The Image Mill
2011 · 50m · Canada
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, theatrical
A filmed record captures Robert Lepage and Ex Machina's monumental Image Mill projection spectacle for Quebec City, using master shots, aerial views and a reworked score by Rene Lussier.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lepage's maximalist spectacle gets the documentary treatment—which sounds like the most boring possible move, until you realize the reworked score and aerial framing turn it into something that actively argues against the live experience it's documenting, which is deliciously perverse.
A measured study in how cinema captures monumentality: the master shots and aerial perspective create a deliberate formal distance from the theatrical event, situating itself squarely in the essay-film tradition while Lussier's score rescores the entire cultural moment into something more introspective and archival.
The real move here is trusting Lussier's rework to do the heavy lifting—instead of simply recording Lepage's visual excess, the recomposed score reframes the entire spectacle as something elegiac and questioning, which costs nothing but changes everything about what we're actually watching.