Reflection
2012 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Sylvie Trouvé
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, surreal
Montreal appears through puddles, glass, and other mirrored surfaces that fragment familiar streets into shimmering abstractions. Blending live imagery with animation, the film considers how people filter out these spectral doubles and how a camera can reveal feeling within them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Trouvé's puddle-gazing feels a bit too reverential toward the everyday sublime—the kind of experimental formalism that gets consensus nods at art houses, which is exactly why it doesn't interest me.
A formally disciplined meditation on refraction and perception that sits squarely in the lineage of structural film and phenomenological cinema; the marriage of live action and animation as a sustained formal argument about how we see is exactly the kind of considered craft that rewards close attention.
The decision to fragment Montreal through reflective surfaces rather than shoot it straight is smart, but it's the seamless integration of animation into found glass—that specific technical choice of when to hand-draw versus when to capture—that makes the sensory argument actually land.