| Remember the ice storm of
January 1988? Dan Sokolowski does. He lived through it. Like
any hardy and self-respecting canuck artist who's been awestruck
by the power of winter (and the list includes such luminaries
as Lawren Harris, Jean-Paul Lemieux and Jean Pierre Lefebvre),
Sokolowski has made art out of his elemental encounter. A concise,
economical combination of still photographs, sounds of branches
straining and cracking, a sliver of animation, and the neutral
readings of Environment Canada weather warnings by filmmaker
Frank Cole, this modest marvel is a richly detailed, oddly amusing
portrait of what were officially described as "ice-paralyzed
areas." Beyond the empirical evidence of the stark beauty
of the images of this frozen world (trees, road signs, a Canadian
flag), Sokolowski's film suggests the sinister and ephermeral
quality of all "fixed" forms of language, technology,
and even cinema. Part epistemological tone poem, part home movie,
and reminiscent of the famed Unit B documentaries of the NFB,
Fire & Ice is a meditative, minimalist and startlingly
expansive dissection of a natural disaster. |
