Home For Christmas by Rick Hancox
(August 18, 1978)
“…to
provoke, if possible, to invite, to stir up the many to press through this
defile of ‘the individual,’ through which… this age, all history, the human
race as a whole, must pass.” S. Kierkegaard, The Point
of View
The task of
awakening an awareness of individual existence is not possible with the
objective stance of conformist cinema. However, with the indirect communication
of the autobiographical film, a state of subjectivity can be approximated in
the viewer. In this manner we may come closer to sharing the truth of human
experience, whatever it may be. But since all cinema
is manipulation, what must first be questioned is not the objective facts, the
but the truth of the filmmaker’s subjectivity. Cinema just adds a sensual means
to participate in this truth, but it is no different from other arts in terms
of the necessity to depart from objectivity. This comes naturally to the cinema
which, only when moving from celluloid to image, from matter to mind, is
perceived as the more ‘realistic’ art form, and is thus a perplexing platform
for anything approaching a materialist dialectic.
My own
autobiographical films differ in form from one idea to the next. I simply do
not believe there is one way to make all films, just as I do not believe matter
is the only reality. Home for Christmas,
for example, is the icon of a person enquiry stretching over two years, and as
the enquiry went, so went the form. It was neither possible nor desirable to
sacrifice intimacy for the tired ‘production values’ of sharpness, steadiness,
and crispness of sound, although such values are in the film enough. The
camerawork and editing, at times tranquil, at times frenetic, is not arbitrary,
but an accurate reflection of my subjective experience of the trip. It is
literally the way I see, and this kind of style is something not just allowable
but crucial to the autobiographical film.
Home for Christmas is about what happened the year I
brought the camera home. It’s about the way people chose to ham it up, ignore
the camera, or pretend to. There is no voyeuristic candor; in fact such a
situation did not exist when I was willing to enter the space of the film to be
‘shot’ too, sometimes after giving the camera to total strangers. In this
sense, it is important to see the film as also ‘about’ what happens to a
camera, the camera functioning consistently as a kind of reflexive verb. This
isn’t the worn-out, deliberate examination of the documentary film process,
complete with official veneer of clapstick, because
shooting the film was no big deal. Home
for Christmas is not the kind of ‘concerned’ documentary which would have
the middle-class filmmaker’s presence validated only by some phony
confrontation with the ‘pain’ of his bourgeois roots.
In my films
the camera is simply a tool of discovery, not a god of propaganda, and as such
the films are free to reveal within themselves the significance of the
filmmaking act. In Home for Christmas,
there was not even a script, but research consisted of years of accumulated
knowledge of similar trips. The film deals in archetypes. It is not arbitrary
to introduce a camera into this milieu to see ‘what happens;’ it is the
deliberate exercising of free will, and a faith in cinematic inquiry. I simply
begin with the assumption that subjective truth is waiting to be discovered and
translated through the process of shooting and editing. That translation is
based on a desire to share the shooting/editing phenomenon itself. The manner
in which the viewer studies this translation is crucial to a deeper
understanding—especially his willingness to suspend traditional ‘production
values.’
From:
Autobiography: Film/Video/Photography ed. John Stuart Katz (Toronto: Art
Gallery of Ontario, 1978)