In Waking Windows AKA Victoria’s Wake, there is an admirable precision to your parsing the elements of the cinematic machine—the projector, the pull-down mechanism and intermittent movement, rotating machine parts, the revolving shutter, which alternates light and dark. Your parsing the elements of the apparatus reveals gruesomely its horrifying relentlessness. But that lexical analysis is really a means (as clever and well executed as it is). What took me aback was your courage in highlighting an aspect of the cinema that arises from its machinic character, one that instills fear into many of us who work with it. That uneasiness is provoked by the eerie feeling that the cinema’s mechanical repetitiveness is associated with the death drive (Freud’s Todestrieb). The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan pointed out the death drive is simply the fundamental tendency of the symbolic order to produce repetition. The machinic (the cinematic apparatus) in this work has become a stand-in for the symbolic and, in its relentless drive to produce repetition, has allied itself with the death drive. I think that connection is most astute: the symbolic order of the cinema is complicitous with the Todestrieb (and, hence, with all forms of aggression). You’re sharp in connecting film’s repetition compulsion to its phantasmatic character. Your relating the gaze and the lens to death is both clever and sensitive. Picasso referred to an art work as a sum of destructions. In Waking Windows, aka Victoria's Wake, you’ve made evident that a cinema strip is a sum of aggressions.

R. Bruce Elder.