Invention (2015) | Berlinale 2016

February 18th, 2016
Author: Meredith Taylor

Director: Mark Lewis

78min | Documentary | Canada

With INVENTION Mark Lewis creates a visual masterpiece of the built environment. Moving silently and stealthily through urban landscapes, his voyeuristic camera pictures architecture from every angle, sometimes in reverse, sometimes from above from Hitchcock’s famous God’s eye perspective. His wide-angle lens glides round the structures exploring and exposing elevations and staircases, planes and surfaces, light and darkness, spiralling round and panning into hidden corners in this intoxicating exposé of the places where we work, play and walk.  This is cinema at its most visually exhilarating; psychogeography in full swing.

In his visual anthology Toronto-based visual artist Mark Lewis takes us on a whirling tour of cityscapes moving effortlessly through Paris, Sao Paulo and Toronto. From famous corners of the Louvre Museum to the modernist buildings of Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil and Mies van der Rohe in Canada, INVENTION offers a whirling tour of cityscapes. Lewis eschews a formal narrative or any sound in this calm and contemplative take on the buildings we inhabit, the squares where we meet and the spaces where we congregate. A paean to our physical environment, INVENTION shows how our built environment can effect the way we think, work, live and relate just as crucially as the weather.

INVENTION is an exhilarating experimental work, a contemporary take of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, inviting us to explore and contemplate the world we live in while we’re not there and from a purely visual stance along the lines of Heinz Emigholz’s Parabeton only much better: it’s a cinematic journey through space and form. MT

REVIEWED DURING BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016 

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