The Maltese Cross Movement
Keewatin Dewdney, 1967, CA, 16mm, 7'
The “Maltese Cross” system was at the heart of the cinema machine in its infancy. This was the mechanism that originally dissected the continuity of vision in the camera and also reassembled it in the projector. Keewatin Dewdney uses it as the central motif in this fascinating film, which not only addresses the nature of cinematographic illusion, but also plays in a witty way with the cognitive relationship between word and image. The Maltese Cross Movement reads like a rebus. In the process of its decoding, the deep-rooted process of attributing meaning is reversed, and in doing so generates a turbulent counter current which carries us along to the edge of the logics of meaning.



