The Impostor

The Impostor (hello goodbye) is a 2003 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, one of several works commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell for the Tranz Tech festival. Cockburn's video draws formally on Campbell's style while at the same time metaphorically expresses the artist's anxiety in making the video itself. Plot In a split screen, a man dressed in a black suit and tie (Daniel Cockburn) speaks directly to the audience, while a black and white home movie is being projected next to him, on the left. He describes a dream in which he was asked to read a eulogy for his father. As he does so, the projectionist on the left hand side (Daniel Cockburn) is cutting the film with scissors. Watching his father (Daniel Cockburn) in the home movie, he realizes that the gestures his father made are a kind of prison; he is forced to repeat them involuntarily. Then the man in black looks on with the horror of recognition, realizing that his father's body language "prefigured all the gestures into which I would later grow, thinking they were my own."