Cake And Steak

Opening with an ominous score, split-screening of staggered footage - eaves and leaves, station wagons while the score signals "here be dragons", a slightly different, closer angle of the same. An amalgamation of found footage, narrated or at least offering guidance in flat white letters on the screen.

Watching is made difficult - there are snippets, quotes, snatches - the opening bar of Peter Gunn's theme, a sitcom child getting a sitcom scolding. There are ostensibly sections, or at least section markers, but they form a game of their own - Part 1, Chapter 4, 7, Version 11, 3, 10.

The mechanised doldrum of split-level ranch homes and white-walled convertibles is reminiscent of The Human Factor, another found footage project at the 2012 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Fascinating glimpses of days gone by, here punctuated by textual reminders of ages not yet spent - "tomboy", "princess", a shopping list which features Wonder Bread and Celery Sticks and is therefore not part of the Leibowitzian Canticle. Children laugh and run (we do not hear them) under labels like "2nd best friend" and "bombshell". Footage is reversed, looped, inverted. A black woman walks by with a stack of white towels, past a white family, while we are reminded of leisure and fulfilment.

The soundtrack is by Phil Hagopian and Paul Griffiths, and by Floyd Fisher, and with "early recordings" by John Zorn, and there are those bits of Henry Mancini and dialogue from the Dick Van Dyke show. In a land of white picket fences a dog chases everything. Along with The Future Is Behind You and Surf + Turf this forms part of The Suburban Trilogy, three films unified in their examination of what passes for society among what passes for the subdivision bourgoisie.

Cake And Steak manages the discomfiture of repetition ably, the same mixture of familiarity and horror that comes from photographs of abandoned Nevadan housing developments, of overgrown buildings in Detroit, of a child powered by mayonnaise sandwiches pedalling a tricycle down an empty street. It's compelling, haunting, meaningless - it's all projection, these juxtapositions, it's a kaleidoscope of noise and image, and yet, within it, pattern. The tyranny of prosperity, conformity, modernity, and in that over and over again there are cracks to step on, lines to read between. It is compelling, haunting, meaningful.