PLASTIC SURGERY – 1975 / 19:00 / 16mm to SD

Plastic Surgery is a hyperbolic tract on the exploitation of nature by man. Plastic Surgery becomes a grand metaphor for filmmaking: degraded optically printed images of actual surgery on the body of the filmmaker cut to a knife ripping celluloid. The soundtrack is composed of electronic pops and squeals which keep pace step for step, the exhausting procession of sometimes startling juxtapositions effected through editing and superimposition.

– Jim Shedden, Michael Zryd, The Independent Eye

Plastic Surgery draws an analogy between the cutting and suturing of the human flesh (rather ambiguous images of a minor operation refilmed from Super 8) and the reconstructing of celluloid images on film and in the viewer’s consciousness. His film has the aimless but sometimes ominous quality of a dream, a dream without a story line and in which connections between moments represent the play of libido without or before thought. The film’s concern with performance and the fitting together of parts of things, seen not only in its imagery but in its very construction, seems to express a sexual anxiety which is also implied by the fascination with the threading together of the slit flesh. In a broader sense the concern is with the fitting together of the world, with the anxiety inherent in the making things make sense.

— Tony Reif, Self-portrait, Essays on the Canadian and Quebec Cinema, 1980