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No one else's films look like Isiah Medina's. He is one of the only contemporary filmmakers who seems not only to have taken stylistic cues from late Godard but to move those methods in a newer direction. It isn't just the fact that films like Inventing the Future and He Thought He Died are steeped in dense philosophical ideas, although like Godard, Medina seems a bit more interested in rolling this verbiage around on the tongue, like poetry or wine, than in explicating those ideas or demanding full comprehension from the viewer. This alone would make He Thought He Died fairly singular in today's cinematic landscape. But it's really Medina's visual language that takes off from Godard's video work, asking us to rapidly oscillate between images or navigate multiple perspectives, flipping between windows and among perceptual options. We might call it Internet Cubism

That's to say, Medina isn't just making quick, disjunctive edits or sending us darting around a given space in the way Vertov would have. There's a speed to the movement of Medina's images that registers as much faster than anything we could experience with a physical splice. It seems like a cop-out to say that the editing in He Thought He Died moves as the "speed of thought," but there is a degree to which Medina takes an image away and replaces it with another just milliseconds before we have nominalized that previous image. we perceive it, but it only coalesces as a concept after it is gone, and so we're asked to imprint that prior concept onto the next one, a dialectical relationship even more dramatic than Godard's toggling between images in the Histoire(s) or Goodbye to Language.

The fact that Medina is applying this formal logic to a film that is actually about the life and death of images only makes He Thought He Died that much more intellectually dynamic. Although it's a very different film in every way, I found myself thinking about the 1953 Chris Marker / Alain Resnais collaboration Statues Also Die, an essay about the French plunder of African art and artifacts, and how their "death" was finalized once they had been placed in a museum. Works of art have not always been rarefied objects segregated from everyday life. The institutionalization of the museum space, its designation as a place apart from the vicissitudes of time and utility, is a relatively recent invention, and Medina asks us to think about how a set of paintings (his own) function as objects separated from his creation of them.

We see the artist (Medina) painting in the studio, or carrying his canvases around in a cloth portfolio. We see them laid out on a table in a back room of a museum, and we also see them strewn around an anonymous hotel room. Against the glassy facades of downtown Toronto, we watch as these art objects are exchanged for cash, and although none of us should be surprised by the movements of the art market, there's something pleasingly vulgar about watching artworks being traded like sex in some mid-scale Hilton, rather than on an auction floor where the abstraction of commodity relations assumes the air of a ritual.

There's a strange disconnect at work in He Thought He Died. Despite its flux of images and sounds (check out that improvised oboe!), through its halting, overlapping theoretical dialogues, in many ways it's a very direct cinematic statement. The artist penetrates the locked-up, after-hours museum space to retrieve his canvases, something he can only achieve as a ghost. (Cf. Jarmusch's The Limits of Control. "How did you get in here?" "I used my imagination.") The author is dead, but only once he is dead is he capable of once again taking possession of his paintings. He is not entirely dead, however; this spirit can hold onto tangible things, suggesting that he is only philosophically or metaphorically dead. He is dispossessed, separated from his creations, and reclaims them as a common art thief.

Likewise, we see Kelley Dong filming the areas around and within the museum, photographing artworks, watching museumgoers engage with them, and she films the unseen labor behind the scenes of the exhibitions. We might call her "the documenter," and in addition to producing these multiple reproductions of various artworks, she also produces thick aesthetic discourse in her conversations with Andalib Khan. (It seems these characters are called "Sam" and "Loren," though I never would have known this.) In short, Medina is displaying the processes by which an artwork becomes a text, either through reproduction or through discourse. He Thought He Died has a great deal in common with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin and John Berger. But time has worn us down. We think we understand those critiques. To remedy that familiarity, Medina has subjected them to the most fundamental Modernist dictum: make it new.

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