Film run-time: 8 minutes | Starring Trevor Anderson, Luke Oswald, Rob Chaulk
Written and Directed by Trevor Anderson, Produced by Blake McWilliam, Cinematography by Peter Wunstorf
“The Little Deputy“, a 2015 short film by Trevor Anderson, is a mythologized re-telling of one man’s childhood memory, recaptured as a pivotal instance of self-realization. In filtering the past through an artistic lens, a creative reclamation can enable a deeper understanding of self. Trevor wishes to recreate a photograph that he had taken in his youth with his dad.
Structured as a triptych of vastly different time periods and aesthetic styles, Anderson alludes to the malleability of form, as akin to gender, and to the genred narratives that are likewise artificial designates which segregate analogous creations: fiction, non-fiction; male, female; story, self. These categories are subtly interweaved in a blended work that defies indexical simplicity.
As a stylistic display of contrasts, the film’s different segments manage to simultaneously encapsulate a time and a feeling. The low-resolution analog video of Trevor’s childhood is shaky, unbounded, nostalgic, and genuine, whereas an incisive imagining in adulthood is fluid, confident, regal, and robust; in enacting such visual dissimilarities, Anderson may point to personal assessments that denote an early naiveté and later maturity in one’s comprehension of identity.
The act of creation, whether a formation of identity or a foundation of principle, is one that is inherently theatrical and prosaic at once. By circumventing imposed limitations in both cinematic construct and societal conventions, Anderson achieves a film that acknowledges the dramatic in the unassuming, and asserts the wide diversity of identities existing outside of an orthodox paradigm.