Chris Marker: The Hollow Men.

Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art Toronto January 27 - March 4

Chris Marker's video installation The Hollow Men (2005) presented on a series of eight plasma-screen monitors mounted in a row, captures a haunting vision of the death and destruction of World War I, an event that functions as a prelude to the dawn of a new era. Taking as his starting point T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," written during the violent chaos of the early twentieth century, Marker juxtaposes fragments derived from Eliot's lyrical lament with found photographs that float across the screens and fade away into blackness. These alternating sequences of black-and-white still images and text march solemnly, almost mechanically, to the cadence of Toru Takemitsu's melancholy piano composition Corona. The video is presented in an alternating pattern across the sequence of screens, with every second monitor displaying the same series of images; the …