Man with a Movie Camera

Lewis’s Venice project makes use of rear projection, a classic Hollywood technique in which an actor, say, is filmed in the studio against the backdrop of a film set elsewhere, creating odd effects familiar to viewers of films from the ’40s and ’50s — James Mason in Nicholas Ray’s 1956 Bigger Than Life, for example, frantically steering what looks like a completely stationary car as the road unspools wildly behind him. Lewis recently completed a documentary, Back Story, on the history of the technique, and employed it in his well-known 2006 piece, Rear Projection: Molly Parker.

In that film, Parker appears to be standing on a path near a roadside gas station and a cabin. She is wearing a summer dress, her arms folded, the dense stand of trees behind her flecked with early-autumn red and orange. The camera slowly moves toward her, and then, suddenly, the trees go dark, and as the camera backs away the trees lose their leaves, the light blanches, and the landscape fills with snow. Parker remains there, bare armed and bare legged in the dead of a Canadian winter. Lewis’s films are always in part about the evolving history of the medium, but they also point to something about our relationship to the world: Parker seems lonely, helpless, oblivious, and disconnected, time and the seasons in fast-forward behind her.

“I’m interested in the idea that different parts of an image can be from different times and places,” he says. “And I like combining different technologies. For Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night, Skating the part shot in Toronto is in film, and the part shot in Los Angeles is in digital.”

Cold Morning combines Lewis’s interest in the history and nature of cinema with the history of modernism in architecture. In addition to the romantic — and, for Lewis, lighthearted — Nathan Phillips Square, at least two other films will be included in the installation. TD Centre, 54th Floor consists of a steep, crushed view of King Street in Toronto’s financial district from the fifty-fourth floor of one of German architect Mies van der Rohe’s last major works, the sleekly transcendent Toronto-Dominion Centre. And in the title film, Cold Morning, a homeless man arranges his personal effects over a steaming sewer grate, old dirty snow in the gutter, cars rushing past, pigeons warming themselves on a nearby grate. Lewis’s project moves from cinematic lyricism (the camera in Nathan Phillips Square moves as though it, too, were gliding on skates) to the troubled, utopian dreams of modernist architecture (the unravelling financial system as seen from Mies’s pure, Platonic heights) to the outcasts of a twenty-first-century city.

Fittingly, the films will play at the Canada Pavilion in Venice, a building that itself borrows from different architectural genres. “The pavilion was made in 1958 by progressive Italian architects,” says Barbara Fischer. “It looks sort of like a garden shed, and it plays off the neoclassicism of the other buildings nearby, like the German Pavilion. With Mark, it will be part of the project. He lays the history of film into the medium of architecture. The whole pavilion will be a cinematic machine, moving from daylight to cinema light.” Lewis and Fischer have planned Cold Morning so carefully that Fischer commissioned a New York design firm to do detailed architectural drawings of the installation. The films will be presented as single-screen projections, with the visitor literally moving from the ordinary world into the meticulously orchestrated and shimmering world of the moving image.

For Lewis, the relationship between film and reality, daylight and cinema light, is complicated and symbiotic: his films unmask the shape of how we see and move through and inhabit our artificial and conflicted world; and when we walk back out of the gallery, eyes squinting, we see things differently.

Back at the Drake, with its plush red sofas, its gleaming, brass-railed bar and low, atmospheric light, one is reminded again that a project like Cold Morning costs a lot of money, which is why Barbara Fischer continues to schmooze frantically. As the event winds down, we spill out onto the icy sidewalk and into a car and head for Hart House, where Lewis is staying. The Nathan Phillips Square portion of the shoot is finished, but there is still lots of work to do — most of the work, in fact. He will be in London in a few days, then back in Toronto in March, then off to Los Angeles, where he has a crew that does his rear screen work.

By turns weary and anxious, he sinks back in his seat, takes a deep breath, and says, “God, I hate fundraising.” There is something almost comic about a very intellectual, German-born curator and a very focused London-based artist immersed in the rigours of bootstrapping an expensive project on behalf of Canada. But still, the lovely palaces and gardens of Venice at the end of spring, and all those VIP dinners and parties, are just a few months away.