Idiocinema

IDIOCINEMA
MARPLOT’S GUIDE TO FILM
A NAC Member Group Exhibit for the Mighty Niagara Film Festival

Photographs by: Dan Brown, Brian Donnelly, Jaime Duncan, Georges Gerfaut, Lauren Hunter, Melanie MacDonald, Avery Mikolic-O'Rourke, Gabrielle de Montmollin, Adrianna Morganelli, Jen Simpson, Jonny Simpson, Koi Tran, Thuan Tran

A world that would tolerate its own demise if only it were allowed to watch it in the cinema is not going to be intimidated by the incomprehensible.

    —Karl Kraus

In the fall of 1995, a man with a briefcase suffered a fatal seizure in a dépanneur in Montreal, after an agitated and confused exchange with the proprietor. Apart from his name –Walter Marplot– authorities could not determine anything else about the man: no one seemed to know him and the few identification documents matched no known official offices or protocols.

Stranger still were the contents of his briefcase: a manuscript for an encyclopedia of films, along with several still photographs identified in cramped handwriting as shots from some of the films discussed in the manuscript.

However, none of the hundreds of films described therein were recognized even by experts, yet they seem to cumulatively depict some alternative history not just of cinema, but of the world. This display offers a sampling of that manuscript.