When seeing isn’t believing
Vancouver director Toporek explores the impact of media in Beware of Images
Vancouver director Sergio Toporek took seven years to complete Beware of Images. His ambitious, animated feature-length documentary is a journey through the history of mediated representation and its relationship to our experience.
The film traces the relationship we have with past, present and even future media technologies and their socio-cultural impact.
A 1929 quote by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte about his work inspired Toporek to embark on the project, which was financed in part through 1,026 Kickstarter backers who pledged $53,378.
After painting a pipe, Magritte titled the work This Is Not A Pipe. When someone pointed out to the artist that he really had created a pipe, the artist responded: “Try filling it with tobacco then.”
Underlying this cheeky response was a clear and implicit message. Images have the power to draw you in and manipulate you into seeing and believing things that aren’t real.
“I started teaching at the Vancouver Film School about 12 years ago and felt that students were getting excellent technical skills training but not so much in the finer points of the media literacy that is required of design professionals to appreciate the effect of their work on consumers and society,” said Toporek.
“When I approached the then head of digital design, Sebastien de Castell, he said to put together something as an elective course. That grew into a number of courses and, eventually, required curriculum.”
Toporek’s students implored the instructor to devise a means to present these course materials into something that could be disseminated to the public at large. After all, engaging with media is a universal experience.
“So I worked away at it off and on for a few years and then for four years I focused almost entirely on the film,” he said. “Normally, this sort of thing is set in the very immediate moment that is affecting our lives or the recent past, but I wanted to show that this has been happening for, at the very least, 30,000 or more years. That is as far back as the images we know that we have been creating to respond to with some primal urge.”
From cave paintings to virtual reality, Beware of Images delves into how representational and abstract art provides emotional triggers, ritual, spiritual and community identity and more. Through key moments in history (but not chronologically), Toporek outlines how subsequent generations always see themselves as more enlightened than the previous. But the truth is that as media technologies develop, we may actually be more susceptible.
“Wherever it has been shown, it has been packed and the Q&A sessions that follow almost always wind up asking about what can be done?” said Toporek.
“What I hope I have done is made a conversation starter.”