I like to believe that I am pretty open-minded when experiencing new kinds of films. I really enjoyed the Maya Deren content we saw in class the first week, and I also enjoyed Man Ray's L'Etoile de Mer, but the CalArts films we saw by Sidney Peterson were probably a worse experience for me then even Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. There is nothing in the Lead Shoes, be it iconic images, cultural images, dream images, good cinematography, good acting, anything, that distinguishes this film as a surrealist expose rather than someone who was given a camera and recorded people performing what is perhaps the most unimaginative, banal things someone could use a camera to record with. Then the filmmaker edited everything he shot together and called it surrealism. There is no production value, no concept, nothing in this film that makes history worthy to remember other than how to frustrate and bore the heck out of a film class. The only thing Peterson did right was expose his film correctly, and that's where it ends. Perhaps the only cool "surrealist" moment I caught from the film was near the end with the voices wailing "what's for breakfast?" over and over again at the end, because that is probably something my mind would produce in my dreams right before I woke up.
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