Polycephaly in D

Michael Robinson

2021 | 00:23:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video

Collection: New Releases, Single Titles

Tags: Found Footage, Mental Landscape

Polycephaly in D is a densely collaged exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma, and psychological free-fall of the contemporary moment. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake; we lose one head so as to grow another.

"With Polycephaly in D, Michael Robinson brings his pop-archivist sensibility into conversation with the current moment. Suffused with existential dread that taps directly into pandemic-era anxieties, the film tells a story of two telepaths through a montage of found footage of natural and manmade disasters, both real and fictional. In its most inspired sequence, scenes from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the 1976 remake of King Kong, and the 1984 action-adventure comedy Romancing the Stone are intertwined into a weirdly romantic vision of the apocalypse.” - Jordan Cronk, for Hyperallergic 

"What gradually emerges from this roiling cascade of garish imagery—which extends Robinson’s investigations with the detritus of pop culture, while approximating the surreal collisions of everyday doomscrolling—is the terror of being caught in an eternal, undifferentiated present. But as in Onward Lossless Follows (2017), there is in Polycephaly the humorous release of realizing the contingency of a debased present-tense view. In the film’s flashes of illumination, we realize that even amid the flood, we are capable of seeing otherwise." - Lawrence Garcia, for Reverse Shot

"monumentally bonkers" - Andrew Swafford, for Cinematary

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Premiere

Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto, ON
2021

Exhibitions + Festivals

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Chicago International Film Festival

Light Matter Film Festival

Rotterdam International Film Festival

Related Titles

Onward Lossless Follows
These Hammers Don't Hurt Us