The Cinematheque

3D Presentation

“Thrillingly destabilizing … Its considered yet adventurous employment of 3D makes Hollywood’s innovations look juvenile by comparison.”

Beatrice Loayza, The New York Times, on Laberint Sequences

Laberint Sequences
Canada/​Spain 2023
Blake Williams
21 min. DCP

The new film from stereoscopic artist Blake Williams, a TIFF Wavelengths 2023 highlight, is set at first within Barcelona’s Parc del Laberint d’Horta. Laberint Sequences builds out a language of shots, which mark the picturesque park’s statues, hedges, flowers, and intersections, before delving deep into a realm of artifice that introduces new, quasi-alien elements to Williams’s work, including an actor (Deragh Campbell). The rhythm here is a pleasing and complex ricochet, where sound, image, colour, depth, and intertextuality are constantly activated.

“[Williams] creates the sensation not so much that we are moving through the maze as that the maze is moving around us—a dazzling, literally dizzying effect that’s only accentuated by the employment of 3D.” Lawrence Garcia, Reverse Shot

“Laberint Sequences suggests that the eye is capable of feeling so much more than we suspect … The film is genuinely speculative: it doesn’t exist in opposition to anything, but as a new version of feeling itself.” Frank Falisi, The Brooklyn Rail

followed by

PROTOTYPE
Canada 2017
Blake Williams
63 min. DCP

The stereoscopic image emphasizes a human truth: our two eyes see from different angles. Blake Williams’s first feature pushes this concept to its breaking point, unearthing attractions that skew our vision of early film history: not Méliès, not Lumière, but a secret third thing. Most of PROTOTYPE employs a fixed camera, meaning the cutting, glitching, and 3D composition comes from within waves, image ghosts, and, in particular, the screens of mid-century CRT TVs, arranged in panels that fire off loops of something deliberately in between video art and camera obscura imagery. Hypnotic, haunting, and historically unprecedented, Williams’s work is that rare thing, an essential work of 3D cinema.

No dialogue

One of the Best Avant-Garde Feature Films of the 2010s (#4)
Michael Sicinski, MUBI Notebook

“Williams creates a sci-fi landscape that begets a new kind of origin myth … An immersive trip that consistently upends the adage, ​‘Once upon a time…’” Andréa Picard, TIFF