The Fleeting Shadow of Things

October brings yellow and orange and red leaves and fowl to eat. This weekend I also happened to see a film by the National Film Board titled The Fleeting Shadow of Things, Collage 8, Fragments of a Chronicle. It was deeply moving to see scenes of Montreal and winter from our new home in Calgary. The world is too big to embrace in one sweep. So as the author tried to embrace time lost we did the same with place....

"Jacques Giraldeau's The Fleeting Shadow of Things invites us on a journey, a variation on carefully crafted memories tracing a remarkable bridge between "once" and "from now on." It is a delicate work of filmic art, unfolding in a mosaic of keepsakes and images gathered in the course of a lifetime. In it, we follow the enigmatic Évariste Quesnel from Cuba to Île-aux-Grues, but he eludes us, leaving only the footprint of where he has been - an invitation to meditate on and learn to read those places. Criss-crossing these fragments of yesterday and today, now abandoned to memory - diary, film, painting, letter, questioning our relationship with these shadows, the filmmaker posits art as the archives of real life, a place where the crumbling of time is, somehow, stopped."-