A film which seems deceptively simple, DEAD RECKONING comprises three identical-length shots which explicitly demonstrate the process of shooting a landscape, reframing the footage according to a specific idea of visual order, and then re-presenting it. Framing and re-framing a landscape is an expression of our desire to make order of what we see out there, to catalog it or at least understand it in some organized way. In DEAD RECKONING, his last 16mm film, David Wilson creates a beautiful dialogue between this very conceit and the fragile human inability to succeed in such an endeavor. By suggesting the numerous ways in which we try to understand the environments around us (a surveying cross, an airplane, a camera, an optical printer, a projector, a movie theatre…), Wilson’s film ends up revealing the major flaw in the concept, which is that these attempts at controlling our world are all the while directed at our own blind fumblings, and the landscapes are in fact the things that contain us.

[Source: Mark Toscano]