A technical marvel of artifice and fictive solidities, the claustrophobic world of the creature is juxtaposed with footage of natural scenery shot on Super 16mm film. These vistas and intimate close-ups, indexed through the warm, analog materiality of film, present a striking contrast with the digital trompe-l’oeil of the creature and its environment in a way that faintly rhymes with the voiceover narration. Adapted from Tibetan Buddhist thinker Chögyam Trungpa’s seminal collection of lectures Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973), the monologue presents an allegory for the formation and development of the ego, through a narrative of “a captive monkey in an empty house.” Kantarovsky’s creature at times appears to play the part of Trungpa’s monkey, and yet the relationship between the voiceover and the imagery is tenuous, intermittently aligning and diverging. At times, the authoritative voice of the narrator appears to emerge from sources within the house itself, or from the creature’s interior world.
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