films
ransom notes
5 min., 35mm, Colour, Sound, 2011.
“We have your …” The ransom note, in our collective imagination, is an interesting entry point to the politics of ownership, freedom and exchange alue, made by transforming mass media (newspapers) content into a personal message – the re-appropriation of language and meaning through the act of collage. Ransom Notes explores this strange tension as a means of sorting out the filmmaker’s experience of the hijacking of her city during the Toronto G20 Summit and subsequent riots of June 2010. The film combines new and old media (film, newsprint, print-outs of twitter feeds), exploring social mobilization through mass media, culminating through the structure of a “waltz.” The soundtrack of the film is composed by placing letters, words and sentences directly on the optical soundtrack – in a sense the projector is “reading” the words, and the sound that you hear is the language produced by the cinematic machine.