Homage to Claude Forget

A recent homage to Claude Forget was staged at Casa Obscura in Montreal and some of his films were projected. Some said that the style was in 1980's with black and white scenes stuck between pieces of dialogue, rich in poetic imagery. I left before the projection of Ruth, a longer film but I got the just that here was a man who touched on social issues, which were otherwise less popular in film such as same sex couple issues, and a short on a blind man who makes love.

Other films with less evocative themes were a documentary drama of growing up as an kid in the indifference of the pre-computerized urban jungle, a film about a woman passing out of romance, called "Still Life". and "Train" where a retired train conductor imagines himself to be part of an ongoing train ride past his window and the window comes across as a metaphor on what he imagines his reality to be.

Here was an artist who had the potential to be surreal as in the "Train" and make relatively mundane situations appealing by having the actor invasion himself still conducting a train from the comfort an armchair and when the imagery reaches a peak than the "window" of his mind crashes and he is left to wonder where his life went.

In "Usure" he panned ahead of the actress, a technique uncommon in filming to create the romantic tension of one lesbian at grips with losing her lover and trying to move across the screen to catch up with her other half. Just the message that the couple had kissed hundreds of times and in every way imaginable added a strong subtext to the short film: signifying how so many couples find that being a couple is less inviting than the thrill of being physically intimate. It is a message, which is all too applicable in any couple relationship.