Ann Arbor Film Festival 2010

Daniel Barrow’s “manual animation” performance Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city. In the late hours of the night, he sifts through garbage, collecting personal information and then traces pictures of each citizen through the windows of their homes as they sleep. What he doesn’t yet realize is that a deranged killer is trailing him, murdering each citizen he includes in his book, thus rendering his cataloging efforts obsolete. The garbage man is a failed artist who fears becoming subject to the grip of something overwhelming. This animation traces his attempts to slow down and creatively reflect, in a process of coming to terms with his own self-loathing and fear.

Winnipeg-bred, Montreal-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors.

Co-presented by:
Dreamland Theater