The Golem of Socks
video, 5 minutes, 1995 (additional images 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
This video is a crudely created puppet video about community expectations, trust, and friendship. I made it in Toronto while I was feeling very uninspired by that city and did not want to leave my apartment to make anything. This allowed me and Margaret Bessai to collaborate and have a lot of fun. It was shot on high-8 video with the help of my good friend Angelos Hatzitolios on a blizzardy night in December, 1994. I wrote the story. Margaret read it aloud and created the puppets. I directed and edited it. The next term I wrote a paper about it in a Jewish film course. i had wanted the image to have lots of little cuts in it, to help make it reflect the stitched together nature of the sock golem; this was emphasized by an error with the tape whereas we did not fast forward and rewind the high 8 tape before using it. The tension was loose and we lost the control track occasionally. In 2003 when Ottawa's Saw Video wanted to web cast this video, I needed to restore it. Having lost the 3/4" edit master, I needed to bring all the high 8 footage into a computer for the first time and discovered that the tapes had degraded further. I needed to go through the cut frame by frame, fixing sync errors. This allowed me to emphasized this "stitched" approach.
The puppets for the minor charactors Simon and Marsha were reused in a super-8 film "Attic Playroom". I have also created works related to this set of characters on artist trading cards on paper, the Golem was featured in our Christmas card one year (along with a potato stamp sleigh and our late cat, Baron Munchhausen), as well a tin sculptural cards, and have a forthcoming series with many of the characters (minus the Golem) called "Sock-vile" in the works to be created collaboratively with a team of students. These characters appear in a mini-comic with Canister the Robot called "The Inevitabilty Syndome" and in a film with Canister called Rockem, Sockem, Canister.
