» Experimental Narratives & Avant-Garde Shorts

“When I film, I enter into a dialogue with the world, directly. I present myself (with camera) openly to the inhabited space surrounding me, a space I choose to join with and inhabit dynamically, seeing it and living within it as it is, not as I would dream or wish it to be. The world approaches me as I approach it. It shifts and changes not apart from me, but inclusive of my presence and my motions within it. My gestures, my vision, and the questions I find myself asking, are shaped by that which is immediately present for me within this world that I find myself a part of: I am led by it, as a hunter seeking treasure, as a dancer seeking contact, compelled by certain attractions (of form, of light, of motion, of tone, of substance) that the world provides and the camera interprets in heightened form, as I move through it and as it moves with and around me.”

- Robert Todd

Todd’s oeuvre, both inspired by and rooted in his realist daily environment — the parks near his home, the avenues, the buildings on his street, his own home and those of friends — produces a phantasmagorical graphic world from both light and montage (when there is any; some Films were edited in-camera). Todd insists that all these places we traverse, often without paying attention, are brimming with stories, and that the artist must find the means of “transcription” within his art that might translate them, echoing them in these very dense short films.

Far more than a formalist filmmaker, Robert Todd developed a “thought-cinema” over his body of work, much as described by Gilles Deleuze in “The Time-Image” (University of Minnesota Press, 1989). The cinema, claims the philosopher, no longer seeks to illustrate stories and create meaning, but has become thought itself: “ The film does not record the lmic process in this way without projecting a cerebral process.”