Abstract
From where do images emerge?, is one of the questions that come to my mind when I let in the work of the Toronto based director Mikel Guillén wash over me. His tenth and newest short film, Intermission (2017), which has not yet officially premiered, expresses, like most of his previous work, a restlessness underlying the quiet images and rhythms that surface.
The film creates a sense of universal, cosmic flow. Such becoming is perhaps most apparently presented in the 'moving still images' that feature prominently in the 2014 short The Natural State.
Just imagine a painting that lives and breathes. Not a painting or figure in a paining come to life.
Rather a subtle, half-perceptible pulse in the seemingly inanimate. At times, I feel reminded of the mid-period work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Like this famous director's slow, constant and unnerving reframings of gradually (dis)appearing human bodies, Mikel Guillén creates work where everything moves, ever so slightly. One might be unsure if the movement is in the images or in just a mirage created by the perceptive system of the beholder.