Elliott Power’s K-9INE! — a doorway standoff
Elliott Power’s debut short K-9INE! sharpens the artist’s visual preoccupations — tight 35mm framing, object-led character and a tone that slips between menace and comedy.
Play on VimeoCredits: Elliott Power (artist) — director: Elliott Power; photographer (DoP): Patrick Golan; art director / production designer: Tim Crosbie; stylist: (not credited).
K-9INE! feels like the next logical image for Elliott Power’s work: small domestic settings turned into arenas of performance and quiet threat. The film’s almost-square 1.37:1 framing and 35mm grain compress the world around its two men so that props and placement do the emotional work. A Steven Seagal photo, a boxing poster, a mocked-up newspaper — these details, chosen with Tim Crosbie’s art department, read like the backstory of a record sleeve translated into live action.
Power gives the film the same restraint that has defined his videos and visuals: patient camera moves, long held reactions, and an appetite for discomfort that can flirt with humour. He frames the doorstep as a stage where power is negotiated by silence and small gestures rather than exposition.
"It captures a lot of the themes I’m drawn to as a filmmaker: power, masculinity, performance, domesticity, humour and the absurdity of everyday life." — Elliott Power (director). This quote is the director speaking, not the artist persona.
The result sits comfortably alongside his visual identity: specific, mildly surreal, and constructed so that the image keeps pulling meaning out of the ordinary.
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