieving "slowness" was to place single takes in a multi-frame context, something he did again in '' The Impostor (hello goodbye)''. Looking back a few years later, he said these portions of ''The Other Shoe'' were some of the relatively few shots he had ever made that he found "really aesthetically pleasing."

Release and reception

As part of the LIFT 20th Anniversary programme, ''The Other Shoe'' premiered in

in 2001 and toured Canada through 2002.

Critical and audience response

Stephen Lan saw the short at the

in April 2002, calling it "thoughtful and philosophical... clever and witty." Response to ''The Other Shoe'' surprised Cockburn, who wrote in October 2001 that he derived a "humbling joy" from knowing that a work made with his "simple-minded" intentions could, in "failing to fully make its point," nevertheless be "engagingly conflicted and complex".

Accolade

honorable mention An award, sometimes called a distinction, is something given to a recipient as a token of recognition of excellence in a certain field. When the token is a medal, ribbon or other item designed for wearing, it is known as a decoration. An awar ...

for the Homebrew Award (Best Local Emerging Artist) jointly with '' Metronome'', 2002

Related work

;''monopedal Joy'' (2001) Cockburn made use of outtakes to create the short music video ''monopedal Joy'', a 16 mm projection captured and edited in camera on

Mini DV DV refers to a family of codecs and tape formats used for storing digital video, launched in 1995 by a consortium of video camera manufacturers led by Sony and Panasonic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DV was strongly associated with the ...

and subsequently mastered to Betacam.

References

External links

*
The Other Shoe
' on CCCA {{DEFAULTSORT:Other Shoe, The Films directed by Daniel Cockburn 2000s English-language films Canadian avant-garde and experimental short films 2000s Canadian films