Dead Man

Interview, May, 1996 by Graham Fuller

Like Munch's short feature The Hours and Times (1992), which speculated on the relationship between John Lennon and Brian Epstein on a trip to Barcelona before the Beatles became famous, Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day is a metaphysical meditation on the past - and memory - as a repository of ideals, including romantic love, that exist only to haunt us with their ungraspable perfection, with what once might have been but can never be.

Rob Sweeney's ravishing cinematography lovingly replicates Ansel Adams's romantic photographs of Yosemite, though the movie has the aura, too, of a '40s picture postcard - the kind you can find on any market stall or in any thrift shop - sent and received by people long dead. Ultimately, though, Munch's film isn't an elegy, but an exploration of the elegiac mode and the dreams we lose as each of us, in our own way, heads West.