Letters from Vancouver: The Framing of Perception (1973) dir. Kirk Tougas

The Framing of Perception: “I saw the light…” Sun, light, darkness, shadow – from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its heat, its colour, its radiation, its nature - is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for mass consumption. What is the message? LETTERS FROM VANCOUVER (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message“ (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION and THE FRAMING OF PERCEPTION form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.