Dave Dyment
Dead Ringer poster
Toronto, Canada: Ontario Culture Days, 2022
64 x 100 cm.
Edition of 200
For the promotional poster of my Dead Ringer film, I wanted to include footnotes to the film on the verso. Not citations, digressions. Both because footnotes to a film is funny to me, and also because there were a slew of stories I wanted to tell that couldn't be included in the film proper. And because I like publications.
There are a hundred-and-one footnotes, or rather eighty-eight, and thirteen footnotes to the footnotes. Over seven-thousand words in total. These are primarily things from the original script that had to be removed because of a lack of available visuals to illustrate them, or for length, or pacing concerns. A few examples are below.
The film is about the city of Toronto, through the lens of Casa Loma, so it debuted at the 'castle' last month and has two subsequent screenings at City Hall, the final of which is tomorrow. These are more casual events, so if you don't wish to stay for the full 105 minutes, you can drop in and out.
For more information, or to reserve a spot (which I am pretty certain is not necessary), visit:
24. Cities are often essential characters in police dramas. For example, could The Wire be set anywhere other than Baltimore? Compare the nameless cities in Canadian police procedurals to the titles of American cop shows like Miami Vice, NYPD Blue, Hawaii 5-0, Reno 911, Brooklyn Nine Nine, Chicago PD, and the CSI and NCIS franchises. SCTV parodied this trope with a sketch titled “Magnum P.E.I.”.
25. Canadian shows set in “North Generica” not only attempt to avoid visual landmarks, but are careful regarding jargon. Police procedurals use the term Precinct rather than Division. Officers, Detectives and Lieutenants instead of Constables, Sergeants and Inspectors. Characters open Electric bills, rather than Hydro bills. Script writers are asked to avoid the words Out and About.
27. When Slavoj Žižek remarked to Toronto audiences that “the only ontological reason for San Francisco to exist, is so that Hitchcock can film Vertigo there” he was presumably paraphrasing his favourite philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who made a similar comment about the Peloponnesian war and Thucydides.
88. It would be easy to conclude that Toronto feature films often include thematic examples of duality, deception and concealment. I began collecting scenes with mirrored images from Toronto cinema, and felt like I had hit upon something staggering. Until I listened to an interview with Howard S. Berger - the world’s leading authority on the subject of Prosthetic Quietus, or “Dummy Deaths” as he calls them. Films that feature mannequin stunt doubles that meet their demise.
Berger has come to a similar conclusion: films with corpses portrayed by dummies (with thousands of examples, from every genre) all also include themes of transformation, substitution, deception, and duality. Leading then, one assumes, to the realization that all films contain these themes.
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