CANTOS
The 3 screen video installation “CANTOS” comprised of a series of short monologues recited atop a large, crudely constructed iceberg. Our protagonist “BOB” is an aging businessman (played by actor Peter Marinker) who talks about his personal insight into corporate culture, but by using a vocabulary appointed to business jargon, we the viewer are witness to something more telling about Bob’s state of mind.
Bob addresses us directly, talking strait to camera, we are judge and jury to his situation. His mood swings are dramatic: he contradicts himself, he seems both highly involved in and highly dislocated from the world of which he speaks. It is this fracturing in his personality that indicates to us the false impression he projects, mirrored in the abstract environment of the iceberg adrift at sea. As we observe the character’s self deconstruction we are also made painfully aware of the fragility of the film’s appearance. The makeshift style of the set becomes a failing of Bob’s own making: the whole environment is a project of Bob’s paranoid mindset.
This film explores the isolation experienced in twenty first century culture where people are motivated to operate and devote energy into what are otherwise arbitrary groupings with no real relation to who they actually are. This conditioning is most explicit in the business world, where company policy often encourages an emotional investment in the corporation that seems to replace the personal emotions people feel for the world.
As Bob himself says: “…in my office with my colleagues there is a power that galvanises us, that keeps our nights connected with our days.”
Time: 30mins
Director: Matthew Huston
Written By: Matthew Huston & Melanie Gilligan
