Honoring the spirit of the namesake of TIFF’s Wavelengths program, another Toronto-based filmmaker masterfully plays with space and time creating what has been described in the film notes as a city symphony. Providing an alternative look at Toronto, Sao Paolo and Paris’ Musee du Louvre, Mark Lewis’ Invention is a largely silent completion of earlier works, challenging the conception of space, time, urbanization and cinematography.
Dizzying for the uninitiated, Lewis carefully controls his space, moving though urban landscapes from overhead often slower or — in at least one shot — in reverse. Exposing layers of light and unseen shadows in urban spaces, Lewis frequently employs a wide-angle lens curving around objects at a very slow speed creating a intoxicating 3D effect. A fondness for spaces like spiral staircases at times tests the audience, particularly when taken to great heights above. Those looking for narrative ought to look harder or seek it elsewhere: the film’s final frame and shot settles upon an image and sound ripe for narrative (either a climax or a beginning point), but the journey to this point is exhilarating, rich and rewarding in its simple meditation on the heights of urban space.
Working in his hometown, the Toronto-based Lewis creates a consummate sequence, panning in reverse (in black and white) towards an office tower — entering the space he switches to color, using the lines and windows of the space he explores in the urban space (above a snow storm), crafting a complex visual puzzle.
Moving to Paris’ Louvre, Lewis employs an exhilarating sequence, tracing shadows and figures of visitors moving through the space from above and below, finding a great joy in the reflections and surfaces of those navigating its space and of the work within. His sequences in Sao Paolo explore spaces above and at street level, opening with a liberated sequence of flight from above (a God’s eye perspective) and closing on street level in a sequence in real-time that would seem at home in a Michael Mann narrative feature.
Invention is an exhilarating experimental work that borrows from the convention of the city symphony while breaking its boundaries. It invites us to explore the depth of the frame, often disorienting us in space and time from is haunting opening sequence to the ironic sympathy if finds in its final moments. Heavily controlled in its formalism, Invention offers a very different look at urban space and kind of architecture and interaction. While the earliest experimental filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann investigated rhythms in the every day, Lewis finds slower patterns hidden within architecture and city design, calling attention to these details at a hyper-real pace. Invention is as liberating as it is challenging — like Snow’s Wavelength, it bends time, space, reality and the cinematic form.
Invention is currently screening at TIFF.
