by Tom McSorley, December 2001. Take One
| Set to the Peter Togni Trio's imaginative jazz arangement of George Gershwin's "Summertime," Ottawa independent filmmaker Dan Sokolowski's 10th film is a lively combination of animation and live action. Starting from the simple and often startlingly composed images of the Canadian winter, Sokolowski renders various animated versions of the photographic images in equally various styles and techniques of animation. From the terrestrial to the aerial (there is an evocative animated rendering of the aurora borealis), the interaction of images, photographic and animated, creates an original and absorbing portrait of our quintessentially Canadian season. More than just a montage of wintry pictures, Sokolowski's film by its formal construction explores the nebulous but critical artistic region where abstraction, by some artistic alchemy, actually becomes representation, and vice versa. Influenced by Lawren Harris and Pierre Hebert, not to mention Michael Snow, Sokolowski's work is an intelligent, even witty aesthetic engagement with not only the landscape we inhabit, but also the protean artistic means by which we represent it. Theory meets practice meets theory: all this ,and Gershwin too! |
"... using mostly artist materials in a stop-action,
montage of footsteps through "snow"
of thick white paint and bits of paper
falling in herky-jerky fashion like leaves, while a single white scrap
danced playfully among them, the first flake of winter.
Sokolowski has a unique and engaging style, and (winter)time
has the added advantage of being set to Summertime
as performed by the Peter Togni Trio.
It was a compulsively watchable 4 1/2 minutes"
JAY STONE, Ottawa Citizen
"A breezy jazz rendition of George Gerswhin's
SUMMERTIME provides the upbeat soundtrack for
Dan Sokolowski's (winter)time, an abstract dance of
winter images that makes the dreaded season
seem positively sexy and sophisticated."
T.S. WARREN, Ottawa Xpress