Daniel Cockburn

To celebrate the BFI's Thriller season, filmmaker Daniel Cockburn explores the power of sound to terrify and unsettle. Using sounds from Hollywood's best-known thriller and horror films, Cockburn makes familiar noises frightening and leaves us wondering... What's that sound? And why won't it stop?

In the 1970s, Mark Vonnegut, son of renowned sci-fi author Kurt Vonnegut, leads his friends out of Nixon's broken America to Eden, where they can build something good. His friends are in paradise but Mark begins hearing strange voices. Becoming increasingly threatening, Mark must battle to keep Eden alive.

In an increasingly urban nation, Canada’s national parks are a treasured escape into extraordinary beauty and rugged wilderness. If the Group of Seven were an introduction to the landscape’s majesty, National Parks Project is the next logical chapter. Fifty-two contemporary artists from across the country, whose talents are as diverse as the parks they set out to explore, used their surroundings as a source of inspiration to blend musical and cinematic skills into collaboratively crafted vignettes. Epic in its ambition to celebrate these locales during Parks Canada’s centennial year, this omnibus film resonates with the knowledge that our unprotected land is more vulnerable than ever. Including films by Zacharius Kunuk, Peter Lynch, Sturla Gunnarsson and John Walker, and music by Sarah Harmer, Sam Roberts, Cadence Weapon and The Besnard Lakes, among many others, National Parks Project is a one-of-a-kind documentary experience.

Metronome is a 2002 Canadian short experimental film which mixes appropriated film clips and video by video artist Daniel Cockburn to express ideas about rhythm and order, the self and other minds, and the digital age. Densely philosophical, the work is acknowledged as his international "breakout hit" after several locally successful short works, winning praise from critics, a mention, and an award.

Sculpting Memory places Atom Egoyan in an audiovisual environment woven from the fabric of his own films―a conceptual move that references Egoyan’s adaptation of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape while evoking Egoyan’s own work as a moving-image installation artist and his concern with the recording and displaying of images.

Several story threads about consciousness and perception intertwine in this film by video installation artist Daniel Cockburn.

A karaoke video which takes the lyrics and sentiment of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin pop classic at face value... and then puts a different face on them.

Video and audio of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson from The 6th Day (2000) is loosened up and reworked and subjecting him to a cruel series of digital replications.

What begins as an enquiry on things that mean other things itself becomes a thing that means other things, too. And whatever exactly that thing is, the latest by one of Canada’s most ingenious auteurs is another astounding feat of cerebral and cinephilic dexterity.

Doctor Virtuous can't sleep or stay awake and he's worried about radiation

An unwinnable online game draws Scorsese, De Niro, and all their parasocial friends into a tangled web of headcanon and fugue.

Einstein proposed that time might not flow linearly, suggesting that spacetime bends and warps under powerful matter, seen as gravity's fluctuations. During the pandemic, people experienced this concept firsthand: shrinking horizons made time seem to both stand still and race forward. Daniel Cockburn’s video Ahead of the Curve reflects this surreal period when norms vanished, and internet rabbit holes drew people in—either as black holes for doomscrolling or wormholes to discovery. Through a darkly comic narrative, Cockburn spins a tale full of unexpected twists, linking past and present with disorienting shifts in tone, setting, and tempo, offering hints of what might lie ahead.

Metropolis meets Necropolis, Gotham gets drawn and erased, and Glasgow plays host to a spectacle that nobody will ever see.

A documentary of sorts on the making of the video Metronome, here is the frustrated, anguished, entirely pissed off truth that Sony, JVC, Panasonic, and Apple Macintosh don't want you to see.

Over the course of a ten-year postal correspondence, a pair of movie-going pen-pals share their thoughts on some of 90s cinema’s key traits: the rise of video, the need for speed, and of course the cliff-edge sense of global dread. But do decades have ‘key traits’ at the time? Or do we assign them these characteristics retroactively, trying to make sense of things in hindsight? Only Leonard Nimoy knows for sure.

A roving search across endless colour-fields gradually reveals a solitary singer, struggling to be heard over distortion and doppelgangers.

In the latest of his idiosyncratic blends of found-film hallucination and metaphysical comedy routine, director Daniel Cockburn imagines the thoughts that rattle through the Almighty’s head late at night, presuming that He has a head at all.

Daniel Cockburn discusses that may or may not have seen the film After Hours before

Can you remember the first time you ever saw the end of the world? Through a mesmerising collage of film clips and sound design, artist Daniel Cockburn looks at the habits and assumptions that cinema and its viewers have when it comes to imagining pictures of natural beauty and natural destruction.

One of several works commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell for the Tranz Tech festival. Cockburn's video draws formally on Campbell's style while at the same time metaphorically expressing the artist's anxiety in making the video itself.