Institute History
Description
Low Visibility is a staggering, haunting and thoroughly absorbing film, the first feature by the young Canadian filmmaker Patricia Gruben. Combining narrative techniques and documentary conventions within an intelligent theoretical matrix, she tells the bizarre story of a man found crazed and wandering along a mountain roadside. An apparent amnesiac, he attracts the immediate attention of the police (looking for clues), a psychiatrist (searching for a cure) and the media (on the trail of a story). In this web of institutions and speculations, “Mr. Bones,” as he is called by the hospital nurses, is caught, unable or unwilling to tell his experience. While the psychiatrist grows impatient, the police enlist the aid of a clairvoyant who slowly begins to piece together the true story, something about a plane crash, a diary, two men and a woman . . .and a murder. Mr. bones, seen through the eyes of a news camera, video surveillance, the suspicions of the police and the visions of the psychic, meanwhile stares blankly at the snow on a television set. The suspense builds, the paradox deepens, leading to an ending even more enigmatic than the film’s beginning.