(Winter) time: 2001, 5m, 16mm, prod Sok Cinema, d Dan Sokolowski. (Short Takes).

Set to the Peter Togni Trio's imaginative jazz arrangement of George Gershwin's "Summertime," Ottawa independent filmmaker Dan Sokolowski's 10th film is a lively combination of animation and live action. Starting from simple and often startlingly composed images of the Canadian winter, Sokolowski renders various animated versions of the photographic images in equally various styles and techniques of animation. From the terrestrial to the aerial (there is an evocative animated rendering of the aurora borealis), the interaction of images, photographic and animated, creates an original and absorbing portrait of our quintessentially Canadian season. More than just a montage of wintry pictures, however, Sokolowski's film by its formal construction explores that nebulous but critical artistic region where abstraction, by some artistic alchemy, actually becomes representation, and vice versa, Influenced by Lawren Harris and Pierre Hebert, not to mention Michael Snow, Sokolowski's work is an intelligent, even witty a esthetic engagement with not only the landscape we inhabit, but also the protean artistic means by which we represent it. Theory meets practice meets theory: all this, and Gershwin, too! TAKE ONE

Tom McSorley is the head of the Canadian Film Institute and a contributing editor to Take One.