The leader, that iconic visual identifier announcing to the theater that the film would soon begin. From my earliest encounters with the cinema, that famous countdown always inspired a certain fascination within me, calling up an excited anticipation but also an aesthetic pleasure all its own. I found myself captivated by the unfurling numbers on the screen, almost a film before the film. I appear to share this fascination with filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist Matt Soar, who collects leaders in all their various forms and uses them liberally in his artistic practice, notably with the Lost Leaders series that he began in 2011. The most recent edition, ASANASA (Lost Leaders #21) juxtaposes leaders taken from his personal collection with archival images from NASA in order to present a fantastical allegory highlighting the history of space exploration and that of cinema. The countdown metaphor is doubled back on itself in a mirror-text effect, simultaneously referencing the voyage through the imagination that cinema provides and the very real notion of voyaging through space. An impressive work that beautifully marries found footage and formalist experimental cinema.

Frédéric Savard
Archivist and programmer