The Argument (With Annotations)

The film begins with an "appropriated-footage essay" about metaphor and the suspension of disbelief, the unseen narrator's line of thought taking the audience "on a jagged path" past the works of T. S. Eliot, Groucho Marx, John Carpenter, and Terence Davies, featuring clips from numerous films ranging from The Shining to 300. when "something else" happens: the film is actually a work of fiction.[5] The "argument" made in the first half's video essay is by the film's female protagonist, a septuagenarian professor.[7]

The film's second half follows the professor's own life, her daily routine: doing errands, having dinner with her husband, all the while, she is unable to stop thinking about her essay. Written notes appear on screen as she begins to refine her theories and question the accuracy of some of the points she has made.[8]

• Clare Coulter
• Robin Benger

Michael Sicinski recognizes the first half of the film as the type of "theory film" as produced in the 1970s, in the "heyday" of journals like Screen and Ciné-tracts.[10] Calum Marsh observes that the film applies lofty Wittgensteinian language games to metaphors in cinema and television, and then "it pivots sharply, and becomes instead a character study of a college lecturer with a lot on her mind", an effect "common to all of Cockburn's work: ever restless, he aspires principally to challenge and surprise."[11] Sicinski suggests the film "shares traces" in particular with the filmmaker's 2010 feature, You Are Here.[10] C. J. Prince agrees, but is more explicit:

Toying with cinema, language, and time, the first half essentially functions as a video essay laying out the professor's argument. The film's second half is almost the inverse, turning the camera on the professor's own life, which seems to lack any sort of meaning or metaphor whatsoever. Cockburn's film, much like You Are Here, revels in ambiguity; bringing up questions with no answers, it creates a space where various ideas bounce around freely.[7]

The audience, "thinking they are watching an appropriated-footage piece, has the rug pulled out from underneath them when they find that they are watching a fiction film".[5] The now "hybrid" film[12] makes further demands through the inclusion of the onscreen annotations: they may be interpreted as the professor's running internal monologue[13] or as her written notes (aide-mémoire),[10] among other possibilities, but regardless, they require "multiple viewings just to decipher it all."[14]

The short explores the intersection between research and creativity[15] in a way which calls into question its own narrator's authority.[5] The professor questions her own argument, thereby parodically and poetically disrupting her own academic discourse.[15] Questioning the authority of philosophical discourse, the film examines and repositions philosophical sites of activity, foregrounding the esoteric linguistic conventions of exclusivity.[3] Jamie Dunn suggests that while the film is a "sly critique on the nature of using film images out of context" to prove an intellectual point, it is also a subtle examination of memory and ageing.[8] Similarly, Sicinski notes that the film also "subtly examines social mobility, the frailty of the body and mind, and the written note as an aide memoire against the fallibility of aging memory".[10]

The Argument (With Annotations) premiered at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival,[1] as the first film in the Short Cuts Programme, on 8 September 2017.[22] Two months later, it was screened at a sold-out show at Depth of Field, a semi-annual event showcasing recent York University CMA graduate thesis films in November, at the Art Gallery of Ontario.[4] The short was selected for the 2017 Canada's Top Ten minifestival and screened on 14 January 2018,[23] along with a Canadian Open Vault free screening of Cockburn's 2010 feature film, You Are Here.[24]

The short had its American premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, the First Look Festival, on 15 January 2018, where it was misleadingly billed as a "free-associative interrogation and exemplification of metaphors and their meaning",[25] in an attempt to avoid spoiling the film for the audience.[9]

The European premiere took place on 5 May 2018 at the Tower Mill Cinema in Hawick as a double-bill with The Rare Event, an experimental docufiction film by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, at the Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival.[3] The two films played together in the UK and Ireland.[26]

• Official trailer on Vimeo
• The Argument (With Annotations) at IMDb