April 1, 1992

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

It would be nice to play it safe and wait for the results of this competition before proceeding with the work, however the film is at a critical stage and it can't wait three months for a decision. This is especially true as I have agreed to the film's premiere at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the late spring, and must honour that commitment, as it will complete a retrospective of all my work which was initiated over a year ago, and accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Michael Dorland, Liane McLarty, and Arthur Kroker. In order to continue my work on the film I will have to incur lab bills and other debts as necessary, and just hope you will provide a completion grant—whereupon I will disburse the funds in payment of those bills and other relevant expenses accumulated past the O.A.C. competition deadline of April 1, 1992.

The last jury actually awarded me less than half the amount I had requested in order to complete the Moose Jaw project. Members of the jury were hesitant because they felt the film was "very close to the documentary tradition", and that it had elements of a "documentary style". I believe I should have a chance to respond to this concern. First of all it is extremely important to watch the film from beginning to end and to note major shifts in subject/object emphasis, point of view, and style over the course of the film. Essentially it begins in a narrational mode employing some documentary techniques, but then gradually shifts into a more poetic and surreal mode, involving increased abstraction, and ending in a kind of subjective vortex from which the filmmaker/protagonist cannot escape. Devices such a talking head interviews and factual voice-overs from newspapers, trade and tourist brochures are deliberately used as codes, and should be seen in the context of a film which plays with multiple layers of meaning, and a series of binary tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, the psychological and the social,. personal memory and institutionalized (museumized) history. Some of the 'documentary traditions' are established in the film, and then deliberately undermined or deconstructed—i.e. the male authoritative voice reading from the trade and tourist brochures, which is eventually heard flubbing lines, and then seeming to spin out of control.

Another perceived transgression in terms of a more purist experimental cinema may be my use of photographic realism. However this is hardly the exclusive domain of the documentary, but a major tendency in Canadian art that has been well documented. What matters surely is the context in which one employs realism, not the mere trappings of form isolated from anything else.

I have devoted my entire career as an artist to lobbying for, writing about, and making experimental film, as well as introducing the subject through my 12 years teaching at Sheridan College to experimental filmmakers like Carl Brown, Mike Hoolboom, Steve Sangueldoce, Gary Popovich, Phil Hoffman, Richard Kerr, Lorne Marin, and others, and I therefore feel quite frustrated by this form of pure laine experimentalist criticism. Sure, Moose Jaw crosses some genre boundaries, but it's part of the experiment—indeed, I was always taught the nature of the experimental lies in the constant re-definition of the medium. Moreover, I am certain that the regular O.A.C. Film Production jury would not think the film close to documentary (particularly the documentary tradition), and would advise it be sent back to Experimental forthwith. The truth is, there are differing schools of thought with regard to this notion of 'the experimental'. Does the recent movement toward the canonization of experimental film mean that new work, to be important, must adhere itself to such modernist strictures as abstract expressionism, or more detailed recipes like P. Adams Sitney's 'characteristics of structural cinema'?

Moose Jaw is the logical extension of all the work I have done in film-work recognized as belonging to a particular style of experimental cinema that employs autobiography, narrational as well as documentary elements, photographic realism, language—often used poetically —to establish an intellectual context, and a concern for the tension between technology and nature expressed through a broader definition of landscape. Several writers-Michael Dorland, Cameron Bailey, Mike Hoolboom —have already published articles recognizing this, not as an aberration, but as a distinct movement or tendency in Canadian experimental film called the Escarpment School. Looked at another way, it is simply a post-modernist approach to experimental filmmaking which precisely seeks a departure from the self-referentiality of the modernist canon.

I think it should be said that my twelve years or so of financial, psychological and creative struggle with this mammoth project should give an indication of my degree of commitment to a cinema that is anything but close to traditional or dominant cinema. In 23 years of filmmaking I have never lapsed into a kind of cinema for which greater avenues of funding exist, and it is a fact that arts councils are my only hope of financial support. If there's a perception that, as a university teacher I can tap in to academic sources of funding, such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, I can assure you I have tried this route, only to be told filmmaking doesn't qualify—that I should 'try the arts councils'. I should also point out that, while I am perhaps considered a senior artist, I do not have special privileges. My work has received less critical attention than many Ontario experimental filmmakers, and certainly less in terms of O.A.C. funding, which has amounted to only $9800 in fourteen years as a resident Ontario artist.

It must be made clear there is a serious need for funding with this project. I have run out of personal financial resources, and my family and I are struggling. I ask you please, if you agree Moose Jaw is a good film, in fact my best effort in 23 years of experimental filmmaking—the culmination of everything I have learned thus far-and a project worthy of support, that you not be negatively influenced by stereotypes of perceived privilege belonging to my race, my gender, etc., or my 'ranking' as a senior artist. The film needs and deserves your support, and frankly, I need your recognition and encouragement to carry on my work in experimental film.

Yours truly, Rick Hancox